Cant say I ever felt like time management was an issue. Im a forever dm and ran 4e for my friends for several years. I never felt as though things were going too fast or they were leveling too quickly. If anything I loved the fact that it was easier to build encounters (I ran 3e for a long time) and creatures were easy to adjust based on the challenge I wanted to present. The issue I had was actually the powers but not because they're "power" but because the format made it harder for my players and I to improvise. When the best thing to do is use an at-will why swing on a chandelier and drop kick the bad guy? The game design didnt support improvisation. That didnt stop them from doing so but the powers made things cookie cutter I will explain what I enjoyed. Base attack bonus was half level. Period. Each save/defense got the better of two stats rather than reliant on one. Weapons had individual proficiency bonuses making them a bit more unique individually. And the ranger was reliant on magic. My favorite build when I got to play was ranger/rogue. Alot of skills and amazing damage abilities stacked. Oh, and bloodied and healing surges and status conditions streamlined.
The idea that you go from combat encounter to combat encounter to skill challenge to combat encounter with no downtime between them is... kinda insane to me. Yes, if that's what you do, then you're going to level insanely fast, and not really... roleplaying? at that point? I've run two 4e campaigns and been in a third, they were all long running campaigns, one from levels 1 to 30. There were often multiple sessions with no combat in at all, but they seperated bursts of intense violence, sequences of planned encounters that tested the characters. 4e is ultimately a system with a very clear encounter design mandate and a fundamental approach to adventuring build around power-resource management that made it challenging to play and easy to GM.
From my experience playing 4E, I asked to do and try things all the time, and as DM encouraged people to feel free to ask and "we'll figure it out". I remember as a wizard doing things like, "can I burn this cold spell to freeze the bar?" when trying to intimidate someone. Or when a muddy cavern was starting to cave in, using another spell to freeze the mud and buy us a little more time. Shenanigans are always on the cards if you're asking within reason and willing to pay a price for it in my experience, regardless of the game.
My solution is easy. Just reflavour the at will for the drop kick. With few exceptions this is entirely doable. MOST of them aren't doing such a specific thing that it would REQUIRE you do so a specific action. So now instead of swinging your sword it's a dropkick.
I made the Player's Guide to Powers on the DM's Guild. It's a one-to-one conversion of the classes, Powers, Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies, and Magic Items of the 4e Player's Handbook to 5e. If you loved 4e, but you play with a 5e group, you can still play like you want.
Ok, so the reason people don't like it is how it deals with time. Fair enough. I get the impression you DO like it though based on your tone, or at least have a defense of it. However, you don't provide any defense really. It's cool to get recommended a video from a small creator, but idk this is kind of a nothingburger.
Pathfinder 2e shares a lot of design ideas with D&D 4e (due to overlap on the respective design teams) to the extent that it feels kind of like PF2e is a "do-over" of 4e with the benefit of hindsight. And a lot of what they did was to better disguise the design decisions behind game concepts. So things like "encounter powers" have the numbers filed off and become "focus spells". It's not specifically called out that they're intended to be used once per encounter. It's just that you can only recharge them if you rest for ten minutes. Fighters don't get "powers" that give them more complex and powerful actions in combat. They get "feats" that do that. The action economy is simplified, and this has the extra effect of putting a cap on how much power you can unleash at once, quietly, in the background. And I think it's interesting how much better received PF2e is than 4e. I think these more hidden mechanics have something to do with it. Of course, PF2e also has extensive and explicit rules for downtime activities, which closes the hole you point out in 4e.
I can't understand how anything you said relates to time management. Pacing maybe, but not time management. And it's weird because you don't compare Editions fairly. 5e is a beloved Edition, has the same 6 seconds per round and recommends the fewer number of encounters per day. Sorry, I can't understand your point there
@MegaBlizzardman That's subjective. The "concept" is not a rule. It's something that the DM may or may not use. The same could apply to 4e rituals or the process to make residuum. I do recognize that 5e gives more ideas to actions at downtime, but I find It hard to believe that the lack of it makes people hate 4e. A 5e party may never leverage downtime tasks during an entire campaign...
That seems wrong on multiple levels. First 4E had skill challenges, which are basically encounters, and those broke away from the 6 seconds rounds, thus one could have a travel framed as such a skill challenge which took plays over days, weeks, or even months if you like. Also, not all the XP have form come encounters in the first place, thus it was easy to just play without getting this weekend warriors feeling you described, I certainly never got that. But well, maybe I had been lucky to have friends who play the hobby for the roleplay and not just to slaughter monsters.
@ lol no it’s not like all other editions but you know that, if fact no editions are the same but you know that too, you’re just looking to argue. Warriors strike, rend, power strike, invigorating strike, brash strike, and on and on and on 😂
@@destroso And those are more like special abilities instead of say... a spell? what's the difference between a spell and a "special ability"? Im not simply looking to argue, i just think your comparison has flaws.
I commented this on your first 4e video, but Research, Rituals, Training, Work, Organization management, and Crafting are all activities spelled out that you can do during downtime. Do you really NEED Carousing rules to facilitate downtime? I think it comes down to what d Downtime IS. Is Downtime just a randomly rolled table to resolve a minor character activity, or is it meant for players to pursue their own ambitions and goals? I advocate for the latter, and frankly a Carousing table doesn't really help me - and even more frankly no table could really help me write a plot for a character, say, trying to negotiate with local traders to organize a trade agreement for resources for the kingdom.
I liked playing 4th edition. The people that really hated 4th edition were the power gamers. They need to be the heroes of the game, but 4th edition makes it, so the entire party are the heroes. The first time I played 4th edition the DM used starbursts to represent monsters, and the starbursts were evenly divided amongst the players by the end of the game. I have played 3rd or 3.5 edition where DMs used some form candy to represent monsters and by the end of the game the barbarian and ranger would be the only ones to have any candy. This showed that the rest of the party were basically support for these more powerful characters and the games were not the much fun for anyone else but the power players.
I don't necessarily think that I gave it a good shake, but I played a combat session at level one against a hand full of kobolds, and it took forever. That killed it for me.
While i was aware of D&D my whole life (thanks to awesome parents), 4e was my first. I miss it so much. The amount of options for building Characters was so amazing and large! I used to craft dozens of Characters that all had their Concepts fully realized by LV1. 5e needed more levels to do the same with a mere fraction of options (especially now with 5.5e, ugh)
"we shouldn't be telling stories with these games" That is probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and no I'm not going to watch the previous video. I award you 0 points and may God have mercy on your soul
Continue to enjoy your improv theater circle-jerk, I'm sure your rainbow-haired DM gave you levels as 'milestones' just for being nice to his non-binary puglin.
i think his point is "deliberately making the story go the way the players want" as opposed to "doing what the characters would do and sincerely attempting to accomplish the characters' goals, and then allowing the story to emerge as a result of that".
what it boils down to from the 3.5 crowd is that the game felt too much like a video game and that was by design. They even admitted they made it that way to bring in the MMO players. They had already started with DDO but they wanted the gamer crowd to play the P&P game as well so they designed it to function as close as possible.
I actually was OK with time management, it was less time keeping and went more off of the power usage, such as the "daily". My biggest issue was the board gamey powers that all has very specific ranges in "squares", guaranteeing the players played an encounter more like a slow chess game. We would be lucky to get through two encounters in a session. My second problem was the concept of skill challenges which basically implied that there was no improvisation or creativity allowed, just roll one of the listed skill checks to get through the skill check. I do like the 4E lite co-op boardgames.
yeah, the problem with skill challenges (really, the problem with skill checks in general) is that the players aren't really playing at all. so to me, skill checks are in the same category as rolling for random encounters when traveling or dungeoncrawling. the players aren't making choices, so they aren't really playing. I think that 4e actually is a fine engine for roleplay and exploration, but you really need to be ready to fairly adjudicate the usage of combat powers outside of combat. those are largely the tools the players will be familiar with, and so those are the tools they will want to go to outside of combat as well, and I think that a lot of gm's shut that down when they shouldn't. a lot of improvisation and creativity emerges when you let this happen. - yeah the combat is explicitly very board gamey though. if you don't like gamey combat, then obviously dnd 4e isn't for you haha. Personally, I really like board games, but they lack the narrative depth I crave, and so dnd 4e has been perfect for me.
8:28 _"You are crushing a level on a weekend"_ Yes and you are supposed to, because 4E is designed to have up to 30 Levels of available content. Unlike say 5E which is broken past level 10 and almost nobody plays it after that, heck a gaming club I know of have DnD5E PCs capped at level 8.
Your assertion is actually betrayed by your premise, which I believe is true: People can't hate 4e because of its time management if they have never played it or given it a chance. Which is definitely where I landed. I hated the very idea of 4e because it was totally unnecessary. Change for change's sake. Pathfinder's success proved I was not alone in seeing it this way. Why play something that is not D&D without playing something not called D&D also? It made no sense.
"You shouldn't be telling stories with these games." . . . Ok, maybe if you're only playing officially released modules with a fighter named fighter, a mage named mage and a halfling thief named halfling thief, but at that point you'd probably have more fun just playing a video game or running a series of TTRPG sessions. The point of a proper D&D campaign is to create a character, and play them as they interact with other characters, and interact with world created by the DM. To be fair, that is not telling a story, it's rather creating a story.
I hated two things: MMO-like taunts and movement powers which completely replace just walking somewhere. I mean, why walk six squares if you have an at will power that lets you move and do something else? So I got this silly picture in my head where the PCs would not just walk down the street, they would walk six squares and attack the air, walk and attack ... as if instead of pressing forward on your keyboard or controller, you pressed forward AND attack the whole time. There are some ideas which I thought were great, like ritual spellcasting and powers for melee characters, but I took those and tried to incorporate them into 3.5e. I loved the simulationist "completeness" of 3.5e.
Time management was not an issue. I liked many parts but it was hard to get a feel for the characters when they were all the same except fighter, which was a sad class, and wizard.
I've never played 4e or 3e nor do I plan to. I don't think what you're saying is time management as much as simply the pacing of encounters. The whole part of duration of rounds in combat made no sense to me as a 5e player, because that's the same in 5e. As for downtime activities, there's rules and guidelines for that in 5e. What I find an absurd statement is "we shouldn't be telling stories with these games". What is RPG if not an interactive narrative experience? I'm sure there are things 4e do well, but sadly you haven't really refuted any of the other reasons why people would hate 4e.
I've played 4th for 3 different seasons of Encounter of the Week, still have the little encounter cards you were rewarded for hitting the milestones, as well as two campaigns of it. I still hate the system. I hated that every ability and power was a card. I hated that roleplay was pushed onto a far backburner in favor of 'skill check and move on'. I hated the tiefling being a pact baby, throwing out all of the nuance that we had from Planescape. I hated how magic items could be reduced to magic goo that could then be any magic item you want. And I really hated how it was practically unplayable without the app due to the constant erratas. Now... this isn't to say I hated ALL of 4th. I love the idea of minions, enemies that were as threatening as normal monsters but had all of the stamina of a wet paper bag. While I hate how 'roleplay' was handled, I did like the skill challenge mechanic. And I liked how martials had abilities that let them be 'unignorable', letting them have a presence in battle that they didn't in other editions, old and new. Would I play 4th again? Hell no. I gave my 4th books to a library and I have no desire to replace them.
I'm a big fan of 4e, but I don't think time was a big reason for it. One of the reasons why people hated it is one of the reasons why a lot of the people I game with liked it. It's written very technically. There are very few rules issues and most often you can solve them by reading the text absolutely literally. This doesn't work for the people who like to play loose and off-the cuff. The group where we spent the most time with 4e was me, a programmer who worked on operating systems, an electrical engineer who got to spend a little time at Area 51, and a guy who not only used to repair nuclear missiles, he even corrected the documentation for them.
Yeah this felt like the biggest misread I've seen in the hobby since..well 4th edition came out lol. I prefer 4e to 3.5e by a lot because Its ironically way simpler, but the biggest complaints I saw were slow pace and it's rigidity. The math works very well for combat as sport tactical chess battles against evenly matched opponents, it falls apart if you push the numbers much at all. My barbarian spent the entire combat doing mad dash charges into enemies like a meteor, it was super fun! But I couldn't really use my powers to mad dash charge away from a pursuing carriage.
@philopharynx7910 likewise! But rarely do powers have any more flavor than their name, so generally player abilities look like attacks for specifically engaging with similarly powerful adversaries in combat as sport, rather than as toolsets to solve varied problems. This I believe is what people mean when they erroneously say 4e doesn't support roleplaying. Of course it does (provided, like in basically any edition, your character is primarily a combatant). My most strongly characterized character from any TTRPG was so compelling because he was informed by the (rather minmaxed) build options, not in spite of it. But the system rewards and encourages mastery, it doesn't reward or encourage creative expression even by much lip service- thats why 5es "bond/flaws", backgrounds, and trinket tables as simple as they were were so well received on launch I love making up novel mechanics so I don't view it as a real breaker whatsoever. My bigger issue is it's just so dang slow even with the fixed math, and introducing non gamer nerd adjacent players to it was always trying.
@@calebcoulter2268 The book brings the mechanics, but the player brings the roleplaying. You can roleplay Candy Land. While 4e did bring in a lot of stuff, I happier with PF2 overall.
Time management was not the issue for me. It was probably the only thing which I had no issue with, frankly. It was the at least fifty other things I didn't like of that system that made me hate it since the first time I red and tried it. And since Pathfinder 2 is basically a remake of 4e with a few issues corrected, but a bunch of new ones introduced, I don't like it either. By the way, I am not a power gamer and I mostly play as a DM.
'People who don't like 4e played a couple of sessions, or the introductory and decided they didn't like it.' Yeah ... that the point of those products. The selling points the tailored best foot forward. That's like saying "The show is really good but the first season is unwatchable." Or saying "This restaurant has a great menu, if you disregard the first two pages." Those products aren't good people who go to them are just in the sunkcost fallacy.
I saw the plans for 4E and it was enjoyable. Paizo is doing the simplified format FAR better. When dude killed himself, they cratered it, pushed 5E WAY too early, and full force shoved garbage down the throats of gamers. That's what I don't like about 4th. That it forced 5th out.
Maybe, I feel like the mechanics for combat were overdesigned. But, I also have had basically not even a session, as I tried to get in a 4e game and only me and the DM showed up for the three sessions before he called it. The combat, which at most featured one other player, did not flow well at such a low player count. Perhaps with the proscribed four roles filled, it would have felt better. But I think that is another of the problems that the game runs into. My main group, which mostly plays Pathfinder but is branching out into other systems, has had all sorts of odd combos that more or less worked. Though, that's also an unfair comparison, because its a table of six, with everyone having some experience on both sides of the screen. Maybe if we get around to trying 4e, I'll have a more solid take, but the VTT sheets I've seen for it are abysmal, and we mostly play on r20.
most of it is groupthink, memes. some d&d "influencers" like puffin forest straight up LIE about the edition, and people just eat it up, because they haven't played it at all, much less with a competent DM.
Yeah. A whole lot of people dunk on Nickelback online just because that's the cool / group-approved thing to do online, when in reality it's a fine band.
We played it for 1 year and I hate it. It tried to reinvent the wheel and it just didn't need to 😅 Sometimes new ideas don't work when the older systems just frankly worked better. I just got to your point, ok, downtime! I think that you are only 25% right. 😅 from my memory, 4e didn't have survival gear, torches, rations... it was just barebones on release. There were no rules for downtime.... if the manual says " just make it up " that's not a good manual. Same as how D&D 5e Spelljammer, a book about fighting on sailing ships in a 3d environment did not have any rules about boat combat... 😅 am I supposed to... " just make it up " ? It assumes a lot of creativity and frankly unlimited time on the part of the DM 😢 For the other 75% why me and my friends, avid 3.5 players, did not like 4e was the power system 😐 the lack of flexibility on classes as you could no longer multiclass. The mechanics were so broken on release that you could make a rock giant bleed rocks because there were no designation sayong you couldn't. 💔 Maaaaybe 4e got better by 2013 but back on release, we just didn't enjoy it and didn't have 3 years to sit on our hands and wait until it got to a playable state. So we switched to Pathfinder 1st edition published by Paizo. We lovingly called it 3.75e 😅 and 8 years down the road, I picked up 5th edition with abother group and have been playing ever since. Now I just wish it had ship combat rules that are decent... I might pick up AD&D and figure out THAC0 and hex grids if I can muster up a working ship combat system... but then again, I shouldn't I don't have unlimited time or game design experience to make my own system or cobble together one from multiole systems by myself. 😅
I loved 4e. So much. I remember that as a dungeon master, it was frustrating finding players who wanted to play 4th edition and give a crap about exploring the town that they just went into, like why would a module have all the stuff on the town map if you can't use any of the stuff on the map the way your character is built? Eventually I found a group of really good people who liked roleplay, but even then it was frustrating to run down time and social encounters, there just wasn't really a framework for it. By the time I left 4th edition, we had mangled it so much that we had to call it something else, because it only felt like D&D 4th edition, it only used 4th edition powers, and one day I realized, if I have to Homebrew it this much to enjoy it, maybe I should be playing something different
In my personal experience, people hated 4e because they couldn't minimax a god character. The grognard OSR guys hate anything new done to this game and when you also make it that they can't power-twink a special boi...then they all complain about how shitty the game is.
I suspect that the reason people 'hated' 4e was because in many ways it is not even in the same genre of game to older and newer editions of D&D. One thing that many D&D players find hard to face is that D&D is, fundamentally, not a story-telling or roleplaying game first and foremost. It's a tactical combat system, and it's attached very loosely if at all to an outside of combat action resolution system. But it actually doesn't include and detailed social mechanics, narrative tools or other features that you would expect to see in a more modern roleplaying game with strong story-telling elements. This is because D&D is just that old, it came from tabletop wargaming and to a large extent it's remained that. The story in D&D always happens between combats, and combat is the only thing that actually has detailed rules. Yet, 4e is the only edition of D&D to actually fully embrace that identity as a tactical game, and because of that it does feel radically different. It's the only version of D&D to try and balance combat and encourage tactical synergy within the party mechanically. You can see it's legacy where it created a whole branch of the hobby where games that handle social elements lightly and indulge in a tight tactical focus in combat, like the mech RPG lancer, as well as games that tried to keep the elements of combat resolution that worked while brining the game up to date on more modern social and narrative elements, like 13th Age. In essence, 4e was too ambitious, and the change from 'combat system with a basic out of combat action resolution system' to 'intricate tactical combat system with a gamified out of combat resolution system' was too large for most D&D gamers to adapt to, but it walked so that a generation of later tactical tabletop RPG's could run.
Why didn't 4e thrive? 1) WotC wrecked both the setting and backward compatibility, and crapped on the existing 3.x players. Especially the RPGA and Living Greyhawk folks. Great idea, guys, deliberately anger every single person who gave you a nickel in the past. 2) It wasn't D&D. If they sold it as what it actually was-a D&D-based small unit wargame-we'd still be playing a version of it. It's 40k's Kill Team, advertise that way. 3) Too many powers felt the same except for the power tag. Bleah. I played for one year with a great GM using official D&D adventures, with minis and multi-level maps and 3d terrain-essentially the ideal circumstances-and after a year my enjoyment was finally overwhelmed by my irritation, and I left. I tried, really tried, to like it. And I couldn't.
Speaking only for myself, I had two main issues with 4e, and neither one of them was specific to time-keeping. Now I never thought 4e was a bad game, per se. I did think it was a bad edition of D&D and a bad game for me, but there was nothing really wrong with it from a game design perspective. My two issues were that I found it went too far in replacing simulationist concepts with gamist ones. There were just too many decisions where I felt I had to approach things from a player perspective rather than a character perspective because those choices couldn't be expressed in terms of the game world. The second was that by changing the way characters worked they also changed the implied setting to support those characters. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but it changed how I responded to the game from an emotional perspective. It felt like a new game. The problem with that is that whenever I came to it, I didn't want a new game--I wanted a game that felt like D&D. Games like World of Darkness or HERO System fit my needs when I wanted to play something other than D&D, and going back to AD&D 1e or Pathfinder met my needs when I wanted to play D&D. Fourth Edition didn't fit either set of needs, so for me it didn't make the cut.
The biggest problem was it just simply didn't work as a table top game. Because it wasn't designed as one. They tried to make a system that would be good for video games first, and table top games second. And ended up with one that just didn't work for either.
Ran two long games of 4e, played in one that ran from level 1 to level 30, never had a problem with playing at the table, in fact 4e is the edition of D&D that probably plays best at a formal sit down table precisely because it's so tactically focused.
Did it feel like a video game or a tactical boardgame? Absolutely! That's not my main complaint, though it is one. My problem is actually almost the same that I have with 5e - there's not much in the line of actual rules for anything outside of combat. Let's face it: skill challenges were a good idea, but they didn't work in practice.
I've used them in games and they work fine. Check out Matt Colville's Dusk (4e) or The Chain (5e) actual plays and you can see them in action there, too. I think the problem is they didn't describe them well in the first DMG, but they started to refine them by DMG2. I heard it's a consequence of the game getting rushed out, but at least anyone playing 4e now can find the best version of the skill challenge rules on the internet.
@SeiferVII Here are my criticisms. First, they have a set DC regardless of what skill you use. This means that as long as you can sell your GM a justification for why your highest skill applies, you just use the highest skill. There's no bonus for using an appropriate skill, and no penalty for using an inappropriate one. Second, in the end a skill challenge is just a much more complicated way to get to what is still a pass/fail result. You fail three times, boom done. No middle ground even if you succeed at all but one of the skill checks. Still ends in a failure. And I will not accept 'the DM can fix these' as a solution to the criticisms, because a system problem is still valid despite the DM being able to fix a problem. That doesn't invalidate the fact that the problem exists. I think I had a third criticism, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
4e isn't D&D. It is a good game. One mistake the designers made was using the term "Powers", they should have used a different term. I talked with the designers, at length, and your incorrect. They literally had a list of "sacred cows", and beyond that, they could create from scratch. So they took cues from Magic The Gathering, World of Warcraft, and Munchkin. No joke. One of the design goals was to have it set up for transition into the video game space. And, in fact, a number of Japanese phone games use D&D 4e as the game engine, and pay WOTC royalties - Currently. Not 5e, 4e. The problem, according to the designers, was two fold - 1> the "sacred cows" list was too small for current player market - and they lost a LOT of players to Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades. 2> the math was broken at higher levels - they fixed it starting in Monster Manual III, but it was too late in the life cycle. They fixed it for the re-tool with Essentials - but Essentials was packaged badly and not promoted at all... by they they were re-evaluating everything for DnD Next (5e playtest). The major problem with 4e is the math. If you stick to levels 1 to 7, you'll be okay.
Your assertion that 4e's math is broken is quite bizarre, considering that the solidity of the game system is one of its biggest strengths, if not the biggest. If you consider 4e's math broken I wonder how you consider 3.5 or 5e which are a million times worse?
My theory: D&D players are nerds, and a core nerd fantasy is that nerds eventually beat jocks. In most D&D games that happens: wizards have both more utility and are more powerful than "jocks" (martial types) at high levels. But it's not true in D&D 4E. The people who hate D&D 4E often like playing some kind of spellcaster / utility character. For people who love martial and a bit of complexity (i.e. they aren't casual players / newbies), 4E is great, they're not hating it.
4e... the generic everyone has the same abilities, why does this gum taste like a desk, but still keep chewing it, DnD edition Complete removal of skills if you ran it based on the CR system..... it was stupid easy mode Boss mobs with 1 HP minions... feats meant to kill those 1 HP minions misc timed BS mechanics with 20 different effects all overlaping/canceling one another
" We shouldn't be telling stories with these games..." Dude, You're playing D&D wrong. Go play your card games and board games, But don't pretend you are any sort of expert on REAL D&D. Judging by your voice I have been playing longer than you have lived, and you just don't get it. This is not yugio or pokemon and we don't want it to become so. If you have never experienced the pure joy and pride and power of beating a 1 thru 15+ level full campaign that you are a main character in, that you and friends spent months or even years to complete then you are NOT a real D&D player.
I've talked to a few people about 4e. Fun little trend: Every single one of them that said they hated it? They played casters. These are also the people who say things like: "Firearms of any type completely wreck the game balance!" "Martials are just fine the way they are." "Well, yeah- it's MAGIC! It's supposed to be overpowered!" "I like to focus more on the roleplaying and less on the mechanics" "Please use protection the next time my wife goes over to your house, she's not on birth control"
Yeah. Spellcaster players basically want their spellcasters to be better than martials in most ways from mid-level onwards. 4E doesn't let them do that, therefore they mad. They don't like that 4E doesn't give them spellcaster privilege. Unfortunately, if the group's wizard-loving player loudly complains about 4E, then likely the group will find another system.
Cant say I ever felt like time management was an issue. Im a forever dm and ran 4e for my friends for several years. I never felt as though things were going too fast or they were leveling too quickly. If anything I loved the fact that it was easier to build encounters (I ran 3e for a long time) and creatures were easy to adjust based on the challenge I wanted to present.
The issue I had was actually the powers but not because they're "power" but because the format made it harder for my players and I to improvise. When the best thing to do is use an at-will why swing on a chandelier and drop kick the bad guy? The game design didnt support improvisation. That didnt stop them from doing so but the powers made things cookie cutter
I will explain what I enjoyed.
Base attack bonus was half level. Period.
Each save/defense got the better of two stats rather than reliant on one.
Weapons had individual proficiency bonuses making them a bit more unique individually.
And the ranger was reliant on magic. My favorite build when I got to play was ranger/rogue. Alot of skills and amazing damage abilities stacked.
Oh, and bloodied and healing surges and status conditions streamlined.
The idea that you go from combat encounter to combat encounter to skill challenge to combat encounter with no downtime between them is... kinda insane to me. Yes, if that's what you do, then you're going to level insanely fast, and not really... roleplaying? at that point?
I've run two 4e campaigns and been in a third, they were all long running campaigns, one from levels 1 to 30. There were often multiple sessions with no combat in at all, but they seperated bursts of intense violence, sequences of planned encounters that tested the characters.
4e is ultimately a system with a very clear encounter design mandate and a fundamental approach to adventuring build around power-resource management that made it challenging to play and easy to GM.
From my experience playing 4E, I asked to do and try things all the time, and as DM encouraged people to feel free to ask and "we'll figure it out".
I remember as a wizard doing things like, "can I burn this cold spell to freeze the bar?" when trying to intimidate someone. Or when a muddy cavern was starting to cave in, using another spell to freeze the mud and buy us a little more time.
Shenanigans are always on the cards if you're asking within reason and willing to pay a price for it in my experience, regardless of the game.
My solution is easy. Just reflavour the at will for the drop kick. With few exceptions this is entirely doable. MOST of them aren't doing such a specific thing that it would REQUIRE you do so a specific action. So now instead of swinging your sword it's a dropkick.
I made the Player's Guide to Powers on the DM's Guild. It's a one-to-one conversion of the classes, Powers, Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies, and Magic Items of the 4e Player's Handbook to 5e. If you loved 4e, but you play with a 5e group, you can still play like you want.
Ok, so the reason people don't like it is how it deals with time. Fair enough. I get the impression you DO like it though based on your tone, or at least have a defense of it. However, you don't provide any defense really. It's cool to get recommended a video from a small creator, but idk this is kind of a nothingburger.
I never got the sense that most people that disliked 4e played the game long enough for time management to ever be an issue.
it becomes an issue at lvl 4+
Pathfinder 2e shares a lot of design ideas with D&D 4e (due to overlap on the respective design teams) to the extent that it feels kind of like PF2e is a "do-over" of 4e with the benefit of hindsight. And a lot of what they did was to better disguise the design decisions behind game concepts. So things like "encounter powers" have the numbers filed off and become "focus spells". It's not specifically called out that they're intended to be used once per encounter. It's just that you can only recharge them if you rest for ten minutes. Fighters don't get "powers" that give them more complex and powerful actions in combat. They get "feats" that do that. The action economy is simplified, and this has the extra effect of putting a cap on how much power you can unleash at once, quietly, in the background.
And I think it's interesting how much better received PF2e is than 4e. I think these more hidden mechanics have something to do with it.
Of course, PF2e also has extensive and explicit rules for downtime activities, which closes the hole you point out in 4e.
I can't understand how anything you said relates to time management. Pacing maybe, but not time management. And it's weird because you don't compare Editions fairly. 5e is a beloved Edition, has the same 6 seconds per round and recommends the fewer number of encounters per day. Sorry, I can't understand your point there
5e and other editions has the concept of downtime and other out-of-combat actions that have a duration
@MegaBlizzardman That's subjective. The "concept" is not a rule. It's something that the DM may or may not use. The same could apply to 4e rituals or the process to make residuum. I do recognize that 5e gives more ideas to actions at downtime, but I find It hard to believe that the lack of it makes people hate 4e. A 5e party may never leverage downtime tasks during an entire campaign...
That seems wrong on multiple levels. First 4E had skill challenges, which are basically encounters, and those broke away from the 6 seconds rounds, thus one could have a travel framed as such a skill challenge which took plays over days, weeks, or even months if you like. Also, not all the XP have form come encounters in the first place, thus it was easy to just play without getting this weekend warriors feeling you described, I certainly never got that. But well, maybe I had been lucky to have friends who play the hobby for the roleplay and not just to slaughter monsters.
Because it reminds me of World of Warcraft and I liked D&D as it was. Your thumbnail art is awesome though! Do you draw it yourself?
How?
@@rawrawr6666 all the special abilities
@@destroso you mean.. like all the previous editions? Or do wizards,sorcerers,druids,rangers and other casters not count?
@ lol no it’s not like all other editions but you know that, if fact no editions are the same but you know that too, you’re just looking to argue. Warriors strike, rend, power strike, invigorating strike, brash strike, and on and on and on 😂
@@destroso And those are more like special abilities instead of say... a spell? what's the difference between a spell and a "special ability"? Im not simply looking to argue, i just think your comparison has flaws.
I commented this on your first 4e video, but Research, Rituals, Training, Work, Organization management, and Crafting are all activities spelled out that you can do during downtime.
Do you really NEED Carousing rules to facilitate downtime? I think it comes down to what d
Downtime IS. Is Downtime just a randomly rolled table to resolve a minor character activity, or is it meant for players to pursue their own ambitions and goals? I advocate for the latter, and frankly a Carousing table doesn't really help me - and even more frankly no table could really help me write a plot for a character, say, trying to negotiate with local traders to organize a trade agreement for resources for the kingdom.
I liked playing 4th edition. The people that really hated 4th edition were the power gamers. They need to be the heroes of the game, but 4th edition makes it, so the entire party are the heroes. The first time I played 4th edition the DM used starbursts to represent monsters, and the starbursts were evenly divided amongst the players by the end of the game. I have played 3rd or 3.5 edition where DMs used some form candy to represent monsters and by the end of the game the barbarian and ranger would be the only ones to have any candy. This showed that the rest of the party were basically support for these more powerful characters and the games were not the much fun for anyone else but the power players.
I don't necessarily think that I gave it a good shake, but I played a combat session at level one against a hand full of kobolds, and it took forever. That killed it for me.
I prefer 4th edition over 5th
While i was aware of D&D my whole life (thanks to awesome parents), 4e was my first. I miss it so much.
The amount of options for building Characters was so amazing and large!
I used to craft dozens of Characters that all had their Concepts fully realized by LV1. 5e needed more levels to do the same with a mere fraction of options (especially now with 5.5e, ugh)
"we shouldn't be telling stories with these games"
That is probably the dumbest thing I've ever heard, and no I'm not going to watch the previous video. I award you 0 points and may God have mercy on your soul
Continue to enjoy your improv theater circle-jerk, I'm sure your rainbow-haired DM gave you levels as 'milestones' just for being nice to his non-binary puglin.
i think his point is "deliberately making the story go the way the players want" as opposed to "doing what the characters would do and sincerely attempting to accomplish the characters' goals, and then allowing the story to emerge as a result of that".
what it boils down to from the 3.5 crowd is that the game felt too much like a video game and that was by design. They even admitted they made it that way to bring in the MMO players. They had already started with DDO but they wanted the gamer crowd to play the P&P game as well so they designed it to function as close as possible.
and both were clunky messes
I actually was OK with time management, it was less time keeping and went more off of the power usage, such as the "daily". My biggest issue was the board gamey powers that all has very specific ranges in "squares", guaranteeing the players played an encounter more like a slow chess game. We would be lucky to get through two encounters in a session. My second problem was the concept of skill challenges which basically implied that there was no improvisation or creativity allowed, just roll one of the listed skill checks to get through the skill check. I do like the 4E lite co-op boardgames.
yeah, the problem with skill challenges (really, the problem with skill checks in general) is that the players aren't really playing at all. so to me, skill checks are in the same category as rolling for random encounters when traveling or dungeoncrawling. the players aren't making choices, so they aren't really playing. I think that 4e actually is a fine engine for roleplay and exploration, but you really need to be ready to fairly adjudicate the usage of combat powers outside of combat. those are largely the tools the players will be familiar with, and so those are the tools they will want to go to outside of combat as well, and I think that a lot of gm's shut that down when they shouldn't. a lot of improvisation and creativity emerges when you let this happen.
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yeah the combat is explicitly very board gamey though. if you don't like gamey combat, then obviously dnd 4e isn't for you haha. Personally, I really like board games, but they lack the narrative depth I crave, and so dnd 4e has been perfect for me.
8:28 _"You are crushing a level on a weekend"_
Yes and you are supposed to, because 4E is designed to have up to 30 Levels of available content.
Unlike say 5E which is broken past level 10 and almost nobody plays it after that, heck a gaming club I know of have DnD5E PCs capped at level 8.
So happy people are talking about 4e 😁
(I've got the whole collection including Dragon and Dungeon Magazine issues in PDF)
Your assertion is actually betrayed by your premise, which I believe is true: People can't hate 4e because of its time management if they have never played it or given it a chance. Which is definitely where I landed. I hated the very idea of 4e because it was totally unnecessary. Change for change's sake. Pathfinder's success proved I was not alone in seeing it this way. Why play something that is not D&D without playing something not called D&D also? It made no sense.
"You shouldn't be telling stories with these games." . . . Ok, maybe if you're only playing officially released modules with a fighter named fighter, a mage named mage and a halfling thief named halfling thief, but at that point you'd probably have more fun just playing a video game or running a series of TTRPG sessions.
The point of a proper D&D campaign is to create a character, and play them as they interact with other characters, and interact with world created by the DM.
To be fair, that is not telling a story, it's rather creating a story.
I hated two things: MMO-like taunts and movement powers which completely replace just walking somewhere.
I mean, why walk six squares if you have an at will power that lets you move and do something else?
So I got this silly picture in my head where the PCs would not just walk down the street, they would walk six squares and attack the air, walk and attack ... as if instead of pressing forward on your keyboard or controller, you pressed forward AND attack the whole time.
There are some ideas which I thought were great, like ritual spellcasting and powers for melee characters, but I took those and tried to incorporate them into 3.5e.
I loved the simulationist "completeness" of 3.5e.
Time management was not an issue. I liked many parts but it was hard to get a feel for the characters when they were all the same except fighter, which was a sad class, and wizard.
I've never played 4e or 3e nor do I plan to. I don't think what you're saying is time management as much as simply the pacing of encounters. The whole part of duration of rounds in combat made no sense to me as a 5e player, because that's the same in 5e. As for downtime activities, there's rules and guidelines for that in 5e. What I find an absurd statement is "we shouldn't be telling stories with these games". What is RPG if not an interactive narrative experience? I'm sure there are things 4e do well, but sadly you haven't really refuted any of the other reasons why people would hate 4e.
3.5 is far more competent than 5e
5e is a worse version of 2e
I've played 4th for 3 different seasons of Encounter of the Week, still have the little encounter cards you were rewarded for hitting the milestones, as well as two campaigns of it. I still hate the system. I hated that every ability and power was a card. I hated that roleplay was pushed onto a far backburner in favor of 'skill check and move on'. I hated the tiefling being a pact baby, throwing out all of the nuance that we had from Planescape. I hated how magic items could be reduced to magic goo that could then be any magic item you want. And I really hated how it was practically unplayable without the app due to the constant erratas.
Now... this isn't to say I hated ALL of 4th. I love the idea of minions, enemies that were as threatening as normal monsters but had all of the stamina of a wet paper bag. While I hate how 'roleplay' was handled, I did like the skill challenge mechanic. And I liked how martials had abilities that let them be 'unignorable', letting them have a presence in battle that they didn't in other editions, old and new. Would I play 4th again? Hell no. I gave my 4th books to a library and I have no desire to replace them.
I'm a big fan of 4e, but I don't think time was a big reason for it. One of the reasons why people hated it is one of the reasons why a lot of the people I game with liked it. It's written very technically. There are very few rules issues and most often you can solve them by reading the text absolutely literally. This doesn't work for the people who like to play loose and off-the cuff.
The group where we spent the most time with 4e was me, a programmer who worked on operating systems, an electrical engineer who got to spend a little time at Area 51, and a guy who not only used to repair nuclear missiles, he even corrected the documentation for them.
Yeah this felt like the biggest misread I've seen in the hobby since..well 4th edition came out lol. I prefer 4e to 3.5e by a lot because Its ironically way simpler, but the biggest complaints I saw were slow pace and it's rigidity. The math works very well for combat as sport tactical chess battles against evenly matched opponents, it falls apart if you push the numbers much at all. My barbarian spent the entire combat doing mad dash charges into enemies like a meteor, it was super fun! But I couldn't really use my powers to mad dash charge away from a pursuing carriage.
@@calebcoulter2268 I would usually allow "off-label" use of powers where it seemed appropriate.
@philopharynx7910 likewise! But rarely do powers have any more flavor than their name, so generally player abilities look like attacks for specifically engaging with similarly powerful adversaries in combat as sport, rather than as toolsets to solve varied problems.
This I believe is what people mean when they erroneously say 4e doesn't support roleplaying. Of course it does (provided, like in basically any edition, your character is primarily a combatant). My most strongly characterized character from any TTRPG was so compelling because he was informed by the (rather minmaxed) build options, not in spite of it. But the system rewards and encourages mastery, it doesn't reward or encourage creative expression even by much lip service- thats why 5es "bond/flaws", backgrounds, and trinket tables as simple as they were were so well received on launch
I love making up novel mechanics so I don't view it as a real breaker whatsoever. My bigger issue is it's just so dang slow even with the fixed math, and introducing non gamer nerd adjacent players to it was always trying.
@@calebcoulter2268 The book brings the mechanics, but the player brings the roleplaying. You can roleplay Candy Land.
While 4e did bring in a lot of stuff, I happier with PF2 overall.
No.
Time management was not the issue for me. It was probably the only thing which I had no issue with, frankly. It was the at least fifty other things I didn't like of that system that made me hate it since the first time I red and tried it.
And since Pathfinder 2 is basically a remake of 4e with a few issues corrected, but a bunch of new ones introduced, I don't like it either.
By the way, I am not a power gamer and I mostly play as a DM.
OD&D - 4e. I'll play any of those editions. I don't run anything that isn't a TSR product. That IS just me though. Thanks for the share!!
'People who don't like 4e played a couple of sessions, or the introductory and decided they didn't like it.'
Yeah ... that the point of those products. The selling points the tailored best foot forward. That's like saying "The show is really good but the first season is unwatchable." Or saying "This restaurant has a great menu, if you disregard the first two pages." Those products aren't good people who go to them are just in the sunkcost fallacy.
I saw the plans for 4E and it was enjoyable. Paizo is doing the simplified format FAR better. When dude killed himself, they cratered it, pushed 5E WAY too early, and full force shoved garbage down the throats of gamers. That's what I don't like about 4th. That it forced 5th out.
Maybe, I feel like the mechanics for combat were overdesigned. But, I also have had basically not even a session, as I tried to get in a 4e game and only me and the DM showed up for the three sessions before he called it.
The combat, which at most featured one other player, did not flow well at such a low player count. Perhaps with the proscribed four roles filled, it would have felt better. But I think that is another of the problems that the game runs into. My main group, which mostly plays Pathfinder but is branching out into other systems, has had all sorts of odd combos that more or less worked. Though, that's also an unfair comparison, because its a table of six, with everyone having some experience on both sides of the screen.
Maybe if we get around to trying 4e, I'll have a more solid take, but the VTT sheets I've seen for it are abysmal, and we mostly play on r20.
most of it is groupthink, memes. some d&d "influencers" like puffin forest straight up LIE about the edition, and people just eat it up, because they haven't played it at all, much less with a competent DM.
Yeah. A whole lot of people dunk on Nickelback online just because that's the cool / group-approved thing to do online, when in reality it's a fine band.
We played it for 1 year and I hate it. It tried to reinvent the wheel and it just didn't need to 😅 Sometimes new ideas don't work when the older systems just frankly worked better.
I just got to your point, ok, downtime! I think that you are only 25% right. 😅 from my memory, 4e didn't have survival gear, torches, rations... it was just barebones on release. There were no rules for downtime.... if the manual says " just make it up " that's not a good manual.
Same as how D&D 5e Spelljammer, a book about fighting on sailing ships in a 3d environment did not have any rules about boat combat... 😅 am I supposed to... " just make it up " ? It assumes a lot of creativity and frankly unlimited time on the part of the DM 😢
For the other 75% why me and my friends, avid 3.5 players, did not like 4e was the power system 😐 the lack of flexibility on classes as you could no longer multiclass. The mechanics were so broken on release that you could make a rock giant bleed rocks because there were no designation sayong you couldn't. 💔
Maaaaybe 4e got better by 2013 but back on release, we just didn't enjoy it and didn't have 3 years to sit on our hands and wait until it got to a playable state.
So we switched to Pathfinder 1st edition published by Paizo. We lovingly called it 3.75e 😅 and 8 years down the road, I picked up 5th edition with abother group and have been playing ever since.
Now I just wish it had ship combat rules that are decent... I might pick up AD&D and figure out THAC0 and hex grids if I can muster up a working ship combat system... but then again, I shouldn't I don't have unlimited time or game design experience to make my own system or cobble together one from multiole systems by myself. 😅
I hate 4e because of the lore I don't understand mechanics enough to judge it on that I came into D&D with 3.5
I loved 4e. So much. I remember that as a dungeon master, it was frustrating finding players who wanted to play 4th edition and give a crap about exploring the town that they just went into, like why would a module have all the stuff on the town map if you can't use any of the stuff on the map the way your character is built? Eventually I found a group of really good people who liked roleplay, but even then it was frustrating to run down time and social encounters, there just wasn't really a framework for it. By the time I left 4th edition, we had mangled it so much that we had to call it something else, because it only felt like D&D 4th edition, it only used 4th edition powers, and one day I realized, if I have to Homebrew it this much to enjoy it, maybe I should be playing something different
In my personal experience, people hated 4e because they couldn't minimax a god character. The grognard OSR guys hate anything new done to this game and when you also make it that they can't power-twink a special boi...then they all complain about how shitty the game is.
So, don’t do that time management system in the 2d10 fantasy ttrpg we’re developing. Got it.
I suspect that the reason people 'hated' 4e was because in many ways it is not even in the same genre of game to older and newer editions of D&D. One thing that many D&D players find hard to face is that D&D is, fundamentally, not a story-telling or roleplaying game first and foremost. It's a tactical combat system, and it's attached very loosely if at all to an outside of combat action resolution system. But it actually doesn't include and detailed social mechanics, narrative tools or other features that you would expect to see in a more modern roleplaying game with strong story-telling elements. This is because D&D is just that old, it came from tabletop wargaming and to a large extent it's remained that. The story in D&D always happens between combats, and combat is the only thing that actually has detailed rules. Yet, 4e is the only edition of D&D to actually fully embrace that identity as a tactical game, and because of that it does feel radically different. It's the only version of D&D to try and balance combat and encourage tactical synergy within the party mechanically. You can see it's legacy where it created a whole branch of the hobby where games that handle social elements lightly and indulge in a tight tactical focus in combat, like the mech RPG lancer, as well as games that tried to keep the elements of combat resolution that worked while brining the game up to date on more modern social and narrative elements, like 13th Age.
In essence, 4e was too ambitious, and the change from 'combat system with a basic out of combat action resolution system' to 'intricate tactical combat system with a gamified out of combat resolution system' was too large for most D&D gamers to adapt to, but it walked so that a generation of later tactical tabletop RPG's could run.
great points
Why didn't 4e thrive? 1) WotC wrecked both the setting and backward compatibility, and crapped on the existing 3.x players. Especially the RPGA and Living Greyhawk folks. Great idea, guys, deliberately anger every single person who gave you a nickel in the past. 2) It wasn't D&D. If they sold it as what it actually was-a D&D-based small unit wargame-we'd still be playing a version of it. It's 40k's Kill Team, advertise that way. 3) Too many powers felt the same except for the power tag. Bleah. I played for one year with a great GM using official D&D adventures, with minis and multi-level maps and 3d terrain-essentially the ideal circumstances-and after a year my enjoyment was finally overwhelmed by my irritation, and I left.
I tried, really tried, to like it. And I couldn't.
Speaking only for myself, I had two main issues with 4e, and neither one of them was specific to time-keeping. Now I never thought 4e was a bad game, per se. I did think it was a bad edition of D&D and a bad game for me, but there was nothing really wrong with it from a game design perspective. My two issues were that I found it went too far in replacing simulationist concepts with gamist ones. There were just too many decisions where I felt I had to approach things from a player perspective rather than a character perspective because those choices couldn't be expressed in terms of the game world. The second was that by changing the way characters worked they also changed the implied setting to support those characters. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, but it changed how I responded to the game from an emotional perspective. It felt like a new game. The problem with that is that whenever I came to it, I didn't want a new game--I wanted a game that felt like D&D. Games like World of Darkness or HERO System fit my needs when I wanted to play something other than D&D, and going back to AD&D 1e or Pathfinder met my needs when I wanted to play D&D. Fourth Edition didn't fit either set of needs, so for me it didn't make the cut.
The biggest problem was it just simply didn't work as a table top game. Because it wasn't designed as one. They tried to make a system that would be good for video games first, and table top games second. And ended up with one that just didn't work for either.
Ran two long games of 4e, played in one that ran from level 1 to level 30, never had a problem with playing at the table, in fact 4e is the edition of D&D that probably plays best at a formal sit down table precisely because it's so tactically focused.
Did it feel like a video game or a tactical boardgame? Absolutely! That's not my main complaint, though it is one. My problem is actually almost the same that I have with 5e - there's not much in the line of actual rules for anything outside of combat. Let's face it: skill challenges were a good idea, but they didn't work in practice.
I've used them in games and they work fine. Check out Matt Colville's Dusk (4e) or The Chain (5e) actual plays and you can see them in action there, too. I think the problem is they didn't describe them well in the first DMG, but they started to refine them by DMG2. I heard it's a consequence of the game getting rushed out, but at least anyone playing 4e now can find the best version of the skill challenge rules on the internet.
@SeiferVII Here are my criticisms.
First, they have a set DC regardless of what skill you use. This means that as long as you can sell your GM a justification for why your highest skill applies, you just use the highest skill. There's no bonus for using an appropriate skill, and no penalty for using an inappropriate one.
Second, in the end a skill challenge is just a much more complicated way to get to what is still a pass/fail result. You fail three times, boom done. No middle ground even if you succeed at all but one of the skill checks. Still ends in a failure.
And I will not accept 'the DM can fix these' as a solution to the criticisms, because a system problem is still valid despite the DM being able to fix a problem. That doesn't invalidate the fact that the problem exists.
I think I had a third criticism, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
I'll be real, Ive been in the scene since 4e and I still don't think anyone agrees on how to run a skill challenge
@@calebcoulter2268 In my opinion, that supports my assertion that they just don't work.
Yep! FitD's Clocks system is a sort of reimagining of skill challenges that is fleshed out enough to work
I didn't like the way it was presented, like a video game.
Hate it when my game is a game
4e isn't D&D. It is a good game. One mistake the designers made was using the term "Powers", they should have used a different term. I talked with the designers, at length, and your incorrect. They literally had a list of "sacred cows", and beyond that, they could create from scratch. So they took cues from Magic The Gathering, World of Warcraft, and Munchkin. No joke. One of the design goals was to have it set up for transition into the video game space. And, in fact, a number of Japanese phone games use D&D 4e as the game engine, and pay WOTC royalties - Currently. Not 5e, 4e. The problem, according to the designers, was two fold - 1> the "sacred cows" list was too small for current player market - and they lost a LOT of players to Pathfinder and Castles & Crusades. 2> the math was broken at higher levels - they fixed it starting in Monster Manual III, but it was too late in the life cycle. They fixed it for the re-tool with Essentials - but Essentials was packaged badly and not promoted at all... by they they were re-evaluating everything for DnD Next (5e playtest). The major problem with 4e is the math. If you stick to levels 1 to 7, you'll be okay.
Your assertion that 4e's math is broken is quite bizarre, considering that the solidity of the game system is one of its biggest strengths, if not the biggest. If you consider 4e's math broken I wonder how you consider 3.5 or 5e which are a million times worse?
My theory: D&D players are nerds, and a core nerd fantasy is that nerds eventually beat jocks. In most D&D games that happens: wizards have both more utility and are more powerful than "jocks" (martial types) at high levels. But it's not true in D&D 4E.
The people who hate D&D 4E often like playing some kind of spellcaster / utility character. For people who love martial and a bit of complexity (i.e. they aren't casual players / newbies), 4E is great, they're not hating it.
4e... the generic everyone has the same abilities, why does this gum taste like a desk, but still keep chewing it, DnD edition
Complete removal of skills
if you ran it based on the CR system..... it was stupid easy mode
Boss mobs with 1 HP minions... feats meant to kill those 1 HP minions
misc timed BS mechanics with 20 different effects all overlaping/canceling one another
pretty sure you're not talking about 4e dude
your mic gives me ear cancer
This is one of the most simple and brutal comments I've ever seen, and it somehow made me laugh my ass off XD
it's not even the mic the guy's just eating the mic is all
" We shouldn't be telling stories with these games..."
Dude, You're playing D&D wrong. Go play your card games and board games, But don't pretend you are any sort of expert on REAL D&D. Judging by your voice I have been playing longer than you have lived, and you just don't get it. This is not yugio or pokemon and we don't want it to become so. If you have never experienced the pure joy and pride and power of beating a 1 thru 15+ level full campaign that you are a main character in, that you and friends spent months or even years to complete then you are NOT a real D&D player.
OK 5e tourist.
I've talked to a few people about 4e. Fun little trend: Every single one of them that said they hated it?
They played casters.
These are also the people who say things like:
"Firearms of any type completely wreck the game balance!"
"Martials are just fine the way they are."
"Well, yeah- it's MAGIC! It's supposed to be overpowered!"
"I like to focus more on the roleplaying and less on the mechanics"
"Please use protection the next time my wife goes over to your house, she's not on birth control"
Yeah. Spellcaster players basically want their spellcasters to be better than martials in most ways from mid-level onwards. 4E doesn't let them do that, therefore they mad. They don't like that 4E doesn't give them spellcaster privilege.
Unfortunately, if the group's wizard-loving player loudly complains about 4E, then likely the group will find another system.
@@lightworker2956 Dude I've seen them whine about "OP Martials" in 5e.
I was playing a fighter Battlemaster.
"Overpowered"