Skill Challenges
4e really doubled down on Skill Challenges, and their tragic inability to make them function at all is mystifying as it is damning. And it turned a lot of people off. My most 4rrie friends were totally psyched about Skill Challenges and now they... just... don't do them. If you remember the arguments when they first hit, the public was willing to overlook almost any flaws. If they had worked at all they would have been universally adopted and loved. But they didn't, so they eventually drove people away.
I think it really bears special repetition how incredibly forgiving the audience was for Skill Challenges. All they wanted was the loosest of structural frameworks for doing stuff and they were willing to fill in all the details themselves. I am totally serious, people didn't really mind that there weren't any sample DCs for specific tasks or complexity guidelines or action definitions or anything. People were willing to accept the flowchart:
- Everyone tells a little story.
- Everyone rolls a die.
- Hit or Miss is assigned to each player.
- Repeat until the team aggregately succeeds or fails.
Racial Determinism
No one likes the Kalashtar. No one knows what they look like, what they smell like, what they talk like, or why they are supposed to care. All they know is that apparently they are one if they want to play a Laser Cleric or Grindadin. No one knows why, and they hate it. It's part and parcel of the whole dual attribute dependency fiasco, but the part that people really notice is the part where if you want to play a certain class there's a very short list of "acceptable" races and if you want to play a specific race there is a very short list "acceptable" classes. That infuriates people.
True story: I got into a rather ugly fight with a 4rrie soon after 4e came out where he said that he intended to play an Eladrin Rogue/Wizard. And I pointed out that that simply wasn't a supported archetype in 4e. That the Rogue requires two stats to be kept high and neither of those stats are Intelligence, and Wizard powers require a maxed Intelligence, and you only get two stats maxed in 4e. And I didn't throw out any swear words or personal insults, but the man was enraged beyond comprehension. He let out a torrent of curses and banned me from his forum so that he wouldn't have to hear that line of reasoning. But of course, he eventually did put that to the test and discovered exactly what I had said would happen: you can't actually really make an effective Rogue/Wizard, Eladrin or no.
People are seemingly OK with being told that they can't play a Wizard because they are a Dwarf. Sure, they don't like it very much, but it's something they are willing to accept. Under no circumstances do they want to be told that as a Dwarf they have to play a specific type of Druid. That shit is bullshit, and everyone realizes it.
The funny thing is that they even recognized this problem before proceeding to write it in for 4e. They had those little essays about how a race shouldn't be selected just for a bonus, it should really matter and blah blah blah. And that was the idea behind giving each race two separate stat bonuses - even if you essentially needed a Charisma bonus to play a Sorcerer, by having more than a third of the races provide a Charisma bonus it wasn't really that big of a deal. But then what did they do?
- They made all the classes DAD, so the progress towards not wanting specific races for specific bonuses was negative. Now instead of having only 1 in 6 races give the "right" bonus, only 1 in 15 did.
- They made a bunch of race + class specific feats that were specifically better than other feats, so if you chose the right race/class combo you were massively superior to someone who didn't.
The Narrow Classes
I don't honestly care if there are 40 very narrow classes or 4 very wide classes. It seriously doesn't mean shit to me. And there are people who really care, but I don't think that they are a majority. There seriously are people for whom it is a make or break proposition whether they write "Swashbuckler" on their character sheet or "Warrior (and happen to select swashbucklering abilities off the warrior list)." And as far as I can tell, either choice will attract and drive away roughly equivalent numbers of potential gamers.
But you know what's the wrong choice? Having a small number of incredibly narrow classes. That's fucked up. That makes people not want to play your game. And yet, that's what they went with. And the fans were cautiously willing to give them a pass on that. People complained that they couldn't get their bard or druiding on, and fans said "Don't worry, there will be new classes coming shortly." And that just didn't really happen. There still isn't a bow sniper, mobility spearman, or even halfling halberdier to be played. As discussed in the Classplosion thread, people would have been willing to accept the incredible limitations of the Rogue and Paladin class if there had been Thugs and Cavaliers and shit to play instead. But there weren't. There still aren't. And people are unhappy. And rightfully so.
What Would You Do About It?
So there are lots of ways you could go about fixing that up. And oddly, I think it genuinely could be addressed by coming out with a new box set. Possibly, even probably not enough to make me personally like it, but enough to make people in general happy with it. It comes in just a few steps:
- Skill Challenges: You're writing a new DM section anyway. It would be simple enough to include a Skill Challenge system that rewarded participation and had meaningful chances of success and failure.
- New Classes: You're writing the classes over again. Drop DAD. This is super important. When you do the new Laser Cleric powers, they are Wisdom Only. You could go farther and make classes a lot more open, but just by taking the Charisma riders off of Laser Cleric powers, you'd suddenly open the class up to Elves and Dwarves and Humans. And no one would care what Kalashtar were and we'd all be happier.
- New Feats Or even no feats. The 4e feats are by and large very bad for the game. But just by clearing out the racial feats, you'd go a long way toward making the game less stupid and aggravating.
- Classplode! We only have the first 4 months of the new edition, and apparently they are only releasing a total of 8 classes in that period. And that's not good. Especially since they are releasing 10 races in the same period (although 4 of those races are elves, so there is still more diversity in the classes). But there's a whole new year coming out, and the entire DDI for that period. So they could plausibly release the several dozen classes you need to make a 4e style game feel like anything but a straight jacket.
-Username17