Now that it's over, deconstructing 4E

[hogarth]

Okay, perhaps I stated it badly, since everyone here has given me the same answer.

Pretend that all previous versions of D&D didn't exist.

So everything that was inspired by D&D (e.g. other tabletop RPGs and computer RPGs) has ceased to exist as well? That's tough to imagine.

[Cyberzombie]

Now, this is a 5e hype post, but blame shifting aside, this is Mike Mearls saying 'Yep. 4e = MMO, bitches.'

Ah, so that's where that comes from. Well that explains a lot, since I didn't think 4E had the MMO feel at all. It came off as a poorly designed miniatures game ripoff of Final Fantasy Tactics.

[Previn]

Now, this is a 5e hype post, but blame shifting aside, this is Mike Mearls saying 'Yep. 4e = MMO, bitches.'

Ah, so that's where that comes from. Well that explains a lot, since I didn't think 4E had the MMO feel at all. It came off as a poorly designed miniatures game ripoff of Final Fantasy Tactics.

It's a little more than just that:

Sometime around 2006, the D&D team made a big presentation to the Hasbro senior management on how they could take D&D up to the $50 million level and potentially keep growing it. The core of that plan was a synergistic relationship between the tabletop game and what came to be known as DDI. At the time Hasbro didn't have the rights to do an MMO for D&D, so DDI was the next best thing. The Wizards team produced figures showing that there were millions of people playing D&D and that if they could move a moderate fraction of those people to DDI, they would achieve their revenue goals. Then DDI could be expanded over time and if/when Hasbro recovered the video gaming rights, it could be used as a platform to launch a true D&D MMO, which could take them over $100 million/year.

The DDI pitch was that the 4th Edition would be designed so that it would work best when played with DDI. DDI had a big VTT component of its design that would be the driver of this move to get folks to hybridize their tabletop game with digital tools.

Now, Dancey was laid off from WotC several years before all this, so it may not be true, but it fits disturbingly well and a lot of the 4e mmo decisions make a ton more sense with his version in mind.

Side note: WotC made a moderate deal about reacquiring the video game rights when they accomplish it in the last year.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Playing a cat druid in raids challenges you to elegantly juggle your resources, self-buffs, and damage over time effects.

I'm guessing Mikey played the part where you spam magic missile to kill 10 kobolds and leave the starting area, and said, "Well, guess this is what's popular with the kids."

[Voss]

It's a little more than just that:

Sometime around 2006, the D&D team made a big presentation to the Hasbro senior management on how they could take D&D up to the $50 million level and potentially keep growing it. The core of that plan was a synergistic relationship between the tabletop game and what came to be known as DDI. At the time Hasbro didn't have the rights to do an MMO for D&D, so DDI was the next best thing. The Wizards team produced figures showing that there were millions of people playing D&D and that if they could move a moderate fraction of those people to DDI, they would achieve their revenue goals. Then DDI could be expanded over time and if/when Hasbro recovered the video gaming rights, it could be used as a platform to launch a true D&D MMO, which could take them over $100 million/year.

The DDI pitch was that the 4th Edition would be designed so that it would work best when played with DDI. DDI had a big VTT component of its design that would be the driver of this move to get folks to hybridize their tabletop game with digital tools.

Now, Dancey was laid off from WotC several years before all this, so it may not be true, but it fits disturbingly well and a lot of the 4e mmo decisions make a ton more sense with his version in mind.

Ooo. That $50 mil is the threshold that means Hasbro actually gives a flying fuck about a property. It was Dancey's personal Great Hunt that failed miserably and why D&D is considered to be a personal side project that is only permitted because Magic makes enough money.

Of course, as it turned out, a simple digital tabletop was completely beyond their ability, so... whatever.

[rapa-nui]

If there had never ever been any edition of D&D (or chainmail, or any tactical rpg-ish product) I think 4E would still have been perceived to have major shortcomings.

When we play a fantasy game, there are certain trope elements we expect to be fulfilled. While 4e is (generally) acceptable to fulfill the "them bad, me use violence, me rewarded and applauded" power fantasy process (as somsone reduced it recently in another thread) it isn't fun doing so. Your rogue character doesn't feel particularly roguish, your wizard doesn't feel particularly wizardish. When you compare what a warlock is doing to what a bow ranger is doing... it looks really fucking similar.

Another thing we want from all of our game products is meaningful choices. Right from the getgo, 4E failed in that regard. A lot of videogames and most CCGs offer more meaningful optimization choices.

Lastly... this is a fantasy roleplaying game that doesn't hit all the notes. Shapechanging, familiars/pets, followers, illusions were glaring omissions from the getgo. The expected power progression (from other games, not D&D specifically) isn't there.


OK, that's me doing my best to restrict myself to your specific criteria. For me, the biggest fail I experienced with 4e was a session where a single combat took like 4 fucking hours. I didn't stick with it for much longer. This is a massive failure state for any game design- if playing the game has become a tedious chore, you have failed your job as a designer.

3e had a fuckton of problems, but at least with a good DM and some houserule glue, and a healthy helping of Magical Tea Party you could make it work.


(PS: I missed this in my 3 year absence- what is "Feat Tax"?)

[Voss]

Feat tax is pretty much a feat that is more or less required to take. You'd get some debate on Natural Spell for 3e druids, but 4e had the scaling attack bonus feats, which were pretty much required for the math to work out.

Your 4e combat reminded me of the other comparison for 4e: each combat is an episode of Sailor Moon, except there isn't any handy moral lesson on friendship or whatever- just the extended, overly scripted fight with excessive poses between the heroes and the monster of the week while everyone just shoots thematically colored lasers at people while announcing ridiculous attack names. Between the laser clerics and paladins, the sorcerer, warlock and wizard, you could totally do an elemental, holy, and 'love' (or high energy plasma) themed sentai group.

[tussock]

Okay, perhaps I stated it badly, since everyone here has given me the same answer.

But D&D did exist and you probably can't even have fantasy-themed CCGs without it. The fact there's hundreds of similar things in a book called a Monster Manual doesn't make any sense outside the early days of D&D building up hundreds of monsters from scores of incompatible sources for dungeon-bashing that eventually got collected into a profitable hardcover.

What's wrong with it?

But I get what you mean. Ignoring how there's other games that do all the same things only better and also many more things in the same or less page count, why does 4e ruin your evening.


[*]Skill challenges don't work. Numbers-wise it's just a disaster. That's a lot of the game, skills and stuff can't really be used by most characters. Their trap system, exploration, investigation, social bargaining, a whole bunch of the game just doesn't function anything like it's supposed to. It's literally where someone grabs one broadly useful skill and rolls a die for it six to twelve times and then you get to do something else. While you can MTP up a story around it, the story works better if you don't use the associated rules at all. That's with all the patches, the first print just failed everyone.

[*]If you're fighting bugbears, and there's bugbears in the next room, and you check the rules for things hearing fights and moving from A to B, and the two rooms try to fight you at once, the game stops working. It actually crashes, blue screen. The combat doesn't resolve. You just roll dice for hours and nothing happens.

[*]Some of the monsters in the game can do that all on their own, including the eponymous Dragons. Meeting a Dragon in a Dungeon is just a horrible experience where you use all of your tricks up and then keep rolling dice for hours and nothing happens.

[*]You can't talk about the game from the point of view of your character. The things you do in the game don't translate into meaningful stories outside it. Ideally, you might have said something cool you did with their stunt system, only they punish you for using it, so no one does. Again, you can make a story up, but only by ignoring the actual mechanics.

[*]What even is an Ogre? Or anything? Not only can I not talk about my character, the DM can't talk about monsters either. There's skill checks for knowing that the big thing with giant claws that's breathing fire can claw you and sometimes breathe fire. If you find it in a fucking cave, you might be allowed to know it appears in caves. Like, it's interestingly medieval in an ironic hipster way, but any stories will again have nothing to do with the mechanics or anything in the books.

[*]Because there's no stories, there's no 4e web cartoons or amateur fiction either. Well, they paid Penny Arcade a bunch of money to talk about Jim Darkmagic, who burn burn burn burn burn burn burn burn, LOL. Ha. Yeh. Infinite burning. Great. Turns out the story is about how normal people hate your 4e character and want them to die.

[*]It's even difficult to remember or play. Players needed electronic character builders and reference cards and stacks of coloured tokens to go with their minis and ... even for a really punchy four-turn miniatures game, it's just difficult to work with. DMs too, complained of having no idea what their players could do and barely being able to keep up with the monster's powers as various conditions came and went and you have a bunch of crap to roll and check on all the time.

[*]Even the basic resolution schemes with things starting and ending in their own special place in the turn order, with different termination mechanics, that shit is hard to use for no actual benefit.

[*]The errata cycle. Holy fuck. Nobody wanted that shit. No one. The mid-edition errata that screwed a bunch of characters to make the new ones they put out seem better by comparison, that was particularly egregious, but even without that. Crazy pants.

[*]The incredibly linear adventures they put out that went nowhere in such a hurry. The typical session involved moving to point A, fighting the thing there, then moving to point B, and fight those things too. And that was often four hours of your life gone. The rare short fights being things which mysteriously make you stronger for the next one.



And where I have no choice but to compare to previous games, the treatment that the Forgotten Realms and Darksun got was just weirdly out of touch with their customer base. 3e FR won awards. 4e FR has been officially removed from the canon.

[Cyberzombie]

And where I have no choice but to compare to previous games, the treatment that the Forgotten Realms and Darksun got was just weirdly out of touch with their customer base. 3e FR won awards. 4e FR has been officially removed from the canon.

Oh really? They outright ignored the 4E Forgotten Realms completely? What are they doing to it for 5E? I haven't really kept up on FR much.

[CCarter]

A few things on its flaws as a game:

*At release it also needed someone to have already gone through and actually looked for lethal combos; people figured out holes with for instance Orb of Imposition/Sleep and Blade Cascade and ganked Orcus before the book was officially released.

The rapier was another dumb thing that didn't work and continued to not work after errata - in core its a superior [exotic] weapon because its a light blade with +3 accuracy and d8 base damage, making it the ultimate rogue weapon, but also something your fighter couldn't use - even though rogues wouldn't be proficient with it even if it was military [martial]. I believe they errata'd it to military at about the same time they released the hybrid rules, which would actually have worked with the initial version and now gave hybrid fighter/rogues rapiers for free.

*Synergies: the 'tyranny of accuracy' - monster AC/defenses are on a treadmill where missing out on a +1 to hit is significant. +2 was the new baseline and so workable class/race matchups are limited. They attempted a bit to make characters more MAD, e.g. you'd play a dwarf fighter because of the warhammer powers that got CON bonuses and Wis for more combat challenge) but since races got two +2s this eventually after more races were released led to even harder race pigeonholing since races had appeared with both +2s in the right spot for a particular class. Kalashtar and I think shifters for instance. Eventually Essentials just revised PHB races to just pick which stat got a bonus.
There was at some point a 'Melee Training' feat which made lower 'prime requisite' stats more workable - not at a very high optimization level, but perhaps workably for classes which relied largely on basic attacks like swordmages - but this was errata'd back when Essentials classes like the Slayer appeared, that were wholly reliant on basic attacks.

*At a basic mechanic level, it inherited a number of things it didn't need from 3E other than the stats. Do you need a roll to see who goes first when a combat is going to take 10 rounds to resolve anyway? Do you need a damage roll when you're going to roll so many d8s over the course of the combat (all with a +5 from your stat anyway) that the difference is insignificant?

[OgreBattle]

What I learned from 4e backlash is that having different MECHANICS is a very strong part of delivering difference in FLAVOR, and that a fight that drags on with victory guaranteed (but 5 more rounds away) is possibly worse than having a fight that ends in one round.

And fiddly bonus tracking can go to hell and stay in hell.

[Hicks]

[*]Because there's no stories, there's no 4e web cartoons or amateur fiction either. Well, they paid Penny Arcade a bunch of money to talk about Jim Darkmagic, who burn burn burn burn burn burn burn burn, LOL.

Counterpoint! I choose you!

[Voss]

Is that a 4e comic? All I see are words about kobolds.

[momothefiddler]

Yeah at points it specifically discusses 4e mechanics.

[Dogbert]

The question here is, how can I not compare it to an MMO when an ex WotC worker told me that was specifically the main design objective as per executive orders?

The executives literally told the by-then d&d head "give us the second coming of WoW or else." A friend of mine has imparted videogame design seminars, and he used 4E's books as practice for his students.

There's this indie roleplaying book made to emulate JRPGs (can't remember the name), and that's a valid premise.

A couple decades ago, there was this game by Ewen Cluney called Thrash. Its premise was emulating fighting games, and that's a valid premise.

So, speaking of a hypothetical world without d&d, if I read 4E and someone asked what the book is about? Well, you can guess my answer.

If you look at it specifically on its own merits and independently of what d&d was, it's not a total loss, I'm not just the target demo.

[Laertes]

The reason I specified "no MMORPG / board game comparisons" is that those don't invalidate a game. Board games are fun. I don't play MMORPGs but that's because I don't like getting addicted; their basic mechanics are fun too. If someone built a tabletop game that drew inspiration from the resource-management power-cooldown style WoW experience, that might actually be a pretty cool game in its own right. I wouldn't play it as an RPG, but I may well come up with a storyline to link the fights together in the same way that I'd do with 40k or something of that ilk.

Therefore, if someone says "ugh, this game is just an attempt to port WoW to the tabletop", then as long as it's done in an interesting and playable way that's a noble endeavour and I can get behind it. That was what they tried to do, from the sounds of it, and you cannot criticise a designer for achieving their design brief.

What I'm hearing from this thread was that it was done in a dull and unplayable way, and that the core mechanism - that of Daily, Encounter, At-Will powers - was not fun. That's a bad thing and a failure of design. The fact that fights were grindy, dull and went on too long is inexcusable in a game which is intended to be about fighting.

Skill challenges were very obviously tacked on as a "here's something to cover the portion of the game which is not combat and therefore neither the designer nor the player really gives a damn about" piece of eleventh-hour ass covering. The designers did a half-assed job because all that mattered was to have some system there, even if it's bad system. That's inexcusable for a roleplaying game, but for a board game inspired by MMORPGs it's excusable because a board game can't fall back on MTP to cover itself. As such yes, I am not surprised to hear that they suck and that people abandoned them, but they were fairly evidently not intended as the core game activity.

[TiaC]

In an MMORPG, resolving an attack takes a fraction of a second. In 4e it takes close to two orders of magnitude more. The design did not account for this, so even the easy fights took longer than a MMORPG's boss fights.

[Username17]

The thing is that the attempts to import MMO roles like tanking and DPS into table top were kind of fuxxored to begin with. The MMOs they were copying were process oriented time sinks, it's not appropriate to try to put something like that into a turn based game.

When David Noonan went off on a rant about how MMO roles were ported to 4e D&D even though he couldn't find examples of such things in any other source material, you know you've got a major stumbling process of the design team. They were taking things from MMOs that they couldn't figure out a way to fit into table top cooperative storytelling, and then put them in anyway because MMO copying was considered more important than genre emulation or coherent design.

You can't get away from it. Copying MMOs is probably the single biggest reason for 4e being so lame. The red dot/green dot classifications for NPCs, the palette swapping monsters, the monster depiction/corpse loot distinction, and the non-functional "roles" were bad ideas and they didn't work. But they embraced anyway because hamhandedly aping MMO motifs was considered more important than making sense.

-Username17

[Voss]

In an MMORPG, resolving an attack takes a fraction of a second. In 4e it takes close to two orders of magnitude more. The design did not account for this, so even the easy fights took longer than a MMORPG's boss fights.

Eh. I've had MMO boss fights drag on for 20-30 minutes or more. They're painfully uninteresting and tedious. I'd almost call the boring-ass long fights in 4e to be working as intended. Which is its own special brand of sad.


Noonan's blog post(s) are fascinating from the sheer bloody minded stupidity of them. First, he tries to justify them as something natural. Upon looking, he can't find _anything_ to justify this shit, no matter what genre he jumps to. You'd think, at some point that after having done this work, he wouldn't blog about how it is in fact utterly wrong. Instead he doubles down on WoW and (in part 3) how DMs forced themselves to go easy on wizards, to the point of fudging die rolls and making suboptimal decisions, while all the other players universally sacrificed themselves for the M-U.

The really impressive part is part 1, wherein he explains that players largely don't give a shit about roles, and pretty much want to switch between them or not even care about bullshit artificial schema... exactly as it turns out the source material does.

Of course, since he's jumped ship for video games and not writing rules, this shouldn't be all that surprising.

[Username17]

David Noonan must be really hard to work with. Those MMO roles articles are not the only time he has blogged about having done careful and exhaustive research to discover that he is in fact factually wrong and then proceeded to plow on full steam ahead with his own bad idea after he had conclusively proved that it was a bad idea. The comparison between the Monster Manual V and 4e Roles articles is pretty amazing. In both cases he comes up with an idea, then exhaustively researches it and concludes that people fucking hate it and it doesn't fulfill design goals. Then he does it anyway, because he "can't help himself."

• David Noonan: I've decided to do X.
• Everyone else: But that's a terrible idea and it doesn't work.
• David Noonan: It is true that X is both terrible and doesn't work, however I have decided to do X, and that's what we're going to do.
• Everyone else:

-Username17

[tussock]

[*]Because there's no stories, there's no 4e web cartoons or amateur fiction either. Well, they paid Penny Arcade a bunch of money to talk about Jim Darkmagic, who burn burn burn burn burn burn burn burn, LOL.

Counterpoint! I choose you!

Thanks, it's ... so, going from the start ...

Joke about minions running away from PCs because they're crap, only the rules don't support that at all. Joke about "Leader" classes not being good leaders that goes on forever. Joke about how weird adventurers are. It's basically a series of jokes about how the fluff doesn't match the crunch, and how the High Elf is Evil.

Robots are computers, Kobolds are incredibly stupid but also can disarm traps, you can talk forever in one combat round, action points make no sense. Right. So, yeh. The thing about not being able to tell 4e stories is you can still tell stories that have nothing to do with the mechanics, and then it turns out you can add some jokes about how the mechanics aren't helping your story and are weirdly dissociative.

Every mention of 4e is basically "What just happened? That makes no sense." If you compare early OOTS jokes, where they're doing a basic dungeon bash and riffing on how the terminology and legal fine print is a bit awkward, but the rules just happen naturally within the story, it's different. Haley sneak attacks by being sneaky when attacking, etc.

[Aryxbez]

Pretend that all previous versions of D&D didn't exist. Pretend you had no prior versions to compare it to. Pretend that there can be no "it got changed from X to Y" and no "they solved this problem wrong" since there never was an X to begin with, and no previous problem to solve.

It's a blank slate. It's 2007 and a company called Wizards of the Coast, best known for selling CCGs, has just launched a brand new game called Dungeons and Dragons. What's wrong with it?

To no offense of this thread (I've played 4th edition quite a bit), but the implications of this is something I would totally like to see someone rant about. Especially why this is important..I don't know "what" RPG I'd be playing if I wasn't introduced to it by an old starter set/friend. Said Friend later got into Warhammer, and White Wolf, so...I guess I'd be quasi-hipstering into that, longing for some fantasy. It'd probably take me longer than I'd like to get over cognitive bias to truly understand its problems (especially since WW-combat can be drawn out, so 4th edition doing that would seem par for the course). Also if doing WH-Fantasy, I'd possibly find 4th's initial simplicity a godsend...till the complexity set in.


That aside, 4th edition also had the constant arms-race for swag. If you didn't spend your Gold on power, ye would fall behind the curve, and battles would become "Padded Sumo". Optimization was also strongly advised so to minimize the "Padded Sumo' as well, and was another thing a player would have to stay on top with, or else enjoy some grinds.

1.)"The palette of design choices at chargen is too limited."
2.) "The palette of actions that one can take on a turn-by-turn basis is too limited."
3.) "Advancement is too railroadish."
4.) "Classes X, Y and Z worked in too similar a fashion."
5.) "The monsters are all pretty samey."

1.)Each Class had 2 options upon their release, though supplements would add 1-2 per each book, Optimization ensured usually only 1-2 worthwhile, 3 at best (Lazy-Warlord, Int, & Bravura?, Melee/Ranged Rangers, Con-Barians, Shielding swordmages ONLY). Course, even then what ye could do with said options were only for the Combat Minigame, as not going to risk your combat resources on the non-combat Minigame (Skill Challenges). They really should've just given out some "non-combat powers" for free there.

2.)Ye usually get into a Power-usage routine very easily. Most especially Nova-ing/Spiking type method if you're like a Warlord or Ranger. So really could just write out a combat script for your PC to follow. Multi-atks or Enabling of such were king, and pretty much all that mattered (Healing usually minor actions, with couple Leader PC's, you're set).

3.)I guess some probably thinking that's because the numbers are set, but prior editions did that too (silly RPG fans). Instead, guessing derives from your path ye chose at creation, pretty much stuck in a certain grouping of powers, with certain theme, and going outside of that will penalize you most likely (optimization pending). Retraining was very limiting for what it was, could be that?

4.)Same power schedule, & roles had some similar stuff, but mostly worse than their "Powerhouse" counterparts. I imagine it also refers to how no real identity among the powers, like one said before how a certain effect could be any flavor of power source.

5.) Early Monster Manual to say the least, had monsters as pretty similar. Can also be referring to how they're all built on one system for their numbers, so things seem homogenized in that department with no slight variation of numbers. I actually felt decent bit of monsters used got more interesting, mostly the "Big Bruiser" type guys, and Purple Worm got cool too. I think that stems from lot of people look at a list of spells on a monster back in 3rd-ish, and don't really see an identity from the monster, as those effects are hidden in the PHB. While the 4th edition statblock and all its effects are right in front of you. Though yeah, monsters and their "super special unique" powers, didn't really have any cool out of combat uses.

Hope that helps to answer your original queries Laertes?

[nockermensch]

When David Noonan went off on a rant about how MMO roles were ported to 4e D&D even though he couldn't find examples of such things in any other source material, you know you've got a major stumbling process of the design team. They were taking things from MMOs that they couldn't figure out a way to fit into table top cooperative storytelling, and then put them in anyway because MMO copying was considered more important than genre emulation or coherent design.

This shows that not only they're misguided, but they're also dumb. You could add tanking to a shallow RPG like 4e. You could do it in a very video-gamish way by writing monster AI targeting rules and tracking hate for every PC. Hate would increase with attacks, and the trick is that a tank gains a large multiplier on hate for his actions.

Or you could do it in a more interesting way by giving tankers level appropriate damage and having them actually controlling the space around them (large threatened areas, creating difficult terrain, attacks that stop monsters' movement, changing places with a friend as a immediate action, etc).

The actual way they did it in 4e was the shallow way, only more insulting because there were no explicit rules. They simply expect that the DM will run the targeting AI as if he was a video-game.

[Voss]

There were explicit rules for it in 4e. They were just terrible at what they were supposed to do. -2 to hit and trivial damage just isn't relevant when you can attack someone actually dangerous with a significantly lower AC (or save).

Being bad at math broke the fundamental systems under which the game was supposed to operate.

[OgreBattle]

Or you could do it in a more interesting way by giving tankers level appropriate damage and having them actually controlling the space around them (large threatened areas, creating difficult terrain, attacks that stop monsters' movement, changing places with a friend as a immediate action, etc).

Your examples of controlling space, difficult terrain, stopping monsters movement, switching positions as an immediate, those are all things that various 4e classes can do, but when they do those things they also do tiny damage as a 'tradeoff'

I figure one of the mistakes is making strikers a separate role so everyone else had to do less damage in comparison, meaning the fights drag on. With strikers removed as a protected role you end up with...

Fighter- Creates a threat zone, can step in place of allies, and hits hard
Wizard- Lays down zone debuffs, zone effects and hits hard
Cleric- Buffs party and hits hard

and so on.