How much of the anti-4E sentiment is actually justified?

[Lago PARANOIA]

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a 4E fan or anything; I have a really long list of complaints about the game and the PHB3/July 2010 errata fiasco was the last straw. But when you poll the average '3E good, 4E bad' fan about why 4E isn't any good, you tend to get a bunch of bullshit complaints mixed in with the legit ones. Stuff like 'why does the fighter have powers wah wah wah' or 'the idea of having a role system is offensive!'.

So I'm just wondering... if 4E D&D's mechanics actually worked how they wanted to but they just kept the broad style changes (universal powers, magical item showers, elimination of LW/QW, non-monster/player transparency, etc.), how much of the playerbase do you think that they would have lost anyway?

[RobbyPants]

[sidetrack]What was the PHB3/July 2010 errata fiasco?[/sidetrack]

[tzor]

That last question came out of the blue. Basically the whole presentation of 4E was FUBAR from the get go. The end of the OGL was causing panic among the third party support people; people who normally act as free promoters of any change. If your spirits managed to survive those two attacks you were subsequently backstabbed by that brain of Gleemax.

4E never had a chance, the fan base was going to revolt no matter what.

Had 4E been a good game, the fan base would have rejoined some time down the line, just as a large group of 2E fan base rejoined some time after 3E and previously the 1E holdouts had rejoined the 2E club. Real long term holdouts would have been minimial.

Now had 4E been a great game and had a base group of people who actually understood why things were and could actually explain it in a way that made sense, 4E would have been the greatest thing since sliced bread. But that was not the case.

[MGuy]

A good portion probably, especially after PF came out. But I mean without seeing the results of the system working I can't say. If it worked better I'd probably have played more.

[Username17]

A huge amount of the hate comes from simple bad design choices. Time and time again they used the fallback of "let's make it look like WoW", and that sends grognards into paroxysms of rage. There was no reason for that. They didn't have to cover the dwarf with trapezoids or bring in a new flavor of elf that looked exactly like a Blood Elf. The use of "roles" that were blatantly MMO roles didn't help either. I mean, 4rries constantly try to defend that point by saying that D&D has been based on a 4-man party since the seventies - but let's not kid ourselves: Thieves are not Strikers.

Secondly, the hubris of "patch in beta" combined with the arrogance of "you didn't like that stuff anyway" offended lots of people. Telling players that they never liked Gnomes or Halforcs and didn't need to have them in the PHB was an insult. It was more of an insult when the PHB contained literally three kinds of elf. Bringing the PHB out without summonings or multiclassing rules was unacceptable. Bringing the Monster Manual out without Frost Giants was insulting. Yeah, you gotta save some design space for the Fiend Folio so that people will buy it, but putting in the Fire Giant and not the Frost Giant really feels like you're buying an incomplete product.

So well before we get to what the actual rules are, the simple presentation of them was enough to make half the fanbase ragequit. Most people don't actually understand that the item drop system is unworkable and unfixable. Fuck, most of them don't even know that it literally works like Diablo II where you kill Yuan Ti warriors with glowing poison bows and all of that equipment vanishes and a pair of boots drop at the end of the encounter. They don't even get that far because the overall presentation of the game has so thoroughly alienated them that they don't even read that bit.

Most of the people who hate 4e don't hate it because the high level math doesn't work, or the skill challenge system is a complete catastrofuck, or even because the game is boring and repetitive. They hate 4e because WotC released the "Meet the Tiefling" video that told them they were stupid and backwards for having played and enjoyed previous editions.

That being said, a lot of people still defend 4e even when they know it doesn't work in the following areas:

• Powers for Fighters. Seriously, these are all interchangeable with each other and with the basic fucking attack in AD&D, but just the fact that Fighters have powers makes a lot of people feel good.
• Rituals. Lots of people will admit that the rituals are useless, the mechanics don't work, and the costs are set so high that no sane person would use them. But just the idea of rituals is so attractive that people will defend the section even while acknowledging that a functional system would be different in literally every respect.
• Skill Challenges. Defenders of Skill Challenges are getting rarer and rarer. The endless streams of failed revisions has strained people's patience to the breaking point. But the idea was and is popular. People genuinely want cooperative minigames for portions of the game other than stabbing goblins.
• Nerfing Wizards. People don't like that Wizards were left unable to do "things". But most everyone wanted Wizards cut down a bit.

If they had stressed differences between tabletop and MMOs instead of similarities, they would have gotten a lot more traction. If they had been inclusive of D&D tropes instead of dismissive it would have been even better. If they had dropped Eladrin and Half Elves (telling players to use the rule for "Elf" if they were half-human) and included Gnomes and Orcs as playables, they could have just fucking included Tieflings and and their stupid fucking Dragonborn. Sure, some people would have hated the new races, but as long as it isn't cutting out standard playable character types, it wouldn't have been so bad. If they had come out with more roles, like six or eight, such that the roles weren't obviously mappable to Tank, DPS, Healer, and Crowd Control then objections would be scarce.

But they also did not drop enough classes. Not by an extremely long shot. You can add classes. You can drop classes. You can trade classes around. But you can't reduce the number of classes and make classes narrower at the same time. That really makes the game feel incomplete. And while you want to be able to sell more material, you can't sell a game where it feels incomplete and expect people to not be pissed off.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

What was the PHB3/July 2010 errata fiasco?

The PHB3 was just a big ol' pile of donkey dicks. Aside from the crap that was the Psionic classes (where the CharOp board will tell you that the Psion works best if you dump all of your points into one power and spam it), the fact that hybrid classing makes you weaker unless you have an obscure min-max combo in mind--whereupon it makes you much stronger, the nonsensical new races like the shardmind and wilder, and that they released a naked reprint of the Cleric and Druid was enough to get the book condemned even by supporters.

The July 2010 errata was just standard nerf-happy fail. They ended up killing off a LOT of once-viable builds by tightening up the multiclassing rules, shrinking the allotment of top-tier builds for no reason. Probably the most noticeable victim of this was the STR/WIS cleric. They used to be a really effective leader, a serious challenger to the warlord. But the nerfs to Healer's Lore, healing in general, and Righteous Brand pretty much destroyed the build. Which wouldn't be notable, but then they released a STR/WIS class (the Runepriest) that is mostly indistinguishable from the cleric. It just came off as a money grab where they would go into a buff/nerf cycle in order to move product. WotC repented and we haven't seen errata on that scale since, but they lost me as a customer after that naked cynicism. Or gross incompetence. Whichever.

[Plebian]

A huge amount of the hate comes from simple bad design choices. Time and time again they used the fallback of "let's make it look like WoW", and that sends grognards into paroxysms of rage. There was no reason for that. They didn't have to cover the dwarf with trapezoids or bring in a new flavor of elf that looked exactly like a Blood Elf. The use of "roles" that were blatantly MMO roles didn't help either. I mean, 4rries constantly try to defend that point by saying that D&D has been based on a 4-man party since the seventies - but let's not kid ourselves: Thieves are not Strikers.

Secondly, the hubris of "patch in beta" combined with the arrogance of "you didn't like that stuff anyway" offended lots of people. Telling players that they never liked Gnomes or Halforcs and didn't need to have them in the PHB was an insult. It was more of an insult when the PHB contained literally three kinds of elf. Bringing the PHB out without summonings or multiclassing rules was unacceptable. Bringing the Monster Manual out without Frost Giants was insulting. Yeah, you gotta save some design space for the Fiend Folio so that people will buy it, but putting in the Fire Giant and not the Frost Giant really feels like you're buying an incomplete product.

So well before we get to what the actual rules are, the simple presentation of them was enough to make half the fanbase ragequit. Most people don't actually understand that the item drop system is unworkable and unfixable. Fuck, most of them don't even know that it literally works like Diablo II where you kill Yuan Ti warriors with glowing poison bows and all of that equipment vanishes and a pair of boots drop at the end of the encounter. They don't even get that far because the overall presentation of the game has so thoroughly alienated them that they don't even read that bit.

Most of the people who hate 4e don't hate it because the high level math doesn't work, or the skill challenge system is a complete catastrofuck, or even because the game is boring and repetitive. They hate 4e because WotC released the "Meet the Tiefling" video that told them they were stupid and backwards for having played and enjoyed previous editions.

That being said, a lot of people still defend 4e even when they know it doesn't work in the following areas:

• Powers for Fighters. Seriously, these are all interchangeable with each other and with the basic fucking attack in AD&D, but just the fact that Fighters have powers makes a lot of people feel good.
• Rituals. Lots of people will admit that the rituals are useless, the mechanics don't work, and the costs are set so high that no sane person would use them. But just the idea of rituals is so attractive that people will defend the section even while acknowledging that a functional system would be different in literally every respect.
• Skill Challenges. Defenders of Skill Challenges are getting rarer and rarer. The endless streams of failed revisions has strained people's patience to the breaking point. But the idea was and is popular. People genuinely want cooperative minigames for portions of the game other than stabbing goblins.
• Nerfing Wizards. People don't like that Wizards were left unable to do "things". But most everyone wanted Wizards cut down a bit.

If they had stressed differences between tabletop and MMOs instead of similarities, they would have gotten a lot more traction. If they had been inclusive of D&D tropes instead of dismissive it would have been even better. If they had dropped Eladrin and Half Elves (telling players to use the rule for "Elf" if they were half-human) and included Gnomes and Orcs as playables, they could have just fucking included Tieflings and and their stupid fucking Dragonborn. Sure, some people would have hated the new races, but as long as it isn't cutting out standard playable character types, it wouldn't have been so bad. If they had come out with more roles, like six or eight, such that the roles weren't obviously mappable to Tank, DPS, Healer, and Crowd Control then objections would be scarce.

But they also did not drop enough classes. Not by an extremely long shot. You can add classes. You can drop classes. You can trade classes around. But you can't reduce the number of classes and make classes narrower at the same time. That really makes the game feel incomplete. And while you want to be able to sell more material, you can't sell a game where it feels incomplete and expect people to not be pissed off.

-Username17

earlier editions are far, far more like video games with their random encounter charts, random drop charts, and such. the only difference in 4e is the powers; now you have everyone capable of contributing the same despite class choice and yet that scares people that spent the last few years of 3.5 making complex PrC mixups to try and compete with a caster who took one or two. the '4e is like video games' argument is stupid beyond belief because every edition of D&D is like video games because fantasy videogames are a spinoff of D&D; saying this new one is more like them ignores all the similarities present in earlier editions

powers for fighters are one of the best moves; no longer do you say "I full round attack" roll a few times and pass your turn to the wizard so he can drop a forcecage or such on the big bad

rituals are fine but people get really pissed about them, this is linked to the wizard issue. a lot of people who hate on 4e seem to think it was the caster's right to dominate the game entirely and anything that infringes on that right is a travesty, but this is a party-based game. there should be no gotcha classes, and even though some classes in 4e are a bit less powerful in some ways they're still approaching the same level much better

skill challenges are a great idea but the implementation is off, so I can agree there

but a couple things that annoy me about the people who dislike 4e. for one, a lot of them seem to think their personal dislikes translate to either an overwhelming dislike for the edition by everyone or into actual mechanical defects that don't actually exist. and the biggest difference between a lot of people who defend 4e compared to the people who defend 3e? we spent years playing 3e and we are intimately familiar with how bad of a system it actually is, but most people attacking 4e recycle the same partially- or nowhere near-true attacks and just roll with them like they make sense

[virgil]

Could you show us on the doll where the 3E wizard touched you?

[Lago PARANOIA]

powers for fighters are one of the best moves; no longer do you say "I full round attack" roll a few times and pass your turn to the wizard so he can drop a forcecage or such on the big bad

There's two aspects to this.

The first one is that a lot of grognards are just mortally offended at the thought of fighters having powers period. No system is going to please them. Fuck 'em.

The second one is that people who actually want fighters to have powers, like myself, are offended at how bullshit the powers are for them. Without looking at the description it is often very hard to tell the difference between a high-level and a low-level fighter power. And what's worse the powers tend to be stock effects like 'attack all enemies in a burst and push 1' or 'attack two enemies adjacent to you and immobilize them'. With those two things in mind, fighters may as well be doing nothing but full-attacking because the effect on gameplay isn't that much different.

[Psychic Robot]

My main hatred for 4e is the sheer arrogance of the developers. They started changing things about the game and told us that we would like it because they knew we would. They ignored player feedback and gave a giant "fuck you" to the playerbase with their marketing efforts, which amounted to expelling the old loyal 3e players and hoping that the the shiny new WoW player converts would greedily lap 4e's shit up. What was especially offensive about all this was the creation of the Concerns and Criticisms subforum at the time of 4e's development. Instead of addressing the concerns that people had, the forum served as a giant troll trap where the 4rries and the people dissatisfied with the direction of 4e were locked in perpetual flame wars. As the developers ignored this forum completely, it created a feel-good groupthink loop where they would read the other forums, see positive feedback, and pat themselves on the back for how great a job they were doing.

[violence in the media]

earlier editions are far, far more like video games with their random encounter charts, random drop charts, and such. the only difference in 4e is the powers;

Maybe this is a POV-dependent thing, but those random elements are important for taking total control of the gameworld OUT of the MC's hands. Encounter charts are, in my mind, a lot like going on nature walks through unfamiliar areas. You don't know (other than broad generalizations) what kinds of wildlife you're actually going to come across. You might not see anything more notable than sparrows, or you might come across a bear. You don't know if you're going to find a tree felled by lightning, a homeless camp, or a corpse. The notion that the MC doesn't necessarily know these things ahead of time either is somewhat nice.

Random treasure drops, if they're determined after the fact, frequently don't make any sense. Why didn't those lizardmen use the +3 battleaxe or the Staff of Earth when we were fighting them? You're absolutely correct about that. However, in prior editions, it was pretty much assumed that anything you saw the enemies use was fair game for looting afterwards. In fact, that was the most common way you finished kitting yourself out at low levels. Nobody bought masterwork weapons--they just lifted them off the corpses of the fallen. I really liked the aspect of 3E (broken system aside) that allowed you to simply buy or make the item you wanted if you didn't find it in your travels. It felt more player-agency driven and less MC-handholdy than the "letters to santa" system 4E went with.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Most of the people who hate 4e don't hate it because the high level math doesn't work, or the skill challenge system is a complete catastrofuck, or even because the game is boring and repetitive. They hate 4e because WotC released the "Meet the Tiefling" video that told them they were stupid and backwards for having played and enjoyed previous editions.

Okay, assume that you were the head honcho of the D&D branch of WotC and what you say goes as long as it's feasible. You got the job just after that Tiefling video came out and you were also informed that while you couldn't change the product that was about to be shipped, you could direct the production of new books or issue errata or even rewrite whole sections of the PHB and release it in separate books later. What would you do?

[Doom]

My main issue is the game is the use of words that mean something very different in D&D than in 4e.

Magic missile isn't magical, sleep isn't sleep, saving throws aren't saving throws, dominate doesn't dominate, disintegrate doesn't disintegrate, fireball isn't a fireball...these repeated ball-kicks (or should I say cube-kicks?) just added so much unnecessary confusion that it made it tough for D&D players to really "get into" the game, and was very irksome for folks that think words have meaning.

Granted, one could get used to the newspeak words, but the many underlying design issues made it that much easier to dislike the little kid who just kicked you in the balls.

[shadzar]

But when you poll the average '3E good, 4E bad' fan about why 4E isn't any good, you tend to get a bunch of bullshit complaints mixed in with the legit ones. Stuff like 'why does the fighter have powers wah wah wah'

Not wanting a spell list for a basic and simple class is NOT a bullshit, and the preference of any player to seek to NOT have or prefer to not have a spell-list or somesuch for that class, is 100% justified in their preference.

So I'm just wondering... if 4E D&D's mechanics actually worked how they wanted to but they just kept the broad style changes (universal powers, magical item showers, elimination of LW/QW, non-monster/player transparency, etc.), how much of the playerbase do you think that they would have lost anyway?

Not really sure what you mean, but it always dumbfounds me when something is changed for people other than the current adopters of it, you will always lose people. If you don't want to lose people, then don't make changes to something that will place them outside of the want to use the thing.

I am pretty sure they would have lost the Pathfinder crowd that was happy with 3.?, with the "broad style changes" made to 4th edition.

[Emerald]

The first one is that a lot of grognards are just mortally offended at the thought of fighters having powers period. No system is going to please them. Fuck 'em.

The second one is that people who actually want fighters to have powers, like myself, are offended at how bullshit the powers are for them. Without looking at the description it is often very hard to tell the difference between a high-level and a low-level fighter power. And what's worse the powers tend to be stock effects like 'attack all enemies in a burst and push 1' or 'attack two enemies adjacent to you and immobilize them'. With those two things in mind, fighters may as well be doing nothing but full-attacking because the effect on gameplay isn't that much different.

My issue with martial powers is a combination of both of these. The objection to fighters having powers, I think, is not that "Fighters shouldn't have powers! That's like WoW!" etc. but rather "There's no reason those particular powers should be limited by encounter or day at all." I don't really mind the idea of fighters having encounter and daily powers in theory if they're worth it, despite the whole "Why can I only use [daily X] once per day and keep using the others?" issue, but I'm offended by (to use Lago's term) the fact that these powers are powers when everyone used to be able to do things like trip, disarm, bull rush, etc. If in 3e anyone could take a feat to knock people back on an attack regardless of class, why is being able to hit someone and then push them back suddenly a fighter-only thing?

The fact that a given class's powers are homogeneous and not level appropriate is secondary to the fact that those effects shouldn't be powers at all, or should at least be universal at-wills like basic attacks are. Would it have really unbalanced the game to let anyone push 1 on a power and then made powers actually do something worth restricting to 1/encounter or 1/day? If a fighter's powers were things like "Jump 10 squares" in paragon or "Cut down mountains" in epic rather than "Bull rush someone" I'd be more willing to suspend disbelief about the encounter/daily thing if only because it's a trope that you don't keep reusing your super moves.

[talozin]

Maybe this is a POV-dependent thing, but those random elements are important for taking total control of the gameworld OUT of the MC's hands.

From an outsider's perspective, putting control of the gameworld in MC's hands often seems to be what both the people both for and against 4E are saying. As if, in other words, the game has made it harder to surprise MC.

That's both good and bad. It's bad because "you can't surprise MC" sounds suspiciously like "MC can happily railroad the fuck out of you." But there's also a reason why "going off the rails" is not usually assumed to be a good thing.

There's a place for a game where you know what you can expect where you step into it, where you can happily spend an evening whacking monsters and grabbing treasure without worrying too much about how learning Wall of Iron and Fabricate is going to allow the conjurer to seize power over the local economy. I think this is better met by a board game than a "role playing game", but whatever. The two aren't mutually exclusive categories anyway.

The thing is, there were lots of games that met that need already. What was neat about D&D is that it allowed you to do a more simulationist take on the traditional fantasy world, one where, unlike, say, Everquest, you could meaningfully affect the world your character lived in over the long term without resorting to Magic Princess Tea Party. Not to say that all groups did that or even that all groups were capable of doing it, but you could.

Looking at the arguments here, it feels like people are arguing either "that's gone, and it sucks" or "that's gone, and good riddance". People who know 4E will doubtless tell me I'm wrong, but it often reads that way.

[Username17]

Okay, assume that you were the head honcho of the D&D branch of WotC and what you say goes as long as it's feasible. You got the job just after that Tiefling video came out and you were also informed that while you couldn't change the product that was about to be shipped, you could direct the production of new books or issue errata or even rewrite whole sections of the PHB and release it in separate books later. What would you do?

Ooog. OK, that's a tall order. You've just told all the 3rd party publishers to go make their own games, you've told the established fanbase that they are morons, you've promised the sun ad the moon for the Virtual Table Top and it doesn't work, your rules have shitty placeholder numbers for equipment, skill use, and power growth. Your basic combat numbers were left melting in the sun and even before the fact that the numerics are totally unfinished you've already gone to print with a set of classes and monsters that look unfinished even to the untrained eye.

And that is where you'd hand me the hot potato? Ouch. That potato is... pretty hot. No power on Earth is going to keep people from being incredibly angry at this point. They are already angry, and the moment they see the actual books they are going to be angrier. And when they actually read the contents closely they will be even more angry. And when they try to play the skill challenges, they will be angrier still.

What you gotta do is bum's rush people with content. It won't all be good. Hell, a lot of it is going to be fucking awful. But for right now you need a classplosion and a raceplosion. Every book you bring out needs to have a pile of character classes in it. Every fucking one. Mike Mearls went for the line that "balancing things is hard, so we're going to hold off on releasing anything until we're sure we can get it right!" and that was fucked, because people could see that the shit they actually brought out was garbage too! You can't go that way when every single subsystem in your game is obviously unfinished and based on preconceptions that are crap. You need to go the other way. You need to avalanche things so that people can't figure out if the core systems are working or not. Assumption of balance through obfuscation and Oberoni is basically your only option at that point.

Don't do a PHB2 or a DMG2 a year after release. Fire your failed design staff and take some real time to do a PHB2 and DMG2 in like 2 or 3 years. The PHB2 should be coming out to great fanfare right now with what is essentially a complete overhaul of the game. Content drops with new classes and races, and yes new roles and power sources should have been coming out monthly during the entire interim. The PHB2 could have had rules for "consolidated classes" that make genuinely variable classes from the piles of weird stuff that has been being written by a variety of authors of various competency levels.

Yes, you need a replacement Skill Challenge system. You need it fast and you need it hard. But obviously Mike Mearls was not up to that task, and even if for whatever reason you couldn't fucking fire him after he failed to fix it twice, you should have at least taken him off that project and put someone in who could actually do it. Someone who is willing to devil's advocate the system and run the math through a fucking hand calculator.

-Username17

[TheFlatline]

earlier editions are far, far more like video games with their random encounter charts, random drop charts, and such.

Please show me where previous D&D editions gave every character a fucking macro bar of powers all on cooldown timers.

Let me repeat this.

THEY SELL PLAYING CARDS WITH YOUR POWERS ON THEM SO THAT YOU CAN CREATE A MACRO BAR FOR YOUR CHARACTER.

When I saw this and realized what it was, I finally realized. WOTC didn't care and wasn't *really* trying. When they hit writer's block they went and cribbed from WoW or other MMO genre staples.

I'm honest-to-god surprised that they didn't change inventory over to a slot-based system.

That being said, I'm not a grognard who insists that fighters don't get powers. I just want the martial combat options to be interesting. Or effective. Preferably both, but we're dealing with WOTC so I'm willing to settle for one or the other.

Aside from that, if the system actually *worked*, and they didn't call it Dungeons & Dragons, I probably would have been a lot more on board. As is, my "rage" factor goes down to "mostly indifferent" if I pretend that 4th ed is not D&D, the same way I pretend that the 4th Indiana Jones movie isn't an actual Indiana Jones movie.

But as someone else said, they changed so much underlying stuff it's not D&D any more. It's super high fantasy roleplay. Magic missile isn't magic, sleep isn't sleep, etc etc...

[Roy]

Don't get me wrong. I'm not a 4E fan or anything; I have a really long list of complaints about the game and the PHB3/July 2010 errata fiasco was the last straw. But when you poll the average '3E good, 4E bad' fan about why 4E isn't any good, you tend to get a bunch of bullshit complaints mixed in with the legit ones. Stuff like 'why does the fighter have powers wah wah wah' or 'the idea of having a role system is offensive!'.

So I'm just wondering... if 4E D&D's mechanics actually worked how they wanted to but they just kept the broad style changes (universal powers, magical item showers, elimination of LW/QW, non-monster/player transparency, etc.), how much of the playerbase do you think that they would have lost anyway?

I'd say... most of it. Yeah, there's a few people who make up bullshit reasons to bash it, but there are so many legitimate reasons to label it correctly as 4.Fail there is simply no need to lie.

Now the fact that their roles are bullshit, and don't work etc add to the reasons, but really even if everything worked as intended, there's enough reasons for it to be a bad game for it to be a bad game.

[MGuy]

Powers that don't interact with the world. That was what got me in the end.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Just as an aside, Frank, have you heard the whole deal about Final Fantasy 14?

Basically, rather than trying to patch the game mid-fix the game executives stepped in, apologized, refunded peoples' money, and is now making the game free until they get their shit together. This is pretty recent and they're still in the middle of the overhaul so we can't tell for sure whether it worked or not, but it's a pretty novel approach.

Do you think something like that would work? Make a huge deal out of firing the staff, a public apology, bringing in people with a known track record, then asking people for a mulligan while you spent one hell of a year getting your shit together? In the meantime you released all of the unfinished material for free on the web. Or do you think that staying the course would be better?

[sabs]

It's not clear that WoC had that kind of money to afford taking that much of a hit. It's also pretty clear that Hasbro would rather sell their own children for pocket change to the Ritual Sacrifice People, than give shit out for free.

I think Hasbro would have fired anyone who suggested doing that, and possibly even just killed the D&D license.

On a different note:

I was playing Iron Kingdom when the whole 4e was announced. It hurt, it took a game that was fun, and interesting and put it into such limbo that they stopped printing books :/

[MGuy]

Just as an aside, Frank, have you heard the whole deal about Final Fantasy 14?

Basically, rather than trying to patch the game mid-fix the game executives stepped in, apologized, refunded peoples' money, and is now making the game free until they get their shit together. This is pretty recent and they're still in the middle of the overhaul so we can't tell for sure whether it worked or not, but it's a pretty novel approach.

Do you think something like that would work? Make a huge deal out of firing the staff, a public apology, bringing in people with a known track record, then asking people for a mulligan while you spent one hell of a year getting your shit together? In the meantime you released all of the unfinished material for free on the web. Or do you think that staying the course would be better?

They couldn't do that for FFXIII? /nerdrage

[hogarth]

I'm not an early adopter at all, so I probably wouldn't have switched to 4E right away even if it was a really fun game instead of rather boring. But I probably would have switched eventually if everyone else did.

So to answer your question: If 4E had been a clear improvement to 3E in the same way 3E was a clear improvement on 2E, I think everyone would have switched sooner or later.

[Finkin]

If 4E had been a clear improvement to 3E in the same way 3E was a clear improvement on 2E, I think everyone would have switched sooner or later.

That's probably the best argument against 4E altogether.

"Hey 4rry, just look at what happened. Now STFU."