Now that it's over, deconstructing 4E

[Laertes]

A question to the D&D players here, if I may:

Suppose that D&D 4th edition, as written in the original three books, was published without invoking the D&D label in any way and without attempting to position itself as a successor to that brand. What would be your specific mechanical critique of it as a game on its own terms?

Please do not invoke the following, as they are not what I'm asking and may also derail the thread:
- "It's a MMORPG."
- "It's not like old D&D was."
- "It's just a dungeoneering board game."
- "Class X's powers do not properly represent its fluff."
- "The later sourcebooks were badly done."

Please do expound extensively upon the following, as I have heard them repeated but would welcome a more in-depth analysis by people who know the game better than I do.
- "The palette of design choices at chargen is too limited."
- "The palette of actions that one can take on a turn-by-turn basis is too limited."
- "Advancement is too railroadish."
- "Classes X, Y and Z worked in too similar a fashion."
- "The monsters are all pretty samey."

What is mechanically wrong with the game as it stands? What are the issues with it under its own terms? Which parts of it worked, and which did not?

I'm not trying to defend it. I've never played or run D&D and have no stake or champion in the D&D edition wars. I'm trying to understand the specific mistakes they made, in order to learn from them.

[Mistborn]

Honestly 4e's failings are both simple and well know

-all the non-combat parts of the game where gutted, supposedly to be replaced by skill challenges
-skill challenges didn't work and remained unplayable despite being reworked by Mearls several times
-the power system made classes feel samey and offended people by putting fighters and wizards on the same resource system, the deveolpers claimed this was necessary to balance the classes.
-the classes still were not balanced
-reworked magic item system worse than the one that preceded it
-lots of things people liked where removed in order for the math to "just work"
-then the math didn't work anyway.
-instead of only some people being able to do cool things at high level now no one got to do cool things ever.

[zugschef]

We are Yuan-ti with poisoned arrows in quiver. When we die, we might drop butterknives.

[Occluded Sun]

The developers heeded the complaint that certain classes were highly restricted and didn't get to do "cool things" (i.e. fighters) while others had an embarassment of options and broad powers with enough leveling (i.e. wizards).

4e 'solved' this problem by making fighters and wizards similar, which would have been good, if they hadn't done it by making wizards like fighters (limited and boring) instead of the other way around.

The ability of players to use their imaginations to come up with creative and entertaining uses of their powers was mostly eliminated - which I suspect is a large part of why people keep making comparisons to MMORPGs, whose mechanics by necessity do not involve much player creativity.

The abolishment of all the kludgy detail used to support so much of 3e did not take into account that people put up with the kludges because they deeply desired to have something, anything, to permit those sorts of details, and they were willing to put up with arbitrary mechanical complexity if that was what they had to do.

4e may have done well at what it was intended to do, and I've heard people argue that the result is a better game in itself than previous D&D versions... but it's not the game most people wanted to play. It doesn't matter if you've come up with the best version of chess ever imagined if people want to play tennis instead.

[Voss]

The game board is in stasis until the party interacts with the red dots. The important aspects is this doesn't address any RPG concerns like travel, exploration, interaction, choice or consequence. All that is gone, in favor of moving into the Study and bashing Col Mustard Orcs over the head with Lead Swords. You get to act out the murder, but there is no rest of the game. Just the current 10x10 room with orc and unrelated treasure waiting for the win state.

On the mechanics that it does have: weapons X, Y and Z are better than all other weapons. Take those, the rest of the list is irrelevant. Powers, while same in feel, are badly written and many are just better. Take those, ignore the rest. There are feats worth taking.... yeah, you can figure out how this goes by now.

[Laertes]

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. 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?

[rasmuswagner]

Monster Design in 4E was, in theory, an improvement on 3E monster design.

In execution, because RPGs are full of asshats who think math is not the absolute foundation of game design, the implementation was ass, specifically padded sumo.
Also, the writing style was too mechanistic, too many monsters were palette swaps (tentancle bear, FEYWILD tentacle bear, SHADOW tentacle bear, ELEMENTAL tentacle bear), every equipment loadout is a new monster, alchemist monster with a wide array of interesting grenades drops a +1 Bohemian Ear Spoon when killed, et cetera and so forth.

But think of the advances:
*Considerations of action economy. Elite and Solo monsters were (eventually) conceived to have *2 and *5 the output of a single monster, and not just in the form of delivering a fuckload of damage to a single target, and the abilty to soak up defuffs without becoming completely useless.
*Simplicity of design. We don't need to know the Basketweaving skill of a Dragon, much less a Goblin.
*Designing to specs, instead of designing to components and then adding fudge to meet specs. High level beatsticks in 3E have absurd Strength, Constitution and Natural armor that have nothing to do with concept, art or reason, and everything to do with meeting target numbers for their CR.
*Minions. Because leveled or multi-HD beatsticks that attack for fuck-all and take more than a full attack to get rid of are fucking lame.

[Lago PARANOIA]

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54 ... c&start=50

Reasons 1-10

So. If you were going to rank the subsystems, design policies, or aspects of 4E D&D by shittiness in a top ten format, how would you do it?

1. Skill Challenges.

• The effort to create a unified mechanic for dealing with non-combat problems is understandable, and certainly popular at the time. The idea that they could simply shit one out in twenty minutes and release it without ever playtesting it or mathhammering it is incomprehensible.

2. "Monsters Don't Exist"

• Nothing good ever came from the "revelation" that monsters "did not exist" outside of combat. All that did was to encourage the authors to rip every immersive detail from the entire monster manual.

3. Everything is Core.

• Even those assholes dropped this concept less than 2 years into 4e's lifespan, but this was a tragedy. I understand that "Core Rulebooks" sell more than supplements, but trying to set up a system where some musings about a monster type by your C team that your A team never even saw was a "core rule" was incapable of ending well.

4. Yearly Base Books

• The goal of putting out a new set of basic core books in a year's time and another set of basic core books a year after that is obvious from a money-grubbing standpoint, but nothing good came of that. It meant that the designers held things back so that things could be "saved for the PHB 2" or "saved for the DMG 3" or some shit. Over and above the fact that the designers were assclowns, the fact that they had to make a new set of corer than core books in a year's time meant that they were deliberately making crippleware. Even a good designer would produce a bad product if the mission statement was to create an incomplete work.

5. The Item System

• Much has been said about how shitty this subsystem was, but I don't think it will ever be enough. Everything was wrong with this subsystem.

6. The Math

• Everyone likes it when the math works, so it's unsurprising that they used "the math just works" as a rallying cry and a selling point. However, 4e's level-scaling math was a catastrofail. From ice that gets slipperier as you go up in level to the game's general inability to accept different levels of optimization, this was a litany of horror and stupid.

7. Minions

• I can see why Rob Heinsoo thought they were a good idea, he'd used the same rule in Feng Shui (where it works quite well). Players also love them... for a while. But this rule has no place in a campaign game, and even less of a place in a game with level scaling. D&D is both of those things, and people sour on minions quick when they realize that yesterday's boss monster is literally being cleared out by caltrops today. The basic stupidity of the system is also harshly exposed by DoT effects and nuisance damage - two things that Hit Point based games absolutely love using. Minions would have a place in a game that was all one-shots, but in a game like D&D it just shits on verisimilitude for little benefit.

8. "Exception Based Design"

• Look, I know that "exception based design" is an actual thing that is actually a perfectly decent idea, but I'm talking about EBD as the thing that Mike Mearls apparently thought it was - which was a license to dump all the rules for a monster into the monster's writeup and ignore everything else in the game. This was a stupid fucking design system. It gave us the need for a quarter page writeup to switch a monster from using an ax to using a sword, and it gave us five different abilities called "Evil Eye" that did radically different things.

9. Everyone is Vancian

• I'll actually defend Vancian casting from time to time. I think it has a place in the game. But it's a pain in the ass, and not everyone wants to do it. Making every class fiddle with daily powers was a terrible mistake. The idea that they actually scrapped a working system with eight classes where three of them got plundered to make the Book of Nine Swords makes this design decision even more offensive and terrible.

10.Eight Classes

• The class structure they came out with was a war crime. Every class had twelve to fourteen thousand words dedicated to the writeup itself, and it was heavily weighted towards Paragon options that you weren't even going to see for months of play. That's a hundred thousand words dedicated to just eight classes that each support just 2-3 "builds" with as little as one supported weapon each. The whole book and no one could fight with a lance or crossbow, no small character could use any reach weapon, and there wasn't even an option to play a sneaky guy with a hammer. With only about 20 "builds" supported, that might have been OK for a computer game launch, but for a TTRPG, it was disaster.

Sure, the errata cycle was terribad, but I don't even know if that was part of the original design or simply the mad flailings of people who knew they were on a high speed train to fail town and were trying to divert using whatever desperate measures came to mind moment to moment.

-Username17

Reasons 11-20.

You know what? The problem with a top 10 list is that there are more than ten problems with 4E D&D. I could come up with 10 more things that really pissed me off about the edition really easily.

I also realize that a top 10 list is inherently flawed because it implies that number 19 was not as bad as number 1 or even number 11. But whatever.

11, 12, 13. The Mere Implementation of 4.5E D&D

• 4E was obviously heading down the tubes by 2010. So I don't blame them for throwing a Hail Mary. However Essentials, hereby referred to 4.5E because that pisses off 4Erries, did so many goddamn things wrong that they could be their own thread. The fail was so fucking strong that I can easily make them into three separate list items

.

11. The 4.5E Magical Item Changes.

• I totally forgot about this until I started appending this list; regardless, while it's still not bad enough to dislodge the fail of skill challenges from number 1, it should make the magic item system number two if I was ranking these properly. The Magical Item Change was so retarded that everyone completely fucking ignored the whole thing.
  
  Why? The reclassification of magical items as common/uncommon/rare was done half-assed to existing items. There were literally hundreds of magical items already existing before 4.5E came out. In order to fit them into the 4.5E structure that required some intern to release a new errata document that exhaustively retrofitted everything. As the 4.5E design staff couldn't find their dick even if Lorena Babbitt decided to force feed it to them, this didn't happen. Everything was reclassified as 'uncommon' until further notice. That was completely unworkable, of course, since players couldn't unilaterally force uncommon items into the game and entire builds were completely dependent on the acquisition of certain items.
  
  The other thing is that while magical item dailies were one of the worst ideas ever, they were baked into the system at this point. Trying to pretend that magical item dailies didn't really count against other magical item dailies just encouraged people to load up on barrels of Dice of Auspicious Fortune and Stones of Power. The standard 4Errie reaction to that is and was 'your DM should smack you if you try that!'. Thanks, bitches, your edition is soooooo balanced.
  
  So all this backwards compatibility crap did was break the game and leave it broken until everyone just sort of pretended that it didn't exist anymore. Seriously, if you look at 4E character builds on the Character Optimization, they just straight-up act like 4.5E didn't just take a huge hookworm-infested, lactose intolerant diarrhea dump all over the game. And maybe that's for the best.

12. The Brand Spanking-my-ass New Essentials classes.

• The 4.5E classes were redesigned so that they'd be simpler to play. Or at least that was the idea. 4.5E would eliminate many of your options such as replacing all of your encounter powers with fucking Combined Strike and lock you onto rails even harder than 4.0E did. This would attract a new playerbase full of casuals and lapsed players and revive the whole product line! And maybe save Mearls and Wyatt's jobs!
  Note, Mearls and Wyatt did not get fired, proving that Yahweh is a Pathfinder fanboy
  .
  
  To begin with, that shows a remarkable amount of tone-deafness to the complaints of the system. If you ask non-4Erries the biggest problems with 4E classes people will tell you that the resource management scheme locks them into scripting and movespam and that the classes don't get cool shit. Guys, doing this only made the problem worse. The only people who were marginally satisfied with the new 4.5E classes who weren't already in the 4E bubble were grognard furniture chewers who whined that the 4E Fighter was too complex.
  
  Secondly, that project and backwards compatibility were designed to fall right on its fucking ass in many ways. I'll just give two of the big ones. One reason was because 4.5E classes still counted as their 4.0E counterpart and 4.5E classes still got access to class-specific expansion material. Like feats. If you're making an EZ Mode beginner class, it kind of defeats the whole fucking purpose if at level 1 people still have to hunt through dozens of cleric feats, don't you think?
  
  The other reason why it failed was the same reason why Pathfinder Wizard nerfs failed. 4.5E made the basic chassis of classes like the Slayer and Scout stronger but still allowed for it to plunder class options as mentioned above. This had the hilarious effect of making supposedly EZ Mode classes Expert Mode classes.
  
  Thirdly, while this is just churlish, whose fucking idea was it to retroactively rename the classes in order to distinguish 4.0E classes from 4.5E ones? No one wants to call a wizard an arcanist. Go fuck yourself.

13. The Mere Existence of the Rules Compendium.

• The fact that you need a separate 250+ page book just so people can play the game correctly should be ample evidence that your game sucks. You'd think that they would be nice enough to include errata into this bastard, but nope. If you want to play 4.5E D&D you need about 350 pages of extra materials not in the fucking rulebooks in order to do so.
  
  God, I hate this fucking edition.

14. Feat Taxes.

• The Feat Tax is one of the most poisonous game concepts ever. Yes, 3E D&D had this as well but it was only a mockingbird's splatter pellet compared to the valley range of bullshit that 4E D&D indulged in. If you were for example a motherfucking Swordmage or Barbarian almost all of your heroic tier feats would be feat taxes. This got so bad that even diehard fans started complaining about it.
  
  That's one of the things that really pissed me off about the edition in conjunction with the errata policy and why I get more butthurt than usual talking about errata. Nerfs were free and mandatory. Buffs required you to spend several hours trawling through character catalogs.

15. Tschotske Bloat

• Related to the above, 4E D&D got so desperate for people to pay attention to it in its last two years of existence that they went all-in on power creep that wasn't cynical feat taxes. Because even 4Erries have standards. Note: standards may suddenly go away if Mike Mearls asks unctuously enough. Only instead of power creep that, you know, was fair like redoing the advancement charts or releasing a new set of armor they stuffed the power creep into out-of-the-way sections -- mostly, but not exclusively in the magical item catalogs. I like building characters, I have spent literally hundreds of hours thumbing through books and character builders, but I sure as fuck don't like having to scan every single fucking entry in exist hunting for miscellaneous bonuses.

16. The GSL.

• I don't know whether this was was decision by Hasbro suits or by the game developers. Regardless, though, it was tobacco spit in the eye of developers. I pretty much blame Pathfinder gaining market dominance on the GSL.

17. The DDI fuckery.

• The entire thing ended up being fucking vaporware. Which is too bad, because a lot of it looked as rad as hell. But we didn't even get a fraction what was promised in the Monster Manual.
  
  The only barely quality thing we got out of the whole shenanigan was the 4E D&D character builder. But oh yeah, they changed it after the October 2010 update to only work if you have a DDI subscription. And even then it lacks and lacked a lot of basic functionality. For example, you can't employ search terms through magic item descriptions. For something that's literally rehashed XML that is inexcusable.

18. Points of Light/Nentir Vale.

• I hate points of light. It is some immensely lazy shit. Whoever made that editorial decision should have been blacklisted from the industry.
  
  I simply cannot even fathom why the hell the developers let the game hit the shelves without packaging it with a decent campaign setting. The campaign setting is the most important part of a TTRPG. It's the reason why Shadowrun has survived to a 4th Edition, they're the one redeeming quality of GURPs universally-agreed upon, and they even allow Exalted not to be classfied as Shock Porn TTRPGs that belongs on the portion of the shelf where we shamefully store Racial Holy War and FATAL. I mean, Noonan did because he thought that a profitable MMORPG didn't really need a good campaign setting, Collins was too busy furiously masturbating to orc-on-human interracial pornography and/or his greatsword-wielding dwarven fighter, and Mearls is the laziest grifter imaginable, but didn't anyone realize what a monstrously horrible idea this was?
  
  This wouldn't have been so bad if not for:

19. Nuking the Forgotten Realms IP.

• I don't really care much for Forgotten Realms, but it was 3E D&D's moneymaker setting. Even moreso than Nooberron. In lieu of providing their own campaign setting, 4E D&D should have been placing this setting on a pedestal. But because the game developers had the reverse Midas touch, this failed miserably. The sheer scale of the implosion of the IP cannot be understated. 3rd Edition D&D had 28 FR sourcebooks over its seven years of existence. 4th Edition D&D had two over four, both of them in its first year. No one really talks about it because no one really talks about 4th Edition D&D, but I simply cannot imagine a bigger campaign setting debacle than 4E D&D's handling. Seriously, we're talking a level of mishandling a cash cow that reaches Megaman Battle Network or One Piece levels.
  
  Back before TvTropes became a pedophile MRA wasteland, the 4E Forgotten Realms was so awful that it had a whole page dedicated to its fail. They had more than this at one point before Fast Eddie got a case of the Hugbox but I wasn't able to get all of them.
  
  You know what? For hate's sake For old time's sake, let's look at the list one more time.
  

  The Fourth Edition Forgotten Realms of Dungeons and Dragons could demolish a house with this trope. These are just a few of the changes devoted to the new edition change:

  • Tyr (God of Justice) kills his best friend Helm (God of Guardians) over an arranged marriage with the Goddess Of Luck Tymora. An arranged marriage organized by the Goddess of Love, Sune.
  • The previously unknown "split" world of Abier swapped out the vast majority of the Earth analogue nations, as well as many of the less detailed regions. The existence of this split had one throw-away line in the last sourcebook published before the new Campaign Setting. Fans are pissed.
  • What wasn't removed was destroyed by the Spellplague, which supposedly ignored high-magic areas - except for Thay (partially destroyed), a nation of mages; Silverymoon, a nation guarded by a powerful magic field called a mythal; Waterdeep, a city full of mages on top of a mythal created by the Netherese on top of a magic dungeon... The list goes on.
  • The worst is the death of Mystra, the Goddess of Magic. Acknowledged as the most powerful goddess, who knew all spells before they were cast, she was in her home plane with her most devoted servant... and she was killed by her two greatest enemies after TURNING HER BACK ON THEM. Her death, despite having nothing to do with the Planes, manages to completely rearrange them; it also results in the death of her main servant Azuth and the flinging of her other servants, including a God of Prophecy, into the Astral Plane. Oh, but her enemies manage to escape unharmed. This also manages to trigger the previously mentioned Spellplague.

  God, I miss the old TvTropes.

20. Yanking Gamebook PDFs.

• Seriously, what the hell? Did this actually deter any pirates? As far as I know all it did was force pirates to wait a few extra days and increased the proliferation of Touhou pornography.
  
  Pathfinder not only sells gamebook PDFs but allow cheerfully allows people to post the entire fucking thing on their wiki. And they still beat the pants off of 4E D&D in sales back when they were still competing.

Now, since this was written for another thread a lot of them aren't going to meet your request of 'judge how 4E D&D failed without comparing it to other IPs'. But the majority of the complaints show how 4E D&D failed when compared to itself.

[Occluded Sun]

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?

It doesn't give me all that many interesting options and choices. My powers are straightforward and can pretty much only be used for their obvious intended usages, which is smacking things in battle.

The fighting system is far simpler than wargames, but far less interesting than them as well. The game has the simplicity of a video game without the rapid action and reflex engagement that makes video games interesting, and it mostly lacks the scope for creativity and rich imaginative engagement that characterize a good game of "let's pretend". It's basically a do-it-yourself board game without the quality design of the classic games.

I'd rather play a hand or two of M:tG or a few hours of Mage: the Ascension or something. (Dibs on the gearhead Child of Ether!)

[nockermensch]

They completely misread their target public: 4E is a balanced (but boring) PVE squad combat game. For everything else that's not squad level combat, their rules offerings vary between "none" and "woefully incomplete". And yet, they tried to market it as a RPG. You know, the game where you're asked to roleplay the meeple. You say you don't want to read about MMO comparisons, but I really can't help but to think somebody inside WotC really thought kids would be willing to play pen and paper WOW with their friends. Related to that...

They took lessons from video-game design and applied them on a pen and paper game, without realising how this would make cheap tricks like treadmill advancement and monsters being sprites with no relation to their loot painfully obvious to see.

The end result is a horribly shallow product.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Combat is prolonged, a nightmare of record-keeping, and not very interesting.

Everything that is not combat is skill challenges, which are an objective failure by their own stated goals, and completely fucked in general.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The greatest advice I've ever seen for designing a combat-heavy TTRPG or any TTRPG is this:

Design the challenges first. Then design the character creation system so that it meets the challenges. This is a really tempting design paradigm because game designers get more excited designing potential protagonists than potential antagonists, especially if they're supposed to be disposable. However, 4E D&D shows us the peril of doing it in the wrong order. Monsters and other sundry challenges (like environmental geegaw) were clearly designed after the PC system was laid out and that's a huge factor in why 4E D&D monsters are so narrow and unsatisfying and repetitive. Why? Because: 'When all you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail'.

[Voss]

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. 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?

My answer stays exactly the same. They tried to sell a (bad) tactical board game as an RPG. That they couldn't even balance a handful of weapons and a handful of powers in book #1 is embarrassing.

[ishy]

Please do expound extensively upon the following, as I have heard them repeated but would welcome a more in-depth analysis by people who know the game better than I do.
- "The palette of design choices at chargen is too limited."
- "The palette of actions that one can take on a turn-by-turn basis is too limited."
- "Classes X, Y and Z worked in too similar a fashion."

From this article: "If I told you "I'm thinking of a 2[W] power that dazes for 1 round—which class does that power belong to?""

[deaddmwalking]

Without reference to any other version of D&D:

Any Role-Playing Game involves interacting with the game world. Mechanics are used to support genre-expectations (whether those are similar to real-world physics or completely different is immaterial). In 4th edition, there was no interaction with the game world. In the talk of a 40K tabletop game, Frank mentioned that buying an Elf costs X points, adding a bow costs Y points, adding a greatsword costs Z points. Those options modify X, but X always remains the starting point. In 4th edition, tools were integral to monsters. Instead of having 'base stats' modified by the weapon, they just had 'stats for that specific creature with that specific weapon'. Changing an orc with a scimitar to an orc with a spear means starting over from the beginning.

This is anti-immersive.

[Covent]

Just my personal reasons for running away from 4th ed and literally giving away my books:

-Skill challenges were boring and later incomprehensible.

-Combat was "Minion, Minion, BOSS!! = Cleric Daily, Minion, At-will spam ad nauseum"

-The magic item that refreshed your daily power...

-Magic item system. *No Math Zone*

-Fights being decided in the first 1-2 rounds and devolving to as one of my players called it "Chopping down the tallest tree in the forest... WITH A HERRING!" = More at-will spam.

-Monsters being special snowflakes and having "Snowflake power that is totally different from other Snowflake powers even though it has the same name and no you may not see the underlying reasoning/math, because Fuck You I have your money buy more books!11!!1"

But honestly I could have rewritten (I should not have too), Redesigned (This either), or Rule 0'ed most of it but after my friends bought a brand new book at comic-con as a pre release, and by the time the first day of actual sales came around it had 5 pages of errata *BLARGHGGAHRAHG*

*Clams and adjusts self*

-Errata making books useless/obsolete to address glaring rules holes and issues.

[Previn]

A question to the D&D players here, if I may:

Suppose that D&D 4th edition, as written in the original three books, was published without invoking the D&D label in any way and without attempting to position itself as a successor to that brand. What would be your specific mechanical critique of it as a game on its own terms?

Oh, it’s Disgea the boardgame. Good for game night, but stupid for running an epic RP game.

Please do not invoke the following, as they are not what I'm asking and may also derail the thread:
- "It's a MMORPG."
- "It's not like old D&D was.”

Well, these two should be invoked because they do have a basis in fact. It was designed to integrate with DDI as way of tapping the MMO revenue stream, so by dsign it has concessions to that model that make it a worse RPG. It also was not like the old D&D, mechanically, in pacing, in what it actually gave you rules to do and in how it encouraged you to play. Yes, there was a subset that played D&D the way 4e presented it, but it not being like the old D&D was factually a selling point by WotC for 4e, and is still the rallying cry of a large portion of the 4e crowd.

Please do expound extensively upon the following, as I have heard them repeated but would welcome a more in-depth analysis by people who know the game better than I do.
- "The palette of design choices at chargen is too limited.”

This should really read ‘the palette of effective choices at chargen is too limited.’ 4e was so tightly ‘balanced’ that if you deviated from what you ‘should’ play as a race/class combo, or took the wrong feats, you got left behind. This is again factually demonstrable because they errata’d the heck out of the core math of the combat system, and then added in feats to specifically address remaining math issues.

Numerically, it doesn’t matter if you only count effective builds, or all builds, 3.x just using core provides massively more choices at 1st level which increases exponentially as you go up in level. 4e builds don’t have the chance to get remotely that complex and customized. A fact backed up by actually running the numbers.

- "The palette of actions that one can take on a turn-by-turn basis is too limited.”

What you could do was limited to what powers you had. Things that anyone could have done before were either now powers or had to b covered by the infamous pg.42. The problem is; pg.42 is a trap. The numbers were wrong (and were errta’ed at least once), and the amount of checks needed to do things for minimal bonuses was actually a disincentive if you actually understood the numbers.

There was effectively no disincentive to starting any encounter with your encounter powers barring the requirements were not in place (like no enemies in range 1st turn) or you had knowledge that you could need it later in the encounter (rare). So combat was pretty much the same things over and over in the same order. In many cases where in 3.x you would have used the environment, or switched tactics in 3.x, 4e has you banging your head against the challenge with the same thing you’ve been doing for every other encounter. There was a point in time where in 4e you couldn’t push someone over a ledge.

- "Advancement is too railroadish.”

3.x gives you more choices, and more meaningful choices when creating and advancing characters. The multiclassing alone so vastly outmatchs anything 4e puts forth in customization from advancement it’s ridiculous. In 4e you’re choosing from a very small list of powers, many of which are clearly suboptimal because you choose to be a str paladin over a cha paladin, and some feats many of which are actually a tax to stay effective. If you want a concept that is not specifically endorsed by 4e, such as a paladin archer… there is the door, watch your butt on the way out.

- "Classes X, Y and Z worked in too similar a fashion.”

The only thing that noticeably differentiates your class choice is the powers you get. The rest of the class is really just background noise with how 4e does its bonuses. A lot of the powers are basically the exact same thing, this is especially blatant in at-will powers. It breaks down some when you get to about half the powers you’ll have total, but there is still a lot of powers that are effectively just ‘replace str with dex.’ This is probably one of the weaker arguments against 4e.

- "The monsters are all pretty samey.”

Monsters are and aren’t samey, at the same time. Monsters are samey in that monsters have really have jack for abilities and the majority get only a single skill. This makes them really boring. Monsters are not samey in that you have no idea what a monster can do without knowing what that specific monster does. Reference Evil Eye in 4e.

What is mechanically wrong with the game as it stands? What are the issues with it under its own terms? Which parts of it worked, and which did not?

- Skill challenges did not and do not work. The have been errata’d at least 3 times, and no published adventure has ever used a skill challenge as presented by the rules.
- Environmental hazard rules like wise did not work, killing a high level character before they could make it out of a desert while allowing a low level character to safely exit the same desert.
- Stealth did not work, it was errate’d to sort of maybe work.
- The math behind the game was NOT balanced. It had errata before the actual books were released because it took less than an hour for the charopt boards to make several broken builds with leaked stuff. Feats explicitly said to be added to fix math issues, and numerous massive changes to numbers of subsystems proves this. Not minor things like +2 instead of +1, but things like ‘skill challenges are impossible to pass’ and ‘here’s infinite attacks’ or ‘here’s infinite lock down.’
- Hp and Damage was entirely out of balance being absurdly grindy for no reason or gain, and to a large detriment to the game.
- Multi-class characters are failures. It failed at this 3 or 4 seperate times. This one is a pet peeve of mine: In one piece of preview material some idiot said that they felt more like an arcane trickster being a rogue with the arcane initiate feat than playing a actual 3.x arcane trickster.
- Characters are crazy item dependent.
- Characters can’t loot neat things from monsters because of treasure parcels.
- Treasure parcels. Everything about this is bad. This space should have been used to tell the GM how to judge and distribute treasure in context of the game.
- No crafting rules, until way, way after release, and even then it is objectively terrible from a fluff perspective and has issues from a rules perspective (thanks treasure parcels).
- Rituals are a trap due to finite wealth (thanks again treasure parcels).
- The amount of constant errata made the game impossible to discuss online because heck if anyone could follow all of it, let alone if groups choose to use or ignore only parts of it.
- The errata fixing broken parts (which covered what? 80% of the ENTIRE GAME) were not available to new players, and not really expressed that errata existed, meaning that the badly designed game as presented in the PHB, the core book that players were expected to buy to learn the game presented a terrible, broken game that boarded on unplayable for new people without an experience group to guide them.

If 4e didn't have the D&D name on it, it would have been forgettable.

[Josh_Kablack]

In 4e there were two viable strategies for chargen:

1. Supernova. Find a combo or powers that lets you punch above your weight class. Then snag every possible feat/race/item/paragon etc which adds to that combo or gives you additional uses of that combo.

2. Spamalot. Pick a decent at-will, and then get as much as you can to add to it. In combat you use that at-will almost exclusively, and your real tactical choices are about targeting and positioning.

You'll note that the two are playing different resource management games with conflicting payoffs. Supernova will want to finish fights quick and will need to recharge frequently while Spamalot will often want to extend fights and doesn't need to recharge between combats. That sort of result really defeats the point of having all classes on the same power schedule.

[Cyberzombie]

The biggest design problem with 4E was that it's designed as a miniatures game, not an RPG. I'm not really sure where the MMORPG stuff comes from, it's really designed as a pure miniatures game.

The thing that they missed was the fact that miniatures games have a couple things that RPGs don't: transparency and even-strength forces.

In an RPG, you expect the PCs to win most fights, which mean that trying to design a slow-paced combat that reduces numeric variability means that most of the monsters aren't any threat at all. They're already numerically inferior to the PCs (as they're supposed to be in an RPG), but because all the swingy mechanics were taken out of the game, they have no chance of actual victory and everyone knows it. Of course the miniature combat system, designed for close even battles, still takes forever when doing uneven matches, it's just really boring.

The idea to have exception-based design where all the monsters have unique stuff is okay for a minis game. It's fine because everyone can look at everyone else's miniatures stats and then design strategies around it. But this is an RPG, where you don't necessarily know what each monster can do. When you do exception based design and a ton of different monsters, there's no consistency, so PCs have no idea what monsters do and basically cease caring. It pretty much takes out any strategy the game could have had because it's just a giant unknown. It'd be like playing a game of Magic: the Gathering where all your opponents cards are hidden, and you only learn about an ability when he uses it. You can't make any kind of informed decisions. To make matters worse, the game basically tossed logic out the window too, so you couldn't even rely on common sense to help you make decisions.

And as if that wasn't bad enough, 4E wasn't even a good miniatures game. There weren't many options, the classes were boring and one-dimensional and certain tactics like combat healing were just plain uncounterable. So they ended up using miniatures game design principles in an RPG, and then failing to even make a good minis game.

[Kaelik]

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?

If I wanted to play final fantasy tactics, I would play final fantasy tactics. It is a better version of the same game, and it does the book keeping for me.

Compared to the concept of things like WoD or Shadowrun you can see that in those games you play a character who does things in a fantasy world, but Dungeons and Dragons is clearly just a tactics game where you do the bookkeeping yourself instead of on a computer.

And even as a tactics game, it isn't very good. Because you are doing the bookkeeping yourself so it has to give people really basic abilities with easy to understand conditions repeated over and over, a resource management system that is literally just everyone has X abilities they use over and over once per fight, and it doesn't even have as much customization and optimization options as Final Fantasy Tactics.

TL;DR: Final Fantasy Tactics for Table top was and idea no one needed, least of all me.

[Blicero]

If Laertes/anyone cares, Legend is a good example of a game that took 4E's basic design premises, fixed most of the implementation flaws (particularly the math), but still ended up as a boring tabletop version of Final Fantasy Tactics.

[Voss]

The biggest design problem with 4E was that it's designed as a miniatures game, not an RPG. I'm not really sure where the MMORPG stuff comes from, it's really designed as a pure miniatures game.

It literally comes out of the mouths of the designers, both in the wacky preview books and blog posts of said designers. It was really a thing they were trying to sell the game on.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.ph ... ext.74422/

As far as I know, 4th edition was the first set of rules to look to videogames for inspiration. I wasn’t involved in the initial design meetings for the game, but I believe that MMOs played a role in how the game was shaped. I think there was a feeling that D&D needed to move into the MMO space as quickly as possible and that creating a set of MMO-conversion friendly rules would help hasten that

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

It is true that in play it was an inferior version of warhammer quest with a rainbow of super powers, but a lot of design efforts (like the class roles, minion/normal/elite/solo monsters) were specific elements drawn explicitly from MMOs and used as advertising slogans in the false hope of drawing MMO customers and completely reasonable hope of alienating 3e players (because that was also a stated goal). The tanks really honestly tried to create threat to draw attention from the clothies so they could focus on DPS. That a lot of it fell apart and failed should in no way be taken as evidence that they weren't trying to do MMO combat in TTRPG form. Just evidence of how shitty they were at their jobs.

[Kaelik]

If Laertes/anyone cares, Legend is a good example of a game that took 4E's basic design premises, fixed most of the implementation flaws (particularly the math), but still ended up as a boring tabletop version of Final Fantasy Tactics.

Yeah, this. Look up literally any Legends thread to see me make fun of it for exactly the same things, except that the game is better made, but still fucking boring.

[Lokathor]

Please do expound extensively upon the following, as I have heard them repeated but would welcome a more in-depth analysis by people who know the game better than I do.
- "The palette of design choices at chargen is too limited."
- "The palette of actions that one can take on a turn-by-turn basis is too limited."
- "Classes X, Y and Z worked in too similar a fashion."

From this article: "If I told you "I'm thinking of a 2[W] power that dazes for 1 round—which class does that power belong to?""

From the same article:

>>For example, encounter powers were something we were already experimenting with in the tail end of 3rd Edition. Design work on Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords explored this space independently of the early design work on 4th Edition.

Which is just a total lie, so there's that.

[Krusk]

Just my personal reasons for running away from 4th ed and literally giving away my books:

I gave mine away a year or so ago. It took multiple facebook and craigslist postings before I could get someone to let me drive them to their house to give it to them. I had game stores turn me away. I've got something against throwing books away, and in the end drove like 30 minutes to give them away.

For how popular it supposedly was, no one wanted anything to do with it.