Does anyone still play 4e?

[hawkeyefan]

How are any of those role-playing related? Reducing your "epic destiny" to a handful of class features is about as reductive as you can get. Skill challenges were basically anti-roleplay, a way to gamify exploration even to the detriment of common sense. 4e didn't offer anything new as far as alignments, apart from playing with the categories that existed. None of that, zero, has much to do with role-playing opportunities.

None of that has anything to do with roleplaying? Wow.

Okay... what did 3e have that 4e didn't?

Also, considering you mentioned "haggling" as an important RP element, I'll have to assume we have different ideas of what roleplaying is.

Ah, yes. 4e was certainly an innovator in allowing people to just play something else. Woo. So roleplay. Much lore. So very.

I mean... my 5e campaign used the 3e Forgotten Realms Campaign guide for its lore. Somehow, it survived being wrecked by 4e.

Also, 3e was just as tumultuous to the Realms. Again, you're being inconsistent.

And now flippant, as well.

I ran a level 1 to 20 campaign, and while combat could be long, I can't think of any occasions where it dragged out enough to last an entire session. It's not inconsistent to say 4e was simply much, much worse than this than 3e, and by design. I can definitely attribute this deficiency to 4e because it's a deficiency of 4e and not 3e. At least, not by a factor.

I played hundreds of sessions of 3e across all its iterations and it's just as guilty of very long combats.

 

[UnplayedRanger]

4e had long combats, but they were dynamic as hell. I’d love to have more of that then “i swing my sword again” that 5e has.

 

[LikelyArrow]

For what it’s worth, my experience was that switching from 4e to PF1e caused the length of combats to drop dramatically.

 

[pawsplay]

I've seen people talk about three hour long battles in 4e and that has literally never happened in a 3e game in which I have participated.

 

[EmperorNorton]

Battles in 4e taking 3 hours was not the norm, hell, I've never even seen it happen in a game I played/ran. Just because you've heard of them, does not make it true.

I mean, I just had a friend tell me about how they have had a 5e combat last for 2 full 6 hour sessions. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances in that case, and one of those is that the GM is just bad. Because I've heard of this happening doesn't mean it is the norm.

As someone who played a lot of 3.x and a good bit of 4e, 4e combats were not significantly longer than 3.x, with the exception of 3.x having more "I cast one spell and end the combat" spells.

Also just, to be honest a lot of the "you can't do X in 4e" comments I hear a lot are also confusing to me, because they are 100% things I've done in 4e.

This isn't to say someone can't dislike 4e, but a lot of the criticisms are legitimately weird.

 

[BlindAudelay]

This thread is the first time I've ever seen 4e compared to Gauntlet of all things. Hats off.

 

[Acmegamer]

This thread is the first time I've ever seen 4e compared to Gauntlet of all things. Hats off.

Valkyrie needs more food!


LikelyArrow Interesting that you had issues with players playing CN. We only tended to have issues with L.G., N or CE, back in the late 70s and into the 1980s. Those were our three @##@ are you kidding player X? Though even that wasn't all that common, because I'd pull out the Palladium Fantasy Rpgs Alignments and their examples and show it to the players. Helped reduce issues I found.

 

[pawsplay]

Also just, to be honest a lot of the "you can't do X in 4e" comments I hear a lot are also confusing to me, because they are 100% things I've done in 4e.

You can do anything in pretty much any game system. That's not the point. I ran a six month long campaign of Heroes & Heroines, which may be one of the worst supers RPGs ever published, but it was a simple game system so it didn't matter much for my purposes at that time.
I did not say a three hour combat was "the norm" for 4e. I just stated that I know of combat dragging out in some cases, and I have never encountered any examples of things dragging out to that extent with 3e. My admittedly limited experience with playing 4e was that combats were long, required a lot of monitoring of small modifiers, and tended to consume the whole session.
My experience is that combats lasting more than an hour in 4e were, if not common, not exactly rare, and in 3e, pretty rare.

People are welcome to like what they like. My impression of 4e is that all those little mechanical innovations, that people say they love so much, tended to overwhelm the sessions. So I understand why people who like those things like it, and people who don't like that stuff do not like it. Because 4e was very much all those cool, fiddly, detailed, delineated programs that everyone says influenced game design since but I don't really see much of, except as a brief impression.

 

[EmperorNorton]

My admittedly limited experience with playing 4e

I'm going to be honest here: Maybe if multiple people who have played a good deal of 4e are telling you that you are wrong about something about the way it plays, when you admit that you haven't played it much, it's more likely for you to be wrong than the people with more experience.

It's a thing I've constantly been amazed by in RPG discussion circles. People who have barely played a game, or in some cases never even played it at all, telling people who have a lot of experience in the game that they are wrong about how it plays.

4e combat is more uniform in length (in that there are very very few really quick combats, where as in 3.x there can be combats that are over in one action because of how silly powerful some spells were), but longer encounters feel very similar to longer encounters in 3.x in length.

That said, I still find that people exaggerate how long the combats are, or they just have players who take forever. Cause I could definitely run through multiple 4e encounters in a single night, and not even a long night. I think shorter combats could go like 15 minutes, average was about 40 minutes, longer combats could go about an hour. A really complex encounter might take up to 2 (which I've also seen 3.x encounters go as well). Maybe y'all just have slow players?

 

[Sable Wyvern]

As one of the resident 4e haters, my 2c on this topic is that I don't recall the combats being noticeable longer than 3e or d20 Conan. Probably took me longer to prep, as I spent more time thinking about balance, or trying to come up with interesting terrain.

 

[pawsplay]

I'm going to be honest here: Maybe if multiple people who have played a good deal of 4e are telling you that you are wrong about something about the way it plays, when you admit that you haven't played it much, it's more likely for you to be wrong than the people with more experience.

Well, I played it, until I stopped playing it because of my experiences.

 

[LikelyArrow]

As one of the resident 4e haters, my 2c on this topic is that I don't recall the combats being noticeable longer than 3e or d20 Conan. Probably took me longer to prep, as I spent more time thinking about balance, or trying to come up with interesting terrain.

Yeah. Running 4e was easy, which is one of the things I appreciate about it. But prepping it could be a nightmare.

 

[AsenRG]

That said, I still find that people exaggerate how long the combats are, or they just have players who take forever. Cause I could definitely run through multiple 4e encounters in a single night, and not even a long night. I think shorter combats could go like 15 minutes, average was about 40 minutes, longer combats could go about an hour.

My first, and only, 4e game went like this:
We roleplayed for like 15 minutes, fought some group, took a rest (short or long, I no longer know) and joined another fight.
At this point, no session was shorter than 4-5 hours, often way longer. Both were pretty consistently equal in time.

I'll admit that after said experience, I had no desire for a second session, so it remained at that. But that's also pretty consistent with everything I've heard of 4e.

A really complex encounter might take up to 2 (which I've also seen 3.x encounters go as well). Maybe y'all just have slow players?

Given who was in that group, that's basically impossible.

 

[Bourbonjack]

I'm going to be honest here: Maybe if multiple people who have played a good deal of 4e are telling you that you are wrong about something about the way it plays, when you admit that you haven't played it much, it's more likely for you to be wrong than the people with more experience.

It's a thing I've constantly been amazed by in RPG discussion circles. People who have barely played a game, or in some cases never even played it at all, telling people who have a lot of experience in the game that they are wrong about how it plays.

4e combat is more uniform in length (in that there are very very few really quick combats, where as in 3.x there can be combats that are over in one action because of how silly powerful some spells were), but longer encounters feel very similar to longer encounters in 3.x in length.

That said, I still find that people exaggerate how long the combats are, or they just have players who take forever. Cause I could definitely run through multiple 4e encounters in a single night, and not even a long night. I think shorter combats could go like 15 minutes, average was about 40 minutes, longer combats could go about an hour. A really complex encounter might take up to 2 (which I've also seen 3.x encounters go as well). Maybe y'all just have slow players?

There are always players who take forever making a decision. Which is why in earlier editions you push those players towards Fighter, with few decisions to make.

4e Nikes every character play like a MU, so every class has lots of options for players to dither over.

My experienced playing 4e combat were painfully slow and long. I played about a dozen sessions over two groups, and universally every combat was a slog.

There are probably groups who are efficient with combat. But n the monitory I think.

 

[LikelyArrow]

LikelyArrow Interesting that you had issues with players playing CN. We only tended to have issues with L.G., N or CE, back in the late 70s and into the 1980s. Those were our three @##@ are you kidding player X? Though even that wasn't all that common, because I'd pull out the Palladium Fantasy Rpgs Alignments and their examples and show it to the players. Helped reduce issues I found.

Sadly, I’d take a Lawful Stupid paladin any day over the player who would literally roll percentile dice to determine whether his CN yandere PC did something impulsive and completely stupid.

 

[Jetstream]

4e Nikes every character play like a MU,

Autocorrect in action, or are we talking about gods and or shoes?

 

[Bourbonjack]

Autocorrect in action, or are we talking about gods and or shoes?

My Nemesis, autocorrect, strikes again!

 

[LikelyArrow]

My Nemesis, autocorrect, strikes again!

I see we have a common enemy.

 

[The Mad Hatter]

My Nemesis, autocorrect, strikes again!

I just thought you were drunk. I mean your name is Bourbonjack and Nikes wasn't the only error.

But n the monitory I think.

 

[Acmegamer]

Sadly, I’d take a Lawful Stupid paladin any day over the player who would literally roll percentile dice to determine whether his CN yandere PC did something impulsive and completely stupid.

Oh, ours were Lawful Arrogant. One paladin was soo bad that myself and another player (our characters) grew so tired of the SoB that we planned his death and pulled it off. (this would be back in 1982 and AD&D 1st edition) The paladins saving throws were so disgusting that it was truly hard to take him out but we managed it by tricking him into reading the activation word for the gem of soul entrapment, which meant no saving throw. La! One soul trapped paladin. Man was Steve pissed at first, the look on his face was priceless. When you play an unbearable character, don't be surprised when others start plotting.

We tended to play our CN characters as more self serving as an aside. Very closely like Palladium Games defined their version of Chaotic Neutral.

Example below of Unprincipled along with some examples they always included under each alignment.

 

[Nakana]

lol I’m sure by now you’ve all figured out I’m somewhat of a likable smartass…

When I read the image above I immediately thought:

“Unprincipled characters will…

• Have a list of 11 principles”

And it tickled me.

 

[Malckuss]

My favorite alignment in 4e was Unaligned; basically allowed you to sidestep the whole thing.

Also, edition wars aside, I really wish the Forgotten Realms would be, you know, forgotten.

 

[LikelyArrow]

My favorite alignment in 4e was Unaligned; basically allowed you to sidestep the whole thing.

Also, edition wars aside, I really wish the Forgotten Realms would be, you know, forgotten.

I just wish they'd remember there's more to the Forgotten Realms than the Sword Coast.


EDIT: Man, looking back on this era is going to so weird. "Remember that time that they largely undid the changes in the previous edition, but it's still 100 years later and they only released a source book for a part of the world that didn't change nearly as much as some of the others?"

Seriously, there's a part of the world that's a giant sinkhole in 4e and now... what?

 

[Acmegamer]

lol I’m sure by now you’ve all figured out I’m somewhat of a likable smartass…

When I read the image above I immediately thought:

“Unprincipled characters will…

• Have a list of 11 principles”

And it tickled me.

To be more serious. At the time Palladium Fantasy rpg released, we had these terribly written D&D and AD&D 1st edition alignments to go by. These alignments caused a lot of arguments, debates etc back in the day.

Players or DM/GMs who leaned heavily into them as written, others who debated that they were general guidelines and no your first level fucking Chaotic Evil thief hasn't done enough murder, mayheim or made deals with demons etc to radiate the supernatural evil that a paladin can detect.

The paladins who would go around detecting every little thing, were a really annoying, slowed down game play and were just general asshats. When Palladium Fantasy released, the various alignments were explained in a much better way. Most of us who were still playing D&D at that point quickly photo copied those Palladium alignments to hand out as an example just to cut down on stupidity.

 

[Nakana]

To be more serious. At the time Palladium Fantasy rpg released, we had these terribly written D&D and AD&D 1st edition alignments to go by. These alignments caused a lot of arguments, debates etc back in the day.

Players or DM/GMs who leaned heavily into them as written, others who debated that they were general guidelines and no your first level fucking Chaotic Evil thief hasn't done enough murder, mayheim or made deals with demons etc to radiate the supernatural evil that a paladin can detect.

The paladins who would go around detecting every little thing, were a really annoying, slowed down game play and were just general asshats. When Palladium Fantasy released, the various alignments were explained in a much better way. Most of us who were still playing D&D at that point quickly photo copied those Palladium alignments to hand out as an example just to cut down on stupidity.

Can’t say I’ve ever experienced this firsthand but I’ve heard plenty of stories. It’s why I much prefer BRP’s Allegiance system. Your actions determine your allegiance vs. your alignment dictates your actions (that is, IF you’re playing alignment that way). When I was playing 4e regularly we rarely took our alignments into account.

 

[Self Saboteur]

Never had a problem with lawful players. They always seemed to get it right. Never encountered the lawful stupid trope.

It was the chaotic ones that never really could understand how that alignment should be played and would ruin games.

In my experience.

 

[LikelyArrow]

Never had a problem with lawful players. They always seemed to get it right. Never encountered the lawful stupid trope.

It was the chaotic ones that never really could understand how that alignment should be played and would ruin games.

In my experience.

To be fair, the Chaotic Lolrandom was only a couple of players I think. Most CN characters were indistinguishable from Neutral, which is another gripe I have about the alignment. Their reasoning seemed to be they just wanted a "I can do what I want and not really worry about alignment" character, which is closer to Neutral IMO, at least in WOTC editions.

Honestly, this kind of stuff is why I like three 3-alignment system of Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic, with them interpreted as supernatural factions more than ethical inclinations.

EDIT to add: granted, my interpretation of Law and Chaos is literally esoteric.

 

[pawsplay]

Chaotic Neutral always sounded the closest to my real-life alignment... I took it as a bit of an insult when AD&d suggested a CN character would do random things for no reason. I prize individual freedom, and while I do consider myself "good," even generous and kind, I don't believe in or fulfill the requirements of altruism to be an AD&D "good."

 

[Dr. Gnome]

Going to really, really be in the minority here but... I used 4E back in the '00's to get more people who would never consider playing a tabletop roleplaying game to actually jump right in and play a tabletop roleplaying game. I *loved* the subscription model for the character creator because I could sit a friend down that never played a tabletop game but had some experience in WoW or whatever and "walk" them through character creation and then print out a color character sheet (on my ink jet! whoa, what a blast from the past...) that included actual "cards" on the back that listed clearly what their daily, encounter, and at will powers were. On little index-card thingys. At the height of me running 4E I had 9 players that came over weekly and I reluctantly had to turn people down because everyone and their dog wanted to play. I had a mixed group of men and women (and one mom/son duo, that was fun; neither had ever played tabletop RPGs before) and everyone knew what their characters could do. Everyone got the "fun" of creating a character on a piece of software that generated easy to read characters with no knowledge of the rules necessary at all. Everyone loved the way the powers printed out in squares that clearly defined what we could do on the battlemap. It was a mixture of roleplaying and miniatures playing for us.

I guess nobody knew that they should hate the game because it was like an MMO because they weren't really tabletop roleplayers before 4E existed, and I don't think they would necessarily be again without the level of work I put into my old school and 5E games. To this day I'm trying to get a friend's wife into tabletop and I know she'd love the ability to use the online/subscription model character generator I used for all of the characters, and she'd love the ease of understanding what she could do based on her "power cards" ...

Now, I wouldn't necessarily say that 4E would be my choice for experienced tabletop roleplayers but man, it was easy to hook people who loved online character creation. And yea, we roleplayed. I don't get how a system prevents or supports roleplaying, really; it's more a function of the players and the GM at that point. You can storytell as much as you want but when combat did occur, it happened on a really easy to understand platform.

I haven't found anything yet in the virtual tabletop or chargen arena - including 5E's fancy tools - that matched the ease of creating and *understanding* what a character could do compared to the 4E system. It wasn't my favorite game but I'd shell out $20 a month easy for a system that gave me everything printed under one subscription model without me having to buy "ala carte" rulebooks for everything and printed powers out on an easy 3x3 grid for people to understand. And I've played FATE, VtM; all versions of D&D, ran games at conventions back in the '90's... I don't know but 4E was something so different that it allowed me to get people who never would consider a roleplaying game outside of WoW or an MMO to actually really enjoy a game. I loved it for what it was, and I honestly miss it.

Now I run 5E and various OSR systems (I'm partial to OSE right now for my OSR experience) - but nothing really gives that same feeling or ease of understanding for people who grok the MMO/chargen side of things but really just sit there with a character sheet and wonder "what can I do here?" - it's not necessarily the RPG system I would want to 'end up' with for a group of experienced players, but give me five people who have played a computer RPG but never would consider playing tabletop D&D and I could hook 'em with 4E and those easy to understand power cards like nothing else.

I agree with so many when I wish they wouldn't have made it the "new" D&D system but instead just released it as a D&D tactics type game.

 

[Dr. Gnome]

I just wish they'd remember there's more to the Forgotten Realms than the Sword Coast.
View attachment 78604

EDIT: Man, looking back on this era is going to so weird. "Remember that time that they largely undid the changes in the previous edition, but it's still 100 years later and they only released a source book for a part of the world that didn't change nearly as much as some of the others?"

Seriously, there's a part of the world that's a giant sinkhole in 4e and now... what?

Remember "The Great Glacier" supplement? Missed 2e for that kinda stuff. I ran a campaign in Ishe.

I was a little ticked off that they changed everything with 4E for the Realms, too; but I got over it quick when I realized I could just use all my 2E 'fluff" material with the 4E powers and rules.

 

[LikelyArrow]

I thought of another thing I liked about 4e: of all the WOTC editions, the encounter-building guidelines were probably the best. This was a direct result of its degree of mechanical homogenization but building a combat encounter that appropriately challenged a 4 or 5 person party was much closer to a science than the educated guesswork of 3e CRs or the weird-and-largely-pointless multiplied-XP math in 5e.

 

[AsenRG]

Going to really, really be in the minority here but... I used 4E back in the '00's to get more people who would never consider playing a tabletop roleplaying game to actually jump right in and play a tabletop roleplaying game. I *loved* the subscription model for the character creator because I could sit a friend down that never played a tabletop game but had some experience in WoW or whatever and "walk" them through character creation and then print out a color character sheet (on my ink jet! whoa, what a blast from the past...) that included actual "cards" on the back that listed clearly what their daily, encounter, and at will powers were. On little index-card thingys. At the height of me running 4E I had 9 players that came over weekly and I reluctantly had to turn people down because everyone and their dog wanted to play. I had a mixed group of men and women (and one mom/son duo, that was fun; neither had ever played tabletop RPGs before) and everyone knew what their characters could do. Everyone got the "fun" of creating a character on a piece of software that generated easy to read characters with no knowledge of the rules necessary at all. Everyone loved the way the powers printed out in squares that clearly defined what we could do on the battlemap. It was a mixture of roleplaying and miniatures playing for us.

I guess nobody knew that they should hate the game because it was like an MMO because they weren't really tabletop roleplayers before 4E existed, and I don't think they would necessarily be again without the level of work I put into my old school and 5E games. To this day I'm trying to get a friend's wife into tabletop and I know she'd love the ability to use the online/subscription model character generator I used for all of the characters, and she'd love the ease of understanding what she could do based on her "power cards" ...

Now, I wouldn't necessarily say that 4E would be my choice for experienced tabletop roleplayers but man, it was easy to hook people who loved online character creation. And yea, we roleplayed. I don't get how a system prevents or supports roleplaying, really; it's more a function of the players and the GM at that point. You can storytell as much as you want but when combat did occur, it happened on a really easy to understand platform.

I haven't found anything yet in the virtual tabletop or chargen arena - including 5E's fancy tools - that matched the ease of creating and *understanding* what a character could do compared to the 4E system. It wasn't my favorite game but I'd shell out $20 a month easy for a system that gave me everything printed under one subscription model without me having to buy "ala carte" rulebooks for everything and printed powers out on an easy 3x3 grid for people to understand. And I've played FATE, VtM; all versions of D&D, ran games at conventions back in the '90's... I don't know but 4E was something so different that it allowed me to get people who never would consider a roleplaying game outside of WoW or an MMO to actually really enjoy a game. I loved it for what it was, and I honestly miss it.

Now I run 5E and various OSR systems (I'm partial to OSE right now for my OSR experience) - but nothing really gives that same feeling or ease of understanding for people who grok the MMO/chargen side of things but really just sit there with a character sheet and wonder "what can I do here?" - it's not necessarily the RPG system I would want to 'end up' with for a group of experienced players, but give me five people who have played a computer RPG but never would consider playing tabletop D&D and I could hook 'em with 4E and those easy to understand power cards like nothing else.

I agree with so many when I wish they wouldn't have made it the "new" D&D system but instead just released it as a D&D tactics type game.

Man, I'm pretty sure we're all happy that the system worked for you as well as it did!

It just failed to do a comparable job for us, for whatever reason. I suspect a lot of it is about the changes in perspective...like, a lot would depend on what you are comparing 4e to.

I mean, does the system have interesting combat that gives more options to martial characters? Well...more than what? The above is probably true if you're comparing to previous editions, I'd suspect.
If you're comparing it with GURPS with Martial Arts added, The Riddle of Steel, Feng Shui 1e, or Exalted 2e, which used to be my main reference points at the time...it's really not all that impressive, putting it mildly.

And so on. Does it leave you more or less time for roleplaying out of combat? Well...compared to what, and to what previous campaigns?

You can go on and on with this, and list every single complaint!

 

[Dr. Gnome]

Oh my main "like" of it was the ease of getting non-tabletop roleplayers into the game by having a program print them nifty power cards for nearly everything they could do in combat, I think. I miss the digital tools and how you could use those digital tools to easily make characters that a 12 year old who had never seen a roleplaying game or a 50 year old mom could immediately look at and go, "Ah! I feel useful in combat, these power cards are cool!"

 

[pawsplay]

I'm a big fan of tactile items, but that doesn't have to be game-specific.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Deleted- posted in error.

 

[StonesThree]

I just wish they'd remember there's more to the Forgotten Realms than the Sword Coast.
View attachment 78604

EDIT: Man, looking back on this era is going to so weird. "Remember that time that they largely undid the changes in the previous edition, but it's still 100 years later and they only released a source book for a part of the world that didn't change nearly as much as some of the others?"

Seriously, there's a part of the world that's a giant sinkhole in 4e and now... what?

I am racking my brains as to what that sinkhole was... or was it a giant crack in the earth that just appeared? Then Dragonborn suddenly popped up from nowhere... Elves started calling themselves Eladrin? Maztica vanished and was replaced by a continent even more boring.The magic weave had broken so now everybody farted healing magic? Bane was back? It was a crazy time.

 

[AsenRG]

Oh my main "like" of it was the ease of getting non-tabletop roleplayers into the game by having a program print them nifty power cards for nearly everything they could do in combat, I think. I miss the digital tools and how you could use those digital tools to easily make characters that a 12 year old who had never seen a roleplaying game or a 50 year old mom could immediately look at and go, "Ah! I feel useful in combat, these power cards are cool!"

Sure, but I aim to achieve that same result with the Mythras Special Effects cards, so it's not so much game-specific, it's about the support!

And, key fact here, that's the support that 4e used to be getting, it no longer is, and you can't do the same thing easily, because it's not specific to the game itself, but rather, to the online builder it used to have...

 

[LikelyArrow]

I am racking my brains as to what that sinkhole was... or was it a giant crack in the earth that just appeared? Then Dragonborn suddenly popped up from nowhere... Elves started calling themselves Eladrin? Maztica vanished and was replaced by a continent even more boring.The magic weave had broken so now everybody farted healing magic? Bane was back? It was a crazy time.

The sinkhole I meant was the Underchasm, very, very far away from the Sword Coast:

 

[Malckuss]

Sure, but I aim to achieve that same result with the Mythras Special Effects cards, so it's not so much game-specific, it's about the support!

And, key fact here, that's the support that 4e used to be getting, it no longer is, and you can't do the same thing easily, because it's not specific to the game itself, but rather, to the online builder it used to have...

You can still find and use those tools. They aren't that hard to find.

 

[Jetstream]

You can still find and

And…….?