Returning to 4th Edition D&D
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I’ve been playing DND since first edition. When my group got to 4e we jumped on eagerly, then dropped it like a hot potato.
Why?
It wasn’t a bad system, but up till then DND felt like an evolution and 4e felt… different. There were a bunch of undocumented patterns that had been in the rule set for a very long time, strategies, concepts, that just… broke under the new ruleset.
It felt alien. If we had wanted a different system we would have gone looking and found one already. It’s like ordering chocolate ice cream and being given lemon all the while insisting it is still chocolate.
So we jumped to Pathfinder, played around with 5e (which reclaimed a lot of that lineage), and finally really got into Pathfinder 2, which had largely felt true to that lineage all along.
I’d love to say 4e could have flourished if they had billed it as a sister system instead of a replacement, but in all honesty it probably would have had a lot slower growth than hasbro wanted. There were already other competitors and what hasbro really wanted was to refresh the market with the need to replace your set to have (buy) the current version.
@mrcleanup @copacetic I enjoyed my time with 4e, but I really enjoy what games like Lancer and Pathfinder 2e have done with the 4e DNA.
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I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search.
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example.
It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.
5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.
@jjjalljs @Postimo Also, 4e gave us useful at-will cantrips so that a wizard out of spell slots still feels like a wizard.
Its one thing 5e kept that I was glad of. I wish skill challenges had come along too, along with Healing Surges keeping their name. Hit Dice has a whole OTHER meaning within D&D, using the term for the dice you can roll for healing during rests is just confusing.
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I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search.
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example.
It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.
5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.
That’s valid, we might have under utilized rituals in replacing much of what I felt was lost in vancian casting. I still feel the homogenization of powers, while very sensible from a mechanical standpoint, stood out to me as very video game.
I can see you’re point in spell slots use for environmental vs combat, I think that was part of what I found interesting in caster classes in 3.5, and later pf1.
I get that there is a lot of intelligent design in 4e, and I think on a mechanical level it makes a ton of sense, but I think ultimately it comes down to rules vs rulings mentality to the game. I would say it was very much on the side of rules, and for many players that felt much more like the MMOs they knew than a TTRPG.
