4e didn’t deserve the reputation it got. Many people who frankly don’t know what they’re talking about jumped on the “it’s an MMO” train for upvotes and feelings of in-group belonging. It’s a recurring problem with humans- they can just say anything.
I personally didn’t play it much because around when it came out I wasn’t interested in fantasy combat games, but was spending time with the whitewolf games instead.
I’m going to push back on this. I was not super online at that age, but I did play WoW, and I specifically remember feeling like it was playing into the WoW mania of the day. The aggro mechanic, while not literally taunt, was clearly made to function like a taunt. The codification of roles felt similar to the tank/DPS/healer with CC being moved to a role. The way abilities between martials and caster were unified bled the line between magic and ability in ways that felt similar to MMOs.
More than anything for me was that it felt like the system was only for combat in a way that 3.5 didn’t. Obviously DnD in any edition has been a combat focused system, but the way it was systematized in 4e was a drastic step away from the rulings not rules mindset that makes TTRPGs feel more alive than video games. With that flexibility stripped on the systems level, it felt like playing a video game with your friends, and the analog for that at the time was MMOs.
I don’t remember any aggro mechanic from 4e. Do you mean the “marked” stuff? I remember that being pretty interesting and much better than 5e’s “lol they just walk around the fighter” lack of rules.
The way abilities between martials and caster were unified bled the line between magic and ability in ways that felt similar to MMOs.
You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but I always found D&D’s “linear fighters quadratic casters” to be kind of garbage. I do not find “wizards can rewrite reality, but fighters can swing their sword three times” to be interesting or satisfying. Giving all classes fun stuff to do is significantly cooler, and comparing it to MMOs feels like a non sequitur. Many games give cool powers to various archetypes. Limiting the cool shit to half the classes is legacy weirdness.
More than anything for me was that it felt like the system was only for combat in a way that 3.5 didn’t. Obviously DnD in any edition has been a combat focused system, but the way it was systematized in 4e was a drastic step away from the rulings not rules mindset that makes TTRPGs feel more alive than video games. With that flexibility stripped on the systems level, it felt like playing a video game with your friends, and the analog for that at the time was MMOs.
Skill challenges were pretty cool, if I recall. That was a non-combat system that I don’t believe was in 3e. I often see people accidentally reinventing them in 5e, because they want some sort of system for non-combat challenges.
I kind of despise OSR games, so “rulings not rules” reflexively makes my skin crawl. You know what I absolutely do not want in my games? Today my character can climb a wall because the GM is in a good mood, and tomorrow that same wall is impossible because his boss chewed him out at work.
That’s not to say I want specific rules for every situation, but the “GM is the absolute authority” is my ick. Also my ick: not even trying to be consistent across scenes. The whole condescending attitude is just awful.
Anyway. I don’t even remember 4e being more rules-y than other editions, but I admittedly only played like two campaigns of it, once with new players and once with 3e old-hands. I’d need to see specific sections of the 4e rules that are too rules-y, and how they compare to 5e’s implementation.
5e is missing whole systems, or has barely a skeleton of them (social conflict, metagame currency, degree of success, succeed at a cost, conceding conflict, item and spell crafting, to name a few). Not that 4e had those in spades, but I don’t think “5e doesn’t even try” is a selling point.
I always found D&Ds “linear fighters quadratic wizards” thing to be kind of garbage
Not to be a walking stereotype here, but you’ve really got to give PF2 a try. It’s hard to succinctly say why martials feel so good in PF2 - it’s due to a lot of little changes across a lot of different systems - but let’s just say that Fighters and Rogues are legitimately my favorite classes in PF2. And I’ve pretty always been a magic girlie in D&D.
The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity. But yes, PF2 has a bit less of powers per day and a few more powers-per-short-rest (well, PF2’s equivalent of a short rest, anyways).
Pathfinder absolutely can be used to tell a great story. In fact, I think it’s better at that than most of the so-called “narrative systems” out there. But perhaps that’s because most of the narrative systems out there run into some of my own pet peeves - namely encouraging metagaming via player abilities that are entirely divorced from the character you’re playing as. Some other pet peeves include giving players the ability to retcon/declare things as an ability, or having mechanics that explicitly assume that the world only exists insofar as the PCs interact with it.
In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences. This means that the GM must, at a minumum, have enough mechanical ‘rigging’ to work with that players can reasonably predict the likely outcomes of a given course of action, and see those consequences ripple out into the world in the thousand tiny ways that make the game world feel real.
Plus, there are dozens of ways to streamline a crunchy system and make it easier for new players to handle. But there just aren’t that many (good) ways to add complexity to a game that’s transparently simple on it’s face. I find that simpler rules systems paradoxically encourage power-gaming in this way - if you know you can solve any problem with a +8 Tomfoolery skill and a pile of “story points”, why would you ever do anything else? But if you have to choose your approach based on its consequences - not just based on what number is higher - then all of a sudden he decision of whether to bribe, lie to, persuade, sneak past, or assassinate the guard becomes a whole lot harder. And there’s no way to weasel out of it because the skills have extremely defined uses that can’t be bent to mean something other than what they mean.
(Sorry, that reply kinda ran away with me there 😅)
(But if you would like thoughts/help/advice on how to run a crunchier system in a way that produces very “story focused” results, I have a lot of practice with that. It’s both very rewarding and not as hard as it seems. Anyone who reads this and wants to chat, please do. My dms are open.)
The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity.
I think it’s partly poor GM management , but it’s also what players want clashing with what DND-likes are. Players want to use their cool powers. The game wants them to save them for when it “matters”. There’s no squaring that. So that’s why you get players blowing all their cool powers in the first couple scenes, and then wanting to rest. The GM can add consequences (eg: the villains plot advances), but that’s punishing players for how they want to play.
There are some players who truly, sincerely, naturally enjoy the resource management aspects. They are a minority. People pick wizard to do wizard stuff, not to use a crossbow for three hours.
In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences
I am inclined to agree. One of the games I like, Fate, has a mechanic literally named Consequences. It’s still pretty open ended. Players make up consequences as seem appropriate, rather than looking them up in a book. It’s up to the table to enforce them. If you took a consequence “broken arm”, you have to remember that means you can’t swing your greatclub around like before.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of people trying to weasel their skills in Fate. I’ve had “sure, your best skill is Fight so you can totally body slam the bouncer to get into the club, but then you’ll have body slammed a bouncer and people react appropriately”.
I’m not sure what your advice for making crunchier systems work for non-crunchy players would be. I tried to do Mage and the one player that never really learned the rules was always lost and frustrated. They had a strong power set but they didn’t understand it, so every challenge didn’t work. I didn’t want to have someone else back seat driving them, but they didn’t understand how to solve even problems tailored to their character’s strength. And then they didn’t understand the tradeoffs of the different options.
I feel like there’s two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there’s the writer’s room “let’s tell an awesome story together”. At the other, there’s “I am my character and I am in the world”.
I am super far in the writer’s room direction. I don’t want to “immerse” in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say “what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?”, or “what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it’s like a room full of security goons having dinner??”. If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input.
It’s probably no surprise I GM more than play.
I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.
My point wasn’t to strongly stand against any of the choices 4e made, more to give my remembering of the zeitgeist at the time. Like the marked stuff, there is validity in the mechanic, but I distinctly remember describing to friends as we got into 4e, “its like aggro from wow”
Linear vs quadratic is worth solving, but my issue is more in how they solved it. Distilling everything down to powers felt to me like a cop-out and ruined a lot of what I liked about the versatility of magic in 3.5, and again felt very similar to MMOs.
Skill challenges were pretty cool, if I recall. That was a non-combat system that I don’t believe was in 3e. I often see people accidentally reinventing them in 5e, because they want some sort of system for non-combat challenges.
Skill challenges are cool, and are a decent example of basic out of combat design, but more what I felt was stripped was the interesting non-combat use of magic for problem solving. The rituals felt very limited and not as integrated into the identity of the system of classes, and all the powers came with an implied “no bag of rats” qualifier, so they couldn’t be used out of combat for solutions.
I think in the end all of these speak to very different play styles and what we were looking for from the systems. If you enjoy very predicable rules and well balanced and polished mechanics, especially for a largely combat focused campaign, 4e is probably solid for your needs.
On the other side of that though, DnD felt extraordinary to me because interfacing with a human meant that interesting puzzle solving, or creative use of spells allowed for emergent game play in unique ways. Obviously there is still a person on the other side of the screen in 4e, but it felt that many of the mechanics were structured in ways that didn’t lend to the looser play style I, and I assume many other 3.5 players, liked in our DnD games.
I’m getting old and senile but I don’t remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there’s a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of “I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL”, and then people go “that’s not how the spell works”. 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects.
You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that’s actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn’t like it, but casual players also didn’t like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character.
5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there’s a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it’s easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating “5e is baby’s first RPG. It sucks” the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks.
My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as “an MMO” would not have drawn that conclusion.
I haven’t played much 5e, I was comparing it more to 3.5, I am pulling from loose memory and the spotty options that exist online (due to the game system license which honestly didn’t help 4e’s case), but if this source is to be trusted for the things that have been made creative commons, it shows the charm person power. It’s an encounter power with the standardized to hit mechanics the effect is:
The target gains vulnerability to charm and illusion effects from you and your allies, and suffers a -5 penalty to their Will and Sense defenses until they snap out of it.
This charm makes a humanoid creature regard you as its trusted friend and ally (treat the target’s attitude as friendly). If the creature is currently being threatened or attacked by you or your allies, however, it receives a +5 bonus on its saving throw.
The spell does not enable you to control the charmed person as if it were an automaton, but it perceives your words and actions in the most favorable way. You can try to give the subject orders, but you must win an opposed Charisma check to convince it to do anything it wouldn’t ordinarily do. (Retries are not allowed.) An affected creature never obeys suicidal or obviously harmful orders, but it might be convinced that something very dangerous is worth doing. Any act by you or your apparent allies that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell. You must speak the person’s language to communicate your commands, or else be good at pantomiming.
This is obviously only one example, and a particularity egregious one at that, but speaks to the sorts of differences I saw in what 4e was trying to do, and what 3.5 was doing. I don’t think it’s fair to attribute the dissatisfaction specifically to grognards, when these are very clearly different kinds of systems, and the goals of 4e are much more video game like in having controlled variances and results, rather than the freer form of ‘rulings not rules’ intended games.
If that’s not your style than, rock on, but I feel like the counter culture revival of 4e does gloss over the fact that is really was a pretty drastic shift in what DnD was, and it was disliked authentically for the very different and opinionated choices it made, not just online backlash.
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.
@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.
4e didn’t deserve the reputation it got. Many people who frankly don’t know what they’re talking about jumped on the “it’s an MMO” train for upvotes and feelings of in-group belonging. It’s a recurring problem with humans- they can just say anything.
I personally didn’t play it much because around when it came out I wasn’t interested in fantasy combat games, but was spending time with the whitewolf games instead.
I’m going to push back on this. I was not super online at that age, but I did play WoW, and I specifically remember feeling like it was playing into the WoW mania of the day. The aggro mechanic, while not literally taunt, was clearly made to function like a taunt. The codification of roles felt similar to the tank/DPS/healer with CC being moved to a role. The way abilities between martials and caster were unified bled the line between magic and ability in ways that felt similar to MMOs.
More than anything for me was that it felt like the system was only for combat in a way that 3.5 didn’t. Obviously DnD in any edition has been a combat focused system, but the way it was systematized in 4e was a drastic step away from the rulings not rules mindset that makes TTRPGs feel more alive than video games. With that flexibility stripped on the systems level, it felt like playing a video game with your friends, and the analog for that at the time was MMOs.
I don’t remember any aggro mechanic from 4e. Do you mean the “marked” stuff? I remember that being pretty interesting and much better than 5e’s “lol they just walk around the fighter” lack of rules.
You’re entitled to your opinion, of course, but I always found D&D’s “linear fighters quadratic casters” to be kind of garbage. I do not find “wizards can rewrite reality, but fighters can swing their sword three times” to be interesting or satisfying. Giving all classes fun stuff to do is significantly cooler, and comparing it to MMOs feels like a non sequitur. Many games give cool powers to various archetypes. Limiting the cool shit to half the classes is legacy weirdness.
Skill challenges were pretty cool, if I recall. That was a non-combat system that I don’t believe was in 3e. I often see people accidentally reinventing them in 5e, because they want some sort of system for non-combat challenges.
I kind of despise OSR games, so “rulings not rules” reflexively makes my skin crawl. You know what I absolutely do not want in my games? Today my character can climb a wall because the GM is in a good mood, and tomorrow that same wall is impossible because his boss chewed him out at work.
That’s not to say I want specific rules for every situation, but the “GM is the absolute authority” is my ick. Also my ick: not even trying to be consistent across scenes. The whole condescending attitude is just awful.
Anyway. I don’t even remember 4e being more rules-y than other editions, but I admittedly only played like two campaigns of it, once with new players and once with 3e old-hands. I’d need to see specific sections of the 4e rules that are too rules-y, and how they compare to 5e’s implementation.
5e is missing whole systems, or has barely a skeleton of them (social conflict, metagame currency, degree of success, succeed at a cost, conceding conflict, item and spell crafting, to name a few). Not that 4e had those in spades, but I don’t think “5e doesn’t even try” is a selling point.
Not to be a walking stereotype here, but you’ve really got to give PF2 a try. It’s hard to succinctly say why martials feel so good in PF2 - it’s due to a lot of little changes across a lot of different systems - but let’s just say that Fighters and Rogues are legitimately my favorite classes in PF2. And I’ve pretty always been a magic girlie in D&D.
I’ve heard nothing but good things about Pathfinder 2e. I initially ignored it because I really disliked 1st edition.
I really intensely dislike powers-per-day and the five minute adventuring day, but I think PF2e has less of that?
The players available to me are probably more of a lightweight narrative game crew, though.
The 5-min adventuring day is more of a “poor GM management” problem than anything. If time effectively stands still when the PC’s rest, of course they’ll rest at every opportunity. But yes, PF2 has a bit less of powers per day and a few more powers-per-short-rest (well, PF2’s equivalent of a short rest, anyways).
Pathfinder absolutely can be used to tell a great story. In fact, I think it’s better at that than most of the so-called “narrative systems” out there. But perhaps that’s because most of the narrative systems out there run into some of my own pet peeves - namely encouraging metagaming via player abilities that are entirely divorced from the character you’re playing as. Some other pet peeves include giving players the ability to retcon/declare things as an ability, or having mechanics that explicitly assume that the world only exists insofar as the PCs interact with it.
In my personal opinion, player’s choices only feel important if they have real consequences. This means that the GM must, at a minumum, have enough mechanical ‘rigging’ to work with that players can reasonably predict the likely outcomes of a given course of action, and see those consequences ripple out into the world in the thousand tiny ways that make the game world feel real.
Plus, there are dozens of ways to streamline a crunchy system and make it easier for new players to handle. But there just aren’t that many (good) ways to add complexity to a game that’s transparently simple on it’s face. I find that simpler rules systems paradoxically encourage power-gaming in this way - if you know you can solve any problem with a +8 Tomfoolery skill and a pile of “story points”, why would you ever do anything else? But if you have to choose your approach based on its consequences - not just based on what number is higher - then all of a sudden he decision of whether to bribe, lie to, persuade, sneak past, or assassinate the guard becomes a whole lot harder. And there’s no way to weasel out of it because the skills have extremely defined uses that can’t be bent to mean something other than what they mean.
(Sorry, that reply kinda ran away with me there 😅)
(But if you would like thoughts/help/advice on how to run a crunchier system in a way that produces very “story focused” results, I have a lot of practice with that. It’s both very rewarding and not as hard as it seems. Anyone who reads this and wants to chat, please do. My dms are open.)
I think it’s partly poor GM management , but it’s also what players want clashing with what DND-likes are. Players want to use their cool powers. The game wants them to save them for when it “matters”. There’s no squaring that. So that’s why you get players blowing all their cool powers in the first couple scenes, and then wanting to rest. The GM can add consequences (eg: the villains plot advances), but that’s punishing players for how they want to play.
There are some players who truly, sincerely, naturally enjoy the resource management aspects. They are a minority. People pick wizard to do wizard stuff, not to use a crossbow for three hours.
I am inclined to agree. One of the games I like, Fate, has a mechanic literally named Consequences. It’s still pretty open ended. Players make up consequences as seem appropriate, rather than looking them up in a book. It’s up to the table to enforce them. If you took a consequence “broken arm”, you have to remember that means you can’t swing your greatclub around like before.
I’m not sure I’ve seen a lot of people trying to weasel their skills in Fate. I’ve had “sure, your best skill is Fight so you can totally body slam the bouncer to get into the club, but then you’ll have body slammed a bouncer and people react appropriately”.
I’m not sure what your advice for making crunchier systems work for non-crunchy players would be. I tried to do Mage and the one player that never really learned the rules was always lost and frustrated. They had a strong power set but they didn’t understand it, so every challenge didn’t work. I didn’t want to have someone else back seat driving them, but they didn’t understand how to solve even problems tailored to their character’s strength. And then they didn’t understand the tradeoffs of the different options.
FATE is my favorite least favorite system. I love so much about it, but find about half of it absolutely intolerable.
For example - players making up their own consequences. It’s so metagamey that it immediately kills my immersion.
Edit - Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of the Consequences system, but it rubs me the wrong way for the players to be the ones choosing them.
I feel like there’s two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there’s the writer’s room “let’s tell an awesome story together”. At the other, there’s “I am my character and I am in the world”.
I am super far in the writer’s room direction. I don’t want to “immerse” in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say “what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?”, or “what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it’s like a room full of security goons having dinner??”. If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input.
It’s probably no surprise I GM more than play.
I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.
My point wasn’t to strongly stand against any of the choices 4e made, more to give my remembering of the zeitgeist at the time. Like the marked stuff, there is validity in the mechanic, but I distinctly remember describing to friends as we got into 4e, “its like aggro from wow”
Linear vs quadratic is worth solving, but my issue is more in how they solved it. Distilling everything down to powers felt to me like a cop-out and ruined a lot of what I liked about the versatility of magic in 3.5, and again felt very similar to MMOs.
Skill challenges are cool, and are a decent example of basic out of combat design, but more what I felt was stripped was the interesting non-combat use of magic for problem solving. The rituals felt very limited and not as integrated into the identity of the system of classes, and all the powers came with an implied “no bag of rats” qualifier, so they couldn’t be used out of combat for solutions.
I think in the end all of these speak to very different play styles and what we were looking for from the systems. If you enjoy very predicable rules and well balanced and polished mechanics, especially for a largely combat focused campaign, 4e is probably solid for your needs.
On the other side of that though, DnD felt extraordinary to me because interfacing with a human meant that interesting puzzle solving, or creative use of spells allowed for emergent game play in unique ways. Obviously there is still a person on the other side of the screen in 4e, but it felt that many of the mechanics were structured in ways that didn’t lend to the looser play style I, and I assume many other 3.5 players, liked in our DnD games.
I’m getting old and senile but I don’t remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there’s a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of “I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL”, and then people go “that’s not how the spell works”. 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects.
You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that’s actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn’t like it, but casual players also didn’t like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character.
5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there’s a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it’s easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating “5e is baby’s first RPG. It sucks” the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks.
My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as “an MMO” would not have drawn that conclusion.
I haven’t played much 5e, I was comparing it more to 3.5, I am pulling from loose memory and the spotty options that exist online (due to the game system license which honestly didn’t help 4e’s case), but if this source is to be trusted for the things that have been made creative commons, it shows the charm person power. It’s an encounter power with the standardized to hit mechanics the effect is:
Compaired to 3.5’s from here:
This is obviously only one example, and a particularity egregious one at that, but speaks to the sorts of differences I saw in what 4e was trying to do, and what 3.5 was doing. I don’t think it’s fair to attribute the dissatisfaction specifically to grognards, when these are very clearly different kinds of systems, and the goals of 4e are much more video game like in having controlled variances and results, rather than the freer form of ‘rulings not rules’ intended games.
If that’s not your style than, rock on, but I feel like the counter culture revival of 4e does gloss over the fact that is really was a pretty drastic shift in what DnD was, and it was disliked authentically for the very different and opinionated choices it made, not just online backlash.
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.
@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.