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.
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.