People hate 4e and the books get dumped for cheap on ebay. Why do people hate it again?
Disclaimer : I never played 4e
Political : They changed the license of the basic-system from open to closed, thereby alienating 3rd party producers and lots of users. See the recent drama around the OGL.
Social/technical : It was different.
Our group actually enjoyed playing 4e. And we have played all the editions.
There seem to have been some good ideas i 4e, but the overall game just didn’t appeal to me.
A lot of things felt samey. No matter if spells or abilities they all seemed to be very similar to the core with just a coat of flavour paint applied on top.
The balancing and the overall focus of the rules made it seem video gamey to me and that is/was already covered by actual video games and not what I want out of a tabletop rp experience.
To make matters worse the changes in their “primary” setting didn’t appeal much to me either (and apparently not to many others since they basically did away with most of it for 5e).
Here’s a video that goes into some of why 4e wasn’t very good or popular. It’s also pretty funny.
Oh boy. Buckle in, this is going to be a long one. This question crops up periodically on a number of other social media sites, and below is my answer to previous inquiries:
I think for some people, 4th Edition was exactly the sort of game they were interested in. But conceptually it was a departure from the aspects of 2nd edition, and even 3rd edition, which I’d come to enjoy.
Folks have said it was too “videogamey” and certainly it did seem to use some team-videogame concepts, though I wouldn’t say that was exactly what rubbed me the wrong way.
They also nuked a huge chunk of the lore of Forgotten Realms to ‘streamline’ it. Gods, locations, mainstay characters… gone.
Unsurprisingly they ‘fixed’ it in 5e.
poor Cadderly, man… all that work for nothing
Heh. How long ya got?
