Community

Oh, probably most of the people here LIKE 4e, though the people that have complaints are certainly vocal. Most of the people that 'just wanted to keep playing 3.5' (regardless of their opinions of 4e) are either still playing it or playing Pathfinder. Depending on who's flying saucer you fancy 4e is either a total miserable failure and 5e will be on the shelves next week, or it is a great game, but WotC is incompetent and can't make what they particularly want for it (nevermind they managed to write the game in the first place). The general atmosphere seems to be rampant complaining about details of 4e that according to each poster's POV are broken, bad, misguided, poorly written, etc. Generally the atmosphere is rather negative.

OTOH plenty of us have been having great fun with it, and while I too can nitpick, I think it is safe to say it strikes me as fundamentally the best version of the game so far.

So, the haters have mostly gotten tired and gone away. But they're still lurking out there beyond the firelight somewhere like wolves, happy to move in and crow about this or that PF sales figures or to tell us how this or that staff change, new product, canceled product, etc is actually the death knell of 4e with great glee and relish. OTOH the level of the dialog has improved in some sense. I haven't heard anyone call 4e an MMO in at least a week!

As for how it is really doing? You mean like is it a popular game? Heck if I know. Game companies don't release sales numbers. Encounters is still going, LFR is still going, they're still putting out books (more slowly than 2 years ago). It seems like I have people that play in my game regularly. Dunno if there are tons of people playing it right now or not. I figure the "oohhh, new game" has worn off now, so probably some people have moved on. OTOH there are several people every week posting here that are just starting, so you can pretty much draw whatever conclusion you like.

Yes, when 4E was released I read the PHB and was extremely underwhelmed. It felt more like I was back in college reading a biology textbook. Informative? Yes. Fun to read? Oh Hell no. Not in the slightest. The DMG, however, was quite possibly one of the best DMGs printed to date. It wasn't just copy/pasted material from the PHB with explanations on how to use that material against the players. It actually told you how to run the game, and gave great advice to help you do so. So...off to the races we went.

By the time 6 months had passed from 4E's release, I had two weekly home games and 2 FLGS games going at the same time. I was having a blast, as were the players. There were a few issues I had with the system, but that's to be expected. I had issues with every D&D system back to BECMI and 1E. I enjoyed it so much that I did the one thing I swore in the late '90s I would never do again: I re-joined the RPGA. I attended events. I became a D&D 4E Herald. I surrounded myself with 4E, and embraced it lovingly.

Well, time passes, as they say. The flaws (few as they were) of 4E began to gnaw at me more and more. I found myself enjoying the games less and less. It started feeling more like work than a fun past-time. I cut the number of games I ran down dramatically. By this time I only had 1 FLGS game and 1 home game going. I let my DDI subscription run out (and that's a decision I have not regretted yet). I quit buying any- and everything released for 4E just on the general principle that it was 4E. I started seeing what the new books actually added to the game before dropping the money for them. That's when i found that they were adding less and less each time.

It looked to me as though WotC started dipping back into their old bag of tricks, releasing material just for the sake of releasing it, not necessarily because the game benefits from it. That's when Essentials came out. I neither loved nor hated the Essentials options. They were simply that: more options. Not outstanding, but not bad.

As of right now, I still run my 1 FLGS 4E game, but my home game has gone back to AD&D (by request of the players, all of whom started with AD&D). I just started a play-by-post game that is Essentials-only (I want to see these babies in play and find out what all the fuss is about from both sides). As for the book releases becoming slower and slower...that's not really a surprise. Once you release a core product, your sales will boom for a time. Your supplement products will never sell as well as your core product. Unless you want to put out a book every month just to flood the market, then you have to pull back on your releases. That's just common sense, financially speaking.

As to how I feel about 4E now, 3+ years into its release? It's a great game. It does what it does very, very well. It might not do what I want it to do all the time, but that's okay. No edition of D&D has done everything I wanted it to do all of the time. I suspect no edition ever will. My perfect edition would marry the tactical/power-based aspects of 4E with the more free-form AD&D, but that's a very tall order, and I don't expect to ever see that as a finished product, nor do I think it would be very well received by the general public. So...I houserule here and there, and make whatever edition I'm playing suit my tastes. Easy.

I'm a very free form player and DM. I started with the old red box as a kid and got in to AD&D in college when the RA my sophmore year was in group and invited me to join. We ended up going in to a hybrid of 1E/2E eventually as that stuff came out and I'd continued to run/play a variation since then.

When 3E came along I wasn't currently in a group, had relatively recently relocated to a new city & state but I bought the PHB right away. I was turned off by all the minutia of not only character creation, but skill trees and the RP rules bloat fromn the onset. I later tried the game with a couple of different groups, I also played some 3.5 in a couple of groups with people I really like but I never enjoyed the edition itself. Heck, spellcasters were even more dominant than in 1E/2E. And the half-x templates? Yuck!

And I HATED the artwork.

A lot! Armor spikes that would impale the wearer? Anime hugeswords? Outfits Blech!

And the prep time. I want to PLAY the game not build monsters and characters for a week then pre-battle buff. Lets get on with it. I want tactical play.

Then 4E was announced. Th epreview stuff was not catching my attention. Then I picked up the PHB, DMG and MM. I started to read the PHB. What was this, a chemistry textbook converted to gaming? I liked the guts of what I saw but boy was it presented in a dry and uninspiring way. But look, there's tactical play and just a base skill set, no flippin' skill trees and that garbage. Most of the basic classes and races were there. Healing surges are just weird but there's more ways to heal/trigger them than someone having to play a Cleric. That Warlord looks pretty cool. The half-dragons and half-demons are now in the PHB as regular races but oh well. It's time to crack open the DMG.......

Okay, this is looking promising. I have to try this game out, it seems like it could get me back in to a current edition of D&D. The Forgotten Realms stuff is out and Genasi are in it. They're the thing I liked from 3E. My friend is starting a game and I'm on board to give it a go.

Hey, I'm a ranger, look at all my hit points! I'm a Genasi! What's with the fish? Weird mystery scenario to solve? Well, some things are definitely the same. Hey, there's evil lizardmen,er, folk. I fly as I charge in to combat! I, erm, I miss twice and get pummeled. I'm down. Wait, what? 24 HP was a third-level fighter and I have 'em at first! Maybe that was an oddity. CLERIC! Surge plus HP from range 5? Okay, that was sweet. Here we go, I'm up, swing twice, miss twice, I'm hit again and I'm down again. Crap! CLERIC! Okay, I'm up again, this healing surge thing is pretty slick. I like the way it works. It's a great mechanic. This game plays very well. I really like it.

And I've never looked back.

(I've looked around Essentials as much as possible though)