Fourth Edition is the Best Product WotC has Released Since 1999

Like it or not, this is what peak performance looks like

Why 1999? Why open my blog with this post?

Well, it can help sum up where we sit as Gen Y in relation to Cultural Ground Zero.

First, a bit of history. Dungeons and Dragons was originally an expansion for Chainmail. Chainmail is (was) a 1:40 scale miniature wargame, allowing large battles by scaling one miniature to represent up to 40 individuals. For reference, Helm's Deep in Lord of the Rings was 2000 men vs. 10,000 Uruk-hai, which would be 50 minis vs. 250, which could be a decent sized game of Warhammer and thus playable in a few hours.

If you want to know more how this game was supposed to be played, I recommend looking up Jeffro Johnson. The short of it is that it allowed you to create individuals who would gain rank, prestige, and power over time until they were leading Chainmail scale armies. This can easily be seen in the random encounter rules. 400 goblins is too much to manage in current scale RPGs, but that's only 10 minis in Chainmail. You can also see this from the domain rules, where higher level characters gain political power, their own, personal fortress, and armies and peasants following them. Underlying it all was a system of rules that allowed a fair-minded DM to easily run a game without even having an overarching plot, providing a sandbox that allowed the players to have their own fun. Sounds like the kind of game I'd love to play if the books were still in print and it was possible to find a group, but anybody not playing the latest and greatest (5e at the time of this writing) is playing Pathfinder, 3e, or 2e, leaving 1e in the dust.

So what happened? Dungeon modules. Part of the game was having the players explore a dungeon to plunder it for magic items and cash (1e characters had to take time off and pay for training to level up). Hirelings and soldiers will only follow you so far in a dungeon, so much of the dungeon exploration was small scale and involved fighting nastier creatures instead of large numbers. Selling dungeon layouts, along with related plots, story hooks, and other material was the most profitable business for TSR. These modules never went into domain play, disabled many spells (notably 'fly') that made dungeon design harder, and focused solely on a small group of player characters. Over time, this became the default mode of play, with domains and armies being excised. House rules then entered which jettisoned every rule that only made sense in the wider context of a wargame. Individual initiative replaced group turns. Random character generation and training times went away (these rules make more sense when you realize everyone was supposed to have multiple characters). Racial and class level caps went away, since level only represented skill, rather than political rank. By the time Gygax was forced out, what was left of Dungeons and Dragons would be like picking up a later edition of Monopoly and finding out it was solely about building houses and hotels and each player got his own game board to build on.

By the time WotC got the license, D&D was barely on life support. The devs had run out of ideas and the CEO was unwilling to put effort into revitalizing the brand, seeing as how she hated the customers and thought the game was evil (no, seriously). WotC purchased the property in 1997 (this year pops up again and again when looking at the death of Western Culture) and began working on a third edition of the game, though 3e wouldn't see the light of day until after toy giant Hasbro had purchased WotC wholesale, in 1999.

What 3e did to gaming will be the subject of its own blog post, but the short answer is that it consolidated every setting into a grand, unified system (d20) that tried to be everything to everybody and thus ended up being a pre-video game example of mudgenre, the derogatory name given to the modern non-genre (or 'nonre' if you will) of the open world action/adventure game with optional stealth, RPG elements, and a crafting system.

This experiment failed. Every d20 property outside Dungeons and Dragons was met with an overwhelming 'meh' outside the core fandom. I admit being a part of this core fandom. Having lived in the Bible Belt, I had to wait until college to get into D&D, when 3e was all most places were selling, so I associated the entire hobby with 3e and little else. It turns out a combat based game with a class system and six stats isn't a universal system, so WotC did something truly smart for possibly the last time: they asked themselves how people were playing the game and decided to build a new system around it, and everybody played D&D as a 4-6 person (+DM) squad based combat game where a player would control a single character for the duration of the game or where a replacement character would be at the same xp level as the departed one.

Here enters 4e. While maintaining a few of the base mechanics, like d20 rolls, 3-18 stats, and hp, WotC built what amounts to a new system from the ground up. For the uninitiated, the game's main, distinguishing features are:

• Each character starts out with a lot of hp, making 1st level easy to survive
• Each class is given a role (defender, striker, leader, controller) that it primarily serves in combat
• Distances, areas of effect, and all other spatial matters are given in squares, rather than feet
• All classes are given special abilities with different recharge times (in an effort to make every class as interesting as spellcasters)
• Non-combat rules and special combat rules (like grappling) have been completely removed or simplified to focus on core combat
• PCs and monsters use different rules, giving the monster designers more freedom to design interesting counters
• Traditional saving throws were replaced by turning fortitude, reflex, and will into defenses (like armor class) and having some abilities be attacks against those abilities, while saving throws are a naked die roll, typically to shake off an ongoing effect

Backing this all up is a system of discrete, easy to interpret rules that allow for fair play for anybody. The game also introduced one of the best ideas I've seen in any RPG: minions and solo monsters. Most players like the idea of having their characters going around like action movie stars, cutting down hordes of enemies, but most rule sets mean monsters with high enough stats to pose any threat (and thus be worth xp) have too many hit points to fit this purpose. A minion in 4e is a monster with an otherwise normal stat block, but only 1hp. They are worth 1/5 the xp of a normal monster of their level and are not damaged on a miss (some abilities do damage on a miss just like spells in other editions that do damage on a passed saving throw). On the other end are solo monsters, the boss fights of the game. They get multiple actions per turn, gobs of hp, and resistance to many ongoing effects, making it like fighting an entire group of monsters, thus making fights against single, large creatures far more interesting. The game also got away from the old problem of figuring out what your character should do. Defenders (like fighters and paladins) have abilities that incentivize enemies to hit them, allowing them to protect their party. Strikers (like rangers and rogues) have abilities that greatly increase single target damage, allowing them to take out key enemies. Leaders (like clerics and bards) have abilities that buff and heal the party, giving them an advantage in any fight. Controllers (like wizards and druids) have AoE, debuff, and area denial, allowing them to control the flow of battle. You have multiple play styles in each class, but your role never changes (though you can add a secondary roll).

On the story side, power sources added a new way to complete a party. Power source, roughly speaking, is what your character did to give him his abilities. Fighters, for example, are martial, since they are fighters because they study weapons and tactics. Clerics, on the other hand, are divine, since they are clerics because their god gives them power. The primary power sources from the early books (martial, divine, arcane, and wild) created a cool theme to build your character's backstory around. You could also make a party around a power source, since there was usually a class for any given power source/role combination (with martial controller being an obvious gap), meaning it suddenly became easy to have, say, a party that works for a church without trying to twist either the mechanics or story in knots to have a well rounded party (paladin, avenger, cleric, invoker is a complete party, all divine power source). A lot of the clunkier rules were also removed to get rid of the need for down time (something which hadn't made sense since 1e expected you to sideline characters for months at a time) or trading off combat abilities for non-combat abilities. Magic item creation and rituals touched on both. They also got rid of the two axis alignment system, though not in the most elegant way. In short, it's just good/evil, except lawful good and chaotic evil still exist as extreme ends of the scale. The game also features clear dividing lines of when your campaign should take characters to the outer planes, giving more guidance to an aspiring DM.

It's a game. It isn't a simulation. It isn't a storytelling device. It is a really fun game with good, easy to understand rules, something D&D hadn't had in decades. It is also a game that features roles that players are encouraged to play, almost like it's some kind of role playing game. For context, imagine you go into a coma and wake up to find that Settlers of Catan had become a hyper-detailed city building sim based primarily off the flipbook from Cities & Knights. They still have some legacy rules left over from the original, but now there are detailed rules about knights, fortifications, resource management, etc., so much that a single game can take days. The company then releases a new system that focuses totally on city-building, making it easier to play. Well, it isn't really Catan, but at least it's a game.

But people hated it. I heard all the criticisms at the time. It was too much like a video game. There was no role playing. It was just ripping off MMOs (I have made this one myself). It's dumbed down. It's just supposed to sell grids and other accessories. The series sold well enough, but I have only rarely found somebody willing to admit to liking 4e. True to form, WotC backed off and now 5e is definitely a successor to 3e, with most relics of 4e cut out like a tumor. Now we're back to weirdly defined classes with a bunch of legacy rules, except now with far less content (though given the content they're turning out, maybe that's a plus).

Why, though? Now we get into the Gen Y issue. Sometime in the 90s, brands decided to start fostering 'communities' instead of 'subcultures' full of 'customers.' This picture sums it up nicely:

If only we could have seen this coming

D&D players were no longer people who enjoyed playing games. They were fanatics obsessed with their product to the point of turning it into religion, which is why they reacted to 4e like it was Vatican II. WotC found out the hard way that we in Gen Y like our things exactly the same as they used to be, or at least the loudest voices do. There can be no innovation. Sweeping changes, no matter how good or well-intentioned, will not go over well. We didn't want a good game designed around playing 4-6 characters in mostly combat scenarios in a fantasy setting. We wanted our clunky 3e system of skills, classes, and ambiguity, only with the difficulty removed.

As for how this particular brand change happened, it can be traced back to WotC's official PR stance during 3e, but that's a story for another time.

Want something better than the gray gruel WotC offers? Plenty of people are offering new and exciting RPGs and other tabletop, though you likely won't find them in stores. Now is the time for the rise of the independent creator. For example, Brian Niemeier successfully raised enough in his most recent crowdfunding campaign for an RPG based on his Combat Frame XSeed series. It's like if Gundam was written by an American Christian. You can find those and other works here.