I just got done reading all the 4e books. I made several characters: Eris the elven ranger (my first one, figures the combination would be so obvious), Keselva the half-crazy Kalashtar swordmage, Nessie, a former invalid eladrin artificer, Bier the traumatized, slightly suicidal dwarven paladin of Corellon. . . it's become a long list. (No one to play with so all I can do is build characters.)
My primary question: How easy is it to find other people who still play 4e? (Like if I put up a thread in the "find a player" section here, how likely is it I'd get an answer?) I refuse to waste all that time I spent learning the 4e rules; and besides, some of my favorite characters make no sense when translated into 5e. I've read the rules for rangers and Eris ceases to make sense in 5e format.
4E is not a very popular edition. You'd have an easier time of it with 3rd ed D&D/Pathfinder 1st. Roll20 has one current game, and that's a living campaign. Good news is that they have open places. Bad news is that doesn't leave you any choice regarding the game schedule.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Hate to say it, but it's going to be tough for you. For many of us, 4e died when WotC took down the online character builder a couple years ago. Most of the forums are gone now as well.
Good luck. Even if you don't find a group, don't consider the time wasted. It sounds like you've had a great time coming up with character builds and that's a creative and rewarding pastime all on its own.
Gonna be tough 4e really does require some kind of real or virtual tabletop as so much of it was based heavily on positioning, swapping, pushing sliding. On a good note there's no real reason you can't create those same characters in 5e. 4e was far more descriptive I feel with its powers and abilities and leads to a lot of "Oh wow!" but I found when it came to play it pretty much devolved into a other editions "I attack" style play to try and move the combat (which is very slow in 4e) along a tad faster
Hate to say it, but it's going to be tough for you. For many of us, 4e died when WotC took down the online character builder a couple years ago. Most of the forums are gone now as well.
Good luck. Even if you don't find a group, don't consider the time wasted. It sounds like you've had a great time coming up with character builds and that's a creative and rewarding pastime all on its own.
Gonna be tough 4e really does require some kind of real or virtual tabletop as so much of it was based heavily on positioning, swapping, pushing sliding. On a good note there's no real reason you can't create those same characters in 5e. 4e was far more descriptive I feel with its powers and abilities and leads to a lot of "Oh wow!" but I found when it came to play it pretty much devolved into a other editions "I attack" style play to try and move the combat (which is very slow in 4e) along a tad faster
No, actually there is a reason. One of those characters is a race that doesn't exist in 5e. I read the rules for elves and rangers and Eris is impossible in 5e.
Thanks a lot for the replies. Still planning on trying my luck with 4e in the future but thanks for telling me what the odds are.
Quick edit: Sorry if I sound pretty negative. As I mentioned, I have a lot invested in 4e emotionally.
Hate to say it, but it's going to be tough for you. For many of us, 4e died when WotC took down the online character builder a couple years ago. Most of the forums are gone now as well.
Good luck. Even if you don't find a group, don't consider the time wasted. It sounds like you've had a great time coming up with character builds and that's a creative and rewarding pastime all on its own.
Gonna be tough 4e really does require some kind of real or virtual tabletop as so much of it was based heavily on positioning, swapping, pushing sliding. On a good note there's no real reason you can't create those same characters in 5e. 4e was far more descriptive I feel with its powers and abilities and leads to a lot of "Oh wow!" but I found when it came to play it pretty much devolved into a other editions "I attack" style play to try and move the combat (which is very slow in 4e) along a tad faster
No, actually there is a reason. One of those characters is a race that doesn't exist in 5e. I read the rules for elves and rangers and Eris is impossible in 5e.
Thanks a lot for the replies. Still planning on trying my luck with 4e in the future but thanks for telling me what the odds are.
Quick edit: Sorry if I sound pretty negative. As I mentioned, I have a lot invested in 4e emotionally.
I'd be interested in learnign if u need someone to play with
The other hard thing about 4e is that it never had much of a SRD so there just aren't the useful internet resources that are present for 5e or pathfinder. There were plenty of things I liked about 4th edition, but it would be a challenge to run a game.
Standard Reference Document - it makes it easier for third party publishers to produce material for the system, since they don't need to have individual negotiations with WOTC (or the publisher of the relevant game system) in order to be able to publish things for that game system.
That wouldn't be necessary. I have most of the rulebooks in PDF format. And I have most of the rules memorized. . . it would be really easy for me to run a game.
And. . . thanks, smftre512. (I don't know how to directly address people on this forum.) I'll remember that in the future. I'm not looking to set up a game right now, just scouting to see how easy it would be.
Everyone else: Any particular reason why getting a 4e game up would be hard? I mean, why would people not want to play? (Other than starting to play after 5e came out and not knowing the rules.)
Everyone else: Any particular reason why getting a 4e game up would be hard? I mean, why would people not want to play? (Other than starting to play after 5e came out and not knowing the rules.)
Between not being the current edition, not being all that popular of an edition, and low accessibility, finding players would be a challenge (and this is not the best place to look), though not necessarily an insurmountable problem.
Primarily due to 4e's reputation. People who don't read between the lines hear about 4e from players of 3.5, primarily, and most 3.5 players deem 4e to be Literally The Worst Thing Invented In All of the History of Mankind. Worse than war. Worse than sex crimes. Worse than genocide. Worse than PBR. Many/most 3.5 players cannot demonize, denigrate, and badmouth 4e enough, so new-to-5e players get the impression that the game is actively trying to send them to Satan.
Reading between the lines? D&D 4e was an attempt to modernize the game and get it away from some of the clinging old systems that had been strangling 3.5e to death. D&D 4e was also how Wizards discovered that the existing 3.5e playerbase for D&D...does not take modernization well. if D&D is not the exact same D&D as it was fifty years ago, players scream. So 4e was a commercial failure due to community backlash and the refusal of existing players to adopt the new system. Primarily because Paizo was operating "Legally Distinct 3.5e, It's Not D&D We Swear(TM)", a.k.a. Pathfinder, and 3.5 fans could simply switch to playing the exact same game they already had with a publisher that wouldn't trey to do something so malevolent as modernize their game out from under them.
Wizards had to backtrack in a blazing hurry, and as such 5e is much more like older editions of D&D. It's dramatically oversimplified, because Wizards identified that the key issue with getting new players into Pathfinder games is the fact that Legally Distinct Not-D&D-We-Swear 3.5e is incredibly dense, obnoxious, and difficult for the average newbie to pierce, so they "modernized" by stripping out most of the rules and leaving a barely functional skeleton in their place. Somehow, against all odds, it worked. 5e got huge, and Wizards couldn't kill off their money-hemorrhaging online resources for 4e fast enough.
So...yeah. 4e is The Edition That Wasn't, and older players would prefer that it never be spoken of again. Which is sad, because from what I heard 4e actually did worldbuilding, and it trusted its players to actually be capable of intelligent thought. There were some real gems in the system, but there's simply no way to access it anymore. Let alone play it.
4e has a lot of options. Like literally thousands of feats. Some of them are very specific - like you need to be a tiefling avenger with Oath of Pursuit or something like that. It also has a ton of conditional bonuses that you need to keep track of (for attack, damage, all 4 defense stats, etc), and lots of other conditional options too - paragon paths based on your class, epic destinies based on whether you have a feat, and so on. On top of that you have hybrid/multiclass rules that are fairly complicated and likewise opened up other conditional options.
Now for me, none of those are drawbacks. I loved the level of customization 4e offered and spent many hours just poring through feat and power lists and finding weird combinations in order to make memorable characters. But without the primary two tools WotC had to manage all this content - the Character Builder and the Online Compendium (which worked like the various spell/item lookups on this site) - it just became unmanageable. My group played 4e right up to the week they disabled those tools, but without them it just seemed too daunting to deal with. We actually got fairly close to building our own character builder (just for our use due to copyright and whatnot), but we'd been warming up to 5e anyway and the utility of DDB was very enticing.
I suppose you could do a limited content game like the Core + 1 rules they do with 5e, but the huge number of fiddly bits to play with was the primary selling point for us. So we're playing 5e now.
So...yeah. 4e is The Edition That Wasn't, and older players would prefer that it never be spoken of again. Which is sad, because from what I heard 4e actually did worldbuilding, and it trusted its players to actually be capable of intelligent thought. There were some real gems in the system, but there's simply no way to access it anymore. Let alone play it.
4e was not meant to have a setting, but sort of accidentally acquired one because they needed examples and adventures needed to be placed somewhere. Arguably the best sourcebook for the Nentir Vale is "Monster Vault: threats to the Nentir Vale" (which is mostly a collection of monsters with flavor text, but they're pretty fun).
I've only played a little 4E, but if one of my friends offered to lead a 4E game I wouldn't turn them down. I've played a ton of AD&D, but you couldn't pay me to play another game in that edition. For all the fun I had with editions prior to 3E, on the ruleset level they're not good. At all. Love the lore and settings, break out in hives thinking about the mechanics. I don't think 4E modernized the rules all that much and the biggest 3E problem - mechanics bloat, and particularly bad implementations of good mechanics - caught up with 4E too, but it's a decent ruleset. That goes for 3E and Pathfinder 1 too though, especially if you pare down the sources you allow and prune the core books a bit here and there. 4E was different, but not necessarily better. I was there for the edition war, back when WotC still had forums (pre-community even, if memory serves). It got blown up, as such things do, and there were unjust incriminations of the other edition on both sides, but fundamentally a) there was no need for 4E, at least from the players' perspective, and b) there was no clear improvement or advantage to switching editions. I'm not necessarily in favour of 5E's slimmed-down, streamlined ruleset, but at least that's a reason for more than a few people to switch and certainly for new players to give it a go. 4E didn't have that, regardless of some of the things it did extremely well.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I liked 4th edition martial classes, they were somewhat more interesting than 5th edition though there still wasn't a lot of variance, just "What's my standard power chain". I also liked 4th edition monsters for much the same reason, pretty much all of them had something special they could do.
Huh. DMs guild actually has pdf versions of 4th edition rulebooks for pretty low prices. Tempted to get some of them.
I like 5e much better (though I’ve never really played 4e just read a couple of the books found them really complicated). Never tried Pathfinder at all. But I guess that’s not really helpful to the OP. (Sorry @drowfreak I do like drow too.)
I just got done reading all the 4e books. I made several characters: Eris the elven ranger (my first one, figures the combination would be so obvious), Keselva the half-crazy Kalashtar swordmage, Nessie, a former invalid eladrin artificer, Bier the traumatized, slightly suicidal dwarven paladin of Corellon. . . it's become a long list. (No one to play with so all I can do is build characters.)
My primary question: How easy is it to find other people who still play 4e? (Like if I put up a thread in the "find a player" section here, how likely is it I'd get an answer?) I refuse to waste all that time I spent learning the 4e rules; and besides, some of my favorite characters make no sense when translated into 5e. I've read the rules for rangers and Eris ceases to make sense in 5e format.
You won't get a lot of support for it here, since this site is exclusively for 5e. You should probably try someplace like reddit or Roll20.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
4E is not a very popular edition. You'd have an easier time of it with 3rd ed D&D/Pathfinder 1st. Roll20 has one current game, and that's a living campaign. Good news is that they have open places. Bad news is that doesn't leave you any choice regarding the game schedule.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Hate to say it, but it's going to be tough for you. For many of us, 4e died when WotC took down the online character builder a couple years ago. Most of the forums are gone now as well.
Good luck. Even if you don't find a group, don't consider the time wasted. It sounds like you've had a great time coming up with character builds and that's a creative and rewarding pastime all on its own.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Gonna be tough 4e really does require some kind of real or virtual tabletop as so much of it was based heavily on positioning, swapping, pushing sliding. On a good note there's no real reason you can't create those same characters in 5e. 4e was far more descriptive I feel with its powers and abilities and leads to a lot of "Oh wow!" but I found when it came to play it pretty much devolved into a other editions "I attack" style play to try and move the combat (which is very slow in 4e) along a tad faster
That actually sounds fun, i like combat.
Yeah, but I'd like to actually get to play them.
No, actually there is a reason. One of those characters is a race that doesn't exist in 5e. I read the rules for elves and rangers and Eris is impossible in 5e.
Thanks a lot for the replies. Still planning on trying my luck with 4e in the future but thanks for telling me what the odds are.
Quick edit: Sorry if I sound pretty negative. As I mentioned, I have a lot invested in 4e emotionally.
I'd be interested in learnign if u need someone to play with
The other hard thing about 4e is that it never had much of a SRD so there just aren't the useful internet resources that are present for 5e or pathfinder. There were plenty of things I liked about 4th edition, but it would be a challenge to run a game.
SRD?
Standard Reference Document - it makes it easier for third party publishers to produce material for the system, since they don't need to have individual negotiations with WOTC (or the publisher of the relevant game system) in order to be able to publish things for that game system.
That wouldn't be necessary. I have most of the rulebooks in PDF format. And I have most of the rules memorized. . . it would be really easy for me to run a game.
And. . . thanks, smftre512. (I don't know how to directly address people on this forum.) I'll remember that in the future. I'm not looking to set up a game right now, just scouting to see how easy it would be.
Everyone else: Any particular reason why getting a 4e game up would be hard? I mean, why would people not want to play? (Other than starting to play after 5e came out and not knowing the rules.)
Between not being the current edition, not being all that popular of an edition, and low accessibility, finding players would be a challenge (and this is not the best place to look), though not necessarily an insurmountable problem.
Primarily due to 4e's reputation. People who don't read between the lines hear about 4e from players of 3.5, primarily, and most 3.5 players deem 4e to be Literally The Worst Thing Invented In All of the History of Mankind. Worse than war. Worse than sex crimes. Worse than genocide. Worse than PBR. Many/most 3.5 players cannot demonize, denigrate, and badmouth 4e enough, so new-to-5e players get the impression that the game is actively trying to send them to Satan.
Reading between the lines? D&D 4e was an attempt to modernize the game and get it away from some of the clinging old systems that had been strangling 3.5e to death. D&D 4e was also how Wizards discovered that the existing 3.5e playerbase for D&D...does not take modernization well. if D&D is not the exact same D&D as it was fifty years ago, players scream. So 4e was a commercial failure due to community backlash and the refusal of existing players to adopt the new system. Primarily because Paizo was operating "Legally Distinct 3.5e, It's Not D&D We Swear(TM)", a.k.a. Pathfinder, and 3.5 fans could simply switch to playing the exact same game they already had with a publisher that wouldn't trey to do something so malevolent as modernize their game out from under them.
Wizards had to backtrack in a blazing hurry, and as such 5e is much more like older editions of D&D. It's dramatically oversimplified, because Wizards identified that the key issue with getting new players into Pathfinder games is the fact that Legally Distinct Not-D&D-We-Swear 3.5e is incredibly dense, obnoxious, and difficult for the average newbie to pierce, so they "modernized" by stripping out most of the rules and leaving a barely functional skeleton in their place. Somehow, against all odds, it worked. 5e got huge, and Wizards couldn't kill off their money-hemorrhaging online resources for 4e fast enough.
So...yeah. 4e is The Edition That Wasn't, and older players would prefer that it never be spoken of again. Which is sad, because from what I heard 4e actually did worldbuilding, and it trusted its players to actually be capable of intelligent thought. There were some real gems in the system, but there's simply no way to access it anymore. Let alone play it.
Please do not contact or message me.
4e has a lot of options. Like literally thousands of feats. Some of them are very specific - like you need to be a tiefling avenger with Oath of Pursuit or something like that. It also has a ton of conditional bonuses that you need to keep track of (for attack, damage, all 4 defense stats, etc), and lots of other conditional options too - paragon paths based on your class, epic destinies based on whether you have a feat, and so on. On top of that you have hybrid/multiclass rules that are fairly complicated and likewise opened up other conditional options.
Now for me, none of those are drawbacks. I loved the level of customization 4e offered and spent many hours just poring through feat and power lists and finding weird combinations in order to make memorable characters. But without the primary two tools WotC had to manage all this content - the Character Builder and the Online Compendium (which worked like the various spell/item lookups on this site) - it just became unmanageable. My group played 4e right up to the week they disabled those tools, but without them it just seemed too daunting to deal with. We actually got fairly close to building our own character builder (just for our use due to copyright and whatnot), but we'd been warming up to 5e anyway and the utility of DDB was very enticing.
I suppose you could do a limited content game like the Core + 1 rules they do with 5e, but the huge number of fiddly bits to play with was the primary selling point for us. So we're playing 5e now.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
4e was not meant to have a setting, but sort of accidentally acquired one because they needed examples and adventures needed to be placed somewhere. Arguably the best sourcebook for the Nentir Vale is "Monster Vault: threats to the Nentir Vale" (which is mostly a collection of monsters with flavor text, but they're pretty fun).
I've only played a little 4E, but if one of my friends offered to lead a 4E game I wouldn't turn them down. I've played a ton of AD&D, but you couldn't pay me to play another game in that edition. For all the fun I had with editions prior to 3E, on the ruleset level they're not good. At all. Love the lore and settings, break out in hives thinking about the mechanics. I don't think 4E modernized the rules all that much and the biggest 3E problem - mechanics bloat, and particularly bad implementations of good mechanics - caught up with 4E too, but it's a decent ruleset. That goes for 3E and Pathfinder 1 too though, especially if you pare down the sources you allow and prune the core books a bit here and there. 4E was different, but not necessarily better. I was there for the edition war, back when WotC still had forums (pre-community even, if memory serves). It got blown up, as such things do, and there were unjust incriminations of the other edition on both sides, but fundamentally a) there was no need for 4E, at least from the players' perspective, and b) there was no clear improvement or advantage to switching editions. I'm not necessarily in favour of 5E's slimmed-down, streamlined ruleset, but at least that's a reason for more than a few people to switch and certainly for new players to give it a go. 4E didn't have that, regardless of some of the things it did extremely well.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I liked 4th edition martial classes, they were somewhat more interesting than 5th edition though there still wasn't a lot of variance, just "What's my standard power chain". I also liked 4th edition monsters for much the same reason, pretty much all of them had something special they could do.
Huh. DMs guild actually has pdf versions of 4th edition rulebooks for pretty low prices. Tempted to get some of them.
I like 5e much better (though I’ve never really played 4e just read a couple of the books found them really complicated). Never tried Pathfinder at all. But I guess that’s not really helpful to the OP. (Sorry @drowfreak I do like drow too.)
So 3e fans dive bombed 4e into non-existance... wow