Hate for 4e

Don't get me wrong, there is a LOT I had about older editions: "Alignment" anything; Tolkienesque races; Vancian spell-casting; countless cheap magic baubles; demihuman level-caps; saving throws by five specific categories; the pacing between improved to-hits and saves; exploding hit points and static damage dice; classes becoming archetypes instead of broad classifications allowing for a wide range of archetypes; etc.; etc.; etc. But... 

I have my own grievances with 4e.

My experience with 4e was like trying to make a character from within a straightjacket. Character options felt constrained. The rules do not allow players to push outside their class specialty. If you are a Barbarian, all you can do is run around hitting people with a giant axe; if you are a Rogue, you run around stabbing people like a prick, as well as clear traps; if you are a Fighter, all you can do is stand their like a dipshit socking-up the hits like a Linebacker; and so on and so forth. I want the option to play a barbarian who can not just stand there and take it, but to also turn anything he gets his hands on (chair, barrel glass bottle, etc.) into a weapon; a Rogue more focused on dueling and seduction; or a Fighter who can surpass a Ranger in archery and/or duel-wielding. In the case of the later, I end up playing a Ranger as a "Not Ranger", but I was stuck with all the treehugger class-feature bullshit!

Instead of going with a more flexible "Rule Zero" approach, it goes for a more rigid, systematic approach. Yes, combat in most editions of D&D comes off boring and depressing whet they go on for too long, but this game makes combat feel joyless and soulless grinds! One of the big reasons why I hate playing video game RPGs and those big MMORPGs is that combat is a slow-ass fucking grind! Everyone surrounds some big-ass monster or a mob of them, with strikers and spell-chuckers slowly hacking away at them, while tanks and controllers keeps the encounter contained, and healers and buffers keeps the party alive for HOURS ON END! If I want a grind, I'll play fucking World of Warcraft! I play D&D to adventure!

5e did a lot right! One of them was to add rules to encourage role-playing. 4e on the other hand likes to put it on the back-burner. The game is so focused on getting to the action, that its would have a chose scene or a social encounter played-out with a series of meaningless dice throws. As in: "You are being cased by some goons. Make a Stealth check five times to shake them off." That is not role-playing. No! It is the twisted inversion of role-playing called "roll-play". It is cheap and lazy! Role-playing should be about player decisions and acting FIRST; dice rolls for resolving determinant outcomes SECOND!

Most of all, the games is so caught-up with making the game "fair" to everybody. Everything is about balance and clarity. Which is fine here and there... But when the main focus of the rules is making it all fit this way. The game looses a sense of spontaneity, off-the-cuff actions, and sense of dread and mystery that comes form not knowing if something will kill you outright or not. On top of that, they removed some of the cooler elements of D&D that usually makes for the most dynamic role-playing (if rather game-breaking) game play, like Polymorph and Wish. Its like WotC got tired of doing Q&As and wanted the games to severe primarily for tournament games.

That is why 7th edition Gamma World (which ran on 4e D&D) sucks so hard! The first two editions of GW were unbalanced as shit, but they were still fun to play. Hell, they are still fun to play! But 7e GW throw out all this wonky shit that were even too much for vanilla 4e D&D, like the fucking CCG rules. I still find it hard that WotC fucked-up harder with GW than White World Studio with their 6th edition!

And and what I hate most about the game, that most would just dismiss as trivial, is the artwork. This is not something I can ignore! That shit is cover-to-cover -- nothing but loud, flashy, obnoxious fighting and magic-use. It not that, then a return of the 2e era dramatic camera poses, but bereft of any sex-appeal. And Wayne Reynolds is the worst of it! I have never seen an artist go out of his way to make fantasy look so ugly in my life! It all makes my dick and balls want to castrate themselves.

Finding anything good about this games is less about "diamonds in the rough", but more "costume jewelry in a big pile of horse-shit".



Oh and before anyone makes a point about how 4e created the "Point of Light" concept... That was not unique to 4e. Mike Mearls and some of the other old-timers at WotC got that from The Wilderlands Fantasy. It is the apex of "Point of Light" settings. My only beef with that is that is would assume that ALL D&D settings would have to conform to this paradigm — even re-writing long-establish canons! (as someone that loathes the bloated Grayhawk and Forgotten Reams settings, that is saying something)