Except cooldowns were extremely straightforward? You had at-will abilities (use as often as you want), encounter abilities (once per fight), and daily abilities (once per day). Easier than tracking spell slots.
It felt like they were trying to make an MMO be a table-top game at the time when WoW was at the height of its popularity (that WotLK nostalgia). Its not that it was overly bad, it was a square peg, round hole situation.
These days I feel like 5E has no teeth, very good intro but beyond the first few campaigns and the endless art books its mechanically uninteresting. Pathfinder 2e has been what most of my games have converted to.
I have heard the ‘4e was MMO edition’ critique multiple times and not once has anyone been able to articulate why 4e was specifically like WoW in a way that wasn’t outright false or was so broadly similar that it applied to nearly all fantasy RPGs, electronic or tabletop.
It’s better for games where you actually have a table with miniatures imo, but the rules seemingly being structured around this was not great for strictly paper adventures. Grappling was simpler, I guess.
people like to shit on 4e, but every time anyone tries to actually explain why it was bad it just makes me wish for it more.
The way they told me is that every class of 4th edition effectively had 2 builds.
Every level had 2 choices: one that fit your build and one that didn’t.
Choosing any option that wasn’t on the build was useless.
Then there is also something about cooldown abilities, which is hard to keep track of on boardgames.
Except cooldowns were extremely straightforward? You had at-will abilities (use as often as you want), encounter abilities (once per fight), and daily abilities (once per day). Easier than tracking spell slots.
Sounds like Baldur’s Gate 3 in a way
It felt like they were trying to make an MMO be a table-top game at the time when WoW was at the height of its popularity (that WotLK nostalgia). Its not that it was overly bad, it was a square peg, round hole situation.
These days I feel like 5E has no teeth, very good intro but beyond the first few campaigns and the endless art books its mechanically uninteresting. Pathfinder 2e has been what most of my games have converted to.
I have heard the ‘4e was MMO edition’ critique multiple times and not once has anyone been able to articulate why 4e was specifically like WoW in a way that wasn’t outright false or was so broadly similar that it applied to nearly all fantasy RPGs, electronic or tabletop.
It’s better for games where you actually have a table with miniatures imo, but the rules seemingly being structured around this was not great for strictly paper adventures. Grappling was simpler, I guess.