The failure of D&D 4th edition
The design failings of Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition (2008-2013) are well-worn terrain by now, and the unprecedented success of 5th edition suggests we might simply consign discussion of 4e to RPG history and get on with the new game.
However, I think it’s worth learning from the mistakes 4e made, and explaining why it was so controversial at the time. Additionally, it’s worth discussing the innovations of D&D 4e that actually did work, and the ideas that still hold relevance to modern players.
Background
D&D 3.5 players and designers had begun to notice flaws in the edition’s design. Unlike AD&D 1st edition, which was playtested at high level where the most power issues tend to lie, D&D third edition was playtested mainly at low level, where most D&D play takes place. High-level play was the least well balanced. Many radical changes were made in the design of third edition, and the large number of profitable player-focused supplemental sourcebooks led to unintended overpowered combinations and a focus on character building as the primary function in player success. Challenge rating was a rough measurement at best.
Wizards of the Coast was aware of these issues, as were writers at Paizo Publishing’s magazines Dragon and Dungeon, during the period when Wizard of the Coast licensed the magazines to them. For example, the Mad Marquis Querchard (Dungeon #117, Touch of the Abyss, p.57) is a solo sorcerer who fights from behind the bars of his jail cell, a necessary defensive advantage because the official D&D 3.5 challenge rating of CR = Level is largely inaccurate; similarly, Dragotha (Dungeon #134, Into the Wormcrawl Fissure, p.83) has an arbitrary ability called Unholy Toughness to boosts its hit points from 240 to 832 in order to be challenge-appropriate.
Before he was a lead designer on D&D 4th edition, Mike Mearls write two sourcebooks for Malhavoc Press that defined him as one of the greatest experts in the D&D 3.5 rules: The Book of Iron Might (2004), in which he deconstructed the combat system and presented rules for combat maneuvers and combat skill uses; and Iron Heroes (2005), a variant set of all-martial character classes giving interesting combat options to non-spellcaster classes. Mearls’ understanding of the 3.5 rules impressed Wizards of the Coast enough to hire him. His inclusion on the D&D 4th edition design team was seen as a reason for optimism.
However, Wizards of the Coast’s corporate side had also acquired something of a negative reputation for chasing profit at the cost of creative staff. It was common for the company to fire talented writers late in the year, supposedly to balance the books for WotC’s parent company Hasbro, a toy company who counts their financial year ending in December after Christmas. Many former employees would go on to found competing companies, including Monte Cook’s Malhavoc Press. There was a sense that Wizards tended to fire senior writers who were confident enough in their abilities to butt heads with the management, who were more in turn focused on company goals like annual profit. The result was that Wizards of the Coast’s senior staff tended to be yes-men who would put the company’s goals ahead of D&D community.
The result was that, while there was a great deal of optimism about D&D 4th edition ahead of its release, players began to notice flaws.
Flaws of D&D 4th edition
Mandatory miniatures use
In an interview at Gen Con 2007, Mike Mearls responded to concerns that D&D 4th edition was turning D&D into more of a miniatures game than a roleplaying game. Mearls said:1
“Making it more like a board game or a miniatures game defeats the purpose of having D&D. Really, miniatures are no more necessary now than they were in third edition. […] If you don’t use minis now, you’re not going to feel like, ‘well, now I have to have minis’. That’s not changing at all.
As late as March 2008, Mearls still insisted that playing without minis was possible:2
If you played 3e without miniatures, you’ll have no problem with 4e.
When the D&D 4th edition Player’s Handbook was released in June 2008, miniatures were mandatory. The book’s introduction states:
Miniatures: Each player needs a miniature to represent his or her character, and the DM needs minis for monsters. Official D&D Miniatures are custom-made to be used with the D&D game.
Page 6 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide concurs, including miniatures in its list of “what you need to play”. In fact, it lists D&D Miniatures in italics, meaning the official D&D brand miniatures. Either a battle grid or D&D Dungeon Tiles are also required. Unbelievably, character sheets are listed as optional.
Miniatures had been completely optional in D&D 3.0. The D&D 3.5 Player’s Handbook changed its introduction to say “The game assumes the use of miniatures and a battle grid, and the rules are written from this perspective”, but this was largely an attempt to sell more minitures, as the core combat rules had not changed from 3.0.
The 4e combat rules not only assumed the use of miniatures, but were based inherently around the use of miniatures and a square grid. Combat now used multiple enemies by default, drawing intentional influence from the D&D Miniatures skirmish game, as mentioned by James Wyatt in Wizards Presents: Worlds and Monsters, p.10. Many combat powers used by both PCs and monsters relied on specific measurements of distance or area to be meaningful, including many short range attacks, area effects, multi-target effects separated by a limited distance, and forced movement.
The result was that miniatures were absolutely required in D&D 4e for core combat mechanics to be meaningful. Miniatures are only optional in the sense that you could in theory homebrew an alternative.
Now, miniatures are not inherently a bad way to play D&D. The main problem is that by making them mandatory, Wizards of the Coast alienated players who either couldn’t or didn’t want to play with miniatures. I suspect this was motivated more by the company’s desire to sell miniatures than by any overwhelming demand among D&D players. A lot of groups didn’t want to play with miniatures.
Even for groups who do play with them, miniatures have drawbacks. The most obvious is expense. To play as intended, you need miniatures for every encounter, including multiples of the same creature. To run a specific adventure module, you need specific monsters. For example, HS1 The Slaying Stone requires (by my count) at least 39 individual miniatures for a 32-page adventure. Even at $1 per mini, you would spend twice as much on minis than on the adventure ($14.95).
In practice, I’ve never known a D&D group who had every miniature. You could in theory buy nearly every miniature - of maybe 153 monster entries in the 4e Monster Manual, only about 5 did not have any miniature in WotC’s official line by 2010 (I count Cambion, Colossus, Doppelganger, Homunculus, and Larva Mage). In practice, everyone just substituted other things at least some of the time: other miniatures, pieces from other board games, coins, dice, or clever inexpensive home-made pogs.
Even if you wanted to buy miniatures, it was complicated by the way Wizards of the Coast sold their own miniatures line in random blind boxes. For example, the Demonweb booster pack contained 8 random miniatures and cost $14.99.3 If you wanted a specific monsters, such as a guard drake, you had to buy multiple boxes and hope the other creatures were something you could use in your campaign, or find a way to build your campaign around those monsters. In practice, the main way a lot of people bought minis was via resellers on ebay.
Consider also that responsibility for buying miniatures in many groups is up to the DM. I’ve heard of some groups where the players chip in to buy miniatures, but this probably isn’t the norm. The DM usually puts the most time and money into a D&D game, so in practice it’s asking a lot to have them spend even more money.
For developers at Wizards of the Coast, ready access to their own company’s miniatures was no problem. The D&D team had become so isolated from the experience of the ordinary D&D player (something Mearls would admit in his Legends & Lore web article series when he was put in charge of building D&D 4th edition’s successor) that it may not have occurred to them that a massive percentage of players were not able to play the game as designed.
Wizards of the Coast’s designers made an edition of D&D that satisfied corporate management, but not the actual customers of the game.
This is all not mentioning the digital gametable, which never came out, in part due to Wizards of the Coast’s decision to make all their own software in-house and underestimation of their ability as a tabletop games company to produce software. Popular digital gametable Roll20 was not launched until 2012, four years after D&D 4th edition’s launch, by which point Wizards of the Coast were already working on 5th edition.
While the digital gametable could have saved players the difficulty and expense of buying miniatures, it would also have been a massive undertaking. Every Monster Manual released would require Wizards of the Coast to 3D model around 150 new creatures. Of course, most D&D groups probably played in-person, and could not have used these digital gametables. Those who did play online would have been used to non-miniature play, and 4e’s miniature requirement was an unwelcome imposition.
Slow combat
In my experience, combat in Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition took substantially longer than in 3.5, and this did not enhance gameplay. Several mechanical factors caused this.
Both monsters and player characters tended to have high amounts of hit points relative to their damage output, creating an effect known in the community as “padded sumo”. The players spend more rounds in combat, but this does not make the game more enjoyable. In fact, it slows overall progress in the dungeon.
Wizards of the Coast eventually accepted that this was a flaw in the system, notably re-issuing solo monsters with around 20% fewer hit points. Compare, for example, the Elder Red Dragon in Monster Manual (HP 1,050, AC 40) and the same creature in the later Monster Vault (HP 832, AC 38). Wizards should have known this was an issue; I once heard from someone during the 4e playtest that WotC were thought to be A/B testing slightly higher and lower HP versions of creatures, with the playtester reporting that combat had too many hit points.
D&D 4e also has multiple opponents as a standard feature. A typical first-level encounter of four standard kobold skirmishers has a combined total of 135 hit points, but the fighter’s standard damage is no higher than it was in D&D 3.5. 4e’s role-based design does intend for fighters to serve primarily as decoys to protect higher-damage striker classes, but the number of combat rounds is still high.
Characters also have more actions in each turn, making each round take longer. Optimal play often means selecting a Minor power in addition to your Standard, and you can use your Move action to use another Minor action. You’re also tracking more reactions and interrupts.
You also have more powers to choose from, and that adds thinking time. If you do your thinking on other players’ turns, you’re not paying attention to things like which status effects are in play. But another problem is that you can easily run out of Daily and Encounter powers while the combat is ongoing, and now you are using low-damage At-Will powers, which makes combat take longer.
Wizards of the Coast ought to have known about all of these problems, because they were known issues with D&D 3.5 at high character levels. D&D 3.5 players handled it with heavy use of insta-kill spells and super-optimized characters, but these options were eliminated in 4e for balance. Many 3.5 players also handled it by ending campaigns before level 20 (e.g. the original Pathfinder adventure paths for D&D 3.5) or playing low-level variants (i.e. E6).
Long combat isn’t an issue for something like the D&D Miniatures skirmish game, where that’s the entire game, but D&D players traditionally want exploration and progress.
Difficulty tracking status effects
Another problem, which also contributes to slows combat, is that D&D 4e has a large number of status effects to track. It actually has fewer unique status conditions than D&D 3.5 (16 versus 38), but they are used much more frequently.
Most combat powers grant some side-effect which must be tracked. Either the DM tracks this, or the players do. In my experience, the DM has to focus a lot of their attention on accounting paperwork for these status effects, ongoing damage, and event triggers. In my experience, both DMs and players forget to apply them.
For example, the cleric’s Lance of Faith power damages a target and grants one ally a +2 power bonus to their next attack against the same target. The ally must now track which enemy it is and remember to apply the bonus, if they want to attack it. The party may spend extra time discussing the most optimal target, which slows play.
The status effects often don’t matter. A +2 bonus to hit is nice to have, but in practice it only results in an additional hit when you would have missed by 2 or less. About 90% of the time you either missed by more than 2, or hit without the bonus. In other words, Lance of Faith does nothing most of the time. In some instances, you may even have another power bonus to hit, making Lance of Faith useless. This is not just a problem with Lance of Faith, but with the entire use case of +1 or +2 bonuses which must be tracked.
Another problem is that D&D 4e does not include any standard way to track status effects accurately and communicate them to the players. A video game will do this easily, such as with icons above each creature’s head, and will automatically apply effects even if the player forgets. D&D 4e doesn’t have this. There’s no way to view status at-a-glance, so it’s trivial to forget to apply a status, activate a trigger, or end an ongoing effect at the correct time. The DM may have to keep the entire game state in their head, without a reliable way to convey this information to players in a way that is useful.
In my experience as a D&D 4e DM, I found myself spending a lot of time and mental effort manually tracking the complex game state, and could not do this accurately. Triggers also led to confusion tracking initiative order by giving actions to characters out of turn.
Skill challenges
Skill challenges were a mechanic by which multiple skill checks could be required to achieve a success.
This was not necessarily a bad concept. Skill challenges traced their origin to complex skill checks, an optional mechanic appearing in the D&D 3e sourcebook Unearthed Arcana:
Complex skill checks allow the game master to build suspense in critical situations, add tension to multiple-round tasks during combat, enhance special adventure-specific tasks, and resolve complex activities more quickly.
To build suspense with complex skill checks, the game master can simply substitute a complex skill check for a normal skill check during a critical task. In most such situations, using a complex check lessens the likelihood that one failed roll will cause the party a significant setback.
D&D 3.5’s complex skill checks generally represented a single person making discrete progress toward a greater goal, such as training an animal over multiple weeks or disarming a trap with multiple components. Players decided what they were rolling for and understood how each roll contributed to the overall goal.
D&D 4e’s skill challenges took this mechanic and allowed the entire party to contribute to a single complex skill check, and to use multiple different skills. This causes problems that may not be immediately obvious.
Allowing different skills means that progress is abstract and meta, rather than representing anything in-world. If a skill challenge requires twelve successes and allows Athletics and Arcana, it doesn’t matter how many of each you do, as long as you do twelve in total.
The implementation also makes some questionable choices.
The skills which may be used, and what those skills do, are designated in advance. DMs are advised that they can allow other skills, but at a higher DC. The DM is advised to tell the players up-front what skills will be necessary.
Skill challenges were structured like combats, with initiative order, and participation is mandatory (DMG p.74). If your character doesn’t have relevant skills, you’re forced to take part anyway, meaning that you’re weighing the party down.
To give an example, in HS1 The Slaying Stone, the party must complete a skill challenge to sneak through a town without being spotted. Any twelve checks succeed. Twelve Athletics checks to swim the city’s canals will do as well as twelve Dungeoneering checks to navigate through the city. Streetwise would seem more logical, but is arbitrarily capped at only one success. Acrobatics to run along rooftops won’t work at all, because it’s not a listed skill. Diplomacy will grant a success, but Intimidate won’t. Some skills are DC 12, others DC 17, and it’s not clear to the players which are which, or why.
In terms of gameplay, skill challenges as written do not seem rewarding or interesting. You will always want to use the best skill over and over. You aren’t taking part in a narrative event or succeeding through your wits or skill, but just rolling dice.
RPG blog The Alexandrian noted problems with skill challenges in the article Playtesting 4th Edition – Part 6: Skill Challenges, describing them as part of a trend in D&D 4e where mechanics and narrative were disassociated from each other. He described skill challenges as “caring not about what the PCs have done, but merely how much they have done”, and mandating railroading:
“If you follow the rules in the DMG you are supposed to (a) write a script for the PCs to follow; (b) tell them the script; and (c) if they try to deviate from the script, punish them for it with more difficult skill checks.”
While he believed that complex skill checks were still promising, where they represent social events or discrete actions which lead logically to an outcome, he concluded that 4e’s skill challenges were broken:
This “system” is worse than useless. It’s literally just generating random noise and isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.
Not everyone dislikes skill challenges. Matt Colville speaks highly of them in his 2016 video Skill Challenges! Running the Game #21. He considers them to a ways to get players to think creatively about the skills their characters have. Matt’s house rules limits all characters to one use of each skill so that they can’t just roll their best skill over and over.
Disassociated mechanics
A general trend in D&D 4th edition is that the mechanics don’t represent anything narrative or in-world. The Alexandrian was one of the first to release an article on this issue in 2008, titled Disassociated Mechanics.
Skill challenges are one such example, but another is combat powers. For example, marking opponents represents a game mechanic, but doesn’t necessarily represent any thing in the world. Such a rationale can be created, but it’s just a rationalization of the rule. The Alexandrian notes, for example, that if we rationalize a certain power which +2 to allies as a battle cry which inspires rage, it’s still not mechanically blocked by effects like magical silence which should logically affect that, so it’s still disassociated.
Disassociated mechanics work fine in a video game, but D&D rules normally represent a fictional world where common sense applies and is relevant to understanding and interacting with the world.
Cool features of D&D 4e
Artifact concordance rules
In most editions of D&D, artifacts are merely overpowered items. They’re hard to integrate into a campaign except as a plot maguffin (collecting the Rod of Seven Parts) or a campaign-ending event.
D&D 4th edition’s Dungeon Master’s Guide is worth a read even for DMs of other editions. One of its unique innovations is its rules for artifacts.
In this system, artifacts have their own will and purpose. They become more powerful if their bearer fulfils special criteria or performs specific actions which please it, which raises its concordance score. This lets the item start out only moderately powerful gain power over time, which is more balanced.
The item eventually leaves its bearer, either when its goal is achieved or the artifact considers the bearer unworthy, such as when their concordance drops too low. This makes the artifact a challenge to carry, something which controls the player by influencing their actions by clear game mechanics without removing player agency. “Moving On” helps balance the artifact by having it leave once it reaches its maximum power level. When it does leave, the player can feel like they’ve achieved a success rather than that they’ve been robbed of an item.
This system is mechanically and thematically interesting, and gives a place and purpose to artifacts.
Points of Light setting
You won’t find a world map in this or any of the core D&D rulebooks. “The world” in which the D&D game takes place doesn’t have a map–not until you create one.
D&D third edition’s default core setting was the World of Greyhawk, a setting whose history and lore were largely hidden in out-of-print AD&D-era rulebooks. A setting sourcebook was produced, the ‘‘Living Greyhawk Gazetteer’’, but it was somewhat dry and mostly useful as a reference for RPGA scenario writers and long-time fans of the setting.
D&D 4e’s Dungeon Master’s Guide intentionally made its world a blank slate. There is no default or canonical world. The DM was not running “Greyhawk-lite” or Greyhawk with the numbers filed off. Rather, the DM was entirely free to invent their own world, unencumbered by ideas like canon or established history. The DM has complete freedom to tailor their world on a session-to-session basis.
Importantly, the default world concept was especially well-tuned to a traditional Dungeons & Dragons campaign. Most of the world is a dangerous wilderness filled with monsters. Ancient ruins of past highly-magical civilizations are common, and civilized settlements are rare. D&D 4e called this setting concept the “Points of Light”, referring to civilized settlements as points of light in a dark and mysterious world.
RPG writer and YouTuber Matt Colville, in his Running the Game video Railroading, Agency, and Choice, briefly mentions “sandbox” campaigns where players are free to explore the world as they see fit. He draws comparison with the video game RPG Skyrim, where players are free to explore a world full of interesting adventuring locations. The main difference between Skyrim and D&D is that while Skyrim defines all possible adventures in advance, the DM of a sandbox or open-world D&D game is free to invent largely on the fly.
Fundamentally, “Points of Light” meshes really well with how a lot of DMs actually construct campaign worlds by inventing them as they go along. There is no expectation that the DM will either build an entire world in advance or learn old lore. The DM is not constrained by too many preconceived assumptions. Almost nothing is defined until the DM defines it, and anything can be defined.
The “Points of Light” setting concept thus gives DMs the maximum amount of flexibility and control over their own campaign world, and allows the creation of a campaign tailored to the group.
Reskinning and customizing monsters
While an early complaint of D&D was that the mechanical “crunch” and thematic “fluff” often felt disconnected, this created an opportunity for DMs to re-use the statistics for one monster to represent a completely different monster. This was known as “reskinning”, a term used by the D&D community and probably originating in video games, but which was recognized in some later sourcebooks.
For example, the fire beetle is mechanically just a level 1 brute with a bite attack, a close blast 3 fire spray, and fire resistance. The same stats could represent a goblin fire mage or a steam-spewing brass construct. If you want stats for an ankheg hatchling, just use this change the fire to acid.
A mechanic called “creature themes” was introduced in Dungeon Master’s Guide 2. This added additional powers or traits to existing creatures based on some shared group. For example, members of the Legion of Avernus can gain a Fire Shield aura which harms adjacent enemies. It doesn’t matter if they’re humans, tieflings, or bone devils; they can all share this trait which identifies them as part of a group.
Small variants like this don’t massively change the overall power of a creature, but they can allow a variety of creatures in a single adventure to feel like a coherent group, and give players the sense of learning and responding to monster traits.
A similar mechanic, “functional templates”, did a similar thing but with a larger increase in power. You see this use of templates to create thematic coherence in D&D 3rd edition’s Bastion of Broken Souls where half-dragon spawn accompany the red dragon Ashardalon, but the advantage of creature themes is that they don’t modify challenge rating.
At-will and daily spells
In earlier editions of D&D, wizards at level 1 started with a low number of spells, perhaps one or two per day, and the power level of those spells was weak compared to a fighter. The “balance” of wizards was that they became more powerful than the fighter at higher levels. You just had to play an underpowered character for a few levels until you got good.
In retrospect, this was a terrible way to balance classes. It happened even in third edition, where wizard spells ran out quickly at first level and the wizard would resort to firing a crossbow. The first-level spells were not powerful, for their rarity.
D&D 4e gave first-level wizards the ability to cast a spell every round in combat without resorting to thematically weak crossbows or the like. For example, magic missile now dealt 2d4 plus Int modifier damage, giving the caster something to do when more powerful spells ran out.
D&D 5th edition follows this, but does it better. At-will 0th-level spells, now termed “cantrips”, are often equivalent to or better than the fighter’s weapons. Fire bolt deals 1d10 damage. Actual 1st-level spells are now more like artillery strikes, a limited but very powerful resource. Magic missile at level 1 deals 3d4+3 damage (average 10.5) on an auto-hit, and burning hands deals 3d6 in an area (average 10.5, save half). Still, it was 4e’s willingness to break with Vancian tradition that allowed us this innovation.
Conclusion
For D&D 5e players who never experienced 4th edition, it’s enough to understand that D&D 4e was a slow and drawn-out combat experience which required much tracking of small status effects. It sacrificed out-of-combat experience in favor of a more detailed combat experience which was harder to play, and D&D 5th edition abandoned most of 4e’s innovations.
D&D 5e DMs can still draw some valuable ideas from 4th edition.
The 4e Dungeon Master’s Guide, like many earlier editions, is certainly worth reading if you find a cheap copy on sale, for its DMing advice.
The “points of light” campaign setting philosophy encouraged DMs to start with a blank slate and and incrementally define the world as the campaign goes along. It’s an excellent way to come up with a campaign world that suits the players.
Customizing and re-skinning monsters to create new ones is a fantastic idea. As D&D becomes more carefully designed, it’s harder for fan-made monsters to reach the same quality and balance level as official content. Just take the statistics of another creature of the appropriate challenge rating and change the description into something completely different. Or, invent some power or trait and give it to members of a group, who might serve as long-term campaign antagonists.
D&D 4e found a way to integrate artifacts into an ongoing campaign. Before, they were just overpowered items. D&D 4e made them practical. D&D 5e no longer incorporates the 4e artifact concordance rules, which is a shame, as they really gave DMs a way to use these items in a campaign that wasn’t super high level. You can achieve a similar effect by having an artifact become more powerful over time as the player fulfils the item’s goals, which can be a way to drive a campaign.
Footnotes
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D&D 4th Edition: Designing Encounters, 6m 52s. 19 August 2007. ↩
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4e rules will make some games much harder torun, 17 March 2008. ↩