The 4E "Renaissance"

This thing on 5E YouTube is doing a hard sell on 4E as "the next big thing."

As someone who played the game heavily since the first book came out and collected an entire 4E library - and played them all - I can't think of more of a silly and disingenuous thing to try to sell the community.

And we LOVED 4E compared to all the haters. We bought every book and played it. We watched the books get patched before they hit the store shelves, making the physical copies worthless. We did the whole thing with dungeon tiles and figures and played every night for 3 years. We watched them constantly fiddle with monster hit points and damage, making later book classes so overpowered as they tried to patch the game in motion - making the core classes underpowered and weak. We have seen 4E Essentials beta-test the 5E concepts and be this strange dongle reimagining of the game, yet it is compatible with it (that looks like 2024 suspiciously).

But the game let us down so hard that we left Wizards and the barely play-tested, buy-the-next-book, string-you-along garbage they put out. It hurt 5E and made us switch to Pathfinder 1e because it left a bad taste in our mouths.

The 4E "Renaissance" has nothing to do with 4E being great. This game breaks past the 12th level with stun locks, turn-denial, and thousands of hit-point monsters whittling them down with the same powers, turn after turn. Tracking short-duration turn conditions requires a spreadsheet. The game at 1-5 is excellent! Past 6th level, it starts to slowly break down before it fails hard, freezing up and dying a "why are we playing this" death.

By the 18th level, you are standing in a circle around a 1500-hit-point monster, watching yourself make 20 points of damage, and then waiting for the person with the stunning power to deny the monster their next turn. If you miss, ah, well! We will get back to you for the next go around!

Repeat this for 30+ turns of play for four hours for one combat.

The powers in the later books made it worse. You gave the DM a list of "expected gear upgrades" for your build, and optimization was required and assumed for every magic item slot. Optimization was required to keep up with monster progression, and you were stacking bonuses in every slot they gave you.

The math was unconstrained, adding +28 to a d20 attack roll to hit an AC of 35. People's brains were fried after a 3-hour session since it felt like a rapid-fire immersion session for basic math.

There is no way in hell they play-tested this. If they did, it was in one of the best echo chambers ever designed.

5E has a way better high-level game than 4E, and that isn't saying much.

Pushing 4E keeps you from leaving Wizards and trying other games, thus leaving the 5E Wizards community for good. This is why 4E is being pushed. When 2024 D&D comes out, 4E will be dropped by these channels, and you will be out a ton of money buying PDFs you will never use. Wizards will be happy they have the extra money, and the channels don't care as long as you give them views and stay in the D&D cave.

The company does not deserve your business, honestly. There are better and more exciting spaces to play now instead of living in the past.

We are in the early phases of the 5E alternative games, and the time to jump in is now.

Some 5E alternatives take the best of 4E and improve it - mixing the old and the new while staying true to the classic pillars of play.

And there are so many other games to explore, with unique communities and experiences.

I still have those books above; that is my photo.

But we loved 4E. We bought the maps and figures. We played it every night. We did the whole "progression of a game" through the books. We even bought every Essentials book, thinking, "This is gonna finally fix it!"

And in 5E, they ended up doing it again, though this time, they had a better base game to build upon and eventually ruin by the end of the run. The companies rebuilding 5E is where the fun is at these days. Going back to 4E and waiting for the next version of D&D to "finally fix it" is like waiting for Godot.

YouTube is full of it at times with these fads and "keep the community together" tactics, and people that buy into this will likely be unhappy (unless you are a true fan, but even then) and be sucked into wasting money on PDFs. I never bought the 4E PDFs. I have no use for them. The game is that broken. I keep the books because I want to remember the good times.

And you know, when 2024 comes out, 4E will be dropped by the YouTube community as the "we tried it, but it sucked" game that it was, and this is coming from someone who loved 4E and bought the entire run of books.

Loving 4E is about loving what they tried to do, the world they tried to build, and the game's new direction. The only two 4E books I recommend getting are the essays on the design of the world and then using a new set of rules to play in the world that these inspire. These two books made us fall in love with the new world, but the game let us down.

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56956/Wizards-Presents-Races-and-Classes-40

https://www.dmsguild.com/product/56955/Wizards-Presents-Worlds-and-Monsters-4e

The imagination and energy behind 4E were amazing and what we loved. The rules broke the promise.

Games like Level Up A5E (and even ToV) are better systems that try to continue that legacy and move forward. They are a fresh start with no baggage, with communities and teams trying to improve the core design. Playing 4E keeps you from leaving and trying something new and keeps people in that toxic relationship with a Wall Street company.

The new games are coming out now and are exciting places to be in. Don't be fooled back into the cave.

Who makes the game matters, and supporting the people out there making a change for a better future today is a much better place to be than listening to people trying to endlessly sell you the past.