Controversial Opinion
I like D&D 4e
I heard that!
Incredibly easy to DM, build encounters, customize monsters, and loads of material to boot. Also, little known fact, plenty of roleplaying to be had.
4e was my first edition played.
While it did seem too gamey and a frustrating lack of spells to use outside of combat, I liked that they did go beyond the cliches, such as with the Heroes of Shadow book and non-aligned angels.
Non-aligned angels is an example of one of my favorite parts of 4e’s flavor text: the fact that the cosmology was kind of messy. While I love the Great Wheel in the context of Planescape it’s very symmetrical and while that does lend its own sense of weird to a Planescape game it doesn’t evoke the same sense of myth as 4e’s does. 4e’s cosmology was messy, dirty and weird, and much more akin to the stuff of myths in my opinion.
Also I loved the fact that 4e had overarching metaphysical conflicts that went beyond alignments: you had the gods vs the primordials conflict which lead to the creation of the Abyss, which again has that cool mythic titanomachy feel to it, and that’s just one example.
There’s so much to 4e’s worldbuilding I could just gush about endlessly.
Like another thing about 4e’s worldbuilding I liked:
I’ve always liked gnomes. I’ve always thought gnomes are cool. So of course I was a bit disappointed when I heard they weren’t a PC race in the PHB, but I got over it, because 4e gnomes were RAD AS ALL HELL!
As much as I love gnomes in retrospect they didn’t really have much of an identity of their own: they were basically weird dwarves who were really into illusions and also into gems instead of gold and lived in burrows like halflings and talked to badgers. Not saying that isn’t cool, as I said I liked them fine as that, but 4e finally made me love the hell out of them.
4e focused on the fey aspect of gnomes: they were residents of the Feywild, the same place where eladrin and fomorians come from. The eladrin live in their ivory towers in the treetops and the fomorians live underground. Gnomes live in the middle. They’re the people who have always been caught in the middle of the wars of two races who simply don’t give a fuck about gnomes. Their illusion powers suddenly made all the more sense: they needed to be good at illusions so as not to be caught in the crossfire of stupid sexy elves and weird mutant giants.
It also gave a dark twist to the gnomes’ trickster nature and sense of humor. Gnomes in previous editions were described as wacky slapstick tricksters with a love for practical jokes. 4e kept that, but since they were also always used to being the downtrodden they had developed a really dark sense of humor as a defense mechanism. Gnomes were dark illusionist comedians always punching up because when you’re literally the lowest in the Feywild there’s no direction to punch but up.
(Okay, a lot of that is extrapolated from stuff I read from 4e books, but that’s how 4e gnomes have solidified in my mind and my headcanon rules.)
(And like the headcanon thing, the 4e implied setting was just broad strokes enough that you could fill in the gaps and I love that. Ask me about my 4e headcanon and which of the gods are kissing.)
I loved finally having a god of death who wasn’t evil. The Raven Queen was my favorite god for the setting, and will always carry on in my games as the primary god of death (needless to say, I hated the article that came out in Dragon about how the Raven Queen is only neutral because she can’t get away with her plans of conquest and destruction while the other gods are watching her closely).
I will point to Kelemvor as a previous non-evil god of death, but the Raven Queen was cool.
And “behaving because I’m being watched” isn’t neutral, it’s careful.
True. I never got into Forgotten Realms at all, so I never remember any of the gods from that setting. I was so angry at the article for basically saying, “she’s actually entirely evil, and has a long term plan to start up using her position to try and conquer everything once she has enough power to stand against the other gods.” It also described a sect of her worshippers who go into the houses of people who have some kind of terminal illness or other thing that they decide means it’s time for that person to die, and kill them. These people were also described as being neutral.
It sounds sexist to me, but whatever. Nerd dudes get SUPER upset when a female deity/ruler is portrayed as good. (similar attempts have been made to make Alarielle ‘really evil’) Anyway YAY! FINALLY POSITIVE WORDS ON 4th! I have the core rules books and LOVE how the systems sounds, alas, nerds are SO fixed in their ways that it’s all 3.5 or pathfinder….alas, oh well!
God damn I’m now actually thankful I didn’t ever sub for Insider because I too would’ve been super pissed at them turning the most rad goddess into “no actually she’s evil”
Literally the first character I wanted to make for 4e was a tiefling Paladin of the Raven Queen named Melody but I never got to play her because I never actually ended up making her for a game and instead made other characters
