4th Edition Really was the Death of Fun

I've never been a D&D settings guy. I like some of the weird stuff, Planescape, Darksun, Spelljammer. Dragonlance is terrible and has always been terrible. I've got a soft spot for Mystara, but for me, growing up in the Dragon magazine era, the Forgotten Realms felt like the 'default' D&D setting. Default also meaning 'generic'. We never developed a full D&D campaign back in the day (for epic, long running stories we played WEG Star Wars, and you should too), but we did play occasionally and mostly we did what groups our age did: we used one guy's homebrew world that we tooled around in when we wanted to rob a dragon of her hard earned horde.

I'm continuing this with my own players. I have a world/cosmos idea and one city fleshed out, but what lies beyond that is gonna depend a lot on what my players want to do we (hopefully) start up again in the fall. D&D 5 looks like its going back to FR as a default and some of the players might read ahead and I figured I'd refresh my memory a bit.

And that's the long way to say that I took the 4th edition FR book out of the library (because I live in a small city with a good, but not great library system). The world description stuff in the book itself is fine, but the time jump and absurdity of the disasters that occurred in the mean seem pretty silly, even for a fantasy setting. But that's not my gameworld, so its for me to worry about.

I never paid much attention to 4th ed, though I've since heard all the horror stories. Reading the introductory adventure in the FR book, I was completely flabbergasted at how fidgety and foolish 4th ed really is. In my day we had a room description and one line of stats for the monster - this thing has two pages on a simple goblin fight.

But what really killed it for me (and prompted this unnecessary rant) was a story choice. In the first  town of the adventure there is a store that is selling a black horn dagger with a small magical boost at a reasonable price. The adventure really wants the players to have it and offers it up cheap ... but makes no allowance for what to do if the players choose to steal it instead. And trust me, someone is always gonna want to steal it. And if in case, if the story wants a player to have the dagger so much, why not let them steal it?  (WotC castrating the Thief to turn it into the Rogue was a big reason I never played much 3rd ed).

The horn dagger comes back later in a barrow dungeon when the party encounters a hobgoblin shaman who is attempting to resurrect the corpse of an ancient Ogre King. The dagger was once a horn on the Ogre's skull. Okay, not a bad scenario set up... except that is isn't. The text implicitly says that the shaman's ritual won't work. YOU DON'T GET TO FIGHT THE UNDEAD OGRE KING!

Why, why, WHY would you write it like this??!! Giving the party a chance to stop the resurrection, sure. But hinting at pretty good monster, and then cutting it off before it even becomes a possibility is  .... just not Dungeons and Dragons!

I've notice some of thing in a lot of the 5th edition adventures as well. I think its a symptom of the corporatization of WotC under Hasbro, which to be fair, has made D&D more popular that it has ever been. But I also think cleaning up the game has also removed a lot of the grit and gore that made the game so tantalizing to us as kids of the 70s and 80s.

Luckily, the BEST part of D&D as a game is that you don't have to play in their worlds, you don't have to follow the text, you don't even have to follow the rules if you don't want to. Building your own game is where the real magic lies. That and the friends you'll make along the way.