Why didn't we switch to 4e/5e?

[atemu1234]

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

[legomaster00156]

I played 4e before playing Pathfinder. To be clear, I like 4e. I think it's a great, well-balanced system. I just enjoy the breadth of options found in Pathfinder more.

[atemu1234]

I played 4e before playing Pathfinder. To be clear, I like 4e. I think it's a great, well-balanced system. I just enjoy the breadth of options found in Pathfinder more.

I played 4e after, and I don't hate it, but I vastly prefer the options present in the game. I played 5e, and it was better, but in the end, there just wasn't enough of it.

[Psyren]

3.5 was and is my favorite system, I just wanted more of it (+ some changes.) PF offered that, 4e didn't.

As for 5e, I do play it occasionally - I just haven't "switched."

[umbergod]

3.5 was the one edition i really cut my teeth on. Got started with the hell that is 2nd Ed AD&D. 4th edition felt more like an mmo/online game in tabletop format. As for 5th, it looks fun, just havent had the opportunity to play in any 5th ed games

[LigneMaginot]

Because I already owned 3.5 books and resources. I was the DM and none of my buddies wanted to move to a new system.

[jmelesky]

Background: I'm a PF player, but I also play other systems.

PF, like 3.x before it, pushes the "fiddly character building" button in my head. Knowing and exploring the mechanics through the wealth of different options is a very large part of my enjoyment of that system.

4ed never gave me that. I've played it a few times, and while I appreciate that they addressed the balance problem, it doesn't (or didn't, when I looked) have the breadth of options and the complexity potential of combining them.

5ed, when I've played it, felt like a compromise step between 3.5 and an OSR system. Which is odd to say, because they developed some new game concepts along the way (I'm thinking of things like bounded accuracy, or unifying a bunch of stuff to the new advantage/disadvantage mechanic).

Really, neither of them push the button for me the way PF pushes it. And if I want to play a game that doesn't involve weirdly-satisfying complicated character building, I tend to go further afield, to Fate, or PbtA games, or smaller story games.

[thorr-kan]

3.5 was the one edition i really cut my teeth on. Got started with the hell that is 2nd Ed AD&D. 4th edition felt more like an mmo/online game in tabletop format. As for 5th, it looks fun, just havent had the opportunity to play in any 5th ed games

Heretic.

I didn't switch because:
1. I'm still DMing/playing 2ED, which is my first gaming love.
2. The 3ED group fell apart shortly after my first kid was born and never reformed.
3. 4ED just didn't interest me.
4. Haven't had a chance to play 5ED, though it's fun to read, especially the Adventures in Middle Earth stuff.

[Covenant12]

4e sounded not like D&D, and not a game system I'd enjoy. I still have that impression and its been backed up every time someone tells me about it. Not interested. Playing off and on since the boxed sets, 2nd edition was fairly mediocre but still felt like D&D.

I actually got a 5th edition player's handbook as a Christmas present, and on a quick read it looks solid. I like 3.5/Pathfinder better, but if I'd started with 5th first I'd likely stay with that. If I run into 5th edition campaign I'd be perfectly willing to learn.

[Zombimode]

For the people here who largely play 3e/3.5e/PF, why didn't you switch over to 4e/5e when they came out?

My reason was the OGL. The wealth of content is my favorite thing about this game.

I simply like 3.5 better then 4e or 5e.
They are all different games. There is no reason to "switch" just because these other games are called "D&D" and have a higher number.

[Afgncaap5]

I play 3.5 and 5e. I maintain that 5e is the better game system, but I just know 3.5 so often that it's easier for me to default to it. Having said that, 5e's "story-focused" approach has made my 3.5 games a lot better, in my opinion. Don't know if my players agree or not.

And 4e was... a very good game, but not what I wanted to play at the time. I've also had difficulty getting into it since I can never find people running it, since we all know 3.5 and 5e so well. I've adopted some of its Eberron content, though.

Basically, 3.5 has "If you can imagine it, you can stat it" and 5e has "Use your imagination and worry about stats later!" and those both make them easier for me than 4e, and Pathfinder is...

...I can't forget that I'm playing a game when I play Pathfinder.

[Falontani]

I played 3.5 twice before 5e came out. I played 5e for months with several groups in their Adventure's League. I started looking into 3.5 again because while I was playing 5E I was playing dungeons and dragons online, and I knew that it was supposed to be "loosely" based on 3.5. I eventually started to DM a 3.5 group, and I play 3.5, 3 days a week and sparingly online. I hardly ever play 5E anymore because there is not enough.

[Elder_Basilisk]

I played 4e for a while. It was a flawed execution of a bad premise. The bad premise was that the game would be better if every class and monster was the same. All classes get different powers that use the exact same model of resource management and the exact same mechanism to determine if they hit. That's not a terrible model--I like Descent 2e for example which has a lot in common with 4e D&D--but it's not as interesting to me as the prior edition D&D model where different classes have different resources and a fighter or rogue can do their thing forever until they run out of hit points but a wizard only has so many spells per day and his utility spells compete with his combat spells. The flawed execution had to do with the bad math that led it to be harder to hit and harder to boost your defenses the higher level you got.

5e? I've played it a bit but not enough to know if they got the bounded accuracy math right this time. Regardless, I don't want bounded accuracy to begin with. I want a 20th level fighter to miss less often than a first level fighter.

So, 3.5 and Pathfinder are where it's at for me. The last editions of D&D before they decided to try to shove bounded accuracy down my throat. And the last editions of D&D where they have players and monsters playing by the same rules.

[Troacctid]

Hey, speak for yourself, I totally switched over. 4e and 5e are great.

5e? I've played it a bit but not enough to know if they got the bounded accuracy math right this time. Regardless, I don't want bounded accuracy to begin with. I want a 20th level fighter to miss less often than a first level fighter.

I can tell you haven't played much 5e! Enemy AC doesn't scale for crap, and +X weapons are relatively easy to find, so high-level characters eventually just stop missing.

[Goaty14]

3.5 has more options available, IMO

Mate, we have a PrC for skydiving dwarves and a feat that lets you turn Turn Undead into Rebuke Hippos in this game.

Nothing is out of reach of a 3.5 character.

[BloodSnake'sCha]

I never played 4e so I can't say a word about it.

I played some 5e games, I felt like I can't do everything and it felt bad to play like this (even when I made sone homebrew with the DM).

I play 3.5e a lot and I love the ability to do everything I want.

I never played PF so I can't say a single word about it.

[Darrin]

I tend to think of 3.5 as the "Hot Mess" girlfriend/boyfriend or a heavily customized hot-rod. It's a jaw-dropper with sizzle and wicked curves, astonishing complexity and depth underneath the hood, and it is excited and eager to go anywhere and do anything you can imagine. It's got some deep structural problems and crippling mechanical issues in some spots that will leave you crying and blubber-faced in a dark corner or stranded in a bad neighborhood every once in a while, but you keep coming back because the engine is solid and reliable, the quirks are manageable, and it's still really fun to drive it into new places.

I understand to a limited degree what the designers were trying to accomplish with 4E, but I tend to think of it as an "instructional failure". It was important to spend some time away from 3E and understand why it wasn't working out in some areas. The design was much more balanced, calm, measured... but it also took a lot of the sizzle and spunk out of the engine. Overall, 4E came off to me as feeling sterile and generic. Every class was essentially a blaster wizard with the same maneuver deck, just refluffed the cards with different names. They had taken the big ugly lumps out of the mashed potatoes, if you will, but the result was bland, mushy, and plain. It had no heart, no soul.

I have recently started a 5E game as a player, and I'm still getting used to it. I like it, as it's got some of the flavor from 3E that I liked but thought was missing from 4E, but it both impresses and infuriates me. It's got some of the streamlined "less is more" design from 4E, but it's also got a lot of the sizzly and crinkly bits from 3E spread through it. I keep looking for the complexity and the quirkiness of 3E in it, and the system keeps smirking at me, saying "Will you quit worrying about whether or not you get a +1 and +2 and just roll the dice? All those fiddly bits aren't that important!" I keep looking for things in 3E that I want to see in 5E, and they just aren't there, they've been folded into a proficiency bonus or an ability score increase, or just flat-out ignored. Weapon sizes? "Don't worry about it, just roll already." Every time I think I've run into a problem that we had a rule for in 3E, I sit down to just play and... the problem just isn't there anymore. I haven't quite put my finger on it... I think they somehow made "Handwave it and move on already" as part of the mechanics, but I'm not entirely sure what they've done or how they did it. All I know is it seems to be working, and I'm getting a lot of the same sizzle I got from 3E.

[Dimers]

I play 2e, 3.X, 4e and 5e, mostly because I find games that sound neat which happen to be in different systems. I haven't tried Pathfinder. My favorite is 4e but 3.X ranks high too.

I wouldn't recommend "switching" sight-unseen; 4e or 5e might be better for a particular player but worse for a different player. Each has its highlights and its flaws.

[Kurald Galain]

Because of out-of-combat options, and character progression.

4E effectively has no out-of-combat rules other than "roll your best skill and make something up" (or rituals, which boil down to "pay money to roll your best skill"). You can definitely have fun improvising this, but you get zero support from the rules doing so.
5E's skill resolution is utterly random, because ability/proficiency modifiers are tiny compared to the 1d20 spread. This means you either don't use the rolls and improvise everything, or you do use the rolls and nobody can reliably do anything (the "nuh-uh!" / "yuh-uh!" on this is probably the biggest controversy on our 5E forums).

4E character progression is canceled out by scaling DCs and monsters at the same pace as you do, meaning that high-level play is pretty much the same as low-level play. I've fought an elder dragon which was level 1, and a regular city guard which was level 15, in both cases because that was our party's level.
5E character progression is canceled out by bounded accuracy (which ensures that the same skill checks or ACs that were problematic at level one are only marginally less problematic at level ten) and almost all higher-level class features are numerical bonuses to things you could already do.
I actually like that gameplay at low level is fundamentally different than at high level, and both 4E and 5E are designed to prevent this from happening. This is what WOTC calls "the sweet spot": gameplay is best around level X so let's make the entire game resemble level X only. Nothing wrong with that in principle, but really not my preference.

I get that 3E/PF is far from flawless in these areas, but at least it's trying. And in practice, most of the oh-so-often-repeated issues with it are actually pretty rare at the game table.

[Hunter Noventa]

I tend to think of 3.5 as the "Hot Mess" girlfriend/boyfriend or a heavily customized hot-rod. It's a jaw-dropper with sizzle and wicked curves, astonishing complexity and depth underneath the hood, and it is excited and eager to go anywhere and do anything you can imagine. It's got some deep structural problems and crippling mechanical issues in some spots that will leave you crying and blubber-faced in a dark corner or stranded in a bad neighborhood every once in a while, but you keep coming back because the engine is solid and reliable, the quirks are manageable, and it's still really fun to drive it into new places.

I understand to a limited degree what the designers were trying to accomplish with 4E, but I tend to think of it as an "instructional failure". It was important to spend some time away from 3E and understand why it wasn't working out in some areas. The design was much more balanced, calm, measured... but it also took a lot of the sizzle and spunk out of the engine. Overall, 4E came off to me as feeling sterile and generic. Every class was essentially a blaster wizard with the same maneuver deck, just refluffed the cards with different names. They had taken the big ugly lumps out of the mashed potatoes, if you will, but the result was bland, mushy, and plain. It had no heart, no soul.

You couldn't have said it better really. Our group tried 4th Ed briefly and none of us were impressed. The way everything was 'balanced' in the exact same way, all the classes felt the same and doing anything BUT combat seemed highly discourage sent us all back to 3.5/PF.

[Palanan]

I played 3.5 for five long years before 4E came out, and I saw no reason to switch.

Fact is, 4E was almost incomprehensible to me—and the bits I did understand seemed more like an MMORPG than a tabletop RPG as I understood it. Absolutely nothing about 4E appealed to me, and I didn’t see the point in spending a lot of time and effort learning a completely new system that I didn’t even like.

As for 5E, by that time I was playing Pathfinder, and once again didn’t see the point in shifting to a new system. I hear good things about 5E, and wish all those players well—but with over forty hardbacks from 3.5 and Pathfinder, plus any number of modules and APs, I’m pretty well committed to 3.P.

[Vhaidara]

I personally HAVE switched to 4e. I consider 3.5 something that's more of an art than a game, I enjoy the theory op builds, stuff like what Iron Chef and tippy's monk challenge produces, or builds like Chuck E Cheese crossing the entire continental U.S. and setting it on fire in a single round. For actually playing, though, I find 4e has more varied builds that maintain a similar power level, as opposed to the massive gaps that 3.X tends to generate. People who say that 4e characters are all the same have clearly never played, since there are combat viable builds that don't involve attacking (lazy warlords) or doing damage (pacifist leaders or hardcore control casters)

[WesleyVos]

Several reasons.

I love the options that 3.5e has. It's the only system (it seems) where you can make almost any concept come to life. Some house-ruling might be necessary to make it effective, but the base concept can be created.

I love that class is just a name in 3.5e, and that it is easy to rewrite fluff to suit a character.

I love the world-building 3.5e does, giving us the depth of information that the other two don't seem to.

I hate 4e's blandness and video-game-like quality. I want class balance, not class equality.

I hate 5e's advantage system. I'd rather get static bonuses than have to worry about making two dice rolls all the time for every little thing.

I love 3.5e's skill system, in which there is a skill for everything (though I'd argue for a skill point increase for certain classes...).

I hate 4e and 5e's attempt to make all levels of play the same. I don't mind having danger at all levels, but high-level play is supposed to feel different than low-level play.

I love the ability to really optimize a character in 3.5e, which seems to be lacking in 4e and 5e.

I love 3.5e for making monsters and characters play by the same rules - if I want to play a monster as a character, there is an easy way to do that.

Finally, I own all the 3.5e books, there is the OGL as well as various internet resources, and I don't want to spend a crap ton of money on a system that is "meh" at best.

That's a good start as to why I never switched.

[Troacctid]

5E character progression is canceled out by bounded accuracy (which ensures that the same skill checks or ACs that were problematic at level one are only marginally less problematic at level ten) and almost all higher-level class features are numerical bonuses to things you could already do.

I mean, I'm not sure how much 5e you've played, but I've DM'd close to 700 hours of Adventurers League and played a bunch more, and I'd say this hasn't really been my experience. High-level characters are goddamn steamrollers. Throw a T2 challenge at a T3 party and they're going to crush it like it's nothing.

[Recherché]

I started with 4e before finding pathfinder, but I found pathfinder to be much more satisfying. I really like having lots of out of combat options and abilities that can be used creatively for things they were never meant to do. 5e... I'm not terribly fond of the simplified math and some local edition warring has made led to some really bad associations with the local 5e players so I just ignore that entirely.

[Inevitability]

IRL, I basically only play 5e now, because my fellow players aren't that into the tiny finnicky rules of 3.5, nor into the amount of optimization necessary for a viable character.

I still spend time on this forum because I like the incredible wealth of options in 3.5, as well as the methodical, almost academic approach to the game.

[creakyaccordion]

The point has been hit on already, but the major issue I've had with 5e is the lack of specialization due to the cap on stats and the slow way that proficiency bonus scales. It certainly can balance out the party and make it so the Big beefy fighter can try to sneak along next to the rogue and maybe have a chance at not being spotted at the high levels, but I feel 3.5's narrative strength is in its differences. Because the big beefy fighter can't sneak along with the rogue, they have to come up with some other plan of action to assist the whole party. No one truly shines in 5e because the system is too afraid to let anyone be better than anyone else at something.

(Also the way intelligence ended up being changed made me really mad)

[Razade]

3.5 has more options available, IMO

But...it's been out longer?

[BearonVonMu]

I tend to think of 3.5 as the "Hot Mess" girlfriend/boyfriend or a heavily customized hot-rod. It's a jaw-dropper with sizzle and wicked curves, astonishing complexity and depth underneath the hood, and it is excited and eager to go anywhere and do anything you can imagine. It's got some deep structural problems and crippling mechanical issues in some spots that will leave you crying and blubber-faced in a dark corner or stranded in a bad neighborhood every once in a while, but you keep coming back because the engine is solid and reliable, the quirks are manageable, and it's still really fun to drive it into new places.

I love this explanation. I also absolutely love the archaeology aspect of PF/3.5, of needing to dive through six or seven books to make the character do everything they need to do and have all of the features they need.
4th edition is a bit of a sticking point with me. When it first came out, I was in a remote location and had great difficulty getting the books. I managed to get them, though, since my circle of friends back home were playing it. I had about twelve or so books in the end, and spent almost three days poring over them to create a cleric for the ongoing game I was to join. I made the power cards by hand, filled out the sheet by hand, all of it.
When I sat at the table, everyone else has pre-printed power cards. No big deal. Clearly they all just used the same generator. I say this because I had not heard about the online character creator. When I went to use a power, I got told that it did not work like I thought it did. That it had been nerfed and hit with errata.
I was shown the online tool and was shown that it took five minutes to make a character from scratch. That not only were my painfully tracked down overpriced books unnecessary, but also wrong.
I vowed to never give them another dollar.

4th itself is not so horrible. I will play it. 5th edition is also okay. I will play it. I will not run either of them because I am still angry at the publishers.

[atemu1234]

But...it's been out longer?

3.5 also has a very active consumer base, OGL allowed more third-party content, and in general Wizards doesn't produce as much contents for its editions anymore. 4e will probably never catch up, 5e may or may not, but probably will not catch up either.