Sorry. Didn’t mean to be patronizing. Wasn’t my intention.
But as someone who played both with and without the CB, I find declarations that it was “impossible “ to play 4e without the CB to be very overblown.
And to add to the list of things that I have no problem with people not liking 4e for:
1. Presentation. Yup that’s a biggie. That includes the stuff mentioned before like terminology but also stuff like the adventure delve format. As well as loads of other elements.
2. Publication pace. Yikes.
3. Marketing. Yeah this was just bad.
4. Proliferation of interrupt effects which ground the game to a halt in play.
5. Proliferation of damage types which makes the game overly complicated.
6. Spectacular levels of bloat. We probably didn’t need something like forty distinct classes in what, three years?
7. Shockingly poorly written adventures. Goes back to presentation.
That would be most of my list.
I played plenty of 4E and while the core combat loop was fun, almost everything else about the game was not.
To me, 4th Edition shares a lot of design ideas with Pathfinder 2E.
Both place an inordinate focus on the core combat loop (specifically to "balance" it) at the expense of pretty much everything else.
This leads to adventures having to become strings of combat set pieces, with much less focus on the story that connects them.
A 4E adventure and a PF2 adventure is immediately recognizable as specifically just that, a 4E adventure and a PF2 adventure, respectively.
Even though WotC would have denied it, and I'm pretty sure Paizo still would, the fact of the matter is that these adventures aren't really D&D adventures like OD&D, AD&D, 3E and 5E adventures are.
And that is the ultimate source of the failure of these games. They just sacrifice too much of the core D&D experience in order to achieve "balance".
Yes, I know 3E balance was traumatizing to most of us, but 4E and PF2 represents an overcorrection that ultimately dooms both games.
5E is a
much better path forward, even though we can argue where and when WotC oversimplified their D&D game:
the basic core "values" of the D&D adventure remains intact.
This cannot be said about 4E or PF2.