I'm getting old and senile but I don't remember a lot of clever use of magic in 3e. I know there's a lot of jokey posts about it in 5e, but often to the tune of "I cast create water IN HIS LUNGS LOLOLOL", and then people go "that's not how the spell works". 5e also has weird interactions and limitations like sneak attack or smite unarmed, or Eldritch blast and objects. You mentioned the zeitgeist and I think that's actually the key. When 4e came out a lot of 3e grognards didn't like it, but casual players also didn't like it because it was still kind of crunchy, and you had to make choices that could lead to a bad character. 5e came out and is vastly simplified. Now there's a lot of players who would never touch 3e or 4e playing, because it's easy and kind of a shallow game mechanically, so the online sentiment is different. More positive. Also a lot of the grognards have aged out. Without those new players, I feel like people would be repeating "5e is baby's first RPG. It sucks" the way people said 4e is an MMO, it sucks. My argument is that 4e has some dubious similarities to video games, but it was a loud minority and then bandwagon jumpers that cemented the idea. Without that loud minority, I think a lot of people who came to 4e as it was would have enjoyed it fine. People who dismissed it as "an MMO" would not have drawn that conclusion.

I haven't played much 5e, I was comparing it more to 3.5, I am pulling from loose memory and the spotty options that exist online (due to the game system license which honestly didn't help 4e's case), but if [this source](https://open4e.fandom.com/wiki/Charm_person) is to be trusted for the things that have been made creative commons, it shows the charm person power. With the standardized to hit mechanics the effect is: >The target gains vulnerability to charm and illusion effects from you and your allies, and suffers a -5 penalty to their Will and Sense defenses until they snap out of it. Compaired to 3.5's from [here](https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/charmPerson.htm): > This charm makes a humanoid creature regard you as its trusted friend and ally (treat the target’s attitude as friendly). If the creature is currently being threatened or attacked by you or your allies, however, it receives a +5 bonus on its saving throw. >The spell does not enable you to control the charmed person as if it were an automaton, but it perceives your words and actions in the most favorable way. You can try to give the subject orders, but you must win an opposed Charisma check to convince it to do anything it wouldn’t ordinarily do. (Retries are not allowed.) An affected creature never obeys suicidal or obviously harmful orders, but it might be convinced that something very dangerous is worth doing. Any act by you or your apparent allies that threatens the charmed person breaks the spell. You must speak the person’s language to communicate your commands, or else be good at pantomiming. This is obviously only one example, and a particularity egregious one at that, but speaks to the sorts of differences I saw in what 4e was trying to do, and what 3.5 was doing. I don't think it's fair to attribute the dissatisfaction specifically to grognards, when these are very clearly different kinds of systems, and the goals of 4e are much more video game like in having controlled variances and results, rather than the freer form of 'rulings not rules' intended games. If that's not your style than, rock on, but I feel like the counter culture revival of 4e does gloss over the fact that is really was a pretty drastic shift in what DnD was, and it was disliked authentically for the very different and opinionated choices it made, not just online backlash.

I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search. https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example. It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own *thing* (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e's Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me. 5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like "I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But... then if I need fireball I won't have it later. So let's do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn't use magic.". Rituals were a decent solution for that.

FATE is my favorite least favorite system. I love so much about it, but find about half of it absolutely intolerable. For example - players making up their own consequences. It's so metagamey that it immediately kills my immersion.

I feel like there's two poles of the RPG experience. At one end, there's the writer's room "let's tell an awesome story together". At the other, there's "I am my character and I am in the world". I am super far in the writer's room direction. I don't want to "immerse" in my character. I want to tell a cool story about my character. So for me, when I try to jump onto a moving train and flub the roll, having input into what happens is great. I like being able to say "what if I land and roll and my backpack falls, so I lose all my stuff?", or "what if I crash through the window of the wrong car, and it's like a room full of security goons having dinner??". If the GM just unilaterally does that, by contrast, it feels bad to me. I like having input. It's probably no surprise I GM more than play. I imagine at the other end of the spectrum, thinking about that stuff gets in the way of trying to experience the character.

The "writer's room" stuff is, by definition, *not* role-playing. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely enjoy it, but if you tell me we're role-playing and then hit me with that, I'll be upset at the whiplash. I feel like games like FATE need to pick a lane. Either we're all writers telling a story together, or we're trying to role-play as characters and be immersed in the world. But you can't accomplish both things at once. And if we're doing the writer's room thing, we should just play Microscope. It's my favorite improv-game so far (although I'm open to trying others).

I've been playing DND since first edition. When my group got to 4e we jumped on eagerly, then dropped it like a hot potato. Why? It wasn't a bad system, but up till then DND felt like an evolution and 4e felt.. different. There were a bunch of undocumented patterns that had been in the rule set for a very long time, strategies, concepts, that just.. broke under the new ruleset. It felt alien. If we had wanted a different system we would have gone looking and found one already. It's like ordering chocolate ice cream and being given lemon all the while insisting it is still chocolate. So we jumped to Pathfinder, played around with 5e (which reclaimed a lot of that lineage), and finally really got into Pathfinder 2, which had largely felt true to that lineage all along. I'd love to say 4e could have flourished if they had billed it as a sister system instead of a replacement, but in all honesty it probably would have had a lot slower growth than hasbro wanted. There were already other competitors and what hasbro really wanted was to refresh the market with the need to replace your set to have (buy) the current version.

I can see why you might feel that way. Playing in that mode still has some properties of roleplaying- you're often focused on one character and thinking about the world through their perspective - but you're not trying to *be* them the whole time. Maybe it's like being an actor and director at the same time, for a film or play? You drop into the character but also zoom out for the bigger picture. I don't think anyone would say like "Branagh wasn't acting because he was also directing" I don't agree with "can't accomplish both at once", but this is a reasonable thing to disagree on. It can definitely be a mode of play people don't enjoy!

@jjjalljs @Postimo Also, 4e gave us useful at-will cantrips so that a wizard out of spell slots still feels like a wizard.

Its one thing 5e kept that I was glad of. I wish skill challenges had come along too, along with Healing Surges keeping their name. Hit Dice has a whole OTHER meaning within D&D, using the term for the dice you can roll for healing during rests is just confusing.

That's valid, we might have under utilized rituals in replacing much of what I felt was lost in vancian casting. I still feel the homogenization of powers, while very sensible from a mechanical standpoint, stood out to me as very video game. I can see you're point in spell slots use for environmental vs combat, I think that was part of what I found interesting in caster classes in 3.5, and later pf1. I get that there is a lot of intelligent design in 4e, and I think on a mechanical level it makes a ton of sense, but I think ultimately it comes down to rules vs rulings mentality to the game. I would say it was very much on the side of rules, and for many players that felt much more like the MMOs they knew than a TTRPG.