By Seann Barbour
In 2025, Dungeons and Dragons is an ever-present force in our cultural landscape. The game has both built podcast empires and, more recently, sold out Madison Square Garden. It’s safe to say D&D is more popular than it’s been since the 1980’s. It’s sometimes difficult to remember the game was not always so successful – and even neared collapse in the late 90s.
In 1997, D&D’s original owner TSR, facing financial duress, sold the game to Wizards of the Coast (often shortened to Wizards or simply WotC). WotC had risen to prominence by publishing the trading card game Magic: the Gathering, and its team were doubtless excited to work on a classic game that had been such an inspiration to their own. On August 10, 2000, their new version of D&D, dubbed Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition was released.
“3e” as it came to be known was a success. Wizards achieved this by streamlining the game’s archaic rules systems and installing the Open Gaming License (OGL), a legal agreement that allowed anybody to produce content for the game. Third edition reinvigorated D&D, and it reestablished itself as the big fish in the small pond that is the tabletop roleplaying game industry.
As the era of Third Edition continued, however, cracks began to show. Games like D&D, which provide the player hundreds of options that can be combined in countless ways, are difficult to balance. Infamously, the higher levels 3e characters climbed, the more powerful spellcasters became, and the more useless non-casters began to feel. Why swing an axe when you’re guaranteed more damage by casting Harm or Disintegrate? To say nothing of spells like Baleful Polymorph or Forcecage that can render combat a moot point entirely.
The team at WotC set out to address these balance issues, as well as concerns around accessibility for aspiring tabletop adventurers. Wizards sought to build a game that could be enjoyed by anyone, old and new players alike – an epic fantasy adventure anyone could participate in even if they didn’t know a drow from a duergar. On June 6, 2008, the fruit of their labor was unveiled: Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, a bold and radical new step forward in the game’s design.
There was just one problem: everyone hated it.
My First Game
Like many awkward nerds of my generation, I grew up immersed in fantasy. I was part of the Harry Potter generation, and one of the earliest movies I can remember seeing in theaters was The Lord of the Rings. I was at exactly the right age for the Pokemon boom, and I went on to spend a good chunk of my teenage years playing fantasy video games like Final Fantasy and The Elder Scrolls.
Dungeons and Dragons may not have been the cultural juggernaut it had been decades ago, but its influence in fantasy gaming was everywhere-. In 2010, I’d finally sink my teeth into this legendary world and its myriad systems of play.
I still have my first D&D product: the 4th Edition “Red Box” starter set. It came with a choose-your-own-adventure style booklet that served as tutorial for the game’s rules, along with battle maps, an adventure, abridged character creation rules, and a whole lot of punch-out cardboard tokens. I quickly picked up some more substantive rulebooks, and not long after I joined my first campaign on Roll20, with my first character: a Shade Assassin created using the options in Heroes of Shadow.
I found the game easy to pick up (which turned out to be a problem, but we’ll get to that). A lifetime of video game fantasy RPGs had prepared me well, and tabletop roleplaying fast became my new favorite hobby. I wasted paycheck after paycheck on growing a collection of RPG manuals, building an impressive library of not just D&D, but other games as well. But 4e was the center of my collection, my first, and one of my favorites.
However, I soon discovered that I was alone in my enthusiasm for the game. My love for 4e puit me squarely on the wrong side of the “edition wars” that raged across forums and chat rooms at the time.
Fourth Edition infuriated such a massive bloc of the D&D community that later revisions of the game would work to distance themselves from it entirely. For years, tabletop RPG aficionados considered it the worst version of the game, and derided it as a World of Warcraft ripoff that almost succeeded in killing Dungeons and Dragons completely.
Was this a fair assessment? I would argue no. In fact, I’d go a step forward and argue the following: 4e’s most controversial choices, the design elements that were decried as betrayals of D&D, were in fact its greatest strength. In other words: 4e is good, actually.
Big Changes
Dungeons and Dragons has traditionally used a race, class, and level system. This will be familiar to anyone who’s played World of Warcraft or similar games. When you create your character, you choose a fantasy race (human, elf, dwarf, etc.) and a class that defines your character’s capabilities (with the archetypal D&D classes being Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, and Cleric). From there, your character accumulates levels by gaining experience points, and their abilities grow with every level achieved.
While D&D originated this system, video games had refined it by 2008. Game designers zeroed in on specific roles different classes fulfill in a cooperative environment and incorporated these roles into their design philosophies. Support classes heal and buff their allies. Tanks draw the enemy’s attention. DPS (damage per second) focuses on dealing as much damage to foes as they can as quickly as possible.
When designing classes for 4e, the team at WotC decided to look at how games like WoW approached their own class systems, and they built a set of roles that each of the core traditional D&D classes embodied. Fighters typified the Defender (the tank), Clerics the Leader (support), and Rogues the Striker (DPS). For Wizards, they crafted a new role not traditionally seen in video games: the Controller, which focused on debuffing enemies and dealing area of effect or “AOE” damage (for non gamers: that’s damage to all enemies in a limited area).
This choice allowed for easier class balance, and it worked well alongside another choice 4e made: switching its presentation to something more technical. Previous editions featured spell effects written in paragraphs of spirited, if sometimes purple, prose that might sometimes be ambiguous or open to interpretation. 4e, by contrast, rendered all its effects in rigidly defined text boxes that explained in the game’s specific vocabulary exactly what each spell or power did.
For example, take the Wizard’s spell Suggestion. In 3rd edition, Suggestion is a spell that forces a target to make a Will saving throw (that is, roll a die against their Will attribute). On a failed save, the target is convinced to do something by the caster, so long as it’s something that won’t harm the target and isn’t too out-of-character for them. The description spends three paragraphs explaining the parameters and limitations of the effect, ending with the somewhat ambiguous sentence: “A very reasonable suggestion causes the save to be made with a penalty (such as -1 or -2).” It all comes down to this: Suggestion performs the same function as rolling a social skill like Persuasion to convince a non-player character to do something, but it uses its own mechanics to accomplish this task.
Fourth Edition recognizes this, and its version of Suggestion is rendered as a spell that can be triggered when the Wizard is asked to make a Diplomacy check. Its actual effect is only a single sentence long: “You make an Arcana check instead, using that result to determine the outcome of the Diplomacy check.” This results in a spell that accomplishes the same thing as 3e’s version (allowing the Wizard to temporarily be an effective negotiator), but much more cleanly and without introducing extra redundancies and ambiguities into the mechanics.
In terms of game design, this new approach makes for a smooth and functional experience. When players sit down for a game of 4e, everyone at the table knows exactly what will happen when they cast Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Vicious Mockery, or in this case Suggestion.
But for many fans, streamlining D&D in this way missed the point of the game entirely.
No matter how far video game technology advances, there is one thing tabletop RPGs will always have over their digital counterparts: freedom. In a tabletop game, a Game Master (called a “Dungeon Master” or “DM” in D&D) adjudicates all actions on the fly. Players can, theoretically, make any choice they want, and the DM will adjust accordingly. In a video game, however, players will always be limited by both technological constraints and what the designers could anticipate and account for.
For example, I recently taught my girlfriend how to play Dungeons and Dragons with 5th Edition. Her first character was a Changeling Ranger, and during a fight with some goblins, a series of errant rolls resulted in a fire spreading across their combat arena. Thinking fast, she decided to use the smoke as cover while she used her Changeling shapeshifting ability to imitate the goblins’ boss, barking orders at them that led to the goblins rushing blindly into the flames. This was not something I’d anticipated when designing this encounter, and as such if I’d been making a video game, such a tactic would have been impossible.
Of course, any tabletop RPG is still limited in some way by a combination of the individual DM and its own mechanics. D&D, designed as it is for pulpy fantasy adventures, is a poor system for running games about political intrigue or operating a farm. If you try to turn your D&D campaign into Stardew Valley, you’ll end up fighting the system more often than not. But the feeling that you could do those things with the game, if you really wanted to, is a big part of the appeal.
What the introduction of more technical language and class roles in 4e did was rip away that illusion of infinite possibilities. No longer could a player believe they could abandon fighting monsters and villains for a simple life harvesting turnips. The new edition’s rules and their presentation made it clear that this incarnation of the game was about action, adventure, and absolutely nothing else.
A tightness in focus lets the game shine at the things it was actually designed for. But it alienated fans who’d bought into the idea that D&D could encompass the entirety of the fantasy spectrum.
Pools of Reference
Dungeons and Dragons is a game that seeks to emulate fantasy stories. This should be a relatively uncontroversial statement. However, there exist many different types of fantasy stories, and it needs to be clarified which stories, exactly, D&D draws its inspiration from.
In its early days, Dungeons and Dragons specifically based itself on pulpy sword and sorcery tales. Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian and Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga served as major influences on designer Gary Gygax. Many players also see clear influence from Tolkien’s work, especially The Lord of the Rings, though this influence was not as key as it might first appear. In a 1985 essay published in Dragon Magazine, Gygax admitted to disliking Tolkien’s work, but went on to claim that the immense popularity of LotR pressured him to include Tolkienesque elements like elves and dwarves. Famously, the halfling race were referred to as “hobbits” in early D&D supplements, until the Tolkien estate threatened legal action. This combination of pulpy adventure fiction and high fantasy superficialities gave the early game much of its identity.
As time went on, these literary influences began to coalesce into something unique to the game. Dungeons and Dragons developed its own style, built around delving into dark and dangerous locales to plunder riches, wandering always through a land hostile to you. Yet it retained an illusion that it could be anything. Sure it was designed for dungeon delving, but there was nothing strictly stopping you from using the system to run, say, Fantasy High – a campaign set in a John Hughes-esque high school packed with D&D fantasy races broadcast on popular indie streaming network Dropout. Part of Fantasy High’s appeal is the strength of the narrative. Familial drama is far more important than fireballs.
Abandoning this pretense is 4e’s greatest sin. With this edition, Wizards proudly announced D&D was solely a game about groups of heroes fighting evil in grand battles. It was Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. It was Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. And in terms of narrative, it was wholly uninterested in being anything else.
At the same time, 4e also placed a strong gameplay focus on combat tactics. This was best embodied in the Warlord, a new class introduced in 4e’s first Player’s Handbook. The Warlord was a Leader (support) class that functioned as a battlefield commander. It could heal allies by encouraging them to fight through their wounds, and it could grant extra movement and attacks to the rest of the party. It was a class that modeled itself after the cunning and inspiring wartime leaders of fantasy fiction. In terms of what it does, the Warlord is perhaps a better adaptation of LotR‘s Aragorn than any version of the Ranger has ever been. Naturally, it was seen by detractors as a symbol of everything wrong with the game, and by the small-but-growing group of defenders as a symbol of everything it did right.
The mechanics of 4e come together to encourage a very specific style of play. The heroes brave some dangerous locale. They explore, solve puzzles, and piece together the greater plot. Eventually, they come across some dastardly villains, and battle is joined. This results in a shifting of modes: player characters essentially leave an exploration scene and enter a battle scene, with the gameplay changing to accommodate this.
Yes, 4th Edition wants to be an epic cinematic fantasy, but it plays more like a streamlined video game. On release, detractors often compared it derisively to World of Warcraft, citing how characters’ powers operate on a functional cooldown system (meaning abilities must take time to recharge before they can be used again). Others have often argued that the focus on grid-based strategy and positioning brings it more in line with games like Final Fantasy Tactics.
Regardless, it was clear we had come full circle. The video games that D&D had once influenced were now in turn influencing D&D. Old players lamented this sad state of affairs, that the designers at WotC would lower themselves to looking to these lesser experiences for inspiration.
Now here’s the kicker: as someone who started with 4e, it’s clear to me that its video game influences were one of its biggest strengths.
A Tabletop Video Game
Video games as we know them did not exist when Dungeons and Dragons first entered the scene back in the 70’s. But every decade since, video games have become more elaborate, more widespread, and more mainstream. By 2008, when 4e was released, video games had become one of the most common forms of entertainment media on the planet. In May of that year, GTA IV sold 3.6 million units in just one day. Games had officially gone mainstream.
It’s easy to deride 4e for taking influence from WoW, but the truth is that far more people were playing WoW than D&D. The former peaked at 12 million subscribers in 2010. If you’re a millennial like me, video games might have been your first introduction to many fantasy tropes and conceits. Hell, when I taught my girlfriend how to play 5e, the most recent version of D&D, she specifically noted that her time playing WoW made it easier for her to understand the game terminology.
As an 18-year-old first trying out that Red Box, I was coming to Dungeons and Dragons from the perspective of someone who was already deeply familiar with fantasy RPGs in digital form. I looked at the text boxes that explained my character’s powers, and I understood immediately what each power did. I looked at blocks of statistics and could read them with ease, even before I fully understood the system itself.
The oft-derived “videogamey” nature of 4e, far from being a bug, was to my mind a feature. Games like The Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy had prepared me to understand this game at a glance. The rules were intuitive to me in a way they wouldn’t have been had 4e opted for more natural language and a looser design philosophy.
It was a game built for the modern era, and as a new player during that era, I can personally attest that it worked. Everything clicked.
So why did it fail?
The issues with 4e were threefold: firstly, it alienated longtime fans by radically departing from previous editions and only focusing on one style of fantasy. It was so bad that publisher Paizo created Pathfinder specifically to carry on 3e’s legacy. Secondly, WotC abandoned the Open Game License that had been so instrumental in 3e’s success (and which Paizo also took full advantage of to create Pathfinder; a fully legal clone system of 3e). Finally, 4e was simply not released at the right time.
Lessons and Legacy
The fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released in 2014, and it wasn’t long before I was running a game of it on Roll20. Because of my experience with 4e, I felt reasonably comfortable with this, until one day I ran a combat encounter that slapped me in the face with how wildly different these two editions actually were.
It was a climactic confrontation with a nefarious villain, and it was set inside a clock tower. I designed the encounter to emulate a classic cinematic clock tower battle: the heroes and the villain would play a game of cat and mouse across moving platforms, battling both each other and the constant rotation of the gears they stood upon. It would be intense. It would be chaotic. It would be exciting. I was looking forward to it.
The time came. Initiative was rolled. The Warlock immediately cast Dimension Door, a spell that allowed him to grab the Rogue and teleport the both of them right next to the villain. The other Warlock quickly followed suit, teleporting himself and the Fighter. The villain was now completely surrounded, unable to escape. Meanwhile, the Ranger cast Conjure Animals and summoned a pair of giant eagles into the arena, then she and the Cleric hopped onto the eagles’ backs and pelted the villain with spells and arrows from above while the rest of the party beat him to death. The battle was over within three rounds, and the moving terrain never mattered.
My mistake was that I was still thinking in terms of 4e. In that edition, while teleportation is abundant, it generally only has a range of around 30 feet and doesn’t let you bring others along (the 4e version of Dimension Door even explicitly bars you from teleporting others alongside yourself). Player options for flight are not only few and far between, but what options do exist come with heavy restrictions. The designers of 4e maintained a tight focus on balance and ensuring everyone had to engage with the encounter, because they anticipated action set pieces like my clock tower battle and wanted them to work smoothly.
By contrast, the designers of 5e had no focus. In an article about 5e’s design goals, lead designer Mike Mearls called out 4e’s narrow focus as something to be avoided. This new edition needed to be a big tent edition, ideally with a little something for everyone. WotC wanted the game to do anything, which in turn meant it isn’t actually all that good at doing any one thing.
It’s enough to make one wonder if 5e’s runaway success has less to do with the actual functionality of the game, and more to do with the timing of its release. In 2014, streaming was coming into its own. D&D‘s resurgence in popular culture came alongside the rise of Actual Play shows like Critical Role and scripted 80’s nostalgia bait like Stranger Things.
Tabletop RPGs have always been a niche hobby, and while Dungeons and Dragons has enjoyed mainstream success, the rest of the industry has remained largely small scale. But the people working in it pay attention to D&D, and they’ve learned a few things.
Ghosts of 4e
In 2019, indie publisher Massif Press released Lancer, a tabletop RPG about piloting giant mechs. It drew comparisons to 4e, not just in its focus on grid-based battlefield tactics, but in the way its rules explicitly defined the game as having two modes of play: “narrative play” and “mech combat,” just as 4e shifted between similar modes. It has since become a cult hit, to the point that Massif partnered with Dark Horse Publishing to release an updated rulebook last year.
Also released in 2019 was Pathfinder Second Edition. As the original Pathfinder was essentially a repackaging of 3e, it had run afoul of many of the balancing issues that had plagued its parent game. For Pathfinder 2e, the designers sought to correct these issues, and while many of their solutions differed wildly from 4e’s, the comparisons were inevitable.
As the age of fifth edition went on, player’s and designers alike began to look back at 4e with fondness. The vitriol of the edition wars now a fading memory, the game was reevaluated, and now many consider it, as do I, a brilliant game unappreciated in its time.
You don’t have to spend long perusing subreddits or message boards to find players looking for house rules to warp the game into other genres entirely. The trend of D&D players insisting on expending unnecessary time and effort on hacking the system instead of simply learning another game has become something of a running joke in the RPG community. WotC, for its part, is perfectly content to present the game as a big tent and let players struggle to fit their square peg into a round hole. After all, if they’re the only game in town, then they get all the money, right?
Looking back, it was shockingly radical for 4e to instead say “No. These rules are for this type of game, and if you want to play something else, then play something else.” I doubt Dungeons and Dragons will ever be so honest again.
The brand’s place in the culture has changed. In 2008, D&D was too small for parent company Hasbro’s notice, and it could get away with experimentation and big risky moves. But in 2025, D&D is at a new height of popularity – and officially an “under monetized” IP in the Hasbro portfolio. What suit will ever mess with the winning formula? We live in, as Annalee Newitz wrote in The New York Times in 2021, “the age of fan service,” where online fandom is “a force that seeks control over everything.” The reaction from IP holders has mostly been total capitulation.
Fourth Edition is gone, and its legacy is felt mostly in smaller scale projects from a niche industry. It’s not what Dungeons and Dragons is anymore.
And that is a crying shame.
Seann Barbour is a writer from southeastern Virginia with a love for fantasy, horror, and RPGs. When he’s not authoring fiction or essays about niche subjects people get unreasonably heated about, he works with dogs. His work can be found at https://linktr.ee/
Photo by Timothy Dykes.
References:
- Baker, Richard. “Classes Overview,” Wizards Presents: Races and Classes, Wizards of the Coast, 2007, pg. 52.
- Cook, Monte, et al. Player’s Handbook, Wizards of the Coast, 2003.
- Heinsoo, Rob, et al. Player’s Handbook, Wizards of the Coast, 2008.
- Gygax, Gary. “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games,” Dragon Magazine, issue 95, TSR, 1985, pg. 12-13.
- Lopez, Miguel and Morgan, Tom Parkinson. “Playing Lancer,” Lancer Core Rulebook, Massif Press, 2019, pg. 12.
- Mearls, Mike. “D&D Next Design Considerations,” Legends and Lore, Wizards of the Coast, 2012, https://web.archive.org/web/20120723175310/http://wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120409.
- Mearls, Mike, et al. Player’s Handbook, Wizards of the Coast, 2014.
- “World of Warcraft Subscriber Base Reaches 12 Million Worldwide.” Activision Blizzard, https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-details/world-warcraftr-subscriber-base-reaches-12-million-worldwide
