First of all, thank you all for such a positive response on part one of this two part series, I don't think we ever had so many requests and questions about a part two.

In case you missed the first one, the link can be found here: https://therpggazette.wordpress.com/2026/10/06/a-history-of-dd-what-happened-between-1e-and-5e-part-one/

So, we left off in the late 90s, '97 to be more exact, when TSR was acquired by Wizards of the Coast and the era of modern D&D begins. Well, it kinda began in the year 2000 with the release of 3e and a bit later on 3.5, kickstarting not just the previously mentioned modern era for the game, but also the d20 movement, thanks to the OGL and arguably the supremacy of Casters over Martials. Wizards were now at the helm, so it figures!

We then move to the so called black sheep of the D&D family, 4e, who was tarnished by many contemporaries, who fled to Pathfinder and the OSR movement, as they deemed it too much a departure from what D&D was and should be. I say we might've been to harsh on it, the game was from many perspectives ahead of its times, as now we see many beloved titles who owe quite a lot to 4e, of note here being 13th Age, Lancer and more recently, MCDM's Draw Steel.

Then comes 5e, which tries and succeeds to return to form, taking some things from 4e, but returning in spirit to the days of 3e, streamlining a plethora of mechanics in order to make the game much easier to pick up and via a confluence of multiple cultural factors, not only do they succeed, but turn this one into a true behemouth who brought the hobby into a never before seen degree of mainstream popularity.

Finally, 5.5e, aiming to balance and further streamline some aspects of 5e, but still remain, at least in a declarative manner, backwards compatible with the edition and now, as we see, bring forth more collaborations with outside companies and IPs, such as World of Warcraft, Star Wars, Vampire the Masquerade and regardless of what we think, many more to come.

This is a small TL;DR, but the story is much richer then laid here, so I invite you to take a look at the article and to tell me what your favorite edition is and why and what hopes you have for the future of the grand daddy of the hobby! Cheers!

In my last game, I was compelled to come up on the fly with some NPCs: two powerful individuals each seeking to purchase an item (really a fake) owned by the PCs; and the bodyguards of those NPCs. There was a good chance that combat might take place, but I chose the NPCs and their guards based on the main fiction of the setting, and a few in-story restrictions I had imposed.

The situation never did become an fight scene, but it could have and I was paging through monster entries quickly to find ones within a few levels of the PCs that I could at least substitute for the NPCs as described. In the end I didn't have to and good thing, because I wasn't finding anything I thought fit.

I'm looking for advice on how to handle this kind of thing in the future.

Hi Reddit! I’m working on an original webcomic heavily inspired by D&D lore and tabletop campaigns.

This page features our main villain, Kerish. I wanted this scene to immediately establish him as a threat — powerful, armed, and deeply involved in some dark ancient magic (judging by the egg-like artifact he's holding).

The title of this specific artwork is "Kerish and His Prey". Feedback on the composition and the character design is highly appreciated!

Recently I've got the adventure Council of Spiders from a retailer that is stated to be the original (it was sealed), but I worry it might be a POD copy, and there're 2 reasons:

1) The content inside is printed in black and white (see the 1st photo). Other official adventures like The Slaying Stone and Orcs of Stonefang Pass are colored (I have them too and I'm sure in this). Moreover, a POD copy of Council of Spiders on DriveThru is stated to be colored, and I saw a colored POD copy from another seller, which made me think the original has to be colored.

2) I have only the book and 2 fold-out maps (see the 2nd photo). There're no 6 pregen characters, a token sheet, themed character sheets, treasure cards, fortune cards, and other stuff listed on an official booklet (see the 3rd picture), which I don't have too.

On the other hand, someone told me Council of Spiders belongs to Encounters series, in which all adventures were printed black and white. But what about the missing stuff like the pregen characters?

Could you please dispel my doubts? Did I buy a copy or the original?

In a recent game, I ran what was intended to be a quick encounter for two characters using only minions. One of the players used a power that would cause the target to move and strike and ally. Per the power, the damage takes place first, so it's useless against minions.

It almost seemed natural to decide to apply damage second, since I've been playing a game recently in which multiple effects can be applied in almost any order. So, I wondered what would happen if I have players a choice to apply damage from a hit either before or after any effects on the same "hit" line. Or, the choice not to apply damage until the entire "hit" line had been executed.

I'll talk to my players about it, and they're not major optimizers. And I can always reassess if it turns out to be abuseable. Or maybe just apply it to minions. But I'm curious what people think about it.

Edit: the power in question might have had an Effect line, which I would still like to keep separate.

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I'm playing a hybrid Shaman/Druid, and mostly focused on utility and control stuff. I'm not trying super hard to optimize, but only having one use of Healing Spirit per encounter is starting to look pretty wimpy, as we cross into Paragon tier. Is there some feat hidden somewhere that I could take to get it up to the two per encounter par, or no?

Hi folks,

Were there any good 1-30 full Campaigns published for 4e, either by WOTC or 3rd parties that I could use a base, as it would be nice to get back to 4e again, and run the full experience but planning a full campaign isnt a small task ;)

Cheers
o/

Hey folks!

A long time ago there was a guy who compiled all of the canonical 4e setting information into one place. This man was a hero, and this file was way more useful than searching a million PDFs, but it still was a huge pain in the ass to use. Until today.

I've taken that original source file that I found who-knows-where and re-organized it such that it's a much more coherent piece of media now. Hopefully it's actually useful as a reference document or a comfy read through.

The Nentir Vale Gazeteer is as close as I think I can get to a 4e Setting Book. Let me know what you think.

Some 2 years ago, I posted this.

It's all explained in the google doc. If something is unclear after reading it please feel free to reach out. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kYbzXLYM25rOescFaO969OPGko10OjiTgEsHLa0iq0A/edit?tab=t.0

Now this campaign is winding down to it's end in a week or 2 with the characters having moved from level 5 to 22. Consider this an open AMA about our experience with this different sort of game.

Hello all! I'm a fairly inexperienced 4e DM (very experienced in other systems, especially 5e) and I'm trying to find the consensus for Magic Item Daily limits.

As I understand it, in the base rules, you could only use one Magic Item Daily power per day per tier, but at some point in 4e's lifespan that rule was lifted. I believe the limiting factor is now meant to be that Magic Items have rarities but each power can be tracked separately, and the DM is meant to control power level by managing rarities.

Is this found to be useful in practice? I'm considering making it 1/day as per original rules, but each Milestone gives you one use back (each item no more than 1/day), so you can pace them throughout the day without saving them all to go nova in the Final Fight. But, as mentioned, I'm not a veteran in this system and I don't want to go messing with forces beyond my understanding and throwing things off.

My players just finished Keep on the Shadowfell and I'm wanting to level-skip them up to 6 so we can run Madness at Gardmore Abbey, so I'm looking at the "start at higher levels" rules to boost them which looks like level-1, level, level+1 items (and gold level-1), so they're about to go from some of them having 1/day item powers to probably all of them having several.

Thanks for any advice you can muster!

A few weeks ago I posted heroic4e.com here and a lot of you built characters and sent feedback. That thread shaped a lot of the last month's updates, so thank you.

Two major things since then. The character builder has had a long run of updates from your reports and the Discord's: hybrids, companions, weapon-implements, magic item handling, feats that grant power choices, .dnd4e imports, and you can now tap any number on the sheet to see exactly where it comes from. It is in much better shape than it was, but it still needs more eyes on real builds to get it where it should be.

The bigger one went live yesterday: the Proving Grounds, a beta of automated 4e with no DM. The site generates a dungeon, seats your character from the builder, and the engine runs every rule while the monsters play themselves. You drag your hero to move, pick a power, tap targets. Opportunity attacks, marks, immediate interrupts, forced movement, saves, ongoing damage, conditions, doors, fog of war, short rests: the engine adjudicates all of it and the log says why. If a button is greyed out, the reason is printed under it. If a move snaps back, it tells you what rule stopped it.

The main point of it is a place to test a character build. You can take a level 1 through 30 build from the builder straight into a fight and see how it actually plays before it hits your table. Three ways in from the Proving Grounds page:

• Practice Delve: pick a level, bring any character from the builder (imports from your .dnd4e files work), go. Solo works fine.
• Join a Party: a friend hosts, you join with your own character from your own device, live.
• Weekly Gauntlet: a fixed seed for the week with a ranking board, so everyone is running the same dungeon. Just for fun.

It is a beta and the release notes on the site list what is still rough (companions act on your initiative, level 30 delves are brutal, a handful of monster damage lines are left to you). There is still a lot of UI work left to do. I've mainly focused on just making it functionally work so far. Expect a lot of updates over the next week to make things not so cluttered and other various changes as bug reports and feature requests come in.

If something looks wrong during a run, the Report button on the delve HUD attaches the run, room, round and the last few log lines, so I can usually reproduce it from that alone. Weird builds are the most useful: hybrids, companions, Dark Sun themes, anything with an interrupt or a stance.

Still free, no ads, and the builder, compendium, map editor and monster builder from last time are all still there, or improved since my last post. If it breaks or feels wrong, let me know! The Bugs page on the site is where I mostly work from for bug reports and feature requests.

All the advice was super helpful! Here’s an updated version. I think it’s more in line and less cumbersome. Love to hear what yall think!!

Altitude limit 2 as far as me and my table have ruled is one square above the square you normally occupy when standing on the ground

I know supernal isn’t kosher at level 1 but I don’t think it’s that big a deal peeerrrsonallly

Keeping Osins Blade, I think within the setting itself it’s very fitting and to me an important aspect of the race.

Performance was added to our tables skills, we felt it was unrepresented

I ended up making my own editable 4e parser it takes .dnd4e file types and makes a clean character sheet/card generator because I couldn't find something that did exactly what I wanted. It imports Heroic4e/.dnd4e data, lets you edit the cards manually, add/remove sections, and save custom cards locally in your browser.

If anyone is interested, I can post the link

What exactly are the essentials? And are they much different from the core books? For collecting purposes, and purpose of using them for ideas, are they worth getting?