D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[Alzrius]

Bob the World Builder stumbled upon 4e advertising videos. His calm delivery juxtaposed with the advertising content makes the advertising somehow worse.

I remember being at Gen Con in 2007, when WotC made the initial announcement of 4E and showed off that teaser video with the French guy. I cringed at it then, and it hasn't gotten better with age.

"Ze game will remain ze same! ZE GAME WILL REMAIN ZE SAME!"

That promise held up about as well as the Maginot Line.

 

[Pedantic]

Bob the World Builder stumbled upon 4e advertising videos. His calm delivery juxtaposed with the advertising content makes the advertising somehow worse.

Oh wow. I feel so old now. How have all the things I lived through slipped into myth and legend?

Never before have I wanted to type "this kid has no idea how it actually went!"

 

[James Gasik]

4e's marketing was very bizarre. My personal "favorite" was the "preview" books. "Hey, let's sell people entire books to tease our new game!". WTH, who's the target audience there? Gamers who want coffee table books?

And when I first saw the PHB, I felt it was fairly bland. The idea of a Warlord and marking was interesting, but I'd already had more exciting versions of both in the Tome of Battle!

While I truly enjoyed 4e once I committed myself to playing it, I think the thing I missed most was how easy it was on the DM to create encounters with the online DM tools. All the monsters you needed, building or adjusting monsters was a snap!

 

[Reynard]

My wife and I still use the, “I’m a monster! RAW!” line all the time.

TMI!

 

[overgeeked]

I could introduce you to players who fall asleep until the DM says "roll for initiative", lol.

Conversely, I’m a player who generally falls asleep when the GM calls for an initiative roll.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The quote in question appears to be from Logan Bonner's comments on skills in Wizards Presents: Races and Classes, p. 68.

Wow. A very judgemental statement there. I'd certainly be riled up if I heard that. Glad I never bought those books.

 

[thenightgaunt]

Wow. A very judgemental statement there. I'd certainly be riled up if I heard that. Glad I never bought those books.

Oh they're great to get into the heads of the designers. You just have to read between the lines, ignore the pages of fluff, and keep a bit of rawhide nearby so that when the red mist starts to descend you have something to bite down on.

There are gems in there like how they decided there were too many elves and no one needed more than like 3. So they chopped them down to Eldarin, High Elves, and Drow. Because as they put it, all the other types of elves were just "variations on high elves". And reading that was when my brain just kinda shut off for a minute and I came to with the taste of tin in my mouth.

There's other stuff like their excuse for not including gnomes as a PC race option was because they didn't see the point in them. But they explain how tried so hard to come up with a reason to but couldn't think up one.

And I'm trying really really hard not to be a sarcastic ass while writing this. That's how bad some of these excuses are.

OH I almost forgot. Perkins wrote the section on "why teiflings got added" where he was supposed to explain why they added tieflings as a core race in 4e. Basically they were explicitly intended to be the default race pairing for warlocks, and that they were supposed to be the edgy chaotic troublemaker race for people who wanted to play crazy, edgy characters. Also it reads like they were getting sick of Drizzt clones and tieflings are meant to be a way to distract those people into running something else. At least that's how I read these bits:

"Why play Drizzt when you could play the great-grandson of a pit fiend?"

"Their infernal heritage gives them plenty of angst and an excuse to “get medieval” whenever the mood suits them. However, unlike their Machiavellian rivals for coolness, the Underdark-dwelling drow, tieflings are neither confined to the darkness nor afraid to mingle with the surface dwellers. They also carry less evil baggage and enjoy far more autonomy."

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh they're great to get into the heads of the designers. You just have to read between the lines, ignore the pages of fluff, and keep a bit of rawhide nearby so that when the red mist starts to descend you have something to bite down on.

There are gems in there like how they decided there were too many elves and no one needed more than like 3. So they chopped them down to Eldarin, High Elves, and Drow. Because as they put it, all the other types of elves were just "variations on high elves". And reading that was when my brain just kinda shut off for a minute and I came to with the taste of tin in my mouth.

There's other stuff like their excuse for not including gnomes as a PC race option was because they didn't see the point in them. But they explain how tried so hard to come up with a reason to but couldn't think up one.

And I'm trying really really hard not to be a sarcastic ass while writing this. That's how bad some of these excuses are.

OH I almost forgot. Perkins wrote the section on "why teiflings got added" where he was supposed to explain why they added tieflings as a core race in 4e. Basically they were explicitly intended to be the default race pairing for warlocks, and that they were supposed to be the edgy chaotic troublemaker race for people who wanted to play crazy, edgy characters. Also it reads like they were getting sick of Drizzt clones and tieflings are meant to be a way to distract those people into running something else. At least that's how I read these bits:

Hilarious, awful, and infuriating.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I remember being at Gen Con in 2007, when WotC made the initial announcement of 4E and showed off that teaser video with the French guy. I cringed at it then, and it hasn't gotten better with age.

"Ze game will remain ze same! ZE GAME WILL REMAIN ZE SAME!"

That promise held up about as well as the Maginot Line.

Making that promise explicit was half the mistake--the other half was making the changes too obvious. 3E and 5E kept or brought back enough chrome and surface features to disguise the underlying differences until people were already invested in the game.

But I think there was a philosophical difference at the root of things. I get the impression that 4E's team thought people were looking for something that focused on 3.5's strengths as a game and reduced its flaws or extraneous elements. Many people are more concerned with "playing D&D" than playing "the best designed game for the goal," and so 5E focused more on feeling like D&D, and not throwing up obstacles to doing a dozen different things, than with being a system focused on doing a few things well.

 

[Lanefan]

4e's marketing was very bizarre. My personal "favorite" was the "preview" books. "Hey, let's sell people entire books to tease our new game!".

I thought those preview books were the only good marketing 4e did. They at least got me interested.

That interest fell away real quick once I got the first core books and saw what they'd designed.