D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[BryonD]

For the record Rob Heinsoo was the lead designer of 4E at launch.

I recall Mearls talking about being a NYT bestselling author.....

 

[Emerikol]

IMHO, Mearls is the second best designer out there.

I put Kenson at #1.

I don't go listing things by my #1 and #2 favorites. But in this case it is almost reflexive. I couldn't even begin to tell you who #3 is. But the quality of product that I've seen over the years makes these two ranking self-evident within my own mind.

I think 4E is an awesome game if you are in a specific narrow preference. For that target he nailed it. Obviously I know nothing about the internal elements of leading up to 4E. But I'm not going to "blame" Mearls for painting the bulls eye of the target that was put in front of him. Regardless of my personal opinion on the target overall.

I think Monte Cook is #1 and I don't see anyone who even belongs on the same chart as him personally.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I recall Mearls talking about being a NYT bestselling author.....

Mearls was the lead author of the often unfairly maligned 4E Monster Manual 1

I think Monte Cook is #1 and I don't see anyone who even belongs on the same chart as him personally.

I'm trying to think of a game designer I consider more over-rated than Monte Cook.

 

[TwoSix]

I know that you feel that the premise and the supporting evidence isn't there. Same for @Nagol . I don't know. Maybe its because you guys are comparing it to Fate and its Fate Point Economy (or MHRP/Savage Worlds plot/bennie economies). Those economies and system interactions aren't specifically there but those economies in the same fashion (but there is a healing surge economy that manifests in certain ways - spend a healing surge for a success in an SC or for Rituals/MPs - this could have been central but they didn't go that route). Those economies are certainly major parts of some games whose function is to propel narrative. But those aren't the only devices several (the majority) of "Story Now" indie games don't possess them (or at least not in the same form).

One frustrating thing about 4e is how close they were to having a dynamic interplay between healing surges, action points, and skill challenges. Healing surges are such a good way to model the pre-4e attrition model, as long as one accepts that surges are both long term endurance and wounds, as well as a pacing mechanism. Using healing surges as a currency/consequence for skill challenges would link the mechanical process of non-combat and combat encounter and resource expenditure. (I think using the disease condition track to model consequences for healing surge expenditure could be a nod to simulationist tendencies, particularly if the consequence acquired is related to the mode of surge spending. In a similar vein to consequence accrual in FATE.)

Then have healing surge expenditure convert to action points, and use action points as the currency for limited use powers, providing a tension between dwindling healing resources and greater offensive resources. Ah well.

I wish that DMG2 (which was released inside a year of the system's release) would have been the initial DMG (with several other bits of fantastic advice in DMG1), but it wasn't. I wish themes were released before Dark Sun and then NCS's great instruction and centralizing of them to play, but they weren't. All I know is that in now way did I or do I feel like I've drifted the system from its default intent of the proper usage and interpretation of its system components and from several GMing principles (which include the D&D derivative of Vincent Baker's "every moment drive play towards conflict" not conflict-neutral setting exploration - eg - "skip the guards and get to the fun"). I feel like Heinsoo knew exactly what he was creating but they waffled a bit and intentionally put means in the system so that elements of classic D&D attrition/exploratory play were available (if you knew the elements you should be using as they differed in certain ways from prior D&D).

So many gems got released in the first two years that would have made a fantastic core for an updated 4e. Campaign books in the style of Neverwinter, with themes being a great driver of mechanical differentiation (like Dark Sun themes, rather than the watered down themes post-Essentials), would have been a great hook for new material.

 

[TwoSix]

I'm trying to think of a game designer I consider more over-rated than Monte Cook.

But...but.... d20 World of Darkness!

 

[Dausuul]

175,000 people were allegedly happy to helped be experimented on with testing for DDN!

Sure, but they signed up for it. The DDN playtest was explicitly described as a playtest: These rules are a work in progress, they're going to change, and you get to provide input into those changes. Also, we aren't charging for 'em. 4E was presented as a finished game and sold for money. I saw a whole lot of complaints about that.

Anyway, my personal experience of 4E, with background:

I started gaming back in the late '80s. I cut my teeth on the Red Box and progressed from there to 2E. My GMing and playing style were thus shaped by editions which relied enormously on the DM making stuff up on the fly. I kept that style through most of 3E, even though it wasn't always the best fit. When players complained about things like me not following the WBL guidelines (the best 2E DM I ever played under was notorious for campaigns where characters at level 10+ didn't have two copper pieces to rub together), I grudgingly adjusted, but it never sat well. The more I played and ran 3E, the more I felt the "weight" of the system.

I also did a lot of fudging. As DM, I tend to focus on lengthy plot arcs and narratives, which work best with a stable cast of PCs. But I also don't like easy resurrection, which plays havoc with world-building in my view. Since easy resurrection has historically been D&D's way of enabling a stable PC cast, fudging was the only way I could accomplish both of my goals. In BD&D and 2E, this didn't bother me; I was making up so much stuff on the fly anyway that fudging a monster attack or adjusting monster hit points was just more of the same. But in 3E, with its heavier and more coherent rules framework, the necessity started to annoy me. I also became acquainted with the joys of DMing for high-level casters*.

4E promised to make my life as DM vastly easier; making characters more durable so I wouldn't have to constantly intervene to keep them alive, reducing the need for magical treasure, making it possible to easily create spectacular set-piece battles, and cutting back the ability of wizards to derail adventures. I was excited about all these things, and I have to say that 4E delivered on its promises. The first year or so of 4E were awesome. I ran one of the best campaigns of my life, which my players and I still remember fondly five years later.

However, the more I played and ran 4E, the more its limitations started to grate on me. Yes, it made it possible for me to create spectacular, engaging, tactically rich combats--but it was a substantial amount of work to design those combats, and I had to do it every single time. If I tried to improvise an encounter, it usually turned out boring and grindy. Furthermore, as the players gained familiarity with the rules and characters got into Paragon tier, combat often slowed to a crawl as everyone tried to wring every bit of advantage out of the system. (You can blame me and my players for this if you like, but to my way of thinking, a system is responsible for the incentives it offers, and 4E incentivized extreme rules focus during combat.)

Another thing that gave me trouble with 4E was bringing in new players. Introducing a newbie to the game is a great way to refresh your own view of it, and when I looked at 4E through their eyes, I saw a complex tactical game that was dominated by combat; not because my adventures were all that combat-heavy, but because the noncombat mechanics were fast and loose, so noncombat stuff got resolved quickly. An adventure which was 50% combat scenarios and 50% noncombat scenarios ended up being 80% combat in terms of table time. It usually took an hour or more to resolve a single battle, and if you hadn't mastered the rules or just didn't enjoy all those tactical minutiae, it was a really boring hour. Newbies quickly got lost in the blizzard of numbers and powers and conditions.

Finally, and most tellingly, 4E books functioned very well as rules references, but they were no fun to read. At first this seemed perfectly reasonable to me. After all, the goal of D&D is to play a game, right? If I wanted to read a book, I'd pick up a novel. But what I came to realize was that D&D didn't work like that. D&D demands a lot of creative effort from the DM, and that creativity needs fuel. TSR's rulebooks were more than just rules for a game. They were packed with inspiration and ideas. Just the process of looking up monster stats got my imagination working. 3E's decision to split up "fluff" and "crunch," and focus on the latter, made 3E books a lot less engaging. 4E took things even further. Sitting down to read a 4E book was like reading the dictionary.

More and more, I began looking back nostalgically to the TSR era. I even created a fantasy heartbreaker that tried to meld what I saw as the best of 4E with the best of the Red Box**. In the end, I mostly stopped running 4E. When the 5E playtest was announced, I jumped on it, and I'm now gearing up to run my first big campaign in a long while. 5E feels an awful lot like TSR-era D&D, except with coherent, clean, balanced rules, and I'm really excited by it. You might point out that I felt equally excited by 4E when it was released, and you'd be right; but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm just chasing the new shiny. 4E did improve on 3E in a lot of ways, and if I had to pick one of them to run, I'd still take 4E over 3E. But I'd take 5E over either of them, or over the Red Box, in a heartbeat.

[SIZE=-2]*I always played a wizard in my college days. When I told my college DM about the headaches my 3E casters were giving me, he said something to the effect of, "Now you know how I felt having you in my campaigns."[/SIZE][SIZE=-2]

**The resulting system actually bore some resemblances to 5E, particularly in the use of bounded accuracy and "big feats."[/SIZE]

 

[Manbearcat]

One frustrating thing about 4e is how close they were to having a dynamic interplay between healing surges, action points, and skill challenges. Healing surges are such a good way to model the pre-4e attrition model, as long as one accepts that surges are both long term endurance and wounds, as well as a pacing mechanism. Using healing surges as a currency/consequence for skill challenges would link the mechanical process of non-combat and combat encounter and resource expenditure. (I think using the disease condition track to model consequences for healing surge expenditure could be a nod to simulationist tendencies, particularly if the consequence acquired is related to the mode of surge spending. In a similar vein to consequence accrual in FATE.)

Then have healing surge expenditure convert to action points, and use action points as the currency for limited use powers, providing a tension between dwindling healing resources and greater offensive resources. Ah well.


So many gems got released in the first two years that would have made a fantastic core for an updated 4e. Campaign books in the style of Neverwinter, with themes being a great driver of mechanical differentiation (like Dark Sun themes, rather than the watered down themes post-Essentials), would have been a great hook for new material.

Great post. The deployment of the disease/condition track for emotional/mental fallout or attrition (along the lines of the tracks/damage in Fate and MHRP) are something I've been doing from the outset with the system. I thought that was completely intuitive. Fail Skill Challenge > endure surge loss (and micro-surge loss for individual failures) and suffer exposure to an attack which will put you on the track > deny Extended and possibly Short Rests > endure narrative fallout until you get the train back on the tracks or ultimately lose something precious. DMG2e actually covers all of that as well.

However, an opportunity for a thriving economy was indeed missed out on. Willfully or just a missed opportunity, I don't know. If I could put together a 4.5e, it would include (1) total unification of conflict resolution mechanics (including combat) making heavy use of keywords and (2) a thriving economy such as you mentioned (APs, Healing Surges, refresh of limited use abilities). Those are the only areas where I see 4e could fully actualize an indie game experience. The rest is all there. Regarding (1), you could still break out the full tactical combat interface for big, set-piece battles at your discretion. However, the keyword-driven, unified conflict resolution would be mechanically seamless from noncombat to combat. Heated arguments could escalate into combats without having to (a) make some rulings on the deployment of combat abilities in an abstract combat, (b) nest an abstract combat as a skill challenge for an earned pass/fail in a larger challenge, or (c) toggle back and forth between abstract, noncombat conflict resolution and the full-on tactical combat mechanics.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

- Noncombat conflict resolution such as several games from Dogs to Sorcerer (with narrative and mechanical fallout) designed to create dramatic outcomes. They didn't unify it with the entirety of the system because D&D has to have crunchy combat.

- Subjective DCs for the conflict resolution that are tied to stakes and creating dramatic outcomes rather than objective DCs tied to an attempt to (incoherently as they virtually always do) simulate fantasy world physics.

- Scene based mechanics that refresh on a scene by scene basis which have that metagame impetus to them (to push play toward the scene) and a narrative trigger for the refresh (short rest). You see this in games like Dogs and The Shadow of Yesterday. I know they're called Encounter Powers rather than "Scene". I'm pretty sure this can be tied directly to Heinsoo's statement above. They had to be bold, and were, but they also had to defer now and again. It may seem that they arbitrarily agitated the "This doesn't feel like D&D (!)" base, and they may have. There may be no rhyme or reason why they slaughtered certain sacred cows but did others. I don't really know. However, I can easily intuit that if they subbed Scene for Encounter, the feather ruffling would have been immense.

- Healing Surges are pretty much open descriptor.

- Keywords you see in games like Heroquest and Dungeon World. They have both their metagame aspect but they are meant to be tools that lead the fiction.

- Action Points are obviously a narrative device that have their roots in several systems.

I think those who were shocked, upon release, perhaps hadn't really taken the designers at their word, or hadn't fully appreciated that they really were setting out to build an RPG where using the action resolution mechanics is not some sort of supplement to playing the game, but is playing the game.

Thank you. You helped give me clearly defined examples of the reason I don't like 4E.

I'm a fair Sim kind of guy so rules like shifting DC for stakes instead of objective drive me up a wall. And when I play - that playing the game has nothing to do with action resolution mechanic, but exploring the world, interacting with the other characters and the DM; only falling back on the mechanic when you need an impartial deciding factor for certain outcomes (that does sound sort of roleplay vs Rollplay - that isn't my intent).

I remember when FF VII came out on the Playstaion and people complained that the gameplay was hitting the X button. That made no sense to me. The gameplay was in tactics, and building the characters and such - and I feel the same way about pen and paper games - the resolution mechanic is "hitting the X button" but the gameplay is elsewhere. But then I understand that other people feel other ways about how they play.

But this helps me find a way to define what it is I didn't like about it - rather than the rather nebulous "It really doesn't fit my playstyle"

 

[TwoSix]

Great post. The deployment of the disease/condition track for emotional/mental fallout or attrition (along the lines of the tracks/damage in Fate and MHRP) are something I've been doing from the outset with the system. I thought that was completely intuitive. Fail Skill Challenge > endure surge loss (and micro-surge loss for individual failures) and suffer exposure to an attack which will put you on the track > deny Extended and possibly Short Rests > endure narrative fallout until you get the train back on the tracks or ultimately lose something precious. DMG2e actually covers all of that as well.

However, an opportunity for a thriving economy was indeed missed out on. Willfully or just a missed opportunity, I don't know. If I could put together a 4.5e, it would include (1) total unification of conflict resolution mechanics (including combat) making heavy use of keywords and (2) a thriving economy such as you mentioned (APs, Healing Surges, refresh of limited use abilities). Those are the only areas where I see 4e could fully actualize an indie game experience. The rest is all there. Regarding (1), you could still break out the full tactical combat interface for big, set-piece battles at your discretion. However, the keyword-driven, unified conflict resolution would be mechanically seamless from noncombat to combat. Heated arguments could escalate into combats without having to (a) make some rulings on the deployment of combat abilities in an abstract combat, (b) nest an abstract combat as a skill challenge for an earned pass/fail in a larger challenge, or (c) toggle back and forth between abstract, noncombat conflict resolution and the full-on tactical combat mechanics.

In the few sessions I got to try with my homebrew rules, surge loss was mostly presented as greater fatigue. The endurance check to regain a surge after a night's rest got more difficult, and some checks had penalties, where I used 2d20 keep lower. I think I stole this from 5e, it was late 2012-early 2013. I also made long rests require 72 hours in a safe environment, and "short" rests were a full 6 hrs sleep. In general, recharge periods were based on narrative factors (the magical sword of faerie make only recharged at sunset, for example, to allow the hexblade analogue use of her "encounter" powers.)

Ideally, I would have the possible consequences of surge loss more driven by the narrative, especially player concession, but this was an OSR game that got put onto a 4e chassis due to the players complaining about boring combats, so I was looking to maintain the "grim, gritty" atomsphere. Plus I was new-baby sleep derived, so a lot of my game choices were, well, rather impulsive.

 

[TwoSix]

Thank you. You helped give me clearly defined examples of the reason I don't like 4E.

I'm a fair Sim kind of guy so rules like shifting DC for stakes instead of objective drive me up a wall. And when I play - that playing the game has nothing to do with action resolution mechanic, but exploring the world, interacting with the other characters and the DM; only falling back on the mechanic when you need an impartial deciding factor for certain outcomes (that does sound sort of roleplay vs Rollplay - that isn't my intent).

I remember when FF VII came out on the Playstaion and people complained that the gameplay was hitting the X button. That made no sense to me. The gameplay was in tactics, and building the characters and such - and I feel the same way about pen and paper games - the resolution mechanic is "hitting the X button" but the gameplay is elsewhere. But then I understand that other people feel other ways about how they play.

But this helps me find a way to define what it is I didn't like about it - rather than the rather nebulous "It really doesn't fit my playstyle"

No, it's a perfectly fair point. One of the positives of the whole 4e experience, at least here in the online communities, is that there's a much greater recognition that two people's desires for an RPG can be diametrically opposed, despite the fact that both them play D&D. 4e really opened up communication about concepts like play agendas. The online conversation certainly made me a better RPGer, as it exposed me to types of games I wouldn't have tried previously, and made me aware of narrative type games, which I now enjoy over more traditional RPGs.