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

[billd91]

(What follows is an old gamer's lament, not really relevant to the topic, feel free to skip to the next post).

The sad thing is, maximizing the profits for D&D means losing a lot of the things that made me fall in love with the game. Scores of supplemental books fleshing out campaign worlds and providing deep lore and many options for different kinds of games. Experimenting with ways to improve and adjust the game instead of being beholden to design decisions made when I was an infant.

Sure, maybe the mountain of books didn't make much money. But having access to a historical campaign setting book like A Mighty Fortress or Charlemagne's Paladins, or being able to buy a book full of ways to make a tired old game new and fresh again like Magic of Incarnum or Complete Adventurer, or a deep dive into a little known part of a campaign world like Old Empires or even it's distant past like Netheril: Empire of Magic, was what really excited me as a gamer.

To know that now, supplemental products won't be made unless they are chock full of player options because "nobody buys DM books", only the most bare bones of settings will ever be given, and that nothing innovative will ever arise unless a certain percentage of every possible customer is on board with it, is just sad. The great campaigns and games of the past weren't ever based on "x% market approval" or comparing potential book sales to pork futures.

Obviously, a business is just that, a business, and it exists to make money. That's undeniable. But once upon a time, I'd like to think some of the people in charge actually cared about the hobby. Now it's just "what's the bare minimum we can do to make a profit"?

And sure, maybe I only used a fraction of what was printed in those supplements of yore. But they inspired me, in a way that "new spell X" or "new subclass Y" really doesn't.

I get the lament, but the very thing you're lamenting is one of the things that killed TSR - producing too much stuff that wasn't profitable or even in enough demand to pay for its creation. And even though it may have looked like the people in charge cared for the hobby because of all the cool stuff they were producing, they weren't structurally able to care about it in the same way that the hobbyists did. Their funding allocation model was too rigid to jettison a failing project and boost the ones successful in the market.
You may lament maximization of profits as a motive, but you have to have some form of stable and manageable profitability, maximized or not, to keep supporting the hobby at all. TSR ultimately failed at that by doing the very things you lament D&D no longer having.

 

[billd91]

Moving to the AEDU example, it's pretty simple. Let's concentrate on the "E". The issue a lot of D&D players had with the "E" (refresher- "E"ncounter) power system is that while it solved a problem that D&D has always had (the issue of "going nova" in combats) by making giving powers different cooldown periods (at will, per encounter, and daily) it make explicit and unavoidable that this was no longer interested in verisimilitude. For the first time, the game provided resources that would be regained not through the passage of time, but due to the needs of the fiction.

I think I'd quibble with that because the needs of the fiction depends on what level of fiction you're looking at. It certainly isn't looking at the fiction of the exploration of the adventure site, or the adventuring day. It's a very narrow slice of "fiction" - the encounter - which is really, as I see it, more of a game engine based concern than the fiction since it's the primary unit of game mechanical pacing and design. So I'd have said "For the first time, the game provided resources that would be regained not through the passage of time, but due to the needs of the game engine."
And for a role playing game, that's kind of a hard hitting issue. We're encouraged to view things from a PC's perspective, inhabit the PC and make decisions from their perspective, look at things as a developing story with an internally consistent fiction - and this is pretty much in-your-face game mechanic tail visibly wagging the dog. It's no wonder that, whether or not you see the short rest as being significantly different between 4e and 5e, 5e took effort to emphasize the time factor compared to 4e's emphasis on the encounter boundary.

 

[Pedantic]

I think the 5e default hour long short rest is an impediment to verisimilitude and to people actually using short rests in game.

It is hard to imagine people in a dungeon (say the fellowship in Moria) stopping and taking an hour long siesta before continuing on, much less the assumed baseline of twice an active adventuring day.

Amusingly, my table a similar problem in the 4e days with a rituals. 10-minutes felt like an enormous amount of time to spend stationary, doing something loud and obvious in a dangerous environment.

4e's view that it is the heroes catching their breath during an action movie cut scene after a fight scene is over makes more sense to visualize happening both in character and for players actually taking short rests.

As a 5e DM I use the DMG rest variant for short rests to be a breather (the DMG says 5 minutes but I just abstract it to a break), but keep long rests 8 hours.

Players still rarely take short rests in my games though.

I do find this a little shocking. I do something similar, and players rarely turn down an opportunity to take a break and spend some hit dice topping off after they've survived an encounter.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I think I see this every time 4E and WoW comes up -- someone puts forth the AEDU <==> WoW cooldown hypothesis and the thread rushes headlong into agreeing with it, disagreeing with it, or arguing if it is really (technically, functionally, or thematically) different from either what came before or after in D&D (or other TTRPGs). Although other facets of 4E eventually get brought up, we never escape the notion that AEDU is the primary MMO-like quality that may or may not have been why the 'like WoW' notion took hold.

I'd posit that it isn't, and that no one quality of 4E really makes it MMO-like (either in reality, or in intent). It is a holistic combination of the any number of things. Slightly-more-gamist framing of encounter powers as per-encounter; the demarcation of party roles*; the increase in abilities such as debuffs and forced movement and other things that can leave adversaries exposed*; and just a general tonal shift in discussing the combat-OOC divide. None of it sufficient; nor being inarguable**; all of it only being merely leanings in a direction. Because that's what (IMO) it was -- when two paths diverged in the woods of the game design taking the one which seemed more like it would appeal to that market share that WotC believed MMOs were instead capturing and eating into their bottom line.
*regardless of realistically how true this has been since D&D began
**'setting up combos'
***certainly not once you bring in any number of other TTRPGs which are just as or more similar to MMOs (ex: WoW's cooldown resembles Hero System Endurance as much or more than any of the D&Ds)

 

[Mannahnin]

I think I'd quibble with that because the needs of the fiction depends on what level of fiction you're looking at. It certainly isn't looking at the fiction of the exploration of the adventure site, or the adventuring day. It's a very narrow slice of "fiction" - the encounter - which is really, as I see it, more of a game engine based concern than the fiction since it's the primary unit of game mechanical pacing and design. So I'd have said "For the first time, the game provided resources that would be regained not through the passage of time, but due to the needs of the game engine."

You could express that same sentiment about spells or other character abilities being regained every day, though. As Voadam pointed out with his 3E Barbarian example, this wasn't really a NEW concept to 4th. It was just a faster-paced version of a mechanic we accept in 5E right now. And a much faster-paced extrapolation of mechanics which have existed since 1974.

I might instead write "Here the game provided as well resources that would be regained through a shorter passage of time than the traditional overnight rest, attempting to better emulate the pacing of action and fantasy adventure movies."

There's not exactly a lot in the source fiction to support the idea of daily restoration of powers, let's bear in mind. That's just a game conceit ("the needs of the game engine") which we've accepted for many years, and which sparked debate in the 70s. Labeling it a Long Rest in contrast to a new Short Rest concept doesn't make it any less gamist or the new mechanic more so. The Adventuring Day is no less artificial a concept than The Encounter.

The Short Rest of course is not the only way in which 4E game attempted to emulate the fiction of action movies better. The Second Wind mechanic, for a classic example (now in 5E a Fighter-specific ability, where in 4E something everyone could do) of that moment in a fight scene when the protagonist pauses, takes a step back, wipes the sweat off their brow, and shakes off some of the pain of whatever beating they've recently taken.

And of course it's not the first time D&D changed to try to pick up the pace and allow faster-moving adventures. Every single edition from 0E to 4E accelerated the pace of natural healing, for example, to allow for a faster pace of action.

And for a role playing game, that's kind of a hard hitting issue. We're encouraged to view things from a PC's perspective, inhabit the PC and make decisions from their perspective, look at things as a developing story with an internally consistent fiction - and this is pretty much in-your-face game mechanic tail visibly wagging the dog. It's no wonder that, whether or not you see the short rest as being significantly different between 4e and 5e, 5e took effort to emphasize the time factor compared to 4e's emphasis on the encounter boundary.

I see this as another example of 5E being a compromise edition, trying to retain some of what worked in 4E without alienating older fans as much as 4E did.

To Snarf's point, 4E did take the lid off the game mechanic more and give the DM more explicit advice about pacing and encounter design. 5E does much the same thing in its DMG telling us that the game is balanced with the expectation that PCs will get two Short Rests most days, roughly evenly spaced during the Adventuring Day, which is expected to comprise roughly 6-8 Medium or Hard encounters.

But there's nothing inherently more realistic about resting for five minutes vs resting for an hour. They're equally arbitrary. It's mostly just a question of which works better for our table and feels more verisimilitudinous for the world we envision. Voadam opined that an hour is much more of an impingement on his sense of disbelief than five minutes. YMMV.

 

[Velderan]

Thanks!

Are the short 4-10 second cool downs things like how long between swinging a sword again, or are they separate powers in addition to swinging a sword?

It sounds like the short and medium cool down powers were each their own thing with a separate cool down while the 30 minute long cool downs were a choice of long powers with a shared cool down.

So depending on how long WoW fights lasted the short and medium were a bit like 4e at will and encounter powers but the dailies were not like 4e dailies where you can nova and do multiple dailies in one fight or where dailies can last through an entire fight.

Off the top of my head, your regular melee weapon swings had their own timer based on the speed of the weapon. Using an ability with a cool down only reset that melee swing timer if the ability had a cast time. I don't think using an ability that did not have a cast time reset your melee swing timer, but I might be remembering that wrong.

 

[darjr]

I must add, cause it seems it's been lost, it's a fact, according to Ben's quotes, that encounter, rest, daily powers were in fact an answer to duplicating the WOW cooldown mechanic.

They wanted a way to do it without needing a stop watch. Or to be too closely copied from wow. He tells a little story about the meeting where they were trying to come up with a mechanic to use to implement these cooldowns. Mike Mearls said "We need something that can be once an encounter, once a short rest, and once a day". And it was Rodney or Bill at the white board who wrote it down and then said as if he just thought of it. "We can use encounter, short rest, and daily powers".

So it's no longer speculation anymore, not really.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Could we not relitigate the encounter powers and the ideal time of short rest and focus on the information in the seminar. One thing that I might note is that I am of the opinion that 4e combat would be difficult to replicate in a computer game with all the out of turn reactions and granted actions by warlords and the like.

 

[Alzrius]

I must add, cause it seems it's been lost, it's a fact, according to Ben's quotes, that encounter, rest, daily powers were in fact an answer to duplicating the WOW cooldown mechanic.

They wanted a way to do it without needing a stop watch. Or to be too closely copied from wow. He tells a little story about the meeting where they were trying to come up with a mechanic to use to implement these cooldowns. Mike Mearls said "We need something that can be once an encounter, once a short rest, and once a day". And it was Rodney or Bill at the white board who wrote it down and then said as if he just thought of it. "We can use encounter, short rest, and daily powers".

So it's no longer speculation anymore, not really.

I recall that anecdote, though I'm having a very hard time recalling the specific individuals mentioned. I don't think Radney-MacFarland was one of them, but I'm not 100% sure.

 

[Mannahnin]

Could we not relitigate the encounter powers and the ideal time of short rest and focus on the information in the seminar.

Fair.

One thing that I might note is that I am of the opinion that 4e combat would be difficult to replicate in a computer game with all the out of turn reactions and granted actions by warlords and the like.

I tend to concur. The difference between turn-based and real-time combat is absolutely enormous.