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

[UngainlyTitan]

Fair.


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

This prompts a question, I have not tried BG3 multiplayer but I have played Solasta multiplayer, could an MMO run on turn based combat?

 

[Voadam]

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".

Interesting, with a difference between encounter and short rest powers.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

For my part, I think that AEDU was definitely inspired by WoW and similar games. It doesn't have to be seen as a pejorative that can't possibly be true. Plenty of people like 4e, and accepting its inspiration shouldn't affect how you feel about something you like.

You're absolutely right, of course, but 4e defenders are used to "4e is like WoW" being used as a visceral criticism, and feel the need to defend it as such.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

And the 4e cooldowns needed to not be a timed one because a stop watch is a tool to far for a starter box.

Can you explain this sentence, because I have no idea what you're getting at.

I'll chime in here, too: I think Snarf and Mannahnin's divide is coming from this: A 5e short rest and a 4e 5-minute rest are the same (other than duration) in the fiction - You adjust your armour, take a breather, do some bandaging, have a snack, drink some water, whatever. They're similar in mechanics - you heal some hit dice/surges, you recover some not-always-available class abilities.

They're "different" in that 4e expects you to get them between every encounter (unless you don't, but that's the exception) whereas in 5e, you're expected to get a 2-3 per day, and you're expected to do 6-8 encounters per day, so by that math, you're expected to get them every other encounter, instead of every encounter.

That's both a big difference AND a small difference, depending on what you focus on. Or in other words, they've both got points, but are missing each other's.

 

[darjr]

Can you explain this sentence, because I have no idea what you're getting at.

I'll chime in here, too: I think Snarf and Mannahnin's divide is coming from this: A 5e short rest and a 4e 5-minute rest are the same (other than duration) in the fiction - You adjust your armour, take a breather, do some bandaging, have a snack, drink some water, whatever. They're similar in mechanics - you heal some hit dice/surges, you recover some not-always-available class abilities.

They're "different" in that 4e expects you to get them between every encounter (unless you don't, but that's the exception) whereas in 5e, you're expected to get a 2-3 per day, and you're expected to do 6-8 encounters per day, so by that math, you're expected to get them every other encounter, instead of every encounter.

That's both a big difference AND a small difference, depending on what you focus on. Or in other words, they've both got points, but are missing each other's.

That comes from Bens talk. They wanted to do cooldowns but didn’t think they could ask players to use a stop watch to do them. They needed a mechanism they didn’t have yet.

 

[James Gasik]

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.

I totally understand how we got to this point; you can't sustain a business by throwing books into the aether and hoping they will be bought by gamers. Again, what's a hobby for me is a business for the gaming companies. They have to produce to survive, and the days of many sourcebooks are gone.

But like I said, this is also when the hobby was at it's peak for me. Even as recently as Pathfinder 1e, the "many books" model was a thing. Now that it seems to be gone, and everything is scaled back, I really have no choice but to purchase 3rd Party books and hope to find something good there.

And it's not that all third party is bad, I've bought Adventures in Rokugan and Paranormal Power in the last year, for examples. As well as several Kobold Press books. But there is a small stigma attached to such books, unfortunately, so when I purchase them, it's with the full knowledge that the chances of using them is lower.

Not that the chances of using Charlemagne's Paladins was ever great, but hey, 2% is still better than 1%, right?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Can you explain this sentence, because I have no idea what you're getting at.

I'll chime in here, too: I think Snarf and Mannahnin's divide is coming from this: A 5e short rest and a 4e 5-minute rest are the same (other than duration) in the fiction - You adjust your armour, take a breather, do some bandaging, have a snack, drink some water, whatever. They're similar in mechanics - you heal some hit dice/surges, you recover some not-always-available class abilities.

They're "different" in that 4e expects you to get them between every encounter (unless you don't, but that's the exception) whereas in 5e, you're expected to get a 2-3 per day, and you're expected to do 6-8 encounters per day, so by that math, you're expected to get them every other encounter, instead of every encounter.

That's both a big difference AND a small difference, depending on what you focus on. Or in other words, they've both got points, but are missing each other's.

Kind of. But it's deeper than that.

Whatever you might say about the relative strengths and weaknesses of the approaches, there is a definite difference in the approach of 4e and 5e. A way to describe it is that 4e tends to be more prescriptive in the PHB and (ESPECIALLY) the DMG(s). The 5e model, on the other hand, goes out of its way to avoid being prescriptive, often to the point of near unintelligibility (do you roll dice in the open, or not? is fudging okay? whatever, man, it's all good!).

So in 4e, to not allow a short rest between encounters is, quite literally, doing it wrong. It's the exception. It's denying players their encounter-based abilities. It is ... well, encounters are defined by short rests!

On the other hand, 5e has these recommendations. But ... it's all kind of wishy-washy, right? Does every party have 6-8 encounters per day? Do most? Do DMs make sure that a party is going to get the 2-3 short rests? I've seen a lot of D&D games, and while there are tables that do try and adhere to that, I'd say that this recommendation is far from the norm. Moreover, whereas in 4e if a party doesn't get a short rest between encounters, the DM has definitely messed up, in 5e it is entirely possible for a party to want (or need!) a short rest after an encounter and for it to not be possible.

Which again circles around to the idea that the concepts behind the games are ... different. 4e is tighter (is that a good term to use?) in that aspect.

 

[Voadam]

That comes from Bens talk. They wanted to do cooldowns but didn’t think they could ask players to use a stop watch to do them. They needed a mechanism they didn’t have yet.

I am really glad they did not go with x rounds as the recharge.

I really liked 3.5 recharge magic but tracking round countdowns for multiple spell levels was a fiddly pain.

I also was really glad they changed durations to generally either one round, save ends, or encounter.

 

[Alzrius]

I totally understand how we got to this point; you can't sustain a business by throwing books into the aether and hoping they will be bought by gamers. Again, what's a hobby for me is a business for the gaming companies. They have to produce to survive, and the days of many sourcebooks are gone.

A minor tangent on this point: immediately after Riggs' seminar on Fourth Edition, he held another seminar, entitled "The Birth and Death(?) of the OGL." A lot of the same points were covered (he even mentioned a few of the same anecdotes, such as the inflation of hit points in the 4E MM, and how having Mike Mearls and John Tynes working on M:tG instead of D&D was a sign of dysfunction at WotC), but I recall him mentioning a key point:

Tabletop RPGs are, at their core, content creation engines, and this is bad for the companies that produce them, because once you have the basic game you really don't need anything else.

 

[Gammadoodler]

The other part here that I think is worth mentioning is that it's also not like combat in WoW is significantly more "unbelievable" than D&D in any fundamental worldbuilding sense.

Required 'rest periods' and the simple passage of time are equally valid reset mechanics for fantasy BS-ery.

It's not like the WoW designers were looking for immersion-breaking ways for folks to use their characters.