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

[FrogReaver]

I don’t know if you noticed but Snarf and I are different people? I mean I’m no where near as talented.

we see the man behind the curtain!

 

[deganawida]

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.

They are for hobbyists and tinkerers, improv actors and storytellers. The game either produces situations that reinforce that through emergent storytelling, or the players (including the DM) bring it to the game. That’s why everyone is always trying to “fix” their favorite game system. They either want the system to bring it out, or they want it to yield to the demands of story and role-playing.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

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.

Oh! I thought that you were referring to something that 4e did, not something that it didn't do, but that its designers had to find a way to avoid. I follow you now!

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

They are for hobbyists and tinkerers, improv actors and storytellers. The game either produces situations that reinforce that through emergent storytelling, or the players (including the DM) bring it to the game. That’s why everyone is always trying to “fix” their favorite game system. They either want the system to bring it out, or they want it to yield to the demands of story and role-playing.

I like this.

It certainly beats my current working definition, which is this:

Tabletop RPGs are, at their core, systems of rules for people to argue about with strangers on the internet.

 

[James Gasik]

The words I always use to describe 4e are streamlined, focused, and transparent.

Streamlined attempts to remove things from the game that just don't really matter to the gameplay loop. This was a huge divide for some. While Gygax claimed the tracking of time was important to the game, it's been my experience that time is an abstract construct that serves the narrative. Look at spell durations for example. Rounds per level? We track that. Minutes per level? Well it lasts for one fight, but if I have a power that lasts for 7 minutes, whether or not it's going to last into another combat is rarely a question.

It doesn't, even if that's actually 70 rounds of combat, lol!

Ten minutes per level gets a bit wonky, but generally you can squeeze a second fight out of it.

And hours per level is usually "all day" and not worth tracking.

4e was like "so what if durations were literally, 1 turn, encounter, or "save ends" which gives a variable duration?". What if "short rest" was a non-intrusive amount of time that you can assume it happens 99% of the time?

What if instead of spell slots and x per day abilities, we just said "you can use this move as much as you want, this is 1/encounter, and this is a big 1/day ability for tough battles?".

What if we don't worry about geometry and say "you move x squares on a grid"? Which really is no different than AD&D movement being described in inches on a map?

What if minor foes that can generally be dispatched in a single attack LITERALLY can be dispatched in a single attack?

Transparent, on the other hand, says things like: What if powers, rather than lots of descriptive text, just have a quick line of flavor text, and then they do exactly what they say they do? What if monster knowledge is an accepted part of the game, and players have a chance to know what an enemy will do in an encounter, allowing them to make strategic, informed decisions instead of every monster being "surprise, look what I can do!".

What if there are no "secret" or "hidden" rules and we explain the nuts and bolts of how and why the game functions?

Focused, then, narrows down the game to the part that requires the most adjudication. Combat and character options relating to combat, historically, take up the bulk of rulebooks. So let's make sure that part works, and then handwave the rest, allowing people to quickly move past non-combat encounters, since that seems to be what a lot of groups are doing?

This right here, I understand the issue with: I once tried running an old school dungeon in 4e, and it was a train wreck because if it's not swinging a sword or using a power, it's a skill challenge, lol. Oh sure, utility powers and feats not meant for combat exist, but nobody takes those, including most rituals, because you know, as a player, you're going to get into a fight.

You don't know, as a player, if you're going to need an invisible ladder of force once every 5 minutes. And even if you have it, at best it's going to be equal to an automatic success in a skill challenge, if the DM agrees it's even useful!

It's right here where I realized that 4e was fun to play, easy to DM combats for and create combat encounters, but was literally not meant for other kinds of play.

Of course, this is nothing new, I mean, even in 5e, social and exploration tiers of play are virtually non-existent. But 4e came out and said it, and that rubs a lot of people the wrong way.

 

[Malmuria]

I don't know the whole history, but I can't imagine the emphasis on "natural language" in 5e came out of nowhere. My understanding is that it was an explicit turn away from the more 'gamey' language of 4e; I also think that matters even if some of the underlying concepts are the same or similar.* For example, I would argue that 5e is at its best when played in a more relaxed way where, for example, you take short rests for where it makes sense in the fiction rather than trying to follow the 6-8 encounter benchmark.

That said, as an OSR person, I find per-rest abilities to still be too gamey and arbitrary-feeling. Though when you start to go that route you also have to kill some darlings...vanican magic, then levels all together, then classes, until you arrive at something like this.

* I even find some of the diction used to describe some of these concepts grating. For example, I don't like "surge" or "recharge" for their electrical connotations.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

It's right here where I realized that 4e was fun to play, easy to DM combats for and create combat encounters, but was literally not meant for other kinds of play.

Even as someone that values many things 4e did, it really rubbed me the wrong way that the game made no effort to help decide how the meant-for-combat powers might possibly interact with the world outside of those encounters.

 

[Celebrim]

So WotC is pretty much the ENWorld forums, except they're doing it professionally.

And the EnWorld forums are basically High School. And you'd be surprised (if you haven't experienced it) how much of government and academia is just High School with more money.

 

[Kannik]

I think the canary in the coal mine is that we keep hearing World of Warcraft in all these discussions. This game will never bring in that kind of money. It will probably never bring in MoTG type of money. If that's the bar Dnd is doomed to continual cycle of reboot , reboot, reboot till the execs figure that out.

I also recall reading that, during this time, Hasbro was decreeing that all of their divisions (and that the way WotC was sold to Hasbro had made D&D and Magic as separate divisions) be on track to reach at least $X per year or be cancelled. If it was WotC as a whole, this wouldn't have been an issue, but as D&D has never been that big and so had to try to show some massive (and impossible for D&D of any era) new numbers or be binned. I'd love to find out more about how much of this was a thing and if so the whole impact of it.

[Aside: There is a big difference between being sustainable and 'making money.' Current business/economic thinking (and the reward structure for a very small few) in North America is that everything needs to be 'making money' and as much of it as possible, no matter how. This is often justified as 'a company can't lose money' which is (mostly) true, but that just means that a company needs to break even, not that it must prioritize so-called profit over everything else. Which tends to lead to ongoing deleterious outcomes until nothing is left. Unfortunately, again due to that reward structure, that very small few often walk off into the sunset quite unscathed and get to do it again...]

 

[Celebrim]

[*]So why were the numbers for 3.X so much lower than even 2E? According to him, the Hasbro execs were of the opinion that it was because World of Warcraft (which released in late 2004) was eating their lunch. They saw an explosive phenomenon, according to the people Riggs interviewed, that was essentially the same as D&D except in a computerized form, and wanted to get that crowd back to the tabletop. So they handed down a directive to start work on a new edition that would draw the WoW crowd to them (which, Riggs noted, was a major mistake).

There was a time on the forums where asserting the design of 4e was influenced by WoW got you accused of being a moron and a monster.

I mean personally I thought 3e was influenced by Fallout and didn't mean that as a bad thing either. But whatever, water under the bridge I suppose.

Personally, I don't think the big problems with 4e had anything to do with the inspirations it was taking from other games, and so while I don't disagree with Ben's observations (as I have no facts of my own), I disagree with some of his apparent conclusions. In general, I do think that rewriting the core game engine and all the lore at the same time was a classic mistake of updating a product for the sake not of your customers, but the people who aren't your customers, but the WoW influence itself was IMO one of the few things interesting about the 4e system.