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

[MGibster]

I yearn for the day when everyone can stop fixating on 4e as being the "failed" edition, the "controversial" edition, or the "divisive" edition. Just accept that (like it or not) it is a Dungeons & Dragons game, respect that many D&D fans liked the system (and many still do), and just appreciate any contributions and influences it made to modern RPG designs.

The idea that it's a failed, controversial, or divisive edition and it's a D&D game are not mutually exclusive. I can hold multiple thoughts in my head at the same time. Hell, hold my beer while I hold multiple contradictory thoughts in my head.

 

[Kannik]

But different people have different threshholds as to how far they are willing to go in terms of those abstractions. Use the "hit point" example I used earlier. Hit points are an abstraction. For some people, going too far into that abstraction will become "too much." But that's a subjective and personal preference. Arguing with that is the same as saying that they can't complain about anything in Star Wars or Star Trek because of the "pew pew pew" sounds.

I've always found the Hit Points one interesting, especially given how they're defined in the origin of the current iteration of the game, 1e:

Each character has a varying number of hit points, just as monsters do. These hit points represent how much damage (actual or potential) the character can withstand before being killed. A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors. A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being killed. let us suppose that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This is the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The same holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.

HP have always been very abstract and "gamist"... the very name, especially including the word "points", always struck me as an indication of that. Yet for many groups they became thought of in a particular way that was removed from and/or more narrow than its intent and design.

 

[darjr]

I've always found the Hit Points one interesting, especially given how they're defined in the origin of the current iteration of the game, 1e:


HP have always been very abstract and "gamist"... the very name, especially including the word "points", always struck me as an indication of that. Yet for many groups they became thought of in a particular way that was removed from and/or more narrow than its intent and design.

I think that’s partly because that stated design wasn’t followed strictly and sometimes thrown out in later design. Many stated things in AD&D were often ignored in later design.

 

[Alzrius]

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.

That reminds me, Riggs did (very briefly) mention the rewriting of the lore in 4E also, saying that it was mostly because the designers didn't want to have to deal with the voluminous amount of materials from earlier editions (and that this was also behind the Spellplague and hundred-year time-skip in the Forgotten Realms).

 

[Alzrius]

The converse of this was one of the things that rubbed me hard the wrong way. Entries in the Monster Manual basically only had meant-for-combat powers and were stripped almost entirely of the rules or power for interacting with the world outside of combat.

To be fair, I noticed that most keenly in the 3.0->3.5 changeover.

 

[Mannahnin]

I think we are in agreement. I did want to be careful, though, since I think both 4e and 5e made deliberate choices in that regard, and that both choices are defensible and work for what they were attempting to do!

There is a lot of benefit to prescription when it comes to rules and giving guidance on how to play. I've noted, in other contexts, that many games benefit from the tightness of focus.

On the other hand, making the decision to leave things open can cause a lot of frustration, but it also allows for a more robust variety of play.

Agreed indeed. This is why I enjoy each edition of D&D for its own virtues. In the last couple of years I've enjoyed the hell out of and extensively played OD&D, B/X, 5E, and my own Frankensteinian mish-mash of Five Torches Deep and B/X.

On reflection I think my two favorite editions are probably B/X (with some light house rules) and 4E*.

Though I have a sentimental soft spot for 3.x and I DO someday want to revisit it for an Epic 6 campaign, so I can enjoy the complexity of 3E again without the nightmare trudging-through-quicksand it used to devolve into at high level.

(*Perhaps oddly, my early years DMing 4E coincided with my getting into the OSR blog and forum scene, and resulted in the weirdness of me running 4E in a very OD&D-influenced way, with random encounters and procedural dungeon crawling. )

The converse of this was one of the things that rubbed me hard the wrong way. Entries in the Monster Manual basically only had meant-for-combat powers and were stripped almost entirely of the rules or power for interacting with the world outside of combat.

This was the one thing that bummed me out about the 4E monster entries, yeah. I think I found it a little less of a problem in part because of the aforementioned simultaneous digging into the OSR scene I was doing at the time, so I guess I was pretty comfortable patching that on the fly with DM judgements or assigning necessary abilities at the scenario design stage.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

Delete.

 

[Voadam]

To be fair, I noticed that most keenly in the 3.0->3.5 changeover.

How so?

2e's voluminous descriptions versus the 3.0 MM's descriptive sparseness stood out strongly for me.

 

[Scribe]

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.

This is actually why I think working from home is so great. You skip all the BS, and just do work.

 

[billd91]

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.

You could try, but you run into the problem that people doing so always run into. The general public understands that resting for a bit of time really is restorative. The idea that someone might need to catch a night's sleep to replenish their energy is an extremely intuitable mechanic for a game to rest on. The specifics of how many X you get per day may be arbitrary and based on game engine concerns, but the recognition that a good long rest is a fantastic way to recover is not. That's why it's not the tail wagging the dog like the encounter-based unit for recovery is in 4e and why attempts to equate the two are generally rejected.

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.

A second wind is kind of cool and dramatic, and it was when it was introduced in SWSE. But you only got one a day unless you specifically invested in more. Making it a default feature that could be used every encounter deflated most of its dramatic power.

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.

I might agree that there's nothing special about an hour, in particular, but it is substantially longer than 5 minutes which doesn't seem long enough for fully recovering from one death defying exertion to another. There's a reason most high performance runners wind down 10-15 minutes after their race and then rest more afterward and that's because 5 minutes isn't much rest time between major exertions. So yeah, I'd say there is an inherent difference in verisimilitude between a 5 minute recovery and an hour. And, again, that's easily intuitable based on our real life experiences.