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

[Zardnaar]

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.

I don't mind them as such but as optional buy in such as Star Wars Saga Edition. Don't like them don't pick the class or ability that as them.

D&D has sacred cows if you rebooted it via a rime machine at will and encounter powers would probably be best way. AEDU is meh as implemented and daily/long rest is to entrenched in D&Ds DNA to remove it.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.


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.

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.

My thoughts on an ultimate D&D boil down to.

1. Based off SWSE wbut with 5E bounded accuracy. There's your skeleton build on that.

2. d20 ascending numbers Advanced B/X perhaps with moving parts


And from those two basic ideas go from there. If you like 4E for example use 1 as your skeleton. If your tastes more OSR use 2 maybe adding feats or 5E skill system if that's your jam.

 

[overgeeked]

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.

On the off chance this wasn’t already pointed out, this is false. Encounter powers recharge after a five-minute short rest. If you charge from one fight to another without that rest, you don’t regain your spent encounter powers.

“An encounter power can be used once per encounter. You need to take a short rest (page 263) before you can use one again.” 4E PHB, p54.

ETA: Yep, it was mentioned. But the salient bits were skipped. Bolded the bits in your post that I’m objecting to. For clarity.

 

[Zardnaar]

I remember the days when powerful Fiends had a host of spell like abilities that were mostly there for flavor. Sure, a Marilith can use Animate Dead to crank out some zombies, but if you're fighting a Marilith, a zombie shouldn't be much of a threat to you (yes, yes, I know, you could come up with a trick or distraction using zombies, but really, this is a window dressing ability if a Marilith is just gated in to fight you).

On the one hand, you can use abilities like this to explain how a Marilith would take over a city or be a threat to more than just the PC's, but you don't really need a curated list of abilities. I remember a really nasty adventure in Dungeon where a red dragon has equipped fanatical kobold minions with beads from a Necklace of Fireballs to run up and suicide bomb the PC's. How did the dragon get all these Necklaces? Not important to the adventure.

If you want your Marilith to have an undead army, they have an undead army. There's any number of possible explanations that make sense for the campaign outside of "well they have animate dead as a power".

I'm not saying there's no value to such abilities, but when you load up a major enemy with spell like and psionic powers that it probably will never use, that's bloat. Like, I miss spellcasting dragons, but I fully admit that a lot of the time, casting a spell was inferior to the other options a dragon has to work with. Ditto with making sure everyone knows a Silver Dragon has an ability to take on a humanoid form. If that's important to the game, there's any number of reasons why they can do it, up to and including having it as a special ability if you decree they ought to.

If you want your dragon to have a labyrinth made with stone shape and walls of stone, it's not necessary to clutter up the stat block with such powers, you can just say "he's an Earth dragon/he's a prodigy/he made offerings to Tiamat/he's some kind of Dragon-Warlock".

That adventure is Out of the Ashes. TPK except tor my Druid who had a resist fire spell up.

 

[Zardnaar]

There's probably been more discussion about non-magical healing and hit dice in this thread then there was when these mechanics were generated and published. I still can't believe that WotC is basically three gremlins in a trenchcoat competiting against each other while pretending to be a united front. It just makes so much sense when you think about shareholders saying D&D is being mismanaged, and when you think about how like Kate Welch left very strangely after her being brought on was such a big media push, and she only basically stewarded one project. Mearls not working on it, other big RPG designers not working on D&D, most of it being contracted out to freelancers...

How can I even justify debating what rules are good and bad anymore? At this point, the whole idea of playtesting itself seems like a joke by WotC. I mean, according to Ben, monster hit points got jacked up with no oversight at all in 4E right before going live. That's a huge change to make last second that heavily impacts the game, no playtesting, no discussion, just going live.

Nothing in D&D seems to be reflective of a coherent union of voices. It never has, and now we know why -- because WotC's design team is mismanaged, understaffed, and not all on the same page. Crazy. Wild. Insane. Hilarious, really.

The things yall say about the D&D Next playtest also prove this. Man. This is just so surreal to read. I guess I was just naive.

Lol TSR did same thing. Gygax did playtest with his personal groups.

On of the Darksun books a freelancer put in surfing Druids as a joke. They made it to print.

D&D Next and OneD&D not perfect but they're essentially asking what the fans want vs exact mechanics.

 

[overgeeked]

Can anyone familiar with WoW tell me how their cool down periods worked? Was it based on a group mana pool so no magic at all for a bit depending on the strength of the power used? Was it a separate cool down pool for each power so you could use all of your "encounter" cool down powers each fight? Were there options of at will powers to do in between cool downs?

They are real-time cooldowns. From 1 second, 2 seconds, 3, 5, 10, 30, 60…10 minutes, 1 hour. Most had individual cooldowns. Some were linked, like similar effects sharing one cooldown.

 

[overgeeked]

I posted this on Mastodon, in case anyone wanting to get 4e and give it a try.

@cynical13 Monster math was fixed by MM3 and the monster vault. So get those. The gamma world box sets and books, inmho, were probably the very best iteration in that rules system. And the monsters and tech are compatible, even has mm3 monster math! The essentials line is controversial but some folk did love it. Finally get DarkSun if you can. @Alphastream can send you a fantastic set of adventures if you email him. I’m not kidding, the DS 4e stuff is amazing.
https://chirp.enworld.org/@darjr/110865481292856701

That Dark Sun module is fantastic.

 

[overgeeked]

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.

Yeah. That was weird. We always had powers give successes in skill challenges, if applicable. Or count as a successful check, etc.

 

[overgeeked]

My thoughts on an ultimate D&D boil down to.

1. Based off SWSE wbut with 5E bounded accuracy. There's your skeleton build on that.

2. d20 ascending numbers Advanced B/X perhaps with moving parts

And from those two basic ideas go from there. If you like 4E for example use 1 as your skeleton. If your tastes more OSR use 2 maybe adding feats or 5E skill system if that's your jam.

I think you'd be better off starting with 5E as the core and building out from there. Stripping that core down a bit, streamlining some things, bringing back more explicit frameworks like skill challenges (only better designed and playtested), then modding from there to suit anything from AD&D to 4E would be a snap. None of them would be 100% as-originally-printed accurate, but you could play all of them on the same chassis. Most of the differences are thematic and focus. Focus on resource management vs handwaving. Focus on winning the fight before rolling initiative vs after. The rest are mostly minor mechanical differences. Higher vs lower hit dice. Higher vs lower ability modifiers. For a more old-school game, use these optional rules. For a more tactical combat-focused game, use these optional rules. Etc. You know, the promised modularity of the 5E playtest.

 

[cbwjm]

(he also said that the infamous murder-suicide that happened on the Gleemax team had nothing to do with that).

The what?!! Until today I'd never heard of this. Mind you, I think I wasn't super active on forums during the gleemax period either so wouldn't have heard much of anything about it if it was mentioned there.