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

[Zardnaar]

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.

I thought saga etc had some advantages over 5E design and if you're using feats I prefer micro ones.

I would overhaul the feat design to be more inclined with 5E.

But yeah you could also use the guts of 5E (skill and proficiency) and use ot to duplicate SWSE, 3.5 or B/X I suppose. You could add outright encounter powers or whatever into it.

 

[darjr]

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.

It was a terrible thing and in this I think he’s wrong, or at least should count the mismanagement of the person involved and the impact it had after his actions.

For example I’ve heard that he was the only one familiar with all the code as a whole system, that there were parts no one else ever saw or worked in.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

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.

On the off chance you didn't read my followup, this was explicitly dealt with in both the DMG and the DMG2, which stated that short rests were the defining line between encounters, and could be given (for example) when crossing the room to open a door. If you did not get a short rest, then it was not a new encounter.

Again, a defining feature of 4e is that it was written in a certain way with a certain framework in mind; to the extent people chose to follow that framework, it worked incredibly well in framing the game in terms of discrete encounters- making it much more amenable to a more cinematic (there's another term for that) style of play.

But since I've now spent multiple posts explaining this, and have quoted the relevant parts of the DMG* that even state this, and this seems to be ignored, I don't think further reiteration of this will do much good, will it?


*What, is the 4e DMG like the 5e DMG? I thought that wasn't supposed to be the case!

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

Reminds me of the revelation that the difficulty of CRs was shifted at the last minute before publication of 5E. That what's defined as a "Medium" encounter in the DMG was called an "Easy" encounter in the playtest. Everything got shifted over one column at the last second, seemingly without further playtesting.

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".

There's a definite design tension here between what's most playable and usable for reference at the table and what's helpful and gives the DM ideas for scenario design and non-combat use of different monsters and NPCs.

Micah and others have said that they really found the longer 2E and 3E write-ups useful in terms of defining how these monsters could interact with the world, not merely how they fight the PCs. And I'll agree, so did I. Your example of the Marileth creating zombies is a great one. That's genuinely helpful for worldbuilding and scenario design.

But on the other hand 3E statblocks and the design of making them follow the same rules as PCs as far as skill points and feats and everything got insanely unwieldy and long. They were the antithesis of useful at the table. 4E statblocks were an incredible, blessed relief after them, even though I missed some of that longer detail and those noncombat abilities when brainstorming and writing scenarios.

It might be an impossible task to find the perfect middle ground, because different DMs want and need different things.

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

I did explicitly point and object to this. Including in bold text like you did. I also made a post with screenshots of the relevant rules.

Snarf, to be fair, has since expanded his remarks to point out that the 4E DMGs say that the default design expectation is that you'll get a short rest after each encounter. And they warn you to be careful of situations where multiple encounters happen with no rest between, and advise that for scaling purposes you may want to consider such situations as being all one encounter.

He went overboard in his initial claims and made a false claim when he opined that 4E uniquely divorced power recovery from rest or verisimilitude, but I can see now what he actually meant, and it's more defensible and accurate than his initial statements.

 

[Voadam]

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.

So the closest linkage to a shared cool down that I can think of in 4e is the 1/day daily max a character can use from any magic items.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

both the DMG and the DMG2, which stated that short rests were the defining line between encounters, and could be given (for example) when crossing the room to open a door. If you did not get a short rest, then it was not a new encounter.

5e DMG also says that the GM has the option of giving out short rests as he wants, not after just an hour. There still is no difference.

 

[Mannahnin]

5e DMG also says that the GM has the option of giving out short rests as he wants, not after just an hour. There still is no difference.

Eh. I'd say that's a difference like we were talking about before, of 5E being more wishy-washy/flexible/loose, and 4E being more tightly written & designed/prescriptive.

 

[payn]

A little late to the thread, but pretty interesting. I think the 4E is WoW Meme gets such a work out because of cultural aspects more than mechanical ones. A lot has to do with when 4E launched and what was happening at the time culturally. It was the first time a new edition launched in the age of social media. The memes were instant and widely shared. No longer were just the hardcore players writing into magazines or lurking internet forums. Folks were tossing these out on Facebook and everybody with a passing interest was participating. This lead to a lot of false hoods and insults getting a lot more acceptance and trade than otherwise would have in other eras.

That leads me to D&D and video games. There is a sizable sentiment in the TTRPG community that video games are clearly inferior experiences. Often, disparaged as brain rot and too confining. Video games had long been only a minor threat because folks would play them mostly by themselves. Since seen as a minor threat, the 3E meme of "just like Diablo" didnt really have the legs the "4E is WoW" did. WoW wasnt just popular like Diablo, it was revolutionary. Folks could play this massive game online at any time with loads of people. Suddenly, this was a threat to RPG tables everywhere. I recall many a lament that their players dont show up anymore because they would rather be raiding in WoW. The sentiment grew that video games where now destroying TTRPGs.

So, I think you can see where this is going. Saying 4E is WoW is like the yo mama so fat insult of TTRPGs. Folks who dislike the game can drop a simple drive by insult. Folks who do like the game are not only defending it, but fighting back against a cultural sentiment. The battle isnt really about the mechanics and design, its about whether 4E is a "true" TTRPG or not for many. 4E really just a victim of its time. I mean, folks talk about 3E all the time and can do so on its merits and barely ever is "its Diablo" gets mentioned. 5E was spared because it was deigned openly, with a playtest and polled the public. Folks walked the process together with WotC. Which, WotC was not a great steward in 4E either which I believe really hurt 4E further. Anyways, I think the above explains why the battle liens are drawn to this day around 4E on this particular subject.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

5e DMG also says that the GM has the option of giving out short rests as he wants, not after just an hour. There still is no difference.

The 5e DMG also gives the option of making short rests every DAY.

That's because the 5e is not tightly proscribed, unlike 4e. And it ignores almost everything in 4e about short rests marking the boundaries between encounters.

I do appreciate the idea that 5e and 4e are exactly the same, which ... I mean, sure, that's definitely a thought. But that is an insult to both the great design of 4e, as well as the different design in 5e. But, you know, you do you.