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

[AbdulAlhazred]

That just kinda blithely assumes that there weren't an awful lot of people who were enjoying playing FR exactly as it was, and blithely assumes that a large proportion of the prospective 4th ed FR customer base were not, in fact, the pre-4th ed FR customer base.

What am I 'blithely assuming'? I stated what I liked and why I liked it. There's nothing even faintly 'blithe' about that! Why do people here constantly assume that if you post some preference they don't share that you're crapping on them?

I understand what they were TRYING to do with 4th ed FR. But (much like the now-legendary pre-4th-ed marketing campaign which systematically went through half of the history of D&D and told you that it wasn't fun) I think it fell into the trap of being developed in a team that was too insular, and too focused on the question 'how should FR have been done from day 1?' rather than 'how should we proceed with FR from the current point'. They wanted to blank-slate the place.

I think the problem with FR, and similarly in some ways with 3.x in general, is that its flaws became glaringly obvious and they were designed into a corner. 3.x era FR is simply filled to the brim with Mary Sue NPCs and tons and tons of high level junk, plus a meta-plot that is highly ungameable. Now, maybe it would have been a wiser marketing strategy to just invent an entirely new basic core high fantasy campaign setting, but whatever. Honestly, I never cared 2 bits about FR to begin with myself, so its kind of not even something that concerned me.

You could have made a more player-focused FR book without blowing the setting up, if you'd wanted to. That's just a matter of emphasis in the book. Less page count devoted to Elminster and co, more to villain organisations, and plot hooks, etc - 5th ed Eberron did this extremely well. Drop a few lines in there explaining how some hand-wavy pantheon metaplot thing means that the Chosen had to largely retire from active adventuring going forward, that's how i would have addressed The Elminster Problem. You didn't NEED to throw the timeline forward a century and turn the pantheon upside down. Vast amounts of the 4th ed book were devoted to deliberately, systematically making it utterly unusable for people who just wanted to keep their existing, pre-Spellplague game going, or even those who wanted to get any use whatsoever out of their old sourcebooks in the new Realms. And it's not like this wholesale lore apocalypse was even creative destruction - in most cases it was just destruction. Entire regions of the place were dropped into the sea or converted to blasted wastelands in an off-handed paragraph or sentence and not replaced with anything useful, or interesting, or gameable.

Perhaps, but again, I am not all that interested in FR of any vintage to begin with. I was contrasting WA with GW as well as more generally the 4e lore overall.

4e FR may have been a perfectly gameable setting, when viewed in complete and utter isolation from everything that went before it. But for someone who'd been playing the Realms for a while, it was about as far from it as possible. At every turn, it went out of its way to make itself incompatible with everything that had gone before. Regardless of how it was intended, there was no way whatsoever that it was ever going to be embraced by the portion of the player base who liked the Realms as they were. And if you write an FR setting book that's 'intended to be played', surely the the people who like and are playing in the existing FR are worth considering?

Yeah, I dunno. Frankly I think even for the 4e devs FR was pretty much an afterthought. I still say 4e's WA cosmology just crushes old school GW for sheer "plots per unit of stuff" by a million miles.

 

[humble minion]

The planar/cosmological differences between 4th ed FR and pre-4th ed FR are honestly the changes I have the least problems with. I mean, i wasn't in love with WA, but GW never really fit FR very well either, and it was just as shoehorned in. Plus, cosmology is really, really easy to ignore in most FR games, and most non-Planescape D&D games in general. That's a very non-intrusive change, from my point of view. It was the changes to the Realms themselves that really got my goat.

 

[James Gasik]

Fair enough FRs not for everyone sane as Ravenloft or Darksun or Dragonlance etc.

I don't expect them to blow up a setting to appeal to ne though I'll just find one I like. Since 4E FR that was Golarion and Midgard. No big deal.

This reminds me of the time TSR blew up Ravenloft with the Grand Conjunction.

 

[Zardnaar]

This reminds me of the time TSR blew up Ravenloft with the Grand Conjunction.

It was every setting pretty much. Create new interesting setting then blow it up.
Darksun, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Ravenloft etc.

 

[humble minion]

It was every setting pretty uch. Create ne interesting setting then blow it up.
Darksun, Dragonlance, Spelljammer, Ravenloft etc.

Most of the time they'd do it via novels though, the Grand Conjunction was a bit unusual in that department. Prism Pentad blew up Dark Sun (Rise and Fall of a Sorcerer-King bounced the rubble a few times), the Chronicles blew up Dragonlance, then the Legends trilogy did it again, and the Chaos War, then the War of Souls. Faerun got blown up so many times in novels that the game material could never keep up. Rage of Dragons, War of the Purple Dragon, Return of the Shades, Threat from the Sea, Abolethic Sovereignty, Avatar Crisis, Ring of Winter, that whole business with Szass Tam...

Grand Conjunction at least let the PCs be involved. So did the original Dragonlance modules I guess. But TSR was a novel company rather than a games company for a while there, and it showed. The novels were what was blowing up the settings, the game lines were left flailing along behind.

What they SHOULD have done is put a dictum out to the novelists that it's all small-scale stories from now on, unless part of a planned and coordinated event that brought the game material along too. Like the earlier dozen-odd Drizzt books, or the Elaine Cunningham books, or Brimstone Angels - which not coincidentally, were some of the best-received FR books. Tell stories that are smaller and more local and more personal, that don't wreck the setting for everyone else. But of course that'd mean no more Elminster novels, so it was probably a non-starter.

And anyway, most of the novel-driven catastrophes were just driven by the desire to sell novels in the setting, to people who liked the setting. In fact, it was a bit of a joke at the time that FR was undergoing these continual disasters and nobody in any other novel trilogy seemed to notice, because any long-term impact had to be minimal because the Realms couldn't change too much. Dreadful worldbuilding, but at least it was contained. The upending of the Realms by the writers of 4th ed FR was a different beast. An attempt to rejig the setting largely to appeal to people who didn't like it in the first place, at the cost of people who did.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not sure what distinction you're trying to make. The narrative of a game, i.e. the story, is emergent from playing the game...the mechanics push game play in particular directions...so whatever story emerges from play is largely guided by the mechanics. Do you mean like storygames where mechanics push things like scene framing, narrative arcs, act structure, etc?

I mean storygames, yes.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Oh for sure. I hope my hyperbole was transparent - I loved 4e. I think there were some places where the foundations were slightly too transparent (naked might be the correct word), but as an instruction manual and reference it was generally very clear.

I never wanted an instruction manual from my RPG.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That just kinda blithely assumes that there weren't an awful lot of people who were enjoying playing FR exactly as it was, and blithely assumes that a large proportion of the prospective 4th ed FR customer base were not, in fact, the pre-4th ed FR customer base.

I understand what they were TRYING to do with 4th ed FR. But (much like the now-legendary pre-4th-ed marketing campaign which systematically went through half of the history of D&D and told you that it wasn't fun) I think it fell into the trap of being developed in a team that was too insular, and too focused on the question 'how should FR have been done from day 1?' rather than 'how should we proceed with FR from the current point'. They wanted to blank-slate the place.

You could have made a more player-focused FR book without blowing the setting up, if you'd wanted to. That's just a matter of emphasis in the book. Less page count devoted to Elminster and co, more to villain organisations, and plot hooks, etc - 5th ed Eberron did this extremely well. Drop a few lines in there explaining how some hand-wavy pantheon metaplot thing means that the Chosen had to largely retire from active adventuring going forward, that's how i would have addressed The Elminster Problem. You didn't NEED to throw the timeline forward a century and turn the pantheon upside down. Vast amounts of the 4th ed book were devoted to deliberately, systematically making it utterly unusable for people who just wanted to keep their existing, pre-Spellplague game going, or even those who wanted to get any use whatsoever out of their old sourcebooks in the new Realms. And it's not like this wholesale lore apocalypse was even creative destruction - in most cases it was just destruction. Entire regions of the place were dropped into the sea or converted to blasted wastelands in an off-handed paragraph or sentence and not replaced with anything useful, or interesting, or gameable.

4e FR may have been a perfectly gameable setting, when viewed in complete and utter isolation from everything that went before it. But for someone who'd been playing the Realms for a while, it was about as far from it as possible. At every turn, it went out of its way to make itself incompatible with everything that had gone before. Regardless of how it was intended, there was no way whatsoever that it was ever going to be embraced by the portion of the player base who liked the Realms as they were. And if you write an FR setting book that's 'intended to be played', surely the the people who like and are playing in the existing FR are worth considering?

Yup. Simply put, it was simply too much of a break from previous versions of the game in a lot of ways.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This sounds an awful lot like an unfair generalization, the sort of thing that ought to be avoided.

Maybe so, but I have seen it around here. A lot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This reminds me of the time TSR blew up Ravenloft with the Grand Conjunction.

I actually liked that. Made the world feel more alive to have stuff happening in it that wasn't PC-directed.