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

[billd91]

It would have been nice if he showed evidence to back up these claims.

I have no doubt that's coming. His research, which he emphasized was preliminary, is going somewhere - almost certainly toward some kind of publication. He's probably not ready to release any specific numbers yet. But if he says his research indicates that the 4e total is lower, is there a reason you're not accepting that?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Relatedly, in 5e you can grab a hold of the very melt-y gelatinous cube with a grapple, stopping them from doing anything to you, because they need to move into your space to engulf you.

Oozes are just special like that.

Rulings, not rules.

¯\(ツ)/¯

 

[darjr]

Relatedly, in 5e you can grab a hold of the very melt-y gelatinous cube with a grapple, stopping them from engulfing you, because they need to move into your space to engulf you... when your hand is already stuck to them...

Oozes are just special like that.

That’s actually reasonable vs tripping it?

It can still do acid damage to you?

 

[James Gasik]

I don't know, when it came up in a 4e game, we decided that prone applied to a Gelatinous Cube just meant it was flipped onto it's side. There's no reason to expect all faces of the cube can propel it forward- since it has no ability to stick to walls or ceilings, it may very well have an "upright" position. And tripping isn't the only way you can knock something off-balance.

You might expect that a cube would be hard to topple, but for all we know, a gelatinous cube might not weigh very much or be top-heavy. There's always explanations for things that "don't make sense", the issue, I've found is, unless there's a canon explanation written down, people create their own in their heads and seem to not want to accept an alternative.

Prone has been a funny condition since it's inception; it says it means being knocked on the ground, but really designers use it as an "unstable of off-balance" condition. Hence why you can (sometimes) knock flying or swimming creatures prone and make them fall, or (sometimes) knock creatures prone without legs.

I remember Pathfinder 1e being a bit confused about this; you couldn't knock flying creatures prone, and some creatures with tons of legs or no legs couldn't be tripped (like say, Merfolk)...but not all of them.

As an aside, I remember a funny 3.x discussion about the difference between going prone and kneeling being extremely fuzzy, and it being a move-equivalent to stand up from either state.

Rules aren't always going to line up with fluff, nor are they meant to (unless you're, say, playing GURPS). Gary Gygax himself says as much in the 1e DMG that the rules are a necessary abstraction of what is really occurring in the game world. Lots of things happen in the normal course of play that don't make much sense. Or, to paraphrase MST3K:

If you wonder how dragons fly or breath fire, or other science facts (la, la, la, la), then repeat to yourself "it's just a game, I should really just relax".

 

[overgeeked]

Do people actually think “rulings not rules” did not apply to previous WotC editions of D&D? We skipped 3X but ignored rules and added rulings all the time in 4E.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Do people actually think “rulings not rules” did not apply to previous WotC editions of D&D? We skipped 3X but ignored rules and added rulings all the time in 4E.

I think that this is true, but it also obfuscates a very real design trend.

The TSR design was always to elevate rulings and DM adjudication to "make it work."

Late 2e, especially with the various player options, started to move away from this. The design paradigm shifted in 3e, which was much more player-centric and RAW. This continued through 3e, and this design reached its best expression in 4e, which offloaded a lot of the DM's work and made the game much more explicitly player-facing and player-centric.

5e retreated from the 4e position, which is why people talk about it in terms of "rulings not rules." It doesn't go all the way back to the TSR model, but it's much closer in design spirit to that than it is to 4e.

So yes, because of the norms and the community around D&D, there has always been rulings not rules. But that design ethos has not been the same in terms of the design decisions that motivated the choices and philosophies behind the different editions.

IMO, YMMV, etc.

 

[Zeromaru X]

The format of 4e, IMO, encouraged the reader to ignore the fluff and focus on rules and effects, especially in the powers, with their italicized one sentence descriptions.

As a new DM back in the day, with a group of new players who had never played D&D before, it was good to know what were rules and what was fluff. Clear rules also meant less time discussing rulings and re-reading the books for clarifications, and more time devoted to playing.

And while we enjoyed the tactical combat part of the game, we were a quite a roleplaying bunch. That the rules were clearly separated from the fluff didn't mean we did ignore the fluff or roleplayed less because of it. I always find it odd when people say that 4e doesn't allow for roleplaying just because it doesn't have rules for what to do outside combat (as if I need rules to know what to do if the characters go to the bathroom...), when it has a lot of advice and inspiring fluff to encourage roleplaying...

An exact number of 4e sales vs the 3rd sales would have changed your mind? Vs him saying it without a number? Really?

It would have helped to know if 4e is really a "failure", as many claim. Because yes, you can say that 4e sold less than 3e, but that wasn't something exclusive to 4e. Every edition until that point has been selling less than the previous one.

 

[darjr]

I don't know, when it came up in a 4e game, we decided that prone applied to a Gelatinous Cube just meant it was flipped onto it's side. There's no reason to expect all faces of the cube can propel it forward- since it has no ability to stick to walls or ceilings, it may very well have an "upright" position.

They do have a climb speed

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It would have helped to know if 4e is really a "failure", as many claim. Because yes, you can say that 4e sold less than 3e, but that wasn't something exclusive to 4e. Every edition until that point has been selling less than the previous one.

It's a comparative resource issue and an expectations issue (I've done a deep dive on this in the past).

In other words, Hasbro spent significant resources on the development of 4e with the expectation that it would be a massive success, and also lead to a lot of sweet, sweet recurring revenue.

Instead, they ended up not meeting their expectations (not even close), and causing a new competition (PF) to gain significant market share.

This isn't a design fault of 4e- there were a number of reasons for this, including but not limited to a poor launch in terms of marketing the product, unrealistic expectations by Hasbro, and launching the product when the great recession was starting.

But there's a reason that 4e was dead internally by the time that Essentials launched, and that 5e was shepherded by the equivalent of a skeleton crew.

(I would further add that there might be a lesson in that 4e suffered from corporate meddling and unfair corporate expectations, while 5e was allowed to proceed under the radar ... and that might also be relevant to what is currently going on .... but we will see.)

 

[Mannahnin]

As a new DM back in the day, with a group of new players who had never played D&D before, it was good to know what were rules and what was fluff. Clear rules also meant less time discussing rulings and re-reading the books for clarifications, and more time devoted to playing.

And while we enjoyed the tactical combat part of the game, we were a quite a roleplaying bunch. That the rules were clearly separated from the fluff didn't mean we did ignore the fluff or roleplayed less because of it. I always find it odd when people say that 4e doesn't allow for roleplaying just because it doesn't have rules for what to do outside combat (as if I need rules to know what to do if the characters go to the bathroom...), when it has a lot of advice and inspiring fluff to encourage roleplaying...

TBF it has a lot of rules and content for outside combat. The Skill Challenge system is the most developed system any edition has ever had for extended task resolution outside of combat or a single skill check. I think a lot of folks see the big lists of powers and their eyes glaze over a bit, where in other editions that kind of content is mostly confined to the spell lists.