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

[cbwjm]

For what is worth, I never had "rules" disagreement while running free-forms, but I've had quite a few while running fully-fledged games.

I've never played free form games other than when I was a kid running around in the backyard with my cousins imagining being transformers. I've no idea exactly how free form games work, but all I'm imagining is "Bang, bang, got you!"; "no you didn't, I dodged!"

 

[Nikosandros]

I've never played free form games other than when I was a kid running around in the backyard with my cousins imagining being transformers. I've no idea exactly how free form games work, but all I'm imagining is "Bang, bang, got you!"; "no you didn't, I dodged!"

Well, your imagination is falling way short of the mark...

 

[darjr]

I've never played free form games other than when I was a kid running around in the backyard with my cousins imagining being transformers. I've no idea exactly how free form games work, but all I'm imagining is "Bang, bang, got you!"; "no you didn't, I dodged!"

Yes. Ever play D&D with kids? The rules won’t help you.

 

[cbwjm]

One thing with 4e is, I think, that it leaned two hard into the mechanical side, as well as creating the same levelling structures for each class. This meant that each class needed a few pages of powers to match every other class, and I feel like the presentation (which I think matters) fell short for a lot of people. It's been my long held belief that, had they started with the essential classes that the game would have been better received.

 

[Lanefan]

IME 10-15 minutes like you're citing is a good rest period for a period of exertion considerably longer than an action movie or D&D fight. It's obviously subjective based on our prior experiences, but I don't think that an hour is inherently any more intuitive a minimal break to refresh between fights than five minutes is.

To the contrary, like Voadam, I find that an hour is too long to maintain credibility with an action movie-style pacing, ...

Reading through the thread up to here (page 13 of 31), I've seen this call for action-movie emulation come up several times.

I posit that a D&D campaign isn't an action movie, and that to even try to achieve or maintain such a pace for longer than a single scene is a fool's errand and doomed to failure. That kind of pace just isn't sustainable if one wants to keep even a shred of realism in the setting.

 

[Lanefan]

Okay. Though it is one way to make sense of things. Instead of reading a thing then immediately rejecting it, read further and try to work out why it is the way it is. Before throwing up your hands and saying it doesn't make sense and is therefore bad, you take the time to try to work out why it is that way. The rules say it works, but there's no lore to explain it. Okay...so fill in the necessary lore to make the rules make sense. It's just as valid as extensive lore then applying the rules to that. It's likely less frustrating as well.

Sorry, but if-when common sense and the rules come into conflict then common sense is gonna win out pretty much every damn time.

Common sense says you can't trip something that's cube-shaped (thus is very well-balanced) and jelly-like (thus can morph itself around whatever is trying to trip it), so no tripping Gel-Cubes for you and I don't care how many feats and skills you put into your trip ability. (the only exception would be if the Cube was on a steep slope you might be able to get it to fall downhill, but that's kinda rare)

Some rules (in all editions) just get it wrong and need to be changed.

 

[Lanefan]

Because it leads to unnecessary bloat. Fewer more broadly applicable systems take up less space than bespoke rules for every imaginable edge case.

The problem with and broadly applicable system is that designers come up with one and then try to use it for everything, where it only really works for a small to moderate percentage of things. Examples: d20 in 3e or advantage/disadvantage in 5e.

Bespoke subsystems are the answer for things that come up relatively often but don't fit the broad-system mold. As a very pleasant side effect, bespoke (and discrete) subsystems are also far easier to kitbash or modify, as you're not knocking-on to the whole rest of the game system in the process.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Because physics tells us that you can't trip a featureless cube.

Physics also once thought bees shouldn't be able to fly.

There's all sort of stuff out there that conflict with a person's beliefs. Life is stranger then fiction.

 

[cbwjm]

Physics also once thought bees shouldn't be able to fly.

There's all sort of stuff out there that conflict with a person's beliefs. Life is stranger then fiction.

Yeah, but tripping a jelly cube is kind of on the weird side. I mean jelly cubes are also on the weird side, but still...

 

[darjr]

Yeah, but tripping a jelly cube is kind of on the weird side. I mean jelly cubes are also on the weird side, but still...

Yea, you don't even get any acid damage!