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

[James Gasik]

I thought the issue people had with knocking a cube prone was due to it's shape, lol. Weights in D&D bring up entirely new issues. Canonically (at least according to the internet), a gelatinous cube weights 50,000 pounds. Obviously, if we assume the thing is actually 10 x 10 x 10 (which it probably isn't, as creatures don't typically take up their entire space) and it did weigh as much as water, it would have a staggering weight.

But then you have to ask questions about how dungeon floors support it, does it's weight go up to include things it's consumed, is there mass displacement as a result, how does it avoid falling into traps that are triggered by heavy things moving onto them, are the typically mid-Strength cubes affected by encumbrance of things they eat, if a cube did fall into a pit could it actually escape one if it lacks a climb speed, and other silly science facts that D&D never really takes into account (see discussions of flying dragons and gross violations of not just the square cube law, but generally most of physics as we know it).

And that's usually a rabbit hole best left unexplored. Obviously, if weight is a factor, many abilities that reference size not weight run into some issues as to whether they can be shoved/pulled/grappled/knocked prone...again, best not to think about it too much. "Realism" has little place when discussing the fantastic, and a gelatinous cube is definitely that.

Since a few people took issue with my statement about 4e not being designed to be modded, I'll retract it. I don't have any real facts to back it up. 4e isn't any more or less solid state than any other version of D&D, in my opinion, but there are a lot of working parts under the hood that made it difficult to start making changes without finding yourself rather surprised at how those changes affected other parts of the system.

Some parts of 4e could get intricate, and the people who wrote content for it often did things in ways that were counterintuitive. For example, the biggest rules debate I ever had with the game-

The game has Immediate Reactions and Immediate Interrupts. A reaction occurs after it's trigger resolves. An interrupt occurs before it's trigger resolves (thus allowing you to, aha, interrupt it's trigger).

But a lot of times, people would use reactions when they should have used interrupts. For example, a tale of two abilities:

Ability one is a reaction that has, as it's trigger, "when you take damage from an attack". Ok, I'm attacked, I take damage, the ability triggers.

Ability two is a reaction that has, as it's trigger, "when you are targeted by an attack". Ok, I'm targeted and then...well, the ability triggers, before the attack roll is made or I even take damage.

But what if Ability two does something that would negate the attack from being made in the first place? Quickly, two camps emerged. "Reactions are reactions, and interrupts are interrupts", said one. "If it's not an interrupt, it can't interrupt an attack, period."

The second camp said "reactions are to their trigger, and if the reaction makes the attack impossible, oh well". Honestly, at this point, I can't even recall what the official statement was on this (I think it supported the second camp, but either way, members of the first camp were not convinced). And this could have been completely avoided if the people making content had decided to label anything that could interrupt an attack as just that.

I saw this actually unfold over several sessions with my Living Forgotten Realms group. One player had a Drow Warlock. He took a series of Feats that improved his Darkness ability. One session, he unfurled his new ability to, as a reaction before an attack was rolled, use his Darkness, thus imposing a -5 penalty on the attack roll. The DM at that time was annoyed, as they felt it shouldn't work that way, but relented.

Then a few sessions later, he took another Feat, which said "as a reaction to using Darkness, he can move his speed". So instead of just imposing a -5 penalty to hit, he could now simply move out of the range of the attack. This was the point when the DM said "hell no!", and the great Immediate Reaction War began, lol.

I don't even remember how it was eventually resolved (again, I think it was ruled that reactions to triggers happen before anything else does, and so it worked as the player thought it did), but there really wasn't any reason it should have happened in the first place.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Is it? It's the same setting where you can survive the falling damage at any height past a certain level.

Ummm cats???

 

[FrogReaver]

Oh. I hate memes.

There's a meme for that!

 

[Micah Sweet]

Anyway, I see now the real problem with 4e is that it doesn't implement weight rules for cubes.

So in any other edition of D&D can PCs grappled dragons (or cubes, or elephants, or . . .)? Can a dragon crush a PC to death just by landing on them? Or is this interest in size and weight only relevant to this one case?

I would take it into consideration in any game in which it occurs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think picking skill challenges is an interesting tactic. They really were so ill conceived and it seemed they just threw there hands up before printing. It’s one of the few exceptions to the philosophy of 4e. I’ll grant you that. In part I think skill challenges were such a challenge for the 4e designers was, in part, BECAUSE it went against the philosophy of the rest of the system.

Yes, I do think that 4es philosophy at its core with powers etc means fiction doesn’t matter at the altar of the rules. And I think it was a conscious decision at some point. Lock-in was really a part of the strategy for 4e from the rules to the digital effort to the license.

They are a beautiful an ingenious mechanic. The fact that you denigrate one of the aspects of 4e that most enables it as a really excellent narrativist system is telling IMHO. It doesn't go against the rest of the system AT ALL. At most it is an acknowledgement that attempting to completely parameterize the vast range of "this is not combat" activities that come up in an RPG requires a pretty open-ended framework, but the provision OF such a framework is very much in keeping with the way 4e's overall design works and its aims.

I think this whole 'fiction doesn't matter' thing is, AT BEST, a gross mischaracterization. I mean, ALL of my 4e play is heavily marked by extremely dynamic action sequences in which the fiction is overwhelmingly important! No other system compares with it in the D&D sphere in terms of doing this stuff BECAUSE you can rely on how actions will be adjudicated, and then spin from there! Its awesome. All the crazy stuff that I yearned to see happen in AD&D but which players are trained to run away from in fear because any risk is anathema to survival in that game all come to life amazingly in 4e.

 

[darjr]

They are a beautiful an ingenious mechanic. The fact that you denigrate one of the aspects of 4e that most enables it as a really excellent narrativist system is telling IMHO. It doesn't go against the rest of the system AT ALL. At most it is an acknowledgement that attempting to completely parameterize the vast range of "this is not combat" activities that come up in an RPG requires a pretty open-ended framework, but the provision OF such a framework is very much in keeping with the way 4e's overall design works and its aims.

I think this whole 'fiction doesn't matter' thing is, AT BEST, a gross mischaracterization. I mean, ALL of my 4e play is heavily marked by extremely dynamic action sequences in which the fiction is overwhelmingly important! No other system compares with it in the D&D sphere in terms of doing this stuff BECAUSE you can rely on how actions will be adjudicated, and then spin from there! Its awesome. All the crazy stuff that I yearned to see happen in AD&D but which players are trained to run away from in fear because any risk is anathema to survival in that game all come to life amazingly in 4e.

Denegrate?

As a mechanic when it came out the math was wrong. How many times did they rework it? Three times? Within the Living Forgotten realms writers WotC pretty much had to demand that skill challenges be included.

How many videos did Mike make explaining it? More than any other mechanic.

How many debates and discussions where there over using combat powers during skill challenges or just clever tactics vs rolling skills?

I find many folks who like skill challenges are using them not as presented originally but some version of it that came later on in 4es lifecycle.

Are you really going to tell me it was so great as first conceived?

Denigrate? Like it’s a person?

 

[Zeromaru X]

this whole 'fiction doesn't matter' thing

I guess that what they wanted to say with this was: "fiction (as I think it should be) doesn't matter"

 

[pemerton]

I thought the issue people had with knocking a cube prone was due to it's shape, lol. Weights in D&D bring up entirely new issues. Canonically (at least according to the internet), a gelatinous cube weights 50,000 pounds. Obviously, if we assume the thing is actually 10 x 10 x 10 (which it probably isn't, as creatures don't typically take up their entire space) and it did weigh as much as water, it would have a staggering weight.

But then you have to ask questions about how dungeon floors support it, does it's weight go up to include things it's consumed, is there mass displacement as a result, how does it avoid falling into traps that are triggered by heavy things moving onto them, are the typically mid-Strength cubes affected by encumbrance of things they eat, if a cube did fall into a pit could it actually escape one if it lacks a climb speed, and other silly science facts that D&D never really takes into account (see discussions of flying dragons and gross violations of not just the square cube law, but generally most of physics as we know it).

And that's usually a rabbit hole best left unexplored. Obviously, if weight is a factor, many abilities that reference size not weight run into some issues as to whether they can be shoved/pulled/grappled/knocked prone...again, best not to think about it too much. "Realism" has little place when discussing the fantastic, and a gelatinous cube is definitely that.

100% to all this. The idea that issues of weight and size- eg how does a Halfling overbear a Gnoll; why in 3E can only a huge dragon perform a crush attack (because being as big as a rhino isn't big enough to squash a Halfling?); how does a thief's dagger blade actually kill a gelatinous cube? - are handwaved at every point until we get to the prone effect being applied to a gelatinous cube, and now we have the proverbial back-crushing straw, is hard for me to take seriously

Since a few people took issue with my statement about 4e not being designed to be modded, I'll retract it. I don't have any real facts to back it up. 4e isn't any more or less solid state than any other version of D&D, in my opinion, but there are a lot of working parts under the hood that made it difficult to start making changes without finding yourself rather surprised at how those changes affected other parts of the system.

Some parts of 4e could get intricate, and the people who wrote content for it often did things in ways that were counterintuitive. For example, the biggest rules debate I ever had with the game-

The game has Immediate Reactions and Immediate Interrupts. A reaction occurs after it's trigger resolves. An interrupt occurs before it's trigger resolves (thus allowing you to, aha, interrupt it's trigger).

But a lot of times, people would use reactions when they should have used interrupts. For example, a tale of two abilities:

Ability one is a reaction that has, as it's trigger, "when you take damage from an attack". Ok, I'm attacked, I take damage, the ability triggers.

Ability two is a reaction that has, as it's trigger, "when you are targeted by an attack". Ok, I'm targeted and then...well, the ability triggers, before the attack roll is made or I even take damage.

But what if Ability two does something that would negate the attack from being made in the first place? Quickly, two camps emerged. "Reactions are reactions, and interrupts are interrupts", said one. "If it's not an interrupt, it can't interrupt an attack, period."

The second camp said "reactions are to their trigger, and if the reaction makes the attack impossible, oh well". Honestly, at this point, I can't even recall what the official statement was on this (I think it supported the second camp, but either way, members of the first camp were not convinced). And this could have been completely avoided if the people making content had decided to label anything that could interrupt an attack as just that.

I saw this actually unfold over several sessions with my Living Forgotten Realms group. One player had a Drow Warlock. He took a series of Feats that improved his Darkness ability. One session, he unfurled his new ability to, as a reaction before an attack was rolled, use his Darkness, thus imposing a -5 penalty on the attack roll. The DM at that time was annoyed, as they felt it shouldn't work that way, but relented.

Then a few sessions later, he took another Feat, which said "as a reaction to using Darkness, he can move his speed". So instead of just imposing a -5 penalty to hit, he could now simply move out of the range of the attack. This was the point when the DM said "hell no!", and the great Immediate Reaction War began, lol.

I don't even remember how it was eventually resolved (again, I think it was ruled that reactions to triggers happen before anything else does, and so it worked as the player thought it did), but there really wasn't any reason it should have happened in the first place.

Aren't you identifying instances of designer errors? I have some vague recollection of an ability that needed to be "no action" being a "free action" or something like that. I just fixed it.

I'm not saying that the technical work on 4e was perfect. I solved the "weapliment" weapon focus issue at my table well before an official errata was issued. As I mentioned upthread, I'm pretty sure I fixed the Deathlock Wight's fear-effect damage to psychic. And so on.

But I don't think AD&D was free from rules uncertainty just because it was structured with less technical care as a ruleset!

 

[pemerton]

How many debates and discussions where there over using combat powers during skill challenges

None at my table.

or just clever tactics vs rolling skills?

Clever tactics are what open up skills. This is why fiction matters.

Here are two examples:

On the weekend I ran my first session of 4e that invovled only social interaction. So I thought I'd post about how it went.

The starting point
The PCs are low paragon - a dwarf fighter/warpriest of Moradin, a paladin of the Raven Queen, a wizard/invoker, a drow chaos sorcerer/demonskin adept, and a ranger-cleric of the Raven Queen. The player of the ranger-cleric was absent from the session.

The scenario combines elements of Thunderspire Labyringth (a 4e module), Heathen (from a 2008 online Dragon magazine), Speaker in Dreams (a 3E module from WotC) and Night's Dark Terror (a B/X module from TSR), plus some other elements of my own.

The PCs have recently entered a town which is under increasing pressure from hobgoblin and allied raiders. The town is ruled by a Patriarch of Bahamut and a Baron. The PCs are still getting the lay of the political land.

The PCs entered the town as heroes, having saved an affiliated village from being destroyed by hobgoblins. They were lauded by the Patriarch, and invited to join the Baron for dinner that evening. Later that day they then went on to stop an uprising by Demogorgon/Dagon cultists, and to cleanse the cultists' headquarters. In the headquarters, they rescued a priestess of Ioun who had been chained down next to a gibbering mouther, and had gone insane from the constant gibbering - the wizard cured her insanity using Remove Affliction.

The session begain with the PCs talking to the rescued priestess, and interrogating the one surviving and captured cultist.

Talking to the NPCs
This was almost entirely free roleplaying. The PC paladin had made a successful Intimidate check last session to cow the cultist and stop him running away. He made another check this session to interrogate him - the check was sufficiently high (in the high 20s or low 30s, from memory) that I decided nothing would be held back by the cultist. Some other skill rolls were made (History, Arcana) to see what sense the PCs could make of some of the things that the cultist revealed.

The conversations with the cultist and with the priestess happened side-by-side in play, and mostly side-by-side in the fiction. Three PCs were heavily involved - the paladin interrogating the cultist, the wizard and the sorcerer talking to the priestess. The dwarf was less heavily involved in the conversation, but the player of the dwarf was helping the other players put together and make sense of the information being obtained.

I awarded XP as per the guidelines in DMG2 - one monster's worth for 15 minutes of play.

Two revelations had the biggest immediate impact. One involved the PCs' principal enemy. This is the leader of the hobgoblins, a powerful wizard called Paldemar (but called Golthar in Goblinish). The PCs learned that in the town he is not known to be a villain, but is apparently well-thought of, is an important scholar and astrologer, is an advisor to the Baron, and is engaged to the Baron's niece. The PCs (and the players) became worried that he might be at dinner that evening. This was a worry for two reasons - (i) they didn't really want to fight him, and (ii) they know some secrets about an ancient minotaur kingdom that he does not, but has been trying to discover. One of those secrets involves a magic tapestry that the PCs carry around with them (becaue they don't have anywhere safe to leave it).

The second revelation was that the Baron was prophesied to die that night. The paladin had already sensed a catoblepas in the swamps outside the town, and had sensed it approaching the town earlier that day. The priestess explained that a year ago the Baron had been visited by a catoblepas, as a type of forewarning. And the cultist explained that the uprising had taken place today in anticipation of the Baron's imminent demise.

After learning these things, the PCs cleaned up in the cultists' bathroom and then hurried off to dinner.

The dinner
The PCs arrived late, and were the last ones there. On the high table they could see the Baron, and his sister and brother-in-law, and also Paldemar, their wizard enemy. They left their more gratuitous weapons - a halberd for the dwarf and a longbow for the ranger - with the dwarf's herald - an NPC dwarf minion called Gutboy Barrelhouse - and took their seats at the high table. Gutboy was also carrying the backpack with the tapestry.

The PCs also noticed a series of portraits hanging behind the high table. One had a young woman, who was the spitting image of a wizard's apprentice they had recently freed from a trapping mirror - except that adventure had happened 100 years in the past (under a time displacement ritual), and this painting was clearly newly painted. Another, older, painting was of a couple, a man resembling the Baron, and a woman resmembling the rescued apprentice but at an older age.

About this time the players started talking about the skill checks they wanted to make, and I asked them what they were hoping to achieve. Their main goal was to get through the evening without upsetting the baron, without getting into a fight with Paldemar (which meant, at a minimum, not outing him as the leader of the hobgoblin raiders), and without revealing any secrets to him. In particular, they didn't want him to learn that they had found the tapestry, and that it was in fact 15' away from him in Gutboy's backpack. But it also quickly became clear that they wanted to learn about the people in the portraits, to try and learn what had happened over the past 100 years to the apprentice they freed, and how she related to the Baron's family.

This whole scene was resolved as a complexity 5 skill challenge. It ran for more than an hour, but probably not more than two. The general pattern involved - Paldemar asking the PCs about their exploits; either the paladin or the sorcerer using Bluff to defuse the question and/or evade revealing various secrets they didn't want Paldemar to know; either the paladin or the wizard then using Diplomacy to try to change the topic of conversation to something else - including the Baron's family history; and Paldemar dragging things back onto the PCs exploits and discoveries over the course of their adventures.

Following advice given by LostSoul on these boards back in the early days of 4e, my general approach to running the skill challenge was to keep pouring on the pressure, so as to give the players a reason to have their PCs do things. And one particular point of pressure was the dwarf fighter/cleric - in two senses. In story terms, he was the natural focus of the Baron's attention, because the PCs had been presenting him as their leader upon entering the town, and subsequently. And the Baron was treating him as, in effect, a noble peer, "Lord Derrik of the Dwarfholm to the East". And in mechanical terms, he has no training in social skills and a CHA of 10, so putting the pressure on him forced the players to work out how they would save the situation, and stop the Baron inadvertantly, or Paldemar deliberately, leading Derrik into saying or denying something that would give away secrets. (Up until the climax of the challenge, the only skill check that Derriks' player made in contribution to the challenge was an Athletics check - at one point the Baron described himself as a man of action rather than ideas, and Derrik agreed - I let his player make an Athletics check - a very easy check for him with a +15 bonus - to make the fact of agreement contribute mechanically to the party's success in dealing with the situation.)

Besides the standard skill checks, other strategies were used to defuse the tension at various points. About half way through, the sorcerer - feigning drunkenness with his +20 Bluff bonus - announced "Derrik, it's time to take a piss" - and then led Derrik off to the privy, and then up onto the balcony with the minstrel, so that Paldemar couldn't keep goading and trying to ensnare him. At another point, when the conversation turned to how one might fight a gelatinous cube (Paldemar having explained that he had failed in exploring one particular minotaur ruin because of some cubes, and the PCs not wanting to reveal that they had explored that same ruin after beating the cubes) the sorcerer gave an impromptu demonstration by using Bedevilling Burst to knock over the servants carrying in the jellies for desert. (I as GM had mentioned that desert was being brought in. It was the player who suggested that it should probably include jellies.) That he cast Bedevilling Burst he kept secret (another Bluff check). But he loudly made the point that jellies can be squashed at least as easily as anything else.

While fresh jellies were prepared, Derrik left the table to give a demonstration of how one might fight oozes using a halberd and fancy footwork. But he then had to return to the table for desert.

Around this time, the challenge had evolved to a point where one final roll was needed, and 2 failures had been accrued. Paldemar, once again, was badgering Derrik to try to learn the secrets of the minotaur ruins that he was sure the PCs knew. And the player of Derrik was becoming more and more frustrated with the whole situation, declaring (not speaking in character, but speaking from the perspective of his PC) "I'm sick of putting up with this. I want Paldemar to come clean."

The Baron said to Derrik, "The whole evening, Lord Derrik, it has seemed to me that you are burdened by something. Will you not speak to me?" Derrik got out of his seat and went over to the Baron, knelt beside him, and whispered to him, telling him that out of decorum he would not name anyone, but there was someone close to the Baron who was not what he seemed, and was in fact a villainous leader of the hobgoblin raiders. The Baron asked how he knew this, and Derrik replied that he had seen him flying out of goblin strongholds on his flying carpet. The Baron asked him if he would swear this in Moradin's name. Derrik replied "I swear". At which point the Baron rose from the table and went upstairs to brood on the balcony, near the minstrel.

With one check still needed to resolve the situation, I had Paldemar turn to Derrik once again, saying "You must have said something very serious, to so upset the Baron." Derrik's player was talking to the other players, and trying to decide what to do. He clearly wanted to fight. I asked him whether he really wanted to provoke Paldemar into attacking him. He said that he did. So he had Derrik reply to Paldemar, 'Yes, I did, Golthar". And made an Intimidate check. Which failed by one. So the skill challenge was over, but a failure - I described Paldemar/Golthar standing up, pickup up his staff from where it leaned against the wall behind him, and walking towards the door.

Now we use a houserule (perhaps, in light of DMG2, not so much a houserule as a precisification of a suggestion in that book) that a PC can spend an action point to make a secondary check to give another PC a +2 bonus, or a reroll, to a failed check. The player of the wizard PC spent an action point, and called out "Golthar, have you fixed the tear yet in your robe?" - this was a reference to the fact that the PCs had, on a much earlier occasion, found a bit of the hem of Paldemar's robe that had torn off in the ruins when he had had to flee the gelatinous cubes. I can't remember now whether I asked for an Intimidate check, or decided that this was an automatic +2 bonus for Derrik - but in any event, it turned the failure into a success. We ended the session by noting down everyone's location on the map of the Baron's great hall, and making initiative rolls. Next session will begin with the fight against Paldemar (which may or may not evolve into a fight with a catoblepas also - the players are a bit anxious that it may do so).

This is the most sophisticated skill challenge I've run to date, in terms of the subtlety of the framing, the degree of back and forth (two major PCs with whom the PCs were interacting, with different stakes in the interaction with each of them), my concentration on evolving the scene to reflect the skill checks and the other action while still keeping up the pressure on the players (and on their PCs), and the goals of the players, which started out a little uncertain and somewhat mixed, but ended up being almost the opposite of what they were going into the challenge.

He invited them back to his home, where it quickly became clear that he didn't really want their company, but rather wanted them to help him with a problem - he was expecting a visit in a few days from his Duke overlord, but his special apple grove was not fruiting as it normally would.

This was an adaptation to 4e mechanics and backstory of the scenario "The Demon of the Red Grove" in Robin Laws's HeroWars Narrator's Book. The reason for the trees in the grove not fruiting is that a demon, long bound there, has recently been awoken but remains trapped within the grove, and hence is cursing the trees. Mechanically, this was resolved as a skill challenge. First the PCs had to endure the demon's three cries of "Go Away!" (group checks, with failing PCs taking psychic damage - the sorcerer, who is also a multi-class bard, was the most flamboyant here, spending his Rhythm of Disorientation encounter power to open up the use of Diplomacy for the check, which in the fiction was him singing a song of apples blossoming in the summer). Somewhere during this process the cleric-ranger and invoker both succeeded at Perception checks and could hear the high-pitched whistling of a song bird. And the sorcerer's Arcana check revealed the presence of the demon - an ancient and mighty glabrezu (level 27 solo, as I told the players in order to try to convey the requisite sense of gravity).

At this point I thought they would attack the demon, but they decided to speak to it first, to find out how it had got there and what it was doing there. With successful Diplomacy checks they learned that it had been summoned long ago during the Dawn War ("When Miska's armies were marshalling on the Plain of a Thousand Portals") by a powerful drow who had come into the Abyss, in order to ambush a strong and cruel sorceress. But the sorceress had defeated it and trapped it in the grove. When they asked it the name of the sorceress, it replied that the name had been erased from its memory - at which point the player of the paladin of the Raven Queen worked out the sorceress was his mistress, and the player of the drow worked out that the ambusher must be Lolth. They also learned that it had been woken a year ago by an NPC wizard who was, earlier in the campaign, a nemesis of the PCs, as part of his attempts to learn the true name of the Raven Queen.

They then debated whether to bargain with it, but doubted its promise that "My word is my bond." The player of the invoker decided to use the Adjure ritual - that works on immortal creatures only, so he used it to try and change the immortal magic of the Raven Queen that was binding the demon. Instead of being trapped in the grove, they wanted the demon to instead go forth and fight frost giants and formorians. A roll was made (with help from the paladin, the ranger-cleric (who is also a Raven Queen devotee) and the sorcerer (who hates the giants because they serve evil primordials and he serves Chan, a "good" archomental). Unfortunately the roll was not very high, which meant that even with the bonuses it didn't achieve a full success, so the demon is bound for a week only - and hence was quite cheerful as it flew off to the north to beat up on frost giants.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I guess that what they wanted to say with this was: "fiction (as I think it should be) doesn't matter"

Fiction doesn't matter to rules adjudication, because the game encourages you to make up something so the rule as written makes sense. Thus, the rules trump the fiction. You can make the fiction important to your game, but it's not important to the rules.