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

[Lanefan]

I'm not aware of any such rule, and to me it seems quite unrealistic that a warrior carrying a shield would be using it to deflect/block only 1 in 10 (or thereabouts) of blows.

Meh - it maps the narrative to the mechanics. In 1e RAW a shield gives 1 point* of AC, so if that last point is what makes the attack a miss it's logical enough to say the shield is what made the difference.

* - we houseruled it to give 2 points, and 7 years later 2e caught up with us.

 

[Lanefan]

These aren't descriptions of someone abandoning a skill challenge. They are things that might occur during a skill challenge, as part of its resolution.

Except with what I'm speaking of the skill challenge is abandoned before it resolves, during the rolling process.

 

[overgeeked]

I am quite curious about that world. If one applied the same process that got us from 3.5-> Eberron to 5e, what does that resulting setting look like?

The best place to start is cantrips. Infinite free energy of just about all types. Mold earth. Shape water. There have been threads about how potent move earth would be. It's kinda wild depending on how you interpret things.

 

[James Gasik]

I am quite curious about that world. If one applied the same process that got us from 3.5-> Eberron to 5e, what does that resulting setting look like?

Since you asked nicely...

 

[Lanefan]

But the rules say you have to pick a class when creating a character! What happened to consistency?

The game assumes you're playing one of the setting inhabitants who has decided to pick up a class.

But consider this (and it's happened in my games more than once): the characters meet an NPC. They have dealngs with that NPC, and get to know it some. It becomes an ally, or a known contact, or whatever. Let's say the PCs know it to be a Thief.

Then, out of the blue a player says "Can I take over that Thief to play as my character?".

In my view, I-as-DM should be able to say "Sure, here you go, feel free to flesh out my bare-bones notes on it". I shouldn't need to make any changes to the character's underlying mechanics in order to flip it from an NPC to a PC.

Conversely, when a player decides to retire a PC that character's mechanics don't change in the slightest.

It's not about Mending. It's about every single cantrip being so easily available changing the world.

Yeah, the 5e designers didn't think through some of the world-building knock-ons when they came up with some of this stuff.

 

[Gammadoodler]

The game assumes you're playing one of the setting inhabitants who has decided to pick up a class.

But consider this (and it's happened in my games more than once): the characters meet an NPC. They have dealngs with that NPC, and get to know it some. It becomes an ally, or a known contact, or whatever. Let's say the PCs know it to be a Thief.

Then, out of the blue a player says "Can I take over that Thief to play as my character?".

In my view, I-as-DM should be able to say "Sure, here you go, feel free to flesh out my bare-bones notes on it". I shouldn't need to make any changes to the character's underlying mechanics in order to flip it from an NPC to a PC.

Conversely, when a player decides to retire a PC that character's mechanics don't change in the slightest.

Yeah, the 5e designers didn't think through some of the world-building knock-ons when they came up with some of this stuff.

I think there is a fair amount of daylight between..

No one except the PCs are in any way exceptional.

and

PCs are not in any way exceptional vs any other NPC.

And I'd posit that most games live within that daylight.

PCs are exceptional vs. the broader population, but not exclusively so. The broader population does not have class levels, while PCs and other similarly exceptional folks do.

As these already somewhat exceptional characters gain experience, confront dangers, learn dark secrets, are exposed to exotic energies and other magics, they gain capabilities that further differentiate themselves from the broader population.

How much you may have to change an NPC to convert it to a PC is, frankly more about DM prep than any underlying characteristics of the world. You build your NPCs for the storytelling purpose they serve in the way you find most useful.

If you only set them up to assist in picking a lock, or some light infiltration, you might only focus on those things. If you expect them to assassinate a few guards, you might kit them to do that. Maybe you go the whole way and decide to do a full-fledged character build for them. Or.. naybe you just handwave the prep, and say they succeed at whatever task you need them to succeed at and fail when you need them to fail.

None of these are wrong ways to set up your NPC, and none of them say anything particularly meaningful about the world, but the amount of effort to convert them to a PC will vary wildly.

The only dissonance that would exist would be if you had already set out to make that NPC obviously more or less capable than the PCs and the players had been exposed to that gap in capability.

 

[Micah Sweet]

But the rules say you have to pick a class when creating a character! What happened to consistency?


It's not about Mending. It's about every single cantrip being so easily available changing the world.

I'm on record as not being a fan of infinite cantrips.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Where were all of you when the Warrior, Aristocratic, Commoner, and Adept classes were getting axed?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Where were all of you when the Warrior, Aristocratic, Commoner, and Adept classes were getting axed?

I miss those too.

 

[cbwjm]

I did quite like the 3e NPC classes as a means for describing NPCs that weren't quite up to the PC class standard. The different NPC design philosophies of 4e/5e rendered them obsolete, but I still wouldn't mind seeing an NPC class, if only for a different style of game (common people thrown into a dungeon)