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

[Pedantic]

It's not either, or. They're not mutually exclusive. They both point to the same conclusion: it's pointless to try to write rules for everything.

Yes, like I said, you get it from both sides.

First, you literally can't write comprehensive rules for every possible situation that might come up. Second, even if you could, the referee is still in charge of the game and decides everything that's in the world, including the difficulty you're rolling against.

Bullnaughty word. You can get more than close enough for television on both fronts, by determinining what's likely to happen, and by maintaining a professional stance that requires an internal division of labor and it's only ideological purity on both sides that prevents anyone from trying.

So do it yourself.

Do I look like a game designer? I'm arguing about TTRPGs on the internet!

In all seriousness, I do what I can and I pay the few people doing things I like to keep doing them as I can. I'm proud to be one of Scott Gearin's incredibly few patrons among other things, for example.

No, it's not dead. There's still Pathfinder and you can still play 3X to your heart's content. Limited only by the willingness of others to play with you or for you to play solo.

But as a design ethos and a norm, they very much are dead and that is a problem. I can believe 3e was directionally correct, and yet also not fundamentally very good. I have hacked and researched and put together the corpses of old 3PP, fan projects and so on to get it closer and I'm not displeased with the outcome, but that is not what I actually want. I want new and interesting designs and expansion of ideas that frankly still feel pretty nascent to me.

3X and 4E are the high points of "mechanics for everything" in D&D design. The players and designers simply got tired of it, exhausted by the rigor, so abandoned it for "rulings not rules." Nothing's stopping you or others from designing that way. A lot of other games do, along with a lot of 3PP supplements for 5E.

Yes, I know very well what happened with 5e, and the world being what it is play a lot of modified 5e with precisely that kind of 3PP, and it isn't fundamentally what I want to be doing or discussing, or finding community around, but needs must and all that. It's simply tiring to have no progress and to feel part of an excluded middle.

I've always found the "many flavors so everyone can get what they want!" arguments disingenuous. If what you want is a heavy ruleset that attempts to cover all eventualities, you actually need a quite large company quite regularly publishing product unless you're going to use an older system. It's only when you're dealing with lighter rulesets or more generic resolution models that you can have a flourishing diversity, because those products require less work and support to maintain and use. It's why it's so frustrating that those games are dead; there was design progress left there, and I don't particularly like being told we're done with it.

 

[overgeeked]

Yes, like I said, you get it from both sides.

I hold both of those positions. There are no "sides" involved.

Bullnaughty word. You can get more than close enough for television on both fronts, by determinining what's likely to happen, and by maintaining a professional stance that requires an internal division of labor and it's only ideological purity on both sides that prevents anyone from trying.

Tactical infinity. Infinity. Anything can happen. You cannot possibly design specific rules to cover literally every possibility.

The best you could hope for is a few, broadly applicable rules that hopefully cover everything...and then make rulings to fill in the gaps. Like what medium and light RPGs do.

Do I look like a game designer? I'm arguing about TTRPGs on the internet!

Again, they're not mutually exclusive.

Yes, I know very well what happened with 5e, and the world being what it is play a lot of modified 5e with precisely that kind of 3PP, and it isn't fundamentally what I want to be doing or discussing, or finding community around, but needs must and all that. It's simply tiring to have no progress and to feel part of an excluded middle.

I've always found the "many flavors so everyone can get what they want!" arguments disingenuous. If what you want is a heavy ruleset that attempts to cover all eventualities, you actually need a quite large company quite regularly publishing product unless you're going to use an older system. It's only when you're dealing with lighter rulesets or more generic resolution models that you can have a flourishing diversity, because those products require less work and support to maintain and use. It's why it's so frustrating that those games are dead; there was design progress left there, and I don't particularly like being told we're done with it.

Rules heavy sells. Rules light doesn't. It's not hard to see why publishers make heavy games and constantly churn out options and rules. They sell.

 

[Lanefan]

I hold both of those positions. There are no "sides" involved.

Tactical infinity. Infinity. Anything can happen. You cannot possibly design specific rules to cover literally every possibility.

Well, technically, I suppose you could design to cover every possibility by following these two steps to the letter:

1. Design as comprehensive a rules system as you possibly can, covering as many corner cases and oddball twists as you can think of and probably ending up with a rulebook rivalling the Encyclopedia Britannica in size.
2. Ban everything else. If it's not already covered by a rule it can't happen, period stop end of story.

That way, every possibility is covered: if it's in the rules it can happen, and if it's not it can't. There's no third option.

For me-as-player this wouldn't be a fun game to play in that there'd be no way to be the first to think of something and put it in play: either the designers thought of it already and covered it in the rules, or they didn't and it's banned.

 

[overgeeked]

Well, technically, I suppose you could design to cover every possibility by following these two steps to the letter:

1. Design as comprehensive a rules system as you possibly can, covering as many corner cases and oddball twists as you can think of and probably ending up with a rulebook rivalling the Encyclopedia Britannica in size.
2. Ban everything else. If it's not already covered by a rule it can't happen, period stop end of story.

That way, every possibility is covered: if it's in the rules it can happen, and if it's not it can't. There's no third option.

For me-as-player this wouldn't be a fun game to play in that there'd be no way to be the first to think of something and put it in play: either the designers thought of it already and covered it in the rules, or they didn't and it's banned.

Right. Sacrifice tactical infinity in the silly need to have a rule for everything. Which is why fewer, broadly applicable rules and rulings to cover any gaps is better than hundreds of rules for distinct and seldom seen edge cases.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Right. Sacrifice tactical infinity in the silly need to have a rule for everything. Which is why fewer, broadly applicable rules and rulings to cover any gaps is better than hundreds of rules for distinct and seldom seen edge cases.

Really? Just objectively better to have fewer rules? I understand that you prefer FKR play, but you can't objectively say fewer rules are just better. There are plenty of situations where having a codified, well-researched answer to how a PC might accomplish something they want to do might be preferable to just making a ruling, like knowing how the economy of a setting works if a player wants to engage with it, for example. IMO rulings should be left to relatively rare situations where something unexpected happens and a decision needs to be made.

 

[Lanefan]

Right. Sacrifice tactical infinity in the silly need to have a rule for everything.

If one wants a rule-for-everything system the need for such would hardly be considered "silly"; and yes, the trade-off would be to sacrifice tactical (and out-of-combat as well) infinity. For some, that trade-off might be worth it.

And note here I'm defending a position I don't personally hold. For me, while having a solid framework of rules to build on is necessary, trying to have a rule for everything (i.e. the 3e philosophy but dialled even further up) is too much, and hammers the fun part which is creative outside-the-box player-side thinking as to how to overcome obstacles and challenges posed by the game.

Which is why fewer, broadly applicable rules and rulings to cover any gaps is better than hundreds of rules for distinct and seldom seen edge cases.

Unless - and again I'm playing devil's advocate here - the specific intent is that everyone is playing by exactly the same rules, in which case houserules and ad-hoc rulings are a Bad Thing.

 

[Pedantic]

If one wants a rule-for-everything system the need for such would hardly be considered "silly"; and yes, the trade-off would be to sacrifice tactical (and out-of-combat as well) infinity. For some, that trade-off might be worth it.

And note here I'm defending a position I don't personally hold. For me, while having a solid framework of rules to build on is necessary, trying to have a rule for everything (i.e. the 3e philosophy but dialled even further up) is too much, and hammers the fun part which is creative outside-the-box player-side thinking as to how to overcome obstacles and challenges posed by the game.

This is wildly overblown. Firstly, it misses an entire avenue of player expression in using the rules. To use a board game example, I won a game of 1817 primarily by wildly inflating a company's value on the basis of a few somewhat profitable train routes, got shorted by the other players, sold my own shares in the now suddenly failing company, and then used a different company to buy it out at the suddenly very low value, turning those mid-tier routes into very good routes and essentially pocketing the difference in lost value out of the holdings of my other company.

Those maneuvers were allowed to happen because of a web of interlocking, knowable rules and my navigation of them was entirely unlike that of other players around the table. I could have done something else entirely, and in fact another player tried to keep his own company afloat after a similar short, resulting in his bankruptcy. Those rules only took about 20 pages to write, much less the standard couple of 300-400 page books I'm happy to consume for a TTRPG.

Secondly, much of what gets called creative thinking deploys similar repeated tactics and moves, to the point we idiomatically refer to such things as "players swinging from chandeliers." You can just write swinging rules that apply to most objects, and let players understand why they might or might not want to swing on them. I've yet to see a unique enough case that I don't think a pretty robust system of object interactions and skills can't handle it, especially if you're able to constrict genre down to heroic fantasy (or grimdark fantasy, or whatever subvariant you want).

The infinity is much more theoretical than practical.

Unless - and again I'm playing devil's advocate here - the specific intent is that everyone is playing by exactly the same rules, in which case houserules and ad-hoc rulings are a Bad Thing.

I obviously don't care what anyone does at their own table, except insomuch as it would be nice to have enough common ground to discuss what's happening more broadly than my own immediate set of players. The best formulation of what I'd like though is for players to have rules to play with, and reasons to want to play with them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Unless - and again I'm playing devil's advocate here - the specific intent is that everyone is playing by exactly the same rules, in which case houserules and ad-hoc rulings are a Bad Thing.

I also have to note not everyone considers those two in the same bucket. Though less than I used to, I'm not afraid to do house rules (in consultation with my players) but if I'm having to regularly do a lot of ad hoc rulings (especially ones that are not obvious extensions of extent rules) as far as I'm concerned, I'm using an underdesigned game.

 

[cavalier973]

Something I wrote a few years ago:
Thread 'I am perfectly fine with WoTC producing D&D 5th Edition'
https://www.enworld.org/threads/i-am-perfectly-fine-with-wotc-producing-d-d-5th-edition.316055/

My take-away of the OP is that I got incredibly lucky, in that I got a version of D&D that suits my tastes. I also like the various iterations of “Basic D&D”, which I think is related to my fondness for 4e, in some way.

I work too many hours, or I would be running a “Westmarch-style campaign” using 4e with the tax deductions.

when I last had the opportunity to play…well, I dragged out Heroquest, and played it, but a couple of weeks BEFORE that, I got out my copy of the Essentials Red Box, and played through the introductory adventure with my five-year-old. Later, my wife told me that she (the five-year-old) was so excited about how well she did, and was telling my wife all about it. I then played through about half of the intro dungeon (“The Twisting Halls”) with all the tax deductions.

 

[cavalier973]

View attachment IMG_2837.jpeg

4e, FTW!!!

(Human Warlord, Eladrin Paladin, Dragonborn Fighter, Half-elf Warlock, Tiefling Wizard. All from the core PHB)