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

[Zeromaru X]

But the one thing that a detailed rules set gives is that there's less room for a GM to hide behind his necessary authority. If you've got a rules set that's very handwavey, there's always an argument-from-necessity they can use. That's a lot harder a card to play when the rules for a situation are very clear in what should be applied and how it should be resolved.

This is also my opinion. A rules system that address almost all the needs of the game with transparency for both the GM/DM and the players, leaves less room for shenanigans - for both sides, as rules lawyer players are more easily controlled if the DM has clear rules to work with.

 

[overgeeked]

This is also my opinion. A rules system that address almost all the needs of the game with transparency for both the GM/DM and the players, leaves less room for shenanigans - for both sides, as rules lawyer players are more easily controlled if the DM has clear rules to work with.

I've found almost the exact opposite to be true. The more rules there are, the more you have to deal with rules lawyers. Also, the less clearly written the rules, the more you have to deal with rules lawyers. 5E games are dirty with rules lawyers but there are almost no rules lawyers in rules light games and literally no rules lawyers in FKR games. Maybe it's a moth to a flame thing. The people who like to argue rules are attracted to heavier systems so they can argue the rules.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'll just leave what Mike Mearls said to Greg Tito when Greg was still with the Escapist.

“I think we’ve hit the second era of RPG decadence, and it’s gone the opposite way,” he continued. “It’s all about player power now – the DM is just the rules guy – and the DM can’t contradict what the players say. [The game] is taking away from the DM, and that’s where I worry because other types of games can do that better. I might as well play a board game, ’cause I’m just here enforcing the rules. Without the DM as the creative guy, what’s the point?”

Mearls admits 4th edition might have gone too far in creating a perfectly balanced game. “We’ve lost faith of what makes an RPG an RPG,” he said, admitting that in trying to please gamers with a limited imagination, 4th edition might have punished those with an active one. “There’s this fear of the bad gaming group, where the game is so good that even playing with a bad gaming group, you’ll still have fun.”

Now please note, I do think it's maybe an overreaction. He was just coming from the end of 4e, essentially.

I think it evinces a profound lack of insight into what constitutes, and what the values are, of narrativist play. Mike has a bunch of REALLY HUGE blind spots from what I can tell. The utter inability to 'see the point' of play that isn't totally focused on GM authorship pretty much tells it all.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've found almost the exact opposite to be true. The more rules there are, the more you have to deal with rules lawyers. Also, the less clearly written the rules, the more you have to deal with rules lawyers. 5E games are dirty with rules lawyers but there are almost no rules lawyers in rules light games and literally no rules lawyers in FKR games. Maybe it's a moth to a flame thing. The people who like to argue rules are attracted to heavier systems so they can argue the rules.

I'd say its simpler than that; people who don't care about rules aren't particularly likely to be drawn to rules heavy games. Once people do care about rules, they're more likely to be at least somewhat insistent about rules actually being, well, followed.

Where that translates into "rules lawyering" is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes its players abusing a legitimate tool. Sometimes its a GM not liking being held to the rules they got on board. Sometimes its just people, who as I've noted before, considering speed being a priority over everything else.

But its almost a tautology that you're going to see people are less about rules as such, in games that have less rules. They may still argue about GM decisions, but that's a separate thing.

 

[Zeromaru X]

I think it evinces a profound lack of insight into what constitutes, and what the values are, of narrativist play. Mike has a bunch of REALLY HUGE blind spots from what I can tell. The utter inability to 'see the point' of play that isn't totally focused on GM authorship pretty much tells it all.

I don't know if it was a lack of vision, or if it was something he said deliberately, to target the people who like this mode of play. After all, this was the time were they publicly said that 4e was an "utter failure" (that we know it's not actually the truth, as 4e sold, even if it didn't sell the numbers Hasbro wanted) to try to cater to its detractors and the people that was playing Pathfinder and OSR (that they didn't won, anyways, as that people is still playing Pathfinder and OSR).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think it evinces a profound lack of insight into what constitutes, and what the values are, of narrativist play. Mike has a bunch of REALLY HUGE blind spots from what I can tell. The utter inability to 'see the point' of play that isn't totally focused on GM authorship pretty much tells it all.

Perhaps he simply doesn't care for narrative play. There's no point to it for him. Nothing wrong with that.

 

[Lanefan]

I've found almost the exact opposite to be true. The more rules there are, the more you have to deal with rules lawyers. Also, the less clearly written the rules, the more you have to deal with rules lawyers. 5E games are dirty with rules lawyers but there are almost no rules lawyers in rules light games and literally no rules lawyers in FKR games.

No rules lawyers in FKR, sure, but how many "imagination lawyers" do you see; as in players who dispute the shared fiction?

As in:
Player: "I'm by the door while people search."
GM: "There's a nasty monster coming through the door."
Player: "Oh, I'm by the window then!"
GM: "You said you were by the door."
<cue argument>

'Cause this would be my concern with how games like that might go. I mean, hell, I already see enough of it in games where there's rules and minis etc. to fall back on.

 

[overgeeked]

No rules lawyers in FKR, sure, but how many "imagination lawyers" do you see; as in players who dispute the shared fiction?

As in:
Player: "I'm by the door while people search."
GM: "There's a nasty monster coming through the door."
Player: "Oh, I'm by the window then!"
GM: "You said you were by the door."
<cue argument>

'Cause this would be my concern with how games like that might go. I mean, hell, I already see enough of it in games where there's rules and minis etc. to fall back on.

None that I’ve seen. It’s never happened in an FKR game I’ve played in or ran.

If it were to pop up, it would likely be handled the same way we handle it in other games. The referee tells the player to stop being a jackass and we move on. The player keeps being a jackass and they don’t get to play anymore.

 

[Staffan]

Coming in a bit late here...

BitD, everyone I knew in gaming (online and in person) thought 3e was a massive hit, massive resurgence, massive revitalization of the brand, etc.

I think it was a revitalization compared to late-era 2e, but that doesn't mean it got back to the peaks of 1e or early 2e.

A few months ago the Freakanomics podcast had an episode discussing the difference between companies with CEOs who were MBAs and those with CEOs who weren't. They cited a study that showed MBA CEOs might increase profits, but they do this by cutting costs rather than actually growing the business. i.e. They don't actually make companies better other than providing shareholders with some extra profits.

From the POV of the shareholders, that is making the company better. But that's the problem of treating companies solely as vehicles for generating profit for shareholders, rather than as a shared thing that has to work for many different stakeholders.

I can't imagine that the WoW cool downs are like the AEDU system. Are any of the cool down periods slow enough that it is once per fight only? Once per day so not even once per fight?

I think you can more easily see how encounter powers descend from medium-term WOW cooldowns when you look at the intermediate stages in Tome of Battle (which had slightly different recharge mechanism for its three different classes) and the Binder class from the Tome of Magic (where many of the vestiges could grant an ability to be used once every 5 rounds). I can imagine 4e design discussions going "Most fights aren't going to last long enough for these recharge mechanics to be relevant, so why not just make them 1/fight?"

Spell-like abilities, mostly. Check out what a 3.0 pit fiend can do in that regard versus what a 3.5 pit fiend can do; it's rather stark.

Admittedly, this is a very niche area, and one that doesn't apply to a lot of monsters, but for some reason it's always stood out very strongly in my mind. The 3.0 pit fiend can identify targets worthy of corruption via detect good, lure them into sin with suggestion, and defile holy sites with unhallow, etc. The 3.5 pit fiend is basically just a combat machine, though it at least kept the 1/year wish.

AD&D monsters were generally not constructed with any regard for their role in the game. In most cases, they were put together with a "this seems about right" attitude, and then this resulted in a particular XP value and DMs were expected to be able to figure out whether a particular monster was appropriate to use on their own.

3e added the CR mechanic, which was supposed to tell DMs what sort of monsters were appropriate for what levels and how many XP they were worth. But 3.0e monsters were often 2e monsters that just got converted straight over to 3e mechanics, with CR estimated after the fact, meaning that some had a CR that got artificially increased because of one or two particular abilities but the rest of the monster wouldn't come close to matching that CR. For example, the nymph is CR 6 because they cast spells as 7th level druids, but at the same time they have 10 hp and AC 11, meaning a stiff breeze would knock them over. When making 3.5e, they made some effort into both having the whole monster conform to the CR as well as culling some "useless" abilities (usually spell-like abilities). In 3.5e, the nymph got a boost to 27 hp and AC 17, while also changing the save-or-die from Unearthly Beauty into a stun.

The key, as always, is not to ask how many designers there are, but who those designers are. Only two or three people currently designing 5e were on the team when 5e was launched: Crawford and Perkins. (I think Wyatt was there at launch, but left for much of 5e before recently returning.) They've been around a long time; Perkins since the TSR days, I think. If anyone's had the chance to create organizational or political power, it's those two. And yet they keep getting passed over for promotion to the top jobs in the D&D segment. Each time there's an opening in senior D&D management, someone is put in charge of Crawford and Perkins.

I mean, that could just mean that the Hasbro bosses recognize that game/adventure design skill doesn't translate into management skill, and that they don't want to promote them to their level of incompetence.

 

[Micah Sweet]

None that I’ve seen. It’s never happened in an FKR game I’ve played in or ran.

If it were to pop up, it would likely be handled the same way we handle it in other games. The referee tells the player to stop being a jackass and we move on. The player keeps being a jackass and they don’t get to play anymore.

What are the assumptions you operate under in a FKR game? What do you say in session 0?