billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
If you can even slander an adventure module, the fact that he’s not particularly wrong would kinda get him off the hook anyway, B2 is not a particularly good module (Return to… is better).
D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023
- Thread starter Alzrius
- Start date
FitzTheRuke
Legend
They have republished it NOW, sure, but they weren't a publisher of it in 1999! At that time it was a long discontinued TSR module. My point was only that there was no reason back then that a WotC employee would be forbidden to disparage it.
Well, I guess around the time WotC purchases TSR and its assets is around the time that corporate codes of conduct for employees would kick in! But Mearls wasn't working for WotC or TSR back then.
Still, I'm guessing that he wouldn't put that review on the part of his resume that talks about his ability to curate and promote a brand!
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I'm aware of the fact that he is knowledgeable on the subject. The issue is his being put in charge of a product where he was clearly, in his own words, not on board with the way it was designed! Note that he wasn't put there to kill it and start over, he was put there to increase its success, which he predictably enough utterly failed to do... He just does not seem to 'get' what is great about 4e, despite any technical understanding of narrativist play.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Again, perhaps he was part of whatever WotC faction it was that didn't want to push the game towards narrativist play.
Ondath
Hero
Was he not on board with 4e's design principles? AFAIK, the seeds of 4e's design were sown with the Book of Nine Swords, where he was a writer. He was also part of the Scramjet, the core 4e design team that looked into all of D&D's sacred cows and decided which ones should be offed. Surely he would've taken the game in a different direction if the main tenets of 4e didn't appeal to him at the time?
QuentinGeorge
Legend
The review is 100% correct and I do not even like defending that module because of its age. Lost City was published just 3 years later and was better in every conceivable way.
I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think it does show that trying to classify Mearls's RPG proclivities, particularly in light of his professional obligations to his employer, requires some nuance.
You are correct, and this is just revisionist history.
Mearls was added to the 3e design team, and pushed 3e in a certain direction that led to 4e. In fact, just before joining the 3e design team, he wrote an essay (which I have quoted before) which introduced the terrible, no-good term "Mother May I" into TTRPG discourse.
He was, from everything I understood, one of the leading proponents of introducing more narrativist and "Forge"-like concepts into 4e. This is hardly surprising, given that he was one of the people that was heavily involved in the discussions that led to it.
In short, while I am sure we will get more information from Riggs in the future, Mearls was arguably responsible for a lot of what people liked about 4e (in terms of the different direction that it took).
So ... why the backlash? Because Mearls was one of the few people that stayed on after the bloodletting. At that point, despite what people want to say, 4e was considered a failure. I don't mean that in terms of "a well-designed game." Or in terms of "providing an awesome experience that people still like to this day." I mean that in terms of "a broadly successful game that would ensure D&D's continued dominance."
Which means that when he was speaking post-2010 (when 4e was internally dead), he was wrestling with why 4e failed. For people that were still engaged in the front-line skirmishes over the "edition wars" of the time, this probably seemed like a massive betrayal. Remember- they had been out there, defending the game, and here was one of the designers talking about the issues. But for Mearls, it wasn't so much a repudiation of what he had previously believed, but an attempt to reconcile the fact that what he wanted was not, in fact, what was broadly popular.
At least, that's the way I view it. Another way to look at it is that, quite simply, his paycheck depended on him figuring our what went wrong and fixing it. And internally at Hasbro, regardless of how well-designed 4e was, it was something that had gone wrong.
I think people often confuse something that is well-designed, or even ahead of its time, with something that a company should do. There were a lot of people that loved the Apple Newton. But it wasn't a product that Apple should have released at the time, even though ideas from the Newton ended up being adopted into a lot of later products.
