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

[Alzrius]

That’s the point though. Its exactly what I’m saying. 5e is no more simulationist than 4e. Even right down to ejecting 11 movement. It’s just that 5e didn’t tell people that that was what they were doing.

4e’s greatest flaw was being totally transparent.

Yeah, no. 5E is more simulationist than 4E was; again, damage on a miss, to note just a single example.

Honestly, this idea that 4E's flaws weren't flaws at all, "it was just too honest" is more than just complete bunk, it's revisionist history. 4E was indeed very honest about what it was, it's just that large swaths of the D&D community didn't like what it was. The changes it made were not simply cosmetic, nor were they limited to anything that could be adequately summarized as "the same as before, but more honest about it."

D&D isn't the most simulationist of games, and there's merit to the idea that it never was. But the community around it had arguably reached a consensus on the degree to which it struck a balance between gamism and simulationism. It was an unhappy consensus, to be sure, but that's the mark of a good consensus nonetheless, which is a large part of the reason why it remained the dominant game in the industry it created; being the first one to get your foot in the door is all well and good, but that alone won't sustain your position over the subsequent decades.

4E decided that it wasn't going to respect that consensus. We can argue about the exact manner(s) and degree(s) in which it upset the apple cart, and even argue about whether or not said cart should have been upset, but the end result was that a large swath of the D&D community was unhappy with the direction that 4E went.

Hit points, in fact, remain the single best example of this. Ever since the beginning, they represented an area where simulationism gave way to gamism in a necessary compromise, and while the early iterations of the game paid lip service to the idea that hit points were a medley of measuring how severely a character was injured and simultaneously measuring a character's ability to remain combat-capable, the latter view had little-to-no support among the actually rules that delineated how things worked in the game world.

Gygax may have written that hit points were a combination of stamina, luck, divine protection, and numerous other factors – largely because he couldn't countenance how a single wound for 8 points of damage could kill a commoner instantly, but could be shrugged off by a high-level character – but the spells that restored hit points were given injury-specific names such as cure light wounds and heal, not restore divine protection or renew luck. Even the non-magical methods of regaining hit points were modeled after recovering from serious injuries, requiring days if not weeks of bed rest; that's not something you did if you thought that the gods were angry with you.

4E was very honest about trying to have hit points actually perform double duty, being a measure of injuries taken and how much you were still able to keep fighting. And while you can argue that those two things have a Venn diagram-esque degree of overlap, a lot of people saw how the majority of the coverage for those two concepts didn't overlap when you tied them to the same mechanic. (Something which I suspect wouldn't have been the case if they'd used the wound/vitality point system from the Star Wars d20 RPG and the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana, though I also suspect that the designers knew that would have taken 4E even further away from the popular conception of what D&D was.)

There's nothing wrong with wanting to model a fatigue system alongside an injury system, but you can't have the same pool of points model both things at once. At least, not without creating a burden on the imagination that many people didn't want to have to deal with.

4E was very honest about what it was, but that wasn't a "failing" unless you think it should have tried to trick people into thinking it was something it wasn't, and it's to its credit that it didn't go that route (not that I think it would have worked anyway). It was forthright about what it wanted to be, but to a lot of people, what it wanted to be wasn't D&D, and talking about why that was is not "doing donuts on its grave."

 

[Hussar]

How transparent was it that monster hit points were doubled across the board at release?

It took a few months for the community to figure it out.

Making a math mistake isn’t a transparency issue though. It’s simply a math mistake. Stupid mistake, sure. But again, that doesn’t really counter what I’m saying.

WotC was being as clear and open about what they were trying to do as they could be. They were straight up saying that they thought x was a better idea than y. There was very little burying the lede going on.

And that openness got them crucified. No matter what they said, people pulled single points (don’t talk to gate guards, cloud watching - for example) and just went to town.

To the point where ten years later, people are STILL misquoting stuff and grinding those same stones.

When is the last time anyone from WotC said anything publicly that wasn’t vetted through marketing? They used to do it all the time. Hell there were WotC people who posted regularly here on En World.

Now? Everything is kept very much at a remove. Zero direct interaction. Yup we’ve got these great playtests where they chuck out new ideas, the fandom rejects them and we get to keep on going on.

We got the DnD that we demanded.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Making a math mistake isn’t a transparency issue though. It’s simply a math mistake. Stupid mistake, sure. But again, that doesn’t really counter what I’m saying.

WotC was being as clear and open about what they were trying to do as they could be. They were straight up saying that they thought x was a better idea than y. There was very little burying the lede going on.

And that openness got them crucified. No matter what they said, people pulled single points (don’t talk to gate guards, cloud watching - for example) and just went to town.

To the point where ten years later, people are STILL misquoting stuff and grinding those same stones.

When is the last time anyone from WotC said anything publicly that wasn’t vetted through marketing? They used to do it all the time. Hell there were WotC people who posted regularly here on En World.

Now? Everything is kept very much at a remove. Zero direct interaction. Yup we’ve got these great playtests where they chuck out new ideas, the fandom rejects them and we get to keep on going on.

We got the DnD that we demanded.

Honestly, I prefer that they don’t listen to the fans. Writing to the audience generally produces mediocre material. The playtests and all the feedback are going to lead to a game that pisses off people. Many of whom would be pissed no matter what, but still.

I’d prefer that the designers actually designed a game that they were excited to design and excited to play. Not some mishmash of a bunch of different fan requests like they’re a cover band in a crappy bar.

At least the end result would be a game with clear intention and deliberate design instead of a bunch of compromises.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

5E is more simulationist than 4E was; again, damage on a miss, to note just a single example.

Speaking of, OneDnD is including the Graze weapon property for that...

 

[Zeromaru X]

Basically none of the settings are allowed to veer too much from the core game or feel.

Something I consider a good thing. Why I should buy a book about gnomes (to give an example) if this setting book says "our gnomes are different"? I'll feel like I've wasted my money in some irrelevant product, and won't be that willing to buy their next book about elves.

After all, while D&D may be a hobby for us it's a business for them. They need to sell books that are useful for most people, and that means a generalization of the lore. Blame the settings born during 2e for their divisive "uniqueness".

 

[Zeromaru X]

Ditto. Actually convinced me to buy the first three books and HotFL and Rules Compendium, too. Had to sell all my 4e stuff about 10 years ago.

You should get HotFK. It's a really nice book to expands on the unique stuff 4e had to offer (such as using non-standard races).

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Something I consider a good thing. Why I should buy about gnomes (to give an example) if this settings says "our gnomes are different"? I'll like I've wasted my money in some irrelevant product, and won't be that willing to be their next book about elves.

After all, while D&D may be a hobby for us it's a business for them. They need to sell books that are useful for most people, and that means a generalization of the lore. Blame the settings born during 2e for their divisive "uniqueness".

 

[Zeromaru X]

And yet when 3e came out WotC still put out a conversion guide for those wanting to port their 2e characters-games-etc. over to 3e.

No such thing provided for porting 3e to 4e that I've ever seen, nor 4e to 5e for that matter.

Oh, but they did it. There is no formula because the systems were so different that they decided it was just better to make characters from zero than to try to convert them, but they did offered advice on how to convert character concepts from 3e to 4e.

They never compiled that information and just posted it in their now defunct Gleemax website. I still have a note pad with some of that advice on my PC.

Just to dispel a myth.

 

[billd91]

Honestly, I prefer that they don’t listen to the fans. Writing to the audience generally produces mediocre material. The playtests and all the feedback are going to lead to a game that pisses off people. Many of whom would be pissed no matter what, but still.

I’d prefer that the designers actually designed a game that they were excited to design and excited to play. Not some mishmash of a bunch of different fan requests like they’re a cover band in a crappy bar.

At least the end result would be a game with clear intention and deliberate design instead of a bunch of compromises.

But if they didn‘t listen to anybody, would it have a market beyond themselves? Would a corporation employ them to make it? And I can tell you, if they did, it almost certainly wouldn’t be D&D since that property involves certain responsibilities that a group of designers making “whatever floats their boat“ aren’t fulfilling.

 

[Zeromaru X]

Yes, I know I'm wrong for trying to buy a book about gnomes. It's irrelevant like the gnomes themselves.