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

[darjr]

@Hussar I have to admit I'm fuzzy on Mike or Chris posting here during 4e. I do now recall that Mike may have, but I'm not sure about Chris. And even if so I think it was rare, the exception.

I do think it's a shame they don't feel free to post and talk. Some of them have on twitter, but that's more a sign of the times I think.

However WotC being transparent is a vastly different thing than the 4e system being transparent. I think. At least I thought you originally meant the rules were transparent.

And if you want to compare to 3rd, this site was born out of "leaks" about 3rd edition.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

And again you don’t speak for everyone. You speak for a minority.

How do you define minority? I'm not being a jerk here, but it's a serious question. As we've seen from 5e, there was a massive market for "D&D" that 4e wasn't filling. There were people who never chose to play 4e, and instead kept playing 3e. There were people that transitioned to PF. There were people that hadn't been playing D&D (or were playing TSR versions), and instead of playing 4e, kept not playing D&D until 5e. There were people that bought 4e, tried it (thus accounting for the initial sales) and then gave up.

And there were a lot of people that just never played 4e at all, and weren't attracted to the game.

What are those numbers? I don't know. You don't either. Maybe we'll get a better grasp on the actual metrics when Ben Riggs publishes his book, and instead of including the numbers, puts them in twitter posts (heh).

I think that the major issue is that most of the people are talking past each other, as usual. I go back to my idea that there is a difference between a game that is well-designed, and a game that is well-designed as a broadly popular D&D game. I don't think that the two things are the same.

It's perfectly acceptable to love 4e for what it was- a great game. It's also perfectly acceptable to understand that the designers blew through a lot of red flags during the design process; I had previously recounted how, during the initial playtest for 3PP developers, Paizo knew that 4e would be divisive, and it gave them the confidence to go forward with PF. What Riggs has added is that this shouldn't have been a surprise; some of the developers also knew that it would be divisive, and they tried to sound the alarm (and were ignored).

It's an academic question at this point- again, there were a lot of collateral issues that happened - from marketing, to the economy, to replacing the OGL, to telling people in the core books that there was one way to play (yeah, get a battlemap and minis). But there was always a tension between designing a game and designing for a brand- it's the same tension that you see in product. And it's why we still see the interminable battles over the same issues.

It's fine to love 4e. It's fine to not love 4e. In many ways, it was a great experiment, and I think it informed (for better or worse) the more careful and gradual approach that WoTC has taken since.

 

[MockingBird]

Count me in the group that tried it and didn't like it. Still have all my core books and essentials sets though. Still like to Crack them open and read them. Just didn't enjoy playing that particular flavor of D&D.

 

[Mannahnin]

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.

I agree with a lot of the other stuff you wrote, but I think this in particular is a bad example. As you rightly observe, the language around "hitting" in combat and individual attacks (especially missile weapons, which always ran contrary to OD&D and AD&D's one minute combat round and its premise that a given round and a single attack roll represented multiple in-fiction attacks), and of healing spells, was always sabotaging Gary's explanation of what hit points actually are. The latter was compatible with characters fighting and moving at full effectiveness no matter how much damage they take (until zero, anyway), but the game rules and language around hitting and damage and hit points always created this cognitive dissonance.

Ben Laurence did a great job articulating a lot of these issues in a blog article a while back.

I might also suggest that hit points are more of a narrativist and gamist concept than they are simulationist. Like saving throws, the essential purpose of hit points is to keep characters alive, because a storybook hero doesn't die to one sword stroke (as a rule). That was the original reason Arneson put them in his game (when a player playing a knight was dissatisfied by being killed in a single round by a troll), and it's still the main reason D&D uses them.

IMO 4E did the best job to date of squaring the circle reconciling hit points to work better and make more sense. Particularly in its linking most healing to the Healing Surge, a value of (usually) 1/4 of a character's max hit points. This meant that we were finally relieved of the issue D&D had always had of "Cure Light Wounds" being capable of restoring a first level character reduced to zero HP unconsciousness (seemingly a serious wound) to full health. And the issue that a low level character or low-HD class like magic user healed more quickly from injury than an experienced character or a combat-trained one who is inured so pain and injury. By making healing proportionate to the character receiving it, 4E made hit points a little less nonsensical.

I think you're right, though, that the overall changes to the hit point system were a bit too much for a substantial percentage of players who had reconciled themselves to the contradictions of D&D's hit point system and didn't want to think about them anymore.

 

[pemerton]

People who liked 3E and didn't like 4e don't get to claim "ownership" of what it is to enjoy or play D&D. They are not a "we" in relation to whom those who played 4e are "them".

I have no interest in playing 5e D&D. And I regard 3E D&D as largely unplayable. That doesn't make me someone who "hates D&D" or who is departing from some "D&D consensus". My play of B/X and AD&D and 4e D&D, my collection of GH setting material that I use regularly, my conversions of D&D game and story elements to other resolution systems, are as "legitimate" engagements with D&D as anyone else's.

 

[darjr]

People who liked 3E and didn't like 4e don't get to claim "ownership" of what it is to enjoy or play D&D. They are not a "we" in relation to whom those who played 4e are "them".

I have no interest in playing 5e D&D. And I regard 3E D&D as largely unplayable. That doesn't make me someone who "hates D&D" or who is departing from some "D&D consensus". My play of B/X and AD&D and 4e D&D, my collection of GH setting material that I use regularly, my conversions of D&D game and story elements to other resolution systems, are as "legitimate" engagements with D&D as anyone else's.

I have to say it's the odd edition out. I mean you yourself repeatedly point out those differences. So when people play "one thing not like the other" with editions I think it's completely valid to say it's 4e.

 

[Voadam]

D&D has always had the divide of hit points being wounds and hit points being ability to stay combat capable.

In OD&D the difference between a first level fighting man and a 10th level fighting man as ability to stay in combat is there and felt at the table in their hit points during combat. A first level fighting man dies half the time when hit once. A 10th level fighting man gets hit five times and is still swinging his sword for full effect.

Healing a specified fixed amount compared to escalating hp by level was always an awkward match up to higher level characters. In 1e fighters reduced to single digit hp needing more bed rest to heal to full than other classes doing the same was narratively awkward. The least tough characters (magic users, thieves) being able to heal up from wounds faster than tougher characters was awkward.

Healing has always been awkward in the game, one of Gygax's first adjustments was adapting Arneson's van Helsing type into what became clerics with cure light wounds spells, partially so there could be a narratively magical PC game mechanic resource to get PCs healed. Having that healing being a static caster fixed range of hp caused narrative issues when applied to levelling characters with escalating hps and healing needs. This was only partially accommodated by increased spell slots per level and higher level cleric spells healing more.

I really enjoyed 3.5's Unearthed Arcana reserve points as enabling a decoupling of D&D healing and cleric magic and the accompanying issues, then loved 4e's healing surges, full rest healing, and warlord healing.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Great! There are a ton of them out there.

I know! I wish D&D 5e was better than it is because some of the folks in my group tend to default to that game by instinct. It has a gravity to it due to its position in the market and historically.

I run other games for my home group. When one of them GMs, they somehow think it’s easier to run 5e than it is to run a different game. So I wind up having to play 5e.

So I wish it was designed better. I wish they had looked to other games rather than just the sacred cows of past editions for inspiration. I wish that the game actually evolved a bit.

I don’t think that listening to the fans is all that good of an idea when it comes to design decisions. I think what happens is you wind up with a game that just manages to not piss off the most people. It doesn’t really wow anyone, it’s not appealing so much as it just manages to not be unappealing.

But there are already numerous ttrpg's that aren't D&D...

There are numerous ones that are D&D, too! Filled with all the sacred cows that everyone seems to think are necessary!

And I’m sure that 15 years ago the same comment was made to critics of 4e by its fans. Which I’m sure went over well!

 

[billd91]

There are numerous ones that are D&D, too! Filled with all the sacred cows that everyone seems to think are necessary!

Would Friends be the same if Phoebe were replaced by Urkel? Would Star Trek be the same if the Federation were replaced by a Roman aristocracy? Would pre-marital sex be the same without a nagging Catholic sense of shame and guilt?
No, I say.
Some things should have their sacred cows. Let other games have the other things to make their own sacred cows out of.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I have to say it's the odd edition out. I mean you yourself repeatedly point out those differences. So when people play "one thing not like the other" with editions I think it's completely valid to say it's 4e.

Eh. To someone familiar with D&D but mostly playing non-D&D sphere games, the distinctions seem mostly-trivial.