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

[Thomas Shey]

That's how we got 4e: a fairly well-designed game that, in the end, not many people wanted to play (other than maybe for a test drive).

Just a note: not many people by WOTC's standards. As I mentioned years ago with Alternity, 4e would have been considered a striking success by almost any other company in the business.

 

[darjr]

Just a note: not many people by WOTC's standards. As I mentioned years ago with Alternity, 4e would have been considered a striking success by almost any other company in the business.

That’s true. But the other side to that is, would it have sold as well if it was another company?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I didn’t say I expect it to happen. I said it’s what I think would be good.



Sure, I get the corporate thinking behind it. I never claimed my desires aligned with the corporate goal of maximum profits. I’m speaking strictly from a design perspective.



I never said not to do playtesting. I said open playtests aren’t that useful.



An opinion on reddit or an opinion on the playtest surveys are both just opinions. One could be awful and the other great. There’s nothing inherently good about the opinions’ of folks who are doing the surveys.



I’m signed up for Beyond and I’m not doing the surveys. I looked at some of the UA playtest packets and then one of the surveys. I didn’t find the process to be that compelling. I feel like the whole thing is skewed so they can try to get a high consensus. And I don’t think that’s what the goal should be.

The goal should be a good game.

It really should be, huh?

 

[Micah Sweet]

A representative sample of what, though?

Of current 5e players? Very likely, yes.
Of current or lapsed players of other D&D editions? Fairly unlikely.
Of current/lapsed players of RPGs not named D&D (or Pathfinder)? Highly unlikely.
Of people who don't (yet) play RPGs at all? Almost certainly not.

It seems to be they only care about people playing WotC 5e right now and people who haven't played anything yet. Fans of other games don't appear to be on the list. Too small a demographic for them to bother with, I would speculate.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Just a note: not many people by WOTC's standards. As I mentioned years ago with Alternity, 4e would have been considered a striking success by almost any other company in the business.

Of course, WotC's standards were and are the only ones that mattered.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You are advocating making a "good game." People enjoying a game is what makes a game good. If WotC makes a game that people like enough to buy and play...that's the whole shebang.

By that argument, everyone should just make WotC's game, since that's the one most people play.

 

[pemerton]

Looking over this, I think that you're outlining a point somewhat (not completely, but somewhat) orthogonal to the issue around hit points trying to model two different things at once.

Now, hit points are very much gamist in function (though I wouldn't say simulationist; while I won't speak to how Ron Edwards used the term, my conception of it has always been about mechanics that set/affect the narrative directly rather than mechanics that happen to abet dramatization), which is why I previously pointed out that they were an area where simulationism backed off. That was, as I posited, a consensus (or maybe I should have called it a compromise) that everyone was unhappy about, but could live with.

But while the issue of scaling wasn't necessarily limited to healing spells being less effective as a character leveled up (that was just the inverse of the aforementioned issue of how the same 8 hit points' worth of damage in one attack could kill a commoner outright, but meant little to a high-level character), 4E's attempt to fix that by having a central healing mechanic that operated on a percentage basis was a legitimately good idea...one that it completely undercut by leaning hard into having hit points (or rather, the loss of hit points) be a model of being progressively injured until your life was in danger and simultaneously being a model of progressively losing combat capability.

While there was a modest amount of conceptual overlap in those two metrics, they were still dissimilar enough that they caused a cognitive gap for a lot of players in how a given solution (i.e. a warlord yelling at someone to let them use a healing surge, a cure light wounds spell, etc.) functioned for both – since, again, it was a single mechanic modeling two different things at the same time – despite being presented as a fix for only one of those two things.

The result was that the percentage-based healing solution was presented as part of a much greater problem.

It seems that (again) you're not familiar with 4e D&D's healing mechanics.

A warlord's Inspiring Word requires expenditure of a healing surge by the healing character. In the fiction, the warlord encourages the character to dig deep into their reserves.

A cleric's Healing Word is mechanically the same as Inspiring Word. In the fiction, the cleric speaks a prayer and the character is able to dig deep into their reserves.

A paladin's Lay on Hands enable the paladin to spend a healing surge, so that the character onto whom hands are laid regains a surges's worth of hp. In the fiction, the paladin prays, and digs deep into their reserves and gives of them, such that the other character miraculously recovers their will and capacity to fight on.

A cleric's Cure Light Wounds does not require any one to spend a healing surge, and allows the recipient character to regain a surge's worth of hp. In the fiction, the cleric prays and the divinity miraculously restores a character's will and capacity to fight on.

There is no "single mechanic" here, and no "cognitive gap:".

 

[Parmandur]

By that argument, everyone should just make WotC's game, since that's the one most people play.

Looks at third party 5E market

I mean, apparently a lot of people with money on the line agree with you on that point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Looks at third party 5E market

I mean, apparently a lot of people with money on the line agree with you on that point.

My point is, do you consider it a business error for an RPG designer to make anything other than 5e-compatible material?

 

[billd91]

I don’t think that designing a game that appeals to as many people as possible will yield the best game.

Hard to say. But will it yield a game that can support multiple people working in a full time capacity and make a corporation pleased with its profitability? 5e kinda shows that’s possible. And that’s not a bad thing, particularly when it seems to be the biggest market D&D has captured to date.