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

[Parmandur]

Okay… you skipped the questions. What makes 5e fun for you? Like some specific examples would be good, not “I get to have pretend adventures”. What does it do well, specifically?

Why do you not like 4e? Or some other RPG? What do they not do well?

I imagine there are two games you find to be fun. What is it that makes one game more fun for you than the other?

Well, your earlier description of how the game is fuzzy and indeterminate actually goes a long way towards pointing towards what is fun for me, actually. Those are features that facilitate loose and fast play and get in the way less than 3.x did. I started with 3.x in College, and in retrospect we were playing as we later would with 5E, but wrestling against the system a bit. Other RPGs that I find fun include Call of Cthulu and other BRP derivatives, Traveller, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Powered by the Apocalypse games. All of which allow for a nice quick flow of decision resolution.

4E was not fun for me, amd a large part had to do with the presentation to be fair as @Hussar says, but also because of how drawn out combat could be. In 3.x it was easy enough to ignore gridded combat for Theatre of the Mind, but 5E really got out of tge way with facilitating that. Minis still work great for those that want them, bit 4E really did kind of make TotM painful, which then necessitated playing it the one way the designers intended, and combat sort of ate the whole game time up and alowed.everything down. Just not my vibe.

And that's not to say it wasn't fun for a number of people, but that's a shift that left a lot of people out I'm tjw cold...and WotC did not see it because their designers were stuck in an information bubble, as Mike Mearls has described. Designer-centric approaches to design, as opposed to user-centric, can really blow up in the designers face.

 

[Parmandur]

So am I part of 5e's target market?

None of us are, we are weirdos as far as WotC marketing is concerned. 12-24 year olds are the target, since they are the majority of players, and the space that's growing.

 

[James Gasik]

No, even by your own explanations, you're wrong. Given how self-evident that is, I'm honestly not sure why you can't see that, but I'll try and walk you through it anyway.

That's not what happens in the fiction (hence the term "healing" in the power's name).

My guess is that you're confused because you just read the blurb on page 61 of the PHB – "Using the healing word power, clerics can grant their comrades additional resilience with nothing more than a short prayer." – and (apparently) stopped there. Now, that certainly sounds like it could be interpreted as having the target character "dig deep into their reserves," but it clashes with the text on the very next page, where the healing word power is presented, and where the italicized text gives the in-character presentation for what healing word does:

You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds.

That's not "dig deep into their reserves" by any measure, since it literally describes it as wounds being mended. And yet the target character is the one who spends a healing surge.

This is the best proof of my point that you could ask for, as 4E says that hit point restoration via the very same mechanic is one thing (tapping into a personal reserve to regain combat capability) on one page, and then immediately turns around and says that it's something else (a cleric's using divine power to close wounds) on the next page. That's flat-out inconsistent, and openly portrays the double duty that 4E has hit points doing.


And yet you've amply demonstrated how a single mechanic is being employed, and given the best example yet of 4E's cognitive gap on display. Thanks for that!

I want to point out that 5e doesn't handle this any better than 4e does. If hit points are "meat" in the fiction, that still leaves completely unexplained how someone can recover from a sword wound after an hour nap, let alone how a Fighter can recover from the same wound as a bonus action with Second Wind.

Trying to map hit points into anything remotely resembling verisimilitude is utter madness, just like Gary Gygax pointed out multiple times in the AD&D DMG.

 

[darjr]

Probably not. Market visibility is a thing. But I suspect even if it sold a quarter as well, it still would have been considered an amazing success.

I can't disagree. Still though this seems like a pointless thing. Selling a quarter as well puts it in range of Paizo sales. There isn't another RPG that sells as well outside of D&D. Maybe Avatar, but not yet, not consistently. If it weren't for D&D 5e it would be the 800 lbs gorrilla.

So to say if it sold as well as Pathfinder it would be considered an amazing success is a both obvious and not saying much.

I mean there are other great RPGs out there and they don't come near Paizo sales. 4e wouldn't have either.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I want to point out that 5e doesn't handle this any better than 4e does. If hit points are "meat" in the fiction, that still leaves completely unexplained how someone can recover from a sword wound after an hour nap, let alone how a Fighter can recover from the same wound as a bonus action with Second Wind.

Trying to map hit points into anything remotely resembling verisimilitude is utter madness, just like Gary Gygax pointed out multiple times in the AD&D DMG.

True, and yet...the game does demand that they be taken as meat in some ways, most notably in the case of poison, and more broadly in damage types.

 

[Parmandur]

I want to point out that 5e doesn't handle this any better than 4e does. If hit points are "meat" in the fiction, that still leaves completely unexplained how someone can recover from a sword wound after an hour nap, let alone how a Fighter can recover from the same wound as a bonus action with Second Wind.

Trying to map hit points into anything remotely resembling verisimilitude is utter madness, just like Gary Gygax pointed out multiple times in the AD&D DMG.

This whole question got confused when they changed the unit of time measurement in combat from 1 minute to 6 seconds.

 

[darjr]

There is a restaurant at the end of the universe! People can and do accept abstract things and map them arbitrarily to what makes the best fit at the time.

The trick is to get it right. Which exactly like HP, opinions on what is right will vary.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, and for a hobbyist making a game for just friends and family does make sense. But frankly not wanting to make as appealing a game as possible just seems like...bad design to me? The equivalent of making Plan 9 from Outer Space or something.

Why? A game that is very well designed for a subset of people will almost inevitably be less appealing for a superset. That's like saying a Swiss Army knife is always a better design than a specialty tool.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I can't disagree. Still though this seems like a pointless thing. Selling a quarter as well puts it in range of Paizo sales. There isn't another RPG that sells as well outside of D&D. Maybe Avatar, but not yet, not consistently. If it weren't for D&D 5e it would be the 800 lbs gorrilla.

So to say if it sold as well as Pathfinder it would be considered an amazing success is a both obvious and not saying much.

I mean there are other great RPGs out there and they don't come near Paizo sales. 4e wouldn't have either.

I was simply trying to note that something can have a great number of satisfied customers, and still not have enough for WOTC. The latter are fishing for enough numbers that they're effectively operating in a different market than anyone else in the RPG field.

 

[Parmandur]

Why? A game that is very well designed for a subset of people will almost inevitably be less appealing for a superset. That's like saying a Swiss Army knife is always a better design than a specialty tool.

I mean...it's certainly going to be more widely useful. That's why the Swiss army makes them that way.