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

[Micah Sweet]

And in a year it will be, so?


True, but these 'immersion' calls are commonly made only in an effort to put down the non-casters. Of course your halfling cannot jump up 3 meters just because the rules say they can, that's nonsense, why isn't he casting Jump or Fly to do it instead?

That's what magic can do. Stuff that would be impossible without it (or some equivalent, like technology).

 

[Alzrius]

My main point, though was, that the ambiguity was baked in from the very beginning and this has been exacerbated by a succession of designers (all with their own take) adding in their own bits.

I don't disagree that there was ambiguity there at the beginning; from its inception, D&D has straddled the line between being a toolkit and being its own thing (with all of the problems that entails, though there were benefits as well). Likewise, I agree that those ambiguities have been exacerbated by subsequent designers. I'm just of the opinion that those areas of exacerbation can (and have) resulted in diminished clarity more than they've opened up room for customization. Obviously, other people will have their own takes on that, but I think that's a notable reason why so many people had problems with 4E.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

I don't disagree that there was ambiguity there at the beginning; from its inception, D&D has straddled the line between being a toolkit and being its own thing (with all of the problems that entails, though there were benefits as well). Likewise, I agree that those ambiguities have been exacerbated by subsequent designers. I'm just of the opinion that those areas of exacerbation can (and have) resulted in diminished clarity more than they've opened up room for customization. Obviously, other people will have their own takes on that, but I think that's a notable reason why so many people had problems with 4E.

Ya know, I agree with all of that, the issue for D&D is that it is trapped by D&D. The problem is any stance taken on the ambiguities that diminish clarity will be rejected by some (many?) and this is why we are not seeing 6e but a tweaking and polishing of the existing game. I fully expect that many of the elements that people really butt heads about will not be resolved by the revised version.

 

[Autumnal]

Immersion, insofar as it's abetted by internal consistency, is a matter of verisimilitude. If you can say how the non-casters are doing fantastic things, and why they work the way they do, that's virtually always sufficient

In my experience, this is almost never sufficient. Historical records, archeological evidence, first-hand testimony from observers and practitioners, video evidence of extraordinary individuals or groups doing something, none of this is reliably good at persuading someone who’s put an accomplishment outside their box of plausibly mundane action.

I think that losing the 3e category of Ex(traordinary) abilities makes this worse. D&D-ish games benefit from having a vast hinterland of abilities that push beyond what most human-type people can do but are definitely not magical in any significant way. They’re part of how the world of fantasy adventure isn’t precisely like some constrained vision of the mundane outside the realm of specifically magical power.

Rumpelstiltskin, Hercules, and Achilles all have innate or gift-given magical power. Cú Chulainn, Jason’s Argonauts, the knights of the Round Table, and the Hero Twins of Mayan, Navajo, and other Native American stories are extraordinary. (So are Hercules and Achilles in ways apart from their magic.)

 

[Lanefan]

Ahh sorry. On phone.

Movement in 5e is the same as 4e. You do not count diagonals. So you move the same number of squares regardless if you move diagonal or orthogonal. So it’s 1 : 1 : 1 counting.

But spell effects count the diagonals. The way you would in 3e. So 1 : 2 : 1 counting.

This was a huge issue in 4e. Proof that 4e hated simulation. But it elects a shrug in 5e.

Ah, got it.

Were this the case in a game I was in I'd be annoyed with it too; but we just use straight-line measurements for such things (when they matter) that neither snap-to-grid nor stick to the eight cardinal directions.

1 : 1 : 1 movement has a problem even within itself (which bugged me long before I knew about the spell effect thing) in that two people going from adjacent squares A-A to adjacent squares B-B 100 feet away in an open field can take paths of wildly-varying linear distance to get there, yet each one takes the same amount of in-game time and mechanical move-speed. Bleah!

 

[Alzrius]

In my experience, this is almost never sufficient. Historical records, archeological evidence, first-hand testimony from observers and practitioners, video evidence of extraordinary individuals or groups doing something, none of this is reliably good at persuading someone who’s put an accomplishment outside their box of plausibly mundane action.

I'm not sure I follow. You seem to be talking about real-world accomplishments. I'm referring to defining how and why things work the way they do in terms of a fantasy setting. If you want non-casters to have supernatural powers beyond what can be "realistically" accomplished, there's no problem with giving them that; you just need to give them the same degree of definition (from an in-character perspective) that spellcasters have, and you should be fine.

Now, that probably won't be enough for people who want martials to be completely mundane, but still want them to function at parity with spellcasters and other users of supernatural abilities, but that's another conversation altogether.

I think that losing the 3e category of Ex(traordinary) abilities makes this worse. D&D-ish games benefit from having a vast hinterland of abilities that push beyond what most human-type people can do but are definitely not magical in any significant way. They’re part of how the world of fantasy adventure isn’t precisely like some constrained vision of the mundane outside the realm of specifically magical power.

Rumpelstiltskin, Hercules, and Achilles all have innate or gift-given magical power. Cú Chulainn, Jason’s Argonauts, the knights of the Round Table, and the Hero Twins of Mayan, Navajo, and other Native American stories are extraordinary. (So are Hercules and Achilles in ways apart from their magic.)

Sure, and those are all examples of what I was talking about. Such characters are non-spellcasters (i.e. martials) who have supernatural powers which are explained from an in-character standpoint, e.g. divine parentage, etc. That's all it takes. The only problem, that I see, is that there's an issue with tying that to a class, which makes such a thing common (or at least, if there are no class prerequisites) throughout the game world, leading to issues of unintended consequences.

 

[Autumnal]

I'm not sure I follow. You seem to be talking about real-world accomplishments. I'm referring to defining how and why things work the way they do in terms of a fantasy setting. If you want non-casters to have supernatural powers beyond what can be "realistically" accomplished, there's no problem with giving them that; you just need to give them the same degree of definition (from an in-character perspective) that spellcasters have, and you should be fine.

what I mean is that a lot of people have drawn their net of things they’ll accept as plausible and believable narrower than reality, let alone folklore and myth. This is a Problem. Their threshold of verisimilitude is unsuitable for the wellsprings of D&D past and present, and they need to get a different game that shares their limitations or work on stretching their limit. I personally think that not acknowledging reality as realistic in a species of badwrongfun, but am fine with there being games that cater to it - I just need to not play it, exactly as I need to play hundreds or thousands of others for various reasons. But D&D is not a good platform for adventuring framed that way any more than most superhero games or something like Mage: The Ascension are.

 

[Alzrius]

what I mean is that a lot of people have drawn their net of things they’ll accept as plausible and believable narrower than reality, let alone folklore and myth. This is a Problem.

I don't disagree, but if their metric for what's "plausible" or "believable" is based on a comparison with reality, then that seems like an issue of their expectations not being calibrated for sitting down to play a fantasy game, since the premise of such a game is that reality isn't the baseline you draw from. The point of verisimilitude, as I've noted elsewhere, is not to abet "realism," but to coherently portray a fantasy world in an internally-consistent manner. The "how" of the fantastical elements is going to therefore be defined according to what the game is trying to do; if you have someone saying "but a child of the gods shouldn't be able to do that!" then they've missed the point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't disagree, but if their metric for what's "plausible" or "believable" is based on a comparison with reality, then that seems like an issue of their expectations not being calibrated for sitting down to play a fantasy game, since the premise of such a game is that reality isn't the baseline you draw from. The point of verisimilitude, as I've noted elsewhere, is not to abet "realism," but to coherently portray a fantasy world in an internally-consistent manner. The "how" of the fantastical elements is going to therefore be defined according to what the game is trying to do; if you have someone saying "but a child of the gods shouldn't be able to do that!" then they've missed the point.

The problem is there's a fair number of people who draw an incredibly sharp line between "magical" and "nonmagical" in the first place, something that isn't present in almost any fantasy fiction, and their definition of the latter often doesn't even match up with some real world cases, let alone the range permitted in the sourceworks.

 

[Alzrius]

The problem is there's a fair number of people who draw an incredibly sharp line between "magical" and "nonmagical" in the first place, something that isn't present in almost any fantasy fiction, and their definition of the latter often doesn't even match up with some real world cases, let alone the range permitted in the sourceworks.

I get that, but that seems like more of an issue with personal expectations than any sort of internal disconnect between the game rules and the in-character actions they're ostensibly supposed to model.