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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

It still creates a lot of expectation dissonance that comes up constantly in discussion around here.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

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.

Yes, but the impact on what you can change and still keep a large element of your audience is real. We are now hearing that the 2e developers and even Gygax considered ascending AC and decide not to change for fear of upsetting the customers. Wizards got away with a lot with 3e because at the time commercial D&D was dead. The fans that wanted D&D in the marketplace were happy and the ones that might have issues were still playing their preferred version.

 

[Alzrius]

It still creates a lot of expectation dissonance that comes up constantly in discussion around here.

Yes, but the impact on what you can change and still keep a large element of your audience is real. We are now hearing that the 2e developers and even Gygax considered ascending AC and decide not to change for fear of upsetting the customers. Wizards got away with a lot with 3e because at the time commercial D&D was dead. The fans that wanted D&D in the marketplace were happy and the ones that might have issues were still playing their preferred version.

Understand, I'm not saying that player expectations versus what the game delivers isn't an issue (let alone a perpetual one), just that it's a (very recent) digression with regard to what was being discussed before, which was with regard to what the game's operations do versus how they model what's happening in the context of the setting.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

Understand, I'm not saying that player expectations versus what the game delivers isn't an issue (let alone a perpetual one), just that it's a (very recent) digression with regard to what was being discussed before, which was with regard to what the game's operations do versus how they model what's happening in the context of the setting.

Thing is, it is all entangled. We can't get a consensus on what the game mechanics mean now. That is the central crux of the matter.
As I have said before, D&D is trapped by it's past.
And by the fact it was first. By showing the way, others can develop the mechanics needed. If the mechanics becomes popular enough they can be incorporated in to D&D but D&D's room for innovation is tightly circumscribed.

 

[pemerton]

Or maybe the more important difference there is really crunchy sim vs light crunch sim.

Prince Valiant and Classic Traveller both have more "light crunch sim" than any version of D&D.

Hit points; metronymic turn-by-turn combat resolution; all the stuff that @soviet pointed to in post 2231: these are the reasons that describing D&D as a "sim" game makes me giggle.

 

[pemerton]

There are a lot of games made over the last fifty years that were reactions to these very elements in D&D.

This. Characterising D&D as (in general) a "sim" RPG with 4e D&D as some sort of outlier flies in the face of the historical development of RPGs like RQ, RM, C&S, etc, etc, all as reactions against the obvious and dominant non-sim elements of D&D.

That's before we even get to D&D's main tropes, of dungeon crawling and advancement-by-looting, which the classic sim RPGs also tended to depart from to a lesser or greater extent.

 

[pemerton]

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 (it's not like it has to be all that deep, either; "focusing your ki," for instance, can be enough). The problem is that D&D has grown more and more reluctant to talk about the in-character nature of what the rules represent, for reasons I've never been clear about.

I GMed many, many sessions of 4e D&D. There was never doubt that I recall as to why and how things were being done.

If an additional constraint is imposed - along the lines of explain why things unfold as they do by reference to only inherent properties/capacities of the PCs - then 4e will not meet that constraint. But that constraint is not necessary for coherent and verisimilitudinous RPGing.

 

[Alzrius]

I GMed many, many sessions of 4e D&D. There was never doubt that I recall as to why and how things were being done.

If an additional constraint is imposed - along the lines of explain why things unfold as they do by reference to only inherent properties/capacities of the PCs - then 4e will not meet that constraint. But that constraint is not necessary for coherent and verisimilitudinous RPGing.

I'm not sure that anything is "necessary" for that; if you want to do the work yourself, you can turn chess into a verisimilitudinous and coherent game. It's more of an issue as to whether or not the game system works with you or against you in that regard (or simply offloads the work for doing so onto the GM and players rather than doing the heavy lifting itself), and to what extent.

Thing is, it is all entangled. We can't get a consensus on what the game mechanics mean now. That is the central crux of the matter.
As I have said before, D&D is trapped by it's past.
And by the fact it was first. By showing the way, others can develop the mechanics needed. If the mechanics becomes popular enough they can be incorporated in to D&D but D&D's room for innovation is tightly circumscribed.

I wouldn't go so far as to call the game "trapped by its past" per se, though I agree that D&D now has certain characteristics that are definitional to its identity, and for better or for worse changing those characteristics will result in a lot of blowback from fans regardless of their merits (insert New Coke analogy here). That said, there's certainly still room for certain amounts of innovation and/or alteration, which is why we keep getting new editions (beyond the much more central reason of economics).

 

[Hussar]

But just to stick with the New Coke analogy though. You are saying that people rejected 4e because it was too many changes, not necessarily the changes themselves. Just that there were too many.

Fair enough.

But that doesn’t really explain the resistance to pointing out that there are changes in 5e that come from 4e. The very strong reactions to any suggestion that 5e shares a lot of DNA with 4e.

In other words it doesn’t explain the 4e cooties.

 

[CleverNickName]

I know that topic-drift is a thing, but...let's just say it's been a while since anyone mentioned GenCon 2023.