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

[Lanefan]

But D&D is full of these inconsistencies and ambiguities, right? I'm wearing leather armour and I have a Dex bonus. My opponent misses me by one. Did I dodge it, or did my armour absorb it?

That's easy enough to codify, and thus clarify, if one wants to. Your AC comes from your armour, your Dex, and maybe some other factors; and each of those factors contributes a certain number of points to that final AC.

So here, let's say your armour is giving you 2 points of AC, your Dex is giving 3, and you've got barkskin going for another 1 - so AC 16* (using upward AC for this example).

The DM would set a universal order in which these things apply. Dex comes first, then shield, then armour, then barkskin. So, in this case an attack that misses by 1 got past your Dex, got through your armour, but ran aground on your unnaturally thick hide. If the next attack misses by 2, that means it was absorbed by your armour. A miss by 4 means you dodged it; and you don't have to do much at all to avoid an attack that misses by 7 or more.

* - for whatever reason, you forgot your shield this morning.

 

[Lanefan]

Where I don't agree with you, it's about the source of the problem, it's not about the idea that a to hit roll should be a binary operation for some. Quite frankly, I have never, ever saw someone have a problem with the Fireball spell, or any spell, doing damage on a miss like it does in 4e.

That's because Fireball et al don't do damage on a miss. If you're in the area that gets lit up, you're hit by the spell and take damage*; if you're not in the area, you're missed and take nothing. Put another way, AoE spells "hit" the entire area they affect.

Having established that you only take damage if you're hit by the spell (i.e. are in its AoE), the saving throw - along with protective devices/spells and other factors - merely determines just how much you can mitigate that damage.

* - "evasion" notwithstanding, but I've never been fond of that ability as it far too often crosses my disbelief threshold.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You say we must include as one of our parameters to judge 4e the history of D&D.

I'm asking what is the question you think we are trying to answer with this judgement?

There should be some agreement on what the question is before trying to stake out the relevant evidence for one conclusion or another.

The follow ons were why is this the appropriate question to reach a conclusion on. And who is the appropriate arbiter to make that conclusion.

Edit: and to be clear, I don't have a particular issue with considering the historical trajectory of D&D as a consideration, I'm just looking to better understand what question we're trying to answer.

The question as I see it is: can we accept the feelings of those who view 4e in a personally negative light, even if we do not hold that view?

 

[billd91]

People can dislike the rule as much as they want, this I really don’t care. As I said multiple time, to each their own.

What I have a harder time understanding, is people saying that it doesn’t make any sense by denying the parameter of the game that allows the rule to make sense. 4e specifically say that a miss is not necessarily a full miss, that it is not a black or white situation but more nuance than that.

People may dislike it however they want, it doesn’t change the fact that, within the parameter established by 4e, it does make sense.

With DoaM, 4e isn't just saying it's not necessarily a full miss, it's saying there is NO full miss. And that's the bridge too far for me because, with a DoaM attack, it doesn't matter how hampered the attacker is and how advantageous the situation is for the defender - the attack cannot fail.
With so much of D&D's history with hit points and AC and the abstraction of combat, it has always been the case that a hit is not necessarily a full on hit like a sword thrust through the vitals. Or a miss wasn't always a strict miss but an abstract reckoning of how well an AC protected the target. DoaM removes one of possible results and that's where I think it goes too far as a game mechanic for little real gain.

 

[Gammadoodler]

That's because Fireball et al don't do damage on a miss. If you're in the area that gets lit up, you're hit by the spell and take damage*; if you're not in the area, you're missed and take nothing. Put another way, AoE spells "hit" the entire area they affect.

Having established that you only take damage if you're hit by the spell (i.e. are in its AoE), the saving throw - along with protective devices/spells and other factors - merely determines just how much you can mitigate that damage.

* - "evasion" notwithstanding, but I've never been fond of that ability as it far too often crosses my disbelief threshold.

I sometimes wonder if the way we envision AoE spells makes sense. Like, why presume that the spell impacts an area uniformly.

From a rules perspective, I certainly get it, but these are workings of magic, not science or geometry.

It could just be that a successful saving throw means that you were in an area where the magic wasn't as potent (or, in the case of evasion, where it was totally absent).

 

[pemerton]

People can dislike the rule as much as they want, this I really don’t care. As I said multiple time, to each their own.

What I have a harder time understanding, is people saying that it doesn’t make any sense by denying the parameter of the game that allows the rule to make sense. 4e specifically say that a miss is not necessarily a full miss, that it is not a black or white situation but more nuance than that.

People may dislike it however they want, it doesn’t change the fact that, within the parameter established by 4e, it does make sense.

100% this.

Here's a self-quote that shows what I see as the difference between explaining a preference in RPGing and telling someone else that their play is actually incoherent, full of "cognitive gaps", etc:

Runequest, CoC, Stormbringer etc don't especially appeal to me for campaign play, because of the austerity of their PC build rules.

But with pregens, for one-shot play, they are (in my experience) terrific games. The PC just leaps of the character sheet, and the action resolution mechanics support the sort of intense, high stakes conflict that a Stormbringer or CoC one-shot should be focused on.

Very, very elegant system.

When I describe RQ/BRP games as austere, I've got in mind the "truthfullness" of the character sheet - there is the skill with its percentage chance beside it, and there are no tricks or knacks to amplify this (nothing like Feats in 3E, or the gonzo magic of D&D that can often provide automatic successes in place of needing to rely on skill rolls) and no subtleties of action resolution to exploit (contrasting with clever use of OB/DB splitting in RM, or a group of players doing clever things with the initiative sequence in 3E or 4e).

It's just about confronting the situation, with only those percentage chances to fall back on. And you can't even metagame your PC's development, because of the "use and roll under" skill gain rules. So the percentage chances themselves are generated through this very austere procedure. (And if I recall correctly, Stormbringer and at least some versions of RQ have Traveller-style lifepath PC building, don't they? - rather than initial point allocations.)

This is not at all a criticism of the system - just an attempt to describe the impression I have of it. Does it make any sense?

The rules of RQ are not incoherent. But I personally cannot get into their austerity except in the limited circumstances just described.

If someone doesn't like the fiction of the implacable fighter whose attacks cannot be totally withstood, nor the sentimental implications of having one's resolve restored by the words of a friend, they will not find 4e D&D to their taste. Likewise If they don't care for a RPG system in which the implication, in the fiction, of a particular mechanical outcomes - such as the roll of the to hit and damage dice - can't be established independently of its broader context in the fiction and mechanics. (For instance, in 4e D&D a critical hit rolled by a player against an Orc, that kills the Orc, probably has a different fictional implication from a critical hit rolled by the GM against a player, which leaves that player's character not even bloodied, or that drops the character to zero in circumstances where the character is then restored by an Inspiring Word a few seconds later.)

That does not mean that the rules are incoherent, or "unrealistic", or whatever else.

 

[pemerton]

Good question; and also a fine example of the same thing Micah is getting at, where the rules don't properly model what would reasonably be expected to happen in the fiction.

if the fighter is Conan, or Conan-esque, then what would reasonably be expected to happen in the fiction is what I noted above: at the last second the fighter would be aware of the attack, and pantherishly twist just enough to avoid being run through with a spear, instead being only grazed.

Which is the result that AD&D produces.

1e isn't perfect in its fiction-modelling.

Well, it seems to me that you're saying you want different fiction from what AD&D produces, such as (for instance) the absence of Conan-esque types.

It's not terribly hard to do this in a RPG - Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive" sets out a D&D variant that will produce it, to an extent at least.

Describing this as better fiction-modelling just seems wrong to me. It's about changing the fiction.

 

[Micah Sweet]

100% this.

Here's a self-quote that shows what I see as the difference between explaining a preference in RPGing and telling someone else that their play is actually incoherent, full of "cognitive gaps", etc:
The rules of RQ are not incoherent. But I personally cannot get into their austerity except in the limited circumstances just described.

If someone doesn't like the fiction of the implacable fighter whose attacks cannot be totally withstood, nor the sentimental implications of having one's resolve restored by the words of a friend, they will not find 4e D&D to their taste. Likewise If they don't care for a RPG system in which the implication, in the fiction, of a particular mechanical outcomes - such as the roll of the to hit and damage dice - can't be established independently of its broader context in the fiction and mechanics. (For instance, in 4e D&D a critical hit rolled by a player against an Orc, that kills the Orc, probably has a different fictional implication from a critical hit rolled by the GM against a player, which leaves that player's character not even bloodied, or that drops the character to zero in circumstances where the character is then restored by an Inspiring Word a few seconds later.)

That does not mean that the rules are incoherent, or "unrealistic", or whatever else.

Incoherent and unrealistic are not objective descriptors, nor are their opposites. In either case they describe a preference. 4e feels in this circumstance Incoherent and unrealistic to them. It sounds to me (my subjective opinion) that you simply don't care for those words being applied to a game you like in any context. I can certainly relate to that.

 

[pemerton]

That's because Fireball et al don't do damage on a miss. If you're in the area that gets lit up, you're hit by the spell and take damage*; if you're not in the area, you're missed and take nothing. Put another way, AoE spells "hit" the entire area they affect.

I sometimes wonder if the way we envision AoE spells makes sense. Like, why presume that the spell impacts an area uniformly.

To flip this around: an attack that does damage on a miss, be that a fireball or the attack of a fighter or a rogue, always hit their target. The attack roll just determines whether it is a "solid" hit or a weaker/glancing one.

There is no rule of RPG play or design that is contradicted by the previous paragraph.

 

[Gammadoodler]

The question as I see it is: can we accept the feelings of those who view 4e in a personally negative light, even if we do not hold that view?

Accept as what?

That they have them? That there is some basis for them? That they are correct to have those feelings? Something else about them?

And about the whole system? Or particular aspects of it?

Because, it seems to me, that, at least in the recent discourse, the thrust was "I understand that some people don't like this system and that's fine, but I don't find this particular criticism convincing"