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

[Lanefan]

Eh, Harm was always a combat spell and casting times aren’t particularly off since the spell can be cast in a round in both 1e and 3e. 3e added a saving throw, but the chances of dumping a dragon with hundreds of hit points down to 1d4 hit points in one go was VERY attractive since he was absolutely cake to hit with his sub-10 touch AC.

Well, something's working against it; in that in 40+ years* of playing and DMing 1e-adjacent, and with the Harm spell in the game for that entire period, I think I've seen it cast maybe three times, tops.

Harm is one of a whole bunch - as in, hundreds - of possible effects of a wild magic surge, however, and has occurred that way once or twice.

* - of which at least 15 years have been with PCs in play of level enough to access the spell.

 

[Lanefan]

2) And ok, 4e was just a big WotC psy-op to capture the Minis market? I've seen that working hypothesis (which is just another edition war epithet). Well then:

* Worlds and Monsters (the game's primer) would then be about the worst BUY MINIS primer ever. Its all about the game's fiction and sites of thematic conflict with nothing about mechanics or minis.

Agreed on this bit. That said, however...

* If 4e was just a big WotC psy-op to sell minis, how does that comport with the other great edition war epithet that 4e was just a big ole WotC psy-op to convince the World of Warcraft player-base to move their virtual play from WoW to a 4e virtual tabletop? That doesn't seem particularly amenable to buying and deploying figurines for use on physical tables in meat-space!

...around the late-3e/early-4e era, WotC were leaning pretty hard into promoting their minis game; despite most of their sales (I think) being to people who were intending to use those minis for regular D&D play.

* In terms of meatspace 4e games, I've run 2 games fully levels 1-30, 1 game full Heroic Tier, 1 game full Paragon Tier, 1 game using the Neverwinter scheme of levels 1-10 runs through the entire Heroic/Paragon/Epic Tier experiences. In terms of PBP, I've run 5 games (with one current). Of those games, you have 18 players. Of all of those games and 18 players (including the PBPs...of which 4e is an absolute cinch to run for...which oddly doesn't support either Mini-enthusiast capture or VTT, WoW-player capture!), guess how many Minis have been deployed?

0, zip, zilch, nada!

Given the advice and tone of both the 4e PH and DMG, I suspect this just means you weren't playing 4e as intended; which while fine in itself, might make you a bit of an outlier.

Then again, from all I've been able to tell you're one of those rare GMs who can make any system work in any manner, regardless of design intent, and produce a great game out of it. Not all of us are so talented.

 

[tomBitonti]

I’m finding the damage on a miss discussion amusing, in that, if we accept that hit points represent such things as exhaustion, morale, and luck, then both the attacker and defender should potentially gain or lose hit points on any attack. After all, ought not a successful attack improve the attackers morale, and ought not a very successful attack be at times strenuous, and therefore increasing the exhaustion of the attacker? And if a defender uses a limited resource to deflect or dodge a blow, are the not weakened by expending that resource?

With a wider view, characters are gaining and losing effectiveness in many ways. This suggests that a discussion of hit points must be looked at holistically within the overall game system. If consistency is a goal, should a warlord not only be able to shout a character to improved ability, but also shout their opponents to reduced ability?

TomB

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

I’m finding the damage on a miss discussion amusing, in that, if we accept that hit points represent such things as exhaustion, morale, and luck, then both the attacker and defender should potentially gain or lose hit points on any attack. After all, ought not a successful attack improve the attackers morale, and ought not a very successful attack be at times strenuous, and therefore increasing the exhaustion of the attacker? And if a defender uses a limited resource to deflect or dodge a blow, are the not weakened by expending that resource?

With a wider view, characters are gaining and losing effectiveness in many ways. This suggests that a discussion of hit points must be looked at holistically within the overall game system. If consistency is a goal, should a warlord not only be able to shout a character to improved ability, but also shout their opponents to reduced ability?

TomB

I'm going slightly off topic here but you just opened my eyes to something... Hit points clearly don't represent "meat". They represent, like you say, things like exhaustion, morale and luck (and they also obviously represent physical resilience). This means that you could technically have a character that can deal hit point damage in ways that don't involve attacking.

You could have a character using some kind of morale-depriving shout and it does deal hit point damage, but it's "non lethal" since it's damage that does not represent actual "meat" damage. It's a morale attack.

Of course this is similar to the concept of non-lethal damage except with the twist that you don't need anything that's similar to an attack to deal it.

 

[Hussar]

In its player numbers. I think the received wisdom exaggerates how large the tent is in terms of approaches to play.

I disagree here. Most other systems do not cross genre the way we use DnD. You don’t build castles and countries in Call of Cthulhu for example. You don’t do horror in Blades in the Dark typically. You don’t do heroic fantasy in Twilight 2000. So on and so forth.

You do do a lot of different genres in DnD.

 

[Hussar]

IMHO, DoaM gets overstated in 4e precisely because it's not as ubiquitous or prevalent as people make it out to be.
/snip

It gets even better when you actually look at the 4e PHB. Between all the non-magical classes, fighter, ranger, rogue, warlord in the PHB, there were less than 10 powers spread between the classes and 30 levels which didn't have reasonable explanations. The whole "non-magic mind control" thing. That was it. Something around less than 1% of all the powers.

Yet, that's all you heard about. Heck, it's all you hear about still. It's really depressing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It gets even better when you actually look at the 4e PHB. Between all the non-magical classes, fighter, ranger, rogue, warlord in the PHB, there were less than 10 powers spread between the classes and 30 levels which didn't have reasonable explanations. The whole "non-magic mind control" thing. That was it. Something around less than 1% of all the powers.

Yet, that's all you heard about. Heck, it's all you hear about still. It's really depressing.

That's unfair, true, but that issue clearly hit a nerve you have to admit.

 

[Pedantic]

It gets even better when you actually look at the 4e PHB. Between all the non-magical classes, fighter, ranger, rogue, warlord in the PHB, there were less than 10 powers spread between the classes and 30 levels which didn't have reasonable explanations. The whole "non-magic mind control" thing. That was it. Something around less than 1% of all the powers.

Yet, that's all you heard about. Heck, it's all you hear about still. It's really depressing.

That's a bit reductive. You could drop all of those and you'd still hear it about the very idea of daily martial powers to begin with.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I disagree here. Most other systems do not cross genre the way we use DnD. You don’t build castles and countries in Call of Cthulhu for example. You don’t do horror in Blades in the Dark typically. You don’t do heroic fantasy in Twilight 2000. So on and so forth.

You do do a lot of different genres in DnD.

I guess it depends on your use of "most". There's no lack of dedicated generic systems out there; I could probably name a dozen on the fly, not all of them old.

 

[Hussar]

That's a bit reductive. You could drop all of those and you'd still hear it about the very idea of daily martial powers to begin with.

And yet... there's the Battlemaster standing right there. With nary a quibble.

Complete with non-magical mind control - "Goading Attack" (regardless of the tactical situation, I can force an enemy to attack me), "Rally" (regardless of what your character thinks about my character, my battlemaster can inspire you and give you temp HP), "Maneuvering Attack" (I hit an enemy and you get to move your character. How? I dunno).

But, again, it falls below that objectionable threshold so it's fine.

It does make the conversation REALLY hard to take seriously when ten powers became this HUGE issue and even the idea of "martial powers" is a problem too when people are perfectly happy with martial powers in 5e - many 5e fighters and rogue sub-classes have all sorts of martial powers, and have no problems with the same things appearing in 5e.

It's such a minefield. I'm not allowed to question why it's fine in 5e, but not-fine in 4e. There's some sort of magical threshold beyond which there are "too many" changes. Which, when you think about it, explains the 5e playtest a LOT. They started the playtests with big changes. Got feedback, and then walked back those changes until the feedback was suitably positive. WotC has proven pretty adept at finding that magical threshold and then toeing that line.