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

[Snarf Zagyg]

Who says I am? Plenty of folks hated 3E. Though, 5E specifically gauged the water temp before making decisions instead of saying anybody who disagrees is playing wrong and dumb. It seems to have worked out.

Notably, since we are supposed to be discussing history and design decisions, it was the backlash against 3e that started the OSR movement.

 

[payn]

Notably, since we are supposed to be discussing history and design decisions, it was the backlash against 3e that started the OSR movement.

Which gives some credence to the idea of what went wrong with 4E. Designers may have figured all the traditionalists flew the coup.

 

[Micah Sweet]

@Micah Sweet

My insistence is that the rules of the power CaGI do not allow you to move from your space, or rather do not include movement. It's right there in the power description.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Which gives some credence to the idea of what went wrong with 4E. Designers may have figured all the traditionalists flew the coup.

I think it was a mess of different things, including that.

In fairness, I truly think that they were trying to design the best game possible. But that was the problem. You had very good designers (such as Heinsoo and Mearls) who had very strong opinions on what design should be. They also believed that people were all "up-to-date" with the game - in other words, 4e was a "natural evolution" from late-stage 3.5e. Heck, you had Mearls, just prior to joining WoTC, write that post in defense of miniatures where he introduced the whole (I am not going to use the phrase...) "MMI" into discourse.

The problem was that the playerbase, largely, wasn't ready for it. There were still a lot of people who played some (or all) ToTM. You were cutting out the OSR people completely (and hyperaccelerating that trend). Most players weren't playing with Book Of Nine Swords, so the changes were a complete shock. Not to mention that the game was going to be unfamiliar- unlike 5e, which attracted back a lot of the parents who had previously played.

Most importantly, they misread the appetite for a complete rules do-over. 3e was able to do it because the TSR line (which was inter-operable and unchanged for 25 years) desperately needed a complete refresh and there was a consensus in the community that D&D was in a lot of trouble. The community was fully on-board. But 4e came out when 3e had just been released and people had spent all this money on it. There was no driving desire for another complete re-vamp.

Combine that with moving so hard against legacy components, and it was going to struggle.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In my view it in no way detracts from the sense of what is happening to imagine the fighter, performing CaGI, to be interacting in some fashion with the affected enemies which might involve moving bits of their body outside the square that (for mechanical purposes) they are occupying.

You can certainly describe how you're using the power in whatever way you want, so long as the mechanics remain the same. Because in 4e the mechanics are king, and the description has no effect on the action beyond entertainment and potentially a sense of immersion, if 4e's assumptions of play appeal to you. And that's fine. They don't appeal to me. That is all I have ever been saying here.

 

[Voadam]

So to get back to the 4e seminar revelations, the doubling of monster hp is pretty big on the feel of combat.

I remember when I read the 4e DMG and saw the sample level 1 goblin dungeon adventure that ends with a dragon with over 200 hp that this seemed a really tough encounter for five first level characters who have to inflict over 40 hp each at the boss fight to succeed. If the dragon drops anyone it means the rest have to pick up that damage budget slack. That is a lot of rounds of slogging with at wills at first level when you have one daily each and one encounter power.

Given the AEDU structure this seemed that if a PC had spent their one daily in any of the fights beforehand they were in for a tough time. It seemed either designed to encourage/reward saving up your dailies for the boss and never using them as you go, or encouraging you to old school run from the end boss because they are tough instead of action hero take them on, or to just hackmaster slug it out for round after round after round.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

So to get back to the 4e seminar revelations, the doubling of monster hp is pretty big on the feel of combat.

I remember when I read the 4e DMG and saw the sample level 1 goblin dungeon adventure that ends with a dragon with over 200 hp that this seemed a really tough encounter for five first level characters who have to inflict over 40 hp each at the boss fight to succeed. If the dragon drops anyone it means the rest have to pick up that damage budget slack. That is a lot of rounds of slogging with at wills at first level when you have one daily each and one encounter power.

Given the AEDU structure this seemed that if a PC had spent their one daily in any of the fights beforehand they were in for a tough time. It seemed either designed to encourage/reward saving up your dailies for the boss and never using them as you go, or encouraging you to old school run from the end boss because they are tough instead of action hero take them on, or to just hackmaster slug it out for round after round after round.

To me, this was the most surprising (and bizarre) revelation.

However you feel about 4e, I think that most people would acknowledge that it is balanced, and that the math works. The idea that after all of that, they would suddenly just double the hit points of monsters for no good reason ... ugh.

I've seen a lot of people remark about the "slog" of 4e combat. I wonder if some of those people were early adopters that tried it out, and gave up before any revisions.

 

[payn]

To me, this was the most surprising (and bizarre) revelation.

However you feel about 4e, I think that most people would acknowledge that it is balanced, and that the math works. The idea that after all of that, they would suddenly just double the hit points of monsters for no good reason ... ugh.

I've seen a lot of people remark about the "slog" of 4e combat. I wonder if some of those people were early adopters that tried it out, and gave up before any revisions.

/raises hand

 

[billd91]

To me, this was the most surprising (and bizarre) revelation.

However you feel about 4e, I think that most people would acknowledge that it is balanced, and that the math works. The idea that after all of that, they would suddenly just double the hit points of monsters for no good reason ... ugh.

I've seen a lot of people remark about the "slog" of 4e combat. I wonder if some of those people were early adopters that tried it out, and gave up before any revisions.

The slog definitely wore on us. I was skeptical from various design decision that were in the marketing and the general atmosphere. But we did have a couple of players who were really enthusiastic. Even the enthusiastic ones were ground down in the end.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Not sure if my 4E experience was unusual or not. I hated it without having played it, because everything was off about it.

The setting was wrong, they screwed over alignments (LE is THE evil alignment why was it removed? And why did they remove CG?), they changed the planes, skill challenges felt very rough, everything was called "powers", the book had a "weird" presentation if you were used to 3.0 and 3.5. Funnily enough the only opinion I had on classes was that I wanted casters to use a spell system instead of the AE-whatever-it's-called system (a system which I liked on martials).

Our group switched over from 3.5 to PF and when that campaign was over a player took over from me as a GM and he ran a short 4E adventure. The system was a lot better than I expected. I played a fighter and another player who had previously burned out on playing a rogue in PF tried bard and was pretty happy about it.

However, that GM wanted to run adventure paths so we switched to Pathfinder again for a long time. Later on another GM wanted to run 5E with us so we jumped on that, running two campaigns in parallel. I was initially very positive to 5E, having game mastered a short adventure in it earlier, but now that we switched to a longer campaign I began to sour on it. As I played a fighter I realised that you barely have any options, and you suck, relatively speaking. The longer we played, the more this was obvious. Things like how bounded accuracy seems like a good idea, but it doesn't work if some classes get to ignore it (cough casters cough).

Then we tried PF2 and it's funny how much that feels like it is inspired by 4E without actually having anything from the presentation of 4E in it.