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

[James Gasik]

I;ve done this (not the score part I dont think id want that level of granularity). Axiomatic and Anarchistic weaponry can be a lot of fun. Neutrals, of course, get out of it, but get none of the bennies.

While it would be good to be unable to use holy weapons if you're not good, at the time I had my break with alignment, that wasn't the case. The only person who suffered a penalty for holding a holy weapon was an evil character. Ditto for axiomatic and all the rest.*

Even now, in 5e, the Holy Avenger sword only requires you to be a Paladin to attune to it. Your actual alignment means nothing.

*Amusingly, I postulated the existence of a Holy Unholy weapon existing that only Neutrals could use at this time. It likely wouldn't be worth it, as many enemies you face are also annoyingly Neutral, lol. But I did really want to create one, just for the novelty.

 

[James Gasik]

The 3E monk and barbarian can have some combined shenanigans, but then again, there was several other mechanical examples thought to be balanced so the idea does have credence.

Well, it is an example I suppose. However, I find a lot of fault in these statements approach, both with and without alignment. Thats more BIFTs in general. Dont want to bog the thread down in a BIFT chat.

Ah yes, I recall pointing out to someone that a Monk who ceases to be Lawful loses nothing but their ability to gain Monk levels, and they could then become even a Barbarian and gain access to rage at this point.

I was told that was stupid and nonsensical and would never be allowed at a real table.

 

[cavalier973]

Remember when Tallahassee blew the air horn, and all the zombies rushed him?

That was awesome.

 

[tomBitonti]

(1) No one has explained how 3E, 5e or even AD&D is different in this particular respect, when it comes to combat resolution. Upthread, when I asked how you resolve "I cut off their head!" followed by a successful attack roll you explained how you follow the mechanics and ignore the description of the action.

(2) What you say is not true of 4e D&D, as page 42 of the DMG explains.

(3) If - as you have claimed - there are no coherent narratives available, then the narration of something coherent actually does serve a purpose in itself, namely, it establishes coherence in the fiction.

Comparing "cut of his head" with Come and Get It is not a good comparison.

As a more defined example, let's compare Bull Rush, from 3.5E, and Come and Get It, from 4E:

When you make a bull rush, you attempt to push an opponent straight back instead of damaging him. You can only bull rush an opponent who is one size category larger than you, the same size, or smaller.

You pull the target up to 2 squares to an adjacent square.

Note that in 4E "pull" is defined to be the same as "shift" and "push". The fighter using CAGI is not presumed to be necessarily actually pulling the target.

In the 3.5E description, actually pushing the target is unambiguously a part of the action. Additional details are consistent with this -- larger targets are harder to push. The movement must be away from the attacker. The attacker can follow behind the target if they desire.

In the 4E description no details are given (nor are needed) as to how the target gets moved. Were they caused to stumble closer? Were they made to be dis-oriented and caused to move to a location not of their choice, but of the attacker's? Were they goaded into moving next to the attacker? Were they literally dragged closer by the attacker hooking them and moving them closer? Did the attacker mentally take control of their facilities and compel them to move? (One could argue that some form of trickery or a taunt is permitted as an explanation, and a hook is not permitted, since the attack is against Will.)

The 3.5E bull rush ability is much more strongly described than the 4E Come And Get It. While there are details of exactly how the target was pushed with bull rush -- Did the attacker give them a shove with both hands? Did the attacker give them a strong kick? Did the attacker hunch behind their shield and forcefully plow into the defender? -- None of these rises to the level of detail which must be provided to explain a use of Come and Get It, and none is categorically different than the others (all involve a physical push; none involve trickery or mind control or hooking the target).

One could try to correct CAGI by adding a description:

• Your dazzling display of prowess causes the target to be momentarily confused. You pull the target up to 2 squares to an adjacent square.
• Your deadly weave of attacks leaves the opponent no defensible option except to move closer.
• You unleash a torrent of vile insults that the target cannot ignore.
• You leave yourself apparently vulnerable, causing the opponent to rush forward, heedless of the strength of your position and the awaiting attack.

All of which sound fine, but all of which work better if CAGI had not baked in Strength vs Will. In each case, I'd want a different attack combination, and would apply different defensive modifiers depending on the defender.

(Which turns this into a different problem: CAGI simply having bad design, as most supplied descriptions of how it works might want a different check and different defensive modifiers. Something to think about.)

TomB

 

[Thomas Shey]

The Warlock's "Y" design meant half the Warlock powers might be useless to you. Paladins couldn't even be decent Defenders until Divine Power was released- making a character required a lot of diligence on your part, maybe even more so than in 3.5!

Keep in context that I was not a fan of 4e, but played a pretty full length campaign of it.

This is the opposite of my experience, and because I was doing campaign maintenance of the Hero Labs 4e manager (which was not official) I got into a lot of powers and feats guts than most.

Unless you had a very elevated idea of what was needed, it actually required a great degree of effort to get a bad character in 4e. It was possible in a couple of cases to get an overpowered one without trying (there as a notorious Ranger power for example) but as long as you were okay with a middle of the road character there were far, far less trap options than in 3e.

Edit: I should note that we were playing relatively late in the day--post Essentials as a matter of fact--so its possible there are some pre-errata problems early on. But I stand by my opinion at least as of that period.

 

[Voadam]

Comparing "cut of his head" with Come and Get It is not a good comparison.

As a more defined example, let's compare Bull Rush, from 3.5E, and Come and Get It, from 4E:





Note that in 4E "pull" is defined to be the same as "shift" and "push". The fighter using CAGI is not presumed to be necessarily actually pulling the target.

In the 3.5E description, actually pushing the target is unambiguously a part of the action. Additional details are consistent with this -- larger targets are harder to push. The movement must be away from the attacker. The attacker can follow behind the target if they desire.

In the 4E description no details are given (nor are needed) as to how the target gets moved. Were they caused to stumble closer? Were they made to be dis-oriented and caused to move to a location not of their choice, but of the attacker's? Were they goaded into moving next to the attacker? Were they literally dragged closer by the attacker hooking them and moving them closer? Did the attacker mentally take control of their facilities and compel them to move? (One could argue that some form of trickery or a taunt is permitted as an explanation, and a hook is not permitted, since the attack is against Will.)

The 3.5E bull rush ability is much more strongly described than the 4E Come And Get It. While there are details of exactly how the target was pushed with bull rush -- Did the attacker give them a shove with both hands? Did the attacker give them a strong kick? Did the attacker hunch behind their shield and forcefully plow into the defender? -- None of these rises to the level of detail which must be provided to explain a use of Come and Get It, and none is categorically different than the others (all involve a physical push; none involve trickery or mind control or hooking the target).

One could try to correct CAGI by adding a description:

• Your dazzling display of prowess causes the target to be momentarily confused. You pull the target up to 2 squares to an adjacent square.
• Your deadly weave of attacks leaves the opponent no defensible option except to move closer.
• You unleash a torrent of vile insults that the target cannot ignore.
• You leave yourself apparently vulnerable, causing the opponent to rush forward, heedless of the strength of your position and the awaiting attack.

All of which sound fine, but all of which work better if CAGI had not baked in Strength vs Will. In each case, I'd want a different attack combination, and would apply different defensive modifiers depending on the defender.

(Which turns this into a different problem: CAGI simply having bad design, as most supplied descriptions of how it works might want a different check and different defensive modifiers. Something to think about.)

TomB

This points to a different issue as well in discussing the issues with CaGI, there are two versions of CaGI. The original 4e PH one with automatic pull and attacks which is still sold in PDF form, and the online CB revised version with the attacking will defense.

 

[hawkeyefan]

After 15 years I feel like anyone who doesn’t get that a person can be tricked/coerced/insulted/feinted into moving to a disadvantageous position just isn’t going to get it.

 

[Aldarc]

After 15 years I feel like anyone who doesn’t get that a person can be tricked/coerced/insulted/feinted into moving to a disadvantageous position just isn’t going to get it.

My carakter is super smart jst like me! Their is no way that the wuld ever be triked by some dum fiter tonting them! It can only be mind control magic!

 

[Manbearcat]

After 15 years I feel like anyone who doesn’t get that a person can be tricked/coerced/insulted/feinted into moving to a disadvantageous position just isn’t going to get it.

Doesn't happen. Otherwise rational people don't do any of the following:

* Get juked/feinted out of position (sometimes tremendously so) on a basketball court or football field.

* Rush a guy 30 lbs heavier than you who baits you for 20 minutes physically and verbally > who then throws a basketball at your head at point blank range after typical basketball contact > despite knowing with certainty that his two friends are going to jump you and start a full-scale donnybrook.

* Stop in the middle of a busy intersection after an electrical utility worker has purposely driven his 7000 lb truck into the back of your vehicle at about 3-4 mph > proceed to get out your car and jump on the running board of the cab of the truck and slam your finger into the driver's side window to challenge the driver to a scrap.

---

This, or events like it, just doesn't happen in our very mundane world...ever.

Humans are rational all the time. They say rational things. They do rational things. All the time making optimal, rational decisions. Never ever are they hijacked by their endocrine system or tricked by failures of their foolproof perception systems. Never, ever do they weirdly tell self-incriminating falsehoods when the stakes are extremely high even when they didn't "do the thing." Never do they make up events or data when peoples' well-being or even lives are on the line. Never are they taken by false memories or misperceptions to entirely misrepresent events.

Rational. Perfect. People.

 

[Mannahnin]

Not particularly. It’s still breaking the paradigm of weapons vs armor - armor is designed to defend against weapons, no matter how tricky they are used. Plus, AC can incorporate other defensive factors that should be effective against little jabs as much as scything sweeps. Getting past that paradigm should be a very high bar, eking out 2-5 points of damage isn’t that kind of value. In addition, making an array of attempts is all part of the abstraction of combat attack rolls anyway.
Better to design it as an attack against AC that bestows advantage in some way. That serves to improve the chances of the attack dealing damage while remaining within the same paradigm.

Granted, there can be attacks that armor is ineffective against, but D&D usually models those as magical, and if something can bypass an armor type, it was usually a bonus to the attack roll.

Or worse, "touch AC", lol. Which I don't miss, even if it seems odd to me that delivering a touch attack actually cares about what armor someone is wearing at times.

This is an illustration of my point.

In D&D, there is no chance of a spell being recited so poorly that it doesn't work. There is no chance of dropping or spilling a potion that you try and drink during a fight. There is no chance of tripping on an uneven cobble stone while walking across a room, or jogging across the room during a fight.

D&D defaults to auto-success for all sorts of actions that - from real world experience - we know might go wrong.

These decisions about when to permit auto-success, when to insist on a chance of failure, etc, are about game conventions. 4e D&D is not incoherent or unrealistic or cognitive gap-laden because its fiction includes some attacks with swords or bows to be so fearsome that their target is always set back at least a little bit.

Right. We accept that a spellcaster can never fumble their verbal component purely due to the antiquity of the assumption. Despite the fact that such things happen in the source literature. The idea that a fighter can ever be in a position that an attack they make will automatically do something (except perhaps against an incapacitated foe, depending on the edition) is more novel only from a rules perspective. But there's nothing inherently unrealistic about it, and it's definitely consistent with fantasy fiction.

We see situations in fiction like this quite often, in books and on the screen- generally when one combatant is "on his last legs" (ie: last couple of HP). When he "could be knocked over by a stiff breeze". In those spots we as the audience know that if the opponent just bothers to attack, the victim will be unable to adequately defend himself and be cut down. Alternatively, a situation where a warrior is in a tight spot and the opponent has set themselves up for a deadly blow. Which is consistent with the relatively small number of cases in which 4E allows damage on a miss from a martial attack, which are generally A) High level powers/limited maneuvers representing a skilled fighter putting in special effort on an attack, or B) Reaping Strike, the Fighter At-Will, which only ever does single digits of damage, so either just barely impacts the enemy or finishes off one who is "on his last legs".

I liked Touch AC as a concept too, and one area where 5E strikes me wrong is how it makes touch attacks have to roll against full AC. That being said, given how it lets casters use their PR and proficiency with it, the annoyance is mostly just aesthetic.

That's just it: not everyone is willing to subscribe to some of those underlying game conventions without some pushback.

Sure. But some of that pushback is against things which the pusher accepts in other contexts apparently out of familiarity.

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?

Sure. Potentially. I'm not thinking of a specific example but there may have been some. Though thematically the Warlord is more about leading their allies, although some of their powers did have to do with goading enemies.

This touches on another issue folks had. You were never inconvenienced with your powers, they just always worked. Tripping snakes and killing fire elementals with fire. I know the next line of defense is that you can build narrative stories about why an undead would be lured by come and get it, but that misses the point. Some things ought to not be useful/successful in every case.

Let's remember that they're not always successful. CAGI needed to Hit against Will to draw the enemy. Ie: your taunt/manipulation of the enemy had to succeed in order to move them. (I acknowledge that the first version of it, which automatically drew them in, was a bigger issue).

How are they doing those things without leaving their space?

The power doesn't include movement from their space, so I guess 4e says that.

Most of the time they don't need to. Any more than a character in any edition needs to move on the battlefield to make a Save against a Fireball. We recognize that in the fiction they're probably diving for cover or ducking behind something (or someONE), but for battlemap purposes the mini doesn't move. It's important to remember that the battlemap position is still something of an abstraction, though it's an easy trap to fall into of thinking it's absolutely accurate.

It's the same with a lot of changes. A lot of people don't care about alignment. But some people really do. Whether it's because they actually like the old alignment system, or because they like creating "What alignment is Batman" memes, they like the 9 alignments. In a certain way, 4e's choice was the worst possible move; it was ahistorical (neither the 3-alignment system nor the nine-alignment system) and it also didn't do away with it. There are some people that really liked it, but a lot of people? Well, that was their gnome.

This was a good post, but I'll nitpick that the five alignment system wasn't entirely novel or ahistorical. It matches Holmes Basic closely which in turn lines up with Gary's expanded thoughts on alignment in OD&D from The Strategic Review #6 (Vol 2, issue 1), which also broke alignment down into Good, Evil, Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral. I really liked the 5 alignment system, though I can absolutely see how LE or CG could definitely be people's Gnome. Heck, for some of the 90s CG probably would have been MY Gnome.

Moving back the original topic, one of the things that I hope will be examined in more detail is the sales numbers and trends of 4e.

As I've written about previously, 4e was released on June 6, 2008.

We've previously known that 4e was "internally dead" by the time that 4e essentials was released on September 10, 2010.

And, of course, a skeleton crew was tasked with creating the (perhaps last) D&D edition in the middle of 2011.

Which means that within about two years, Hasbro had given up on 4e. Within three years, they had decided to release a "last gasp" edition.

People have previously discussed the ways in which 4e did not match Hasbro's expectations. But I wonder about what the sales looked like after the initial burst of people who bought the books. Given the amount of time and money invested in 4e, the choice to give up on it so quickly does seem odd, but it might be supported if the trend lines were bad; in other words, after the initial burst of people who purchased it because they wanted to check it out, there were fewer recurrent purchases. It would be interesting to compare the sales to the first two years of 3e and (for that matter) to the end period of 3.5e.

Speculation is always fun, but data is much more informative.

I'm really curious about this too. I suspect that cheap and shared access to the online character builder, while a great idea to build a base of monthly and annual subscribers, really impacted the book sales.