D&D General New Interview with Rob Heinsoo About 4E

[Zardnaar]

We only made it to level 8. Only ritual I recall being used was one that moved healing surges around.

 

[humble minion]

Rob credits the negative reaction to 4E being because it changed both the rules and the setting, saying that it might have been better received if the setting stayed the same while the rules changed.

I suspect he's ... not entirely wrong there. Mostly, but not entirely.

It's worth remembering that Grand History of the Realms actually preceded the 4e core books by a short time, and this was where some of the more boneheaded changes to FR lore first got released to a largely-unimpressed reception. Tyr killing Helm, just to choose one example.

For me as a customer (just as one data point, of course), this made the job one step harder for the 4e team. GHotR (and the FR 4e leaks that started to trickle out after it) was basically a huge red flag being waved around with alarms blaring 'this book is garbage and these people REALLY don't know what they are doing!' Losing my trust on something like that made it harder for me to trust WotC over 4e, and indeed, in the end I never played it.

This is not to say the ONLY reason i disliked 4e was the setting changes. I had plenty of other objections, from monsters being shallow and boring to an over-focus on the battlemap rather than the world, to the ridiculously broken and badly-thought-out maths in things like the early iterations of skill challenges. I think Heinsoo is perhaps making a few excuses here. But the setting stuff meant the ruleset came into bat with one strike already recorded (apologies for the bad sports metaphor, I'm Australian and we don't do baseball here...).

(I do feel sorry for the GHotR guy, from time to time. He was a complete FR lore nerd, one of the incredibly dedicated ones, and GHotR was his labor of fannish love for many years, and it finally got officially noticed and published, then the misfiring WotC brains trust of the time decided to populate the last chapter with some of the worst dross you could imagine, and ruthlessly blow up the setting he clearly loved. Must have been a rough experience for him)

 

[DEFCON 1]

This tells m a lot about how 4e rituals were used at your table (or not, as the case may be) but they don't accurately reflect how often they were used at mine because they saw a LOT of use at my table.

Well, of course. But that's the issue I was pointing out.

Some people played 4E exactly as the designers intended it. And for them it hit all the buttons they needed for an awesome game experience. But if the number of those people end up being quite a bit lower than most of the player pool... and other players perhaps are only using the game three-quarters or fifty-percent as it was meant to be run (through no fault other than perhaps the presentation of the rules or the habits those players had from previous RPGs or D&D editions)... then the game on the whole does not get embraced as being the full legitimate Dungeons & Dragons game that it is.

It is what it is. The game is the game. Things could have been different and perhaps skewed things in a different direction, but we will never know. And while I think it's kind of silly how some people seemed to take a perverse glee in cutting 4E apart... we have to accept that whatever the combination of changes were made in creating this game, the admixture just didn't work for a long-term publishing experience. But that's WotC's problem at the end of the day.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm guessing some people cheered?

Pretty much the entire room applauded, which I hadn't been expecting at all. It was quite disheartening.

 

[Muh]

My personal experience supports his theory for what that's worth. When 4E came out, the things I strongly disliked were

• Changes to the realms and other settings
• Changes to alignment
• Casters using implements
• Casters not having spells
• Terminology stuff

But when we actually tried to play it, we did not have a bad time at all. The system itself was pretty good. I, who traditionally have avoided playing martials, played a fighter for the first time and had fun.

 

[TiQuinn]

Pretty much the entire room applauded, which I hadn't been expecting at all. It was quite disheartening.

I’ll never quite get the hate people have for Vancian magic.

 

[Shardstone]

As a counterpoint, I found that roles made it easier to onboard and classes to new players. Many new players liked that roles made class expectations, particularly regarding play style, clear rather than opaque. I had a number of players at my tables who disliked that 5e moved away from roles because they suddenly had the problem in reverse. They now found it difficult to present new classes to their new players and to onboard those players. I understand that the popularity would suggest that isn't true, but I don't necessarily think that this is causally related.

You are correct that roles do make it easier to onboard new players. If the roles had only existed for 1 level, which is a design trick they could have pulled, it would have been fine.

 

[TiQuinn]

You are correct that roles do make it easier to onboard new players. If the roles had only existed for 1 level, which is a design trick they could have pulled, it would have been fine.

There’s probably a way of communicating this without having the concrete box around the character, i.e. “if you want to be a controller, consider these options. If you want to be more of a blaster, consider these. You may find other cool combinations that work together!”

Phrasing matters.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I’ll never quite get the hate people have for Vancian magic.

I think it all comes down to playstyle and what a player wants in their class fantasy.

For me personally, when playing the older editions I never liked the fact that I could have a spell that would help us solve a problem in the moment, but because I didn't memorize it in the morning then we couldn't use that solution. The game was basically taunting me by acknowledging I have the answer, but not letting me use it. And the only way for me to use it was to guess at the start of the day that this spell might be a solution I would need and then cross my fingers it would end up being true. But if it turned out the entire day was ending up being just one combat after the other and half my spell slots had utility magic memorized... then I'd cast the few spells I had and then spend the rest of the adventuring day firing a crossbow and getting like one out of every eight shots actually hitting. Which is not how I would envision a Magic-User actually behaving.

I would imagine that you have a different class fantasy and what I describe above for you would be a boon, not a flaw. Likewise if I was to say that I actually love attack cantrips because it allows me to actually be a Magic-User all the time and not have to spend 90% of my day as an inept crossbowman... you might say that the proliferation of magic in the game has now made the game worse.

Neither of us is right, and neither of us is wrong. It's all just a matter of preference and perspective.

 

[Oofta]

This idea that "presentation" or "lore" were major issues is completely missing the point as far as I'm concerned. People did not bounce off of 4E because it had a poor release or bad PR. A lot of people were super excited about the release, myself included. Books sold out almost immediately at game stores, we ran out of room for tables at game days, the immediate uptake was quite successful in my area.

But even from the first, a lot of people rejected the rules for the simple reason that it was not an evolution of the game rules that they had always enjoyed, it was a completely different approach. If you stripped off the D&D name, the labels, the lore and just looked at the rules it was a different game. There were a handful of core sacred cows like the dice we used, AC, HP. But when you change the other 90% of the core game, it's no longer an evolution of the game. It wasn't D&D to a lot of people because from a rules perspective and the way it actually played at the table it wasn't. It was also a difficult game to run as a DM, especially once you got past heroic tier.

Add in other factors like the broken math we had when first released, the massive amounts of errata that started coming out almost immediately, the book of the month club that flooded the market and led to confusion and made it difficult for a DM to keep track of all the powers and there's a reason there was initial success that quickly faded.

I can imagine a different world. One where 4E was released as a different game altogether and had a different release schedule. Call it Castles & Crypts (or some other name that hasn't already been used), release just levels 1-10 at first. Spend some time and learn what works and what doesn't before doing higher levels. Have classes from the very beginning that weren't built around the standard AEDU structure, ease off the dozens of conditions, reactions and counters that bogged gameplay down to a crawl. Maybe C&C would still be around and be reasonably successful.

But don't slap a D&D label on it and pretend it was just an evolution of the game because it wasn't. Don't blame factors other than the books themselves for the lack of success. A good set of rules would have overcome those obstacles, 4E simply didn't have the broad appeal and staying power that 5E does.