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

[Undrave]

Assuming you aren't also catching your allies, assuming they're all approaching from the same direction, assuming that this is an indoor location that is fireproof, on and on and on.

Assuming the Wizard cares

Buildings made of wood aren't flammable? Trees? The McGuffin the party needs to retrieve?

Eh, that's what Mending is for

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I don't find power gaming fun. Quite the opposite, it saps the fun out of the game. I don't find wizards fun because they're too powerful.

Same. I dislike overpowered things in general. I find them dull.

 

[mamba]

How are these, in any way at all, not just "Vancian, but moreso"? How are they, in any way at all, less gamist than Vancian spellcasting?

you said nothing had changed, these are changes…

As to gamist, that is in the eye of the beholder I guess, you can call anything gamist and nothing, depending on the case you want to make

 

[Kaiyanwang]

Since you are keen on requesting citations:

What, exactly, was "trimmed" as you describe? Since you have said "a lot of stuff" meets this description, I'm sure you can give us at least a handful of examples. Perhaps three or four?

Since there is no 4e SRD, not really actually. No OGL, remember? OGL bad!
But as an example, I can think about Suggestion - it was completely transformed into "make an arcana check for diplomacy" which is horrible to say the least.

 

[niklinna]

I wasn't talking about it from a referee not letting a player do it perspective, but from a player not thinking about it or coming up with the idea perspective.

If 4E powers are written in such a way that it is almost all its mechanical combat expression, we shouldn't be surprised if some players don't consider or think about their use out of combat.

If you are able to take the step from combat power to its potential use out of combat, that's great. But I do think others might not have been so lucky as to making those leaps... just because the power descriptions were not that detailed other than a line or two of fluff.

I have no idea if either of what we are suggesting is true, but my feelings on the matter make sense to me. Take it for what you will.

I have had this issue—and its opposite—as a player and GM, and with more games than just 4e. Sometimes I'll see somebody come up with a creative but legitimate use for a power or ability, which I hadn't seen. Somtimes I'll have a player fish around on the regular for off-label uses of abilities that are clearly out of line. I watch some of treantmonk's videos with simultaneous giggles and eye-rolls.

I still remember the first session of our multi-year 4e game wherein the PCs were trapped in a pantry cellar by skeletons, so we set up a tub of butter to spill and cover the floor. No explicit rules to cover that, but hey it's butter, so the DM whipped up (heh) an agreeable mechanical effect.

An aside: Having played some Champions back in the day, where powers were very, very clearly mechanically defined, but particulars such as damage types and visuals were up to the player, I always chafed at an otherwise cool spell being hard-fixed to fire damage or radiant damage or whatever, just as one example of restrictions. This problem affects every edition of D&D, and many other RPGs, of course.

 

[Undrave]

The inconsistent color bands, I think, were a design mistake.

Nah they made it clear what was At-Will, Encounter or Daily. The readability made it super easy to use at the table and that was the goal. 4e power lists were just NOT designed for a casual read through. Wether that's good or not is up to preferences.

Not necessarily. A lot of stuff that was beyond "movement/damage + movement/effect" was trimmed because it didn't fit the mold and wasn't made for rituals either. And those were rules too, which 4e failed to reproduce, intentionally or not.
This is a massive limitation and framing it as "not pretending to be anything but game rules" doesn't make it.

The of the stuff you say was trimmed has nothing to do with the presentation style.

 

[Aldarc]

Same. I dislike overpowered things in general. I find them dull.

I played a Druid in PF1. It was so OP in comparison to the other characters in our party. I was bored out of my mind. I was even pulling my punches so I wouldn't overshadow other player characters. I ended up retiring my character, switching them out for an Inquisitor, so that other player characters would get an opportunity to shine. I never played a wizard or sorcerer in 3e or PF1 because I was still bitter of a Wizard or Sorcerer (can't remember) overshadowing the entire party in my very first time playing D&D in 3e. But that first game taught me a valuable lesson about D&D: if you want meaningful options in play, choose a spellcaster. One reason why I loved 4e was because it got me back in the saddle of playing martial characters again and having an absolutely fun time doing so. In 5e? I switched back to playing mostly casters because the lessons learned from 4e had clearly been unlearned by WotC.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

The of the stuff you say was trimmed has nothing to do with the presentation style.

Did you read my original post? I encourage you to do so.

 

[Undrave]

Did you read my original post? I encourage you to do so.

Sorry but I still don't understand how that links to what we were talking about how the rules feel too gamist and how I said they do because they're presented clearly and don't pretend to not be game rules. I'm not sure how that relates to the spells that weren't turned into rituals? We were addressing the presentation of the rules being sterile? That doesn't have anything to do with the effects.

 

[Oofta]

Winning is fun. Losing is not fun. Therefore, every fight should be won, because that will be fun.

You already know the problems with this logic.

Automatically winning is boring for me, not fun. It's also totally in control of the DM and what the group considers "winning". If always winning is fun for the group, who am I to tell them they're playing wrong? Who are you?

Then you are not looking at the numbers, or you are actively changing the rules so that the cost of doing the thing most people actually do is no longer trivial. As it stands, few groups do more than 5, maybe 6 combats per long rest on average, most groups take only one short rest per long (or occasionally 2), and most combats are only a few rounds long (maybe 5 for a relatively long combat). This, plus the tedium of actually countering spellcasters meaningfully and the deep unrealism of maintaining constant time pressure all the time that never causes problems from short rests but consistently penalizes long rests, leads to precisely what I described above.


That you have not seen it does not mean it cannot be done. The example I gave above is a Wizard holding their own in damage with only four 3rd level spells. They have four 1st and 2nd, three 4th, two 5th, and one 6th to play with, along with six spell levels from Arcane Recovery (max slot of 5th level.)

"I don't see Wizards solving problems excessively, thus no one does" is not a compelling argument.

So? I don't see how a wizard can bypass encounters on a regular basis. Other posters have questioned it as well.

Is the Wizard prevented from doing so without expending spell slots? Because if not, I'm not seeing how that is a benefit to anyone. You are just stating a thing all people can do in addition to the other stuff. Since it is shared, identical across all classes, it is not under consideration. It would be like saying that person A and person B have the same financial treatment when A gets 401k matching and stock dividends while B does not, because B could always just work another job that does those things (or by spending the income from that job on such.)


It's not complexity. It's depth and versatility. Even if many spells suck (and many do!), having 300+ spells and counting is significantly greater than having 80 feats or 20 maneuvers, especially since feats and maneuvers are rather more hit-or-miss than spells. (And yes, the 300+ isn't a joke. The Wizard has 312 non-cantrip spells, counting only first-party books. A further 19 can be found in the third-party official supplements.)

As far as versatility, yes in some ways wizards can be more versatile. But it doesn't matter, I can have a hundred options as a wizard but my 9th level wizard only has a little over a dozen spells they can memorize. Every wizard I've ever seen in play focuses on either damage or support.

Again, I can only point to a neutral arbiter of combat effectiveness as measured by DPR that I have in Solasta. The only time the wizard was top of the heap was when I was given a wand of fireballs and every fight was mobs in an enclosed space. Unless you have better measurements other than you stating your perception as fact, I'm done.