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

[niklinna]

Not actually. You need varied monster roles that synergize with each other. You need traps and hazards and interesting terrain to make the fights dynamic. Hopefully it's all thematically appropriate. You can't just "add up 4 orcs and you're good."

Avenger (striker) - engaged
Barbarian (striker) - not engaged
Hexblade (striker) - engaged
Wizard (controller) - engaged
Cleric (leader) - not engaged
Ardent (leader) - not engaged
No defender, because no one will play one (despite my begging them for 6 months)

Yeah, that is rough. I hadn't GMed much, but when I finally agreed to, and half my players built characters that were inappropriate for the (prewritten) adventure, I knew we were in for a bit of trouble. The game system also requires min-maxing for certain basic character ideas, but then the adventures put forward challenges that hit characters in singular pain points, sometimes where they've dumped a stat. Sure you only need one face most of the time, but when everybody has to roll on strength to survive a flood....

They've managed surprisingly well in spite of that, but not without complaints.

But 4E without a defender? I have to admit I would have bluntly told the group that was going to be frustrating at best. All the more so if most of your players aren't even engaged. (And that would've been another reason I wouldn't do 4E—it can handle maybe one player not being engaged.)

 

[niklinna]

All that is trivial though, using the digital tools. They’re all there, ready to filter and pick with profiles you can scale up & down by level using the hand cheat sheet. It took me longer to build the tokens for an encounter then to put it together with a hazard + mixed monster group (one elite scaled down, everything else on level), and redo the hazard into something on theme.

Which I find using an online tool on my computer. So I have to scroll through hundreds of choices, pick the brutes, pick the artillery, etc, copy/paste all of stat blocks into a Word Document and print it.

I am wondering now which online tools the two of you are using.

We just started a new adventure that's a dungeon crawl with no roleplaying opportunities. By default, everything has turned evil.

Why are you doing such an adventure when it's clear none of you want that?

Guess I can re-write this "classic" adventure ("the best of 4e") that I've been prepping for a month.
Dammit, I hate being a DM. Nothing works for these people.

It really does sound like you need a break from DMing. Do you ever get a chance to play? Maybe with another group?

 

[Chaltab]

I have to admit I would have bluntly told the group that was going to be frustrating at best. All the more so if most of your players aren't even engaged. (And that would've been another reason I wouldn't do 4E—it can handle maybe one player not being engaged.)

Yeah I feel that. My current main group has three people with ADHD and while two of them did well enough with 4E in the past, one of them started with 5E. Trying to run 4E with that one sounds like a losing prospect.

 

[niklinna]

Let's see. I have the leader of a rival town who has come into their city and declared martial law - who they haven't engaged with. A faction of rebels trying to overthrow him - who they haven't engaged with. An aboleth in the sewers trying to take over the thieves guild with mind control - who they haven't engaged with. The dark thane of the duergar who is weaponizing the dwarves of the nearby mountains.

My biggest frustration with the 4E campaign I played in was, whenever the GM reviewed our opportunities, the party leader would rebut each one with "That sounds too dangerous." Danger was our middle name! We're supposed to go after danger.

There is a lot of stuff going on. When I give them the opportunity to talk, it's all reduced to "you can fight agents of enemy x but these guys do ongoing fire damage." Why? Because they look at their sheets and see "blazing doom of the void" or "fire shroud."
It's that old saying, when you have a hammer, everything's a nail. They have 6-page character sheets, with 5 pages dedicated to attack powers. There's one block of skills on the front page. There's an empty box on page two for personality and backstory.

They don't have any defensive or control powers? No out-of-combat utility powers? Why are their boxes for personality and backstory empty? If they want roleplay instead of dungeon grinds, why are they so focused on combat powers and yet their boxes for personality and backstory are empty?

 

[Aldarc]

Except the constant tinkering because of "balance."

Ever heard of something called "errata"? And if you are not subjected to that sort of constant tinkering, just wait til you get a GM who is constantly tinkering with the game on their own accord.

I like that you do not start immediately as your subclass. It gives people time with the character and I have often seen folks who change their mind and choose after playing with the character for a bit.

Starting later sometimes also means that the players are stuck with their characters for awhile before finding out that their subclass is a dud. But regardless, they are playing that class, and sometimes that's the problem and not the subclass so it doesn't matter when that comes on.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

My biggest frustration with the 4E campaign I played in was, whenever the GM reviewed our opportunities, the party leader would rebut each one with "That sounds too dangerous."

I'll never understand why anyone would roleplay a cowardly adventurer.*

* Actually, I've done it, but I held a divide between what I, as a player, was going to get my poor cowardly character into despite his best efforts to avoid it - I mean, he fought a T-Rex armed with only a frying pan!

Danger was our middle name! We're supposed to go after danger.

Yes, that's called "Adventuring"!

They don't have any defensive or control powers? No out-of-combat utility powers? Why are their boxes for personality and backstory empty? If they want roleplay instead of dungeon grinds, why are they so focused on combat powers and yet their boxes for personality and backstory are empty?

This often seems to be the case with "4e is anti-roleplay" indictments, which I've never quite understood. In my less charitable moments, I always think, "If you want to roleplay... roleplay. There's nothing stopping you!"

Now, they'd counter with "there's nothing encouraging me", and while that might be fair, I still have to say, "So? If you want it, DO IT. Doesn't your desire for it encourage you?"

I mean, it does for me.

 

[niklinna]

Casual play. 3.x was already complex (compared to ad&d 2e), 4e just upped the ante. While you still had simple classes in 3e, 4e got rid of them. You could whip up basic fighter in couple of minutes in 3e and all you had to remember was - full attack. That's it. Even wizards and clerics weren't that complex. You had slots and it's "use and loose". No recharge mechanic. Character resource management was way less complex in 3e, double so in 2e. I mean, you could play it more simple, ignore recharge, but it's playing against system.

I really didn't find 4E classes that complex to play, and I know of several builds that were quite effective even just using basic At-Will attacks. Most classes I looked at had power choices that were very straightforward. Sure, at build/level-up time you had to make those decisions, but if you picked the straightforward powers, you were good to go.

The tracking of multiple modifiers & conditions, now, that I could've done without.

 

[Undrave]

This is the interesting that I find about it all. Many tabletop games that cite 4e as an influence are NOT also citing Warcraft as an influence, but, rather, tactical JRPGs, which in turn were probably some of the most heavily D&D-inspired games out there, especially the classic ones.

I'll be honest. None of the designers of 4e really strike me as the sort of people who were playing World of Warcraft or MMOs. Maybe that's the problem. Maybe it was a superficial look.

When 4e came out I was SUPER into Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (I got like 200 hours in that game) so obviously the tactical combat of 4e spoke to me. I had even tried to create a board game inspired by it (it was a fiddly monster with talent tree that was basically one skills and role play chapter away from being a 4e heartbreaker honestly). Never got into a MMO (I didn't have the computer for)

Really, it needed a pre-life QoL pass. I may be a 4e mega-fan, but it's pretty clear that it came out with at least a couple parts still half-baked, and that's before you consider the presentation issues.

Yeah. If I was remaking 4e I’d just NOT have base class powers beyond level 10 and just give them all additional scaling, with extra uses for encounter powers. Let the Paragon Path and Epic Destiny pick up the slack on those. At one point you just have too many individual powers and the replacement of powers later is kinda clunky. I'd probably add a new type of Utility Powers that's just 'always on' features.

 

[niklinna]

I'll never understand why anyone would roleplay a cowardly adventurer.*

* Actually, I've done it, but I held a divide between what I, as a player, was going to get my poor cowardly character into despite his best efforts to avoid it - I mean, he fought a T-Rex armed with only a frying pan!

Love that!

This often seems to be the case with "4e is anti-roleplay" indictments, which I've never quite understood. In my less charitable moments, I always think, "If you want to roleplay... roleplay. There's nothing stopping you!"

Now, they'd counter with "there's nothing encouraging me", and while that might be fair, I still have to say, "So? If you want it, DO IT. Doesn't your desire for it encourage you?"

I mean, it does for me.

The big 4E campaign I was in, I made up a star pact warlock, and wrote a pretty brief backstory (he'd been born under an ill omen, had a freak twin brother who the midwife disappeared with, and because of all that his father hated him and kept him locked in the cellar until he got his powers). The DM took that and ran with it, even looking at my power choices and tying them into my character's backstory and, unknown to me at the time, major, linchpin factors of the overarching story.

 

[Oofta]

...

* Actually, I've done it, but I held a divide between what I, as a player, was going to get my poor cowardly character into despite his best efforts to avoid it - I mean, he fought a T-Rex armed with only a frying pan!

Okay, I just have to ask. WTF? Was it at least a high quality frying pan? I've heard of the barbarian who had one spell - cast iron - but there's gotta be a story behind this.