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

[Chaltab]

Well 4E at least had sone interesting concepts and identified problems.

Fixing a broken toe by cutting the foot off though was the big problem.

I feel like 'broken toe' is underselling how serious the modifier bloat in 3E and 4E could get. Advantage/Disadvantage is more like amputating a gangrenous leg and replacing it with a simple but effective prosthetic.

 

[Oofta]

I feel like 'broken toe' is underselling how serious the modifier bloat in 3E and 4E could get. Advantage/Disadvantage is more like amputating a gangrenous leg and replacing it with a simple but effective prosthetic.

I played a fighter in 3.5 and had a worksheet - the dice I rolled and then a half dozen lines for the list of potential buffs that I could get. Oh, and a line that I used for power attack, which you could adjust up and down. It was a lot. Fun if you could do all that quickly, I would roll a couple of handfuls of dice before my turn and write it all down with dry erase. Complete pain in the posterior if you didn't want to do that or the DM didn't allow it.

 

[Staffan]

Edit: but then, I'm generally anti-modifiers. 3e, for example, was very problematic for me in how many modifiers you had to track and stack, and at higher levels modifiers easily outweighed the dice rolls a lot of the time. Advantage/disadvantage, combined with bounded accuracy, is so much more elegant to run. I have a lot of players with math challenges, and I don't think I could get nearly the uptake if I presented them with a system like 3e.

The problem with 3e modifiers was this:

That's 16 different bonus types, and I think other books added others. You also had indirect bonuses, e.g. a cat's grace spell giving you a +4 enhancement bonus to Dexterity which in turn increases your Dex bonus by 2 which may or may not give you +2 AC, depending on armor.

If you look at Pathfinder 2 as an example, you have significantly fewer bonuses there. Your base is the proficiency bonus which is either 0 if untrained, or level+2 to 8 depending on proficiency level. To this you add your ability modifier and potentially an item bonus, and that's your permanent value. You can also have a status bonus and a circumstance bonus – status bonuses are for spells and activated items/abilities, while circumstance bonuses are for things like flanking.

That's a lot more manageable than 3e, while still providing more options than 5e's advantage/disadvantage.

 

[Undrave]

I feel like 'broken toe' is underselling how serious the modifier bloat in 3E and 4E could get. Advantage/Disadvantage is more like amputating a gangrenous leg and replacing it with a simple but effective prosthetic.

4e already already had less bonus than 3e though and bonus of the same type don't stack (except the rare untyped bonus)

That's 16 different bonus types, and I think other books added others. You also had indirect bonuses, e.g. a cat's grace spell giving you a +4 enhancement bonus to Dexterity which in turn increases your Dex bonus by 2 which may or may not give you +2 AC, depending on armor.

4e cut that down to 9 types of bonus, three of those were generally flat bonus so they were easier to account for: Racial bonus, Proficiency bonus and Enhancement bonus. Shield bonus was generally like that except for a few rare cases. Power bonus were the most common, but as mentioned, they don't stack with each other.

 

[Chaltab]

4e already already had less bonus than 3e though and bonus of the same type don't stack (except the rare untyped bonus)

Sure, but it's still more than I'm comfortable with my ability to keep track of when running a game. Especially given how... flaky some of my players are.

 

[Undrave]

Sure, but it's still more than I'm comfortable with my ability to keep track of when running a game. Especially given how... flaky some of my players are.

Fair enough. It just feels like there might have been another step in the reduction of bonuses that wasn't 'throw them all out'.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

That's 16 different bonus types, and I think other books added others. You also had indirect bonuses, e.g. a cat's grace spell giving you a +4 enhancement bonus to Dexterity which in turn increases your Dex bonus by 2 which may or may not give you +2 AC, depending on armor.

Eh. Armor tend to not be a floating bonus barring Mage armor. Circumstance is generally something the players looked for so they will remember to keep track of. Insight is rare. Profane and Sacred usually don't happen on the same guy (usually). Synergy for skill checks is usually pre-calculated, nothing that distracts you during a fight. Haste is very common but very specific.
They seem daunting but on practical terms they weren't going to be overwhelming as it looks barring heavy dispels.
Speaking of which, I feared more at high level a Mage's Disjunction. THAT was a game-blocker for the item-heavy campaigns (very likely in high level 3e).

 

[Staffan]

Eh. Armor tend to not be a floating bonus barring Mage armor. Circumstance is generally something the players looked for so they will remember to keep track of. Insight is rare. Profane and Sacred usually don't happen on the same guy (usually). Synergy for skill checks is usually pre-calculated, nothing that distracts you during a fight. Haste is very common but very specific.
They seem daunting but on practical terms they weren't going to be overwhelming as it looks barring heavy dispels.
Speaking of which, I feared more at high level a Mage's Disjunction. THAT was a game-blocker for the item-heavy campaigns (very likely in high level 3e).

Morale bonus from bless or Inspire Courage, luck bonus from prayer, maybe some insight bonus from psionics... and let's not forget AC which would commonly have armor + enhancement bonus to armor + shield + enhancement bonus to shield + natural armor (which is of course a separate category from armor) + enhancement bonus to natural armor + Dex + Dodge + deflection, with some of those not applying to touch attacks, and some not when flatfooted. And let's not forget incorporeal touch attacks where regular armor won't help but armor from a force effect like mage armor does.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Speaking of which, I feared more at high level a Mage's Disjunction. THAT was a game-blocker for the item-heavy campaigns (very likely in high level 3e).

going back to the 90's I was on message boards on AOL, and got called out for being a POS DM over this... and today I think I was (In my defense I was 17-18 at the time and only playing for 3 years)

I had a campaign where the player collected these magic swords, and armors... then when that campaign ended (around level 11ish)it had a major downer ending... the next Friday night we drew up the grand children or children of those characters 65 years later and the OG characters were in hiding the PCs had to go and pass tests to get the items (now at level 2-3) and then go to the gods themselves to reforge special things into super artifact armors... at level 6ish we had 5 super over powered characters each with multi +6 items... and they were teamed up with 3 other characters... each of them had cool artifacts too but not as much. they made it back 'home' and the BBEG and his shadow lich were waiting for them... they had killed a bunch of people they cared about, and the players thought this was the big climatic showdown 2 campaigns in the making... I had something else in mind.

the shadow lich held the BBEG hand and cast "Mord's Disjunction" destroying all the item they just spent 5 levels getting powered up with, some of witch they had spent a year in the previous campaign collecting.


my intent... piss them off tell them they were no longer a threat and leave. then they would grind back to higher level and either fix or make new items (I had seeded ways to do so since this new campaign started). Everyone wanted to quit and call it a TPK... even though not 1 Player Character died.

so I went on line for advice and was told what I would tell new DMs today... taking away the treasure can be WORSE then killing a character, even if you mean it to let them rebuild.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Morale bonus from bless or Inspire Courage, luck bonus from prayer, maybe some insight bonus from psionics... and let's not forget AC which would commonly have armor + enhancement bonus to armor + shield + enhancement bonus to shield + natural armor (which is of course a separate category from armor) + enhancement bonus to natural armor + Dex + Dodge + deflection, with some of those not applying to touch attacks, and some not when flatfooted. And let's not forget incorporeal touch attacks where regular armor won't help but armor from a force effect like mage armor does.

I think there should be some stacking... but 3e was so overdone I never even want to think about it again. 4e was better then 3e but still needed some refinement.

5e went too far the other way, but had the right idea.

I still hate that bounded accuracy wasn't going back to 2e numbers (no not Thac0).

in 2e you could have a 10 through -10 AC with most characters and even monsters landing between 3 and -3... in the WotC increaseing AC worlds that would mean 10 through 30 with most landing between 17 and 23. I honestly feel AC is too low after level 5 or 6 in 5e, but 3e and 4e it was too high.