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

Zeromaru X said:

This was never an issue for me. I don't know, because I was new to D&D back in the day, and didn't had any preconceived ideas of how things should work, and was really aware that this is a game. If my group was going to nitpick about tripping a gelatinous cube (a fantastic creature from magicland), then we should have to complain about dragons, elves, magic, etc...

So, my logical fix was to think that whatever equivalent to the "sensory organs" of the cube were reaccommodated during the tripping, and the cube needed a time to reorganize his body to sense the adventurers again. It's a fantasy creature, after all. Not something real. It doesn't need to follow the logic of our real world.


We are, my friend. We are...

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James Gasik said:

Do they? I remember 2e said: "a Gelatinous Cube cannot climb the walls or cling to the ceiling in order to access the mold so high up, so it is forced to grow up tall, about 10-feet, so it can feast on the mold found up there. Also, any snails who think they can outrun the cube or attempt to escape its insatiable hunger."

The 4e version just has a regular speed, and the 5e version...
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Or do you mean that nothing prevents them from climbing normally?

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Micah Sweet said:

I assume everything follows the logic of the real world unless given reason to believe otherwise.

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Zeromaru X said:

Yeah, but it doesn't necessarily needs to be that way. And that gives you a lot of free hand with world-building.

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Zeromaru X said:

TBH, I'm always gonna be puzzled by 5e downtime rules. Like, people actually need rules to know what their characters do with their free time? I always solved that through roleplaying and rulings (like determining how much the characters spent with their lifestyle, how much the bakery of this player earned, and that stuff).

Skill challenges were a good way to deal with social encounters, though I admit that at first they had problems and they were perfected in the later days of 4e.

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Zeromaru X said:

This was never an issue for me. I don't know, because I was new to D&D back in the day, and didn't had any preconceived ideas of how things should work, and was really aware that this is a game. If my group was going to nitpick about tripping a gelatinous cube (a fantastic creature from magicland), then we should have to complain about dragons, elves, magic, etc...

So, my logical fix was to think that whatever equivalent to the "sensory organs" of the cube were reaccommodated during the tripping, and the cube needed a time to reorganize his body to sense the adventurers again. It's a fantasy creature, after all. Not something real. It doesn't need to follow the logic of our real world.

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Zeromaru X said:

Not in the original entry for the Monster Manual, but they gained it in the Monster Vault.

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Mannahnin said:

I like downtime rules. I recently picked up a more extensive OSR set of them (Downtime in Zyan, by Ben Laurence of Through Ultan's Door fame) because I think they're neat and useful. One of my issues with WotC-era D&D is how there can be a tendency to pack 10-20 levels of advancement into a very short period of time in-world, and I like how downtime systems can help encourage players to do other stuff between adventures and help me as DM make that stuff interesting and make time pass.

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Micah Sweet said:

I assume everything follows the logic of the real world unless given reason to believe otherwise.

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Zeromaru X said:

Odd. My players always knew they needed time between adventures, to rest and recover, to train (those new powers and feats weren't going to appear in their PCs minds a la Matrix), to live their lives... so we always took some time for roleplaying "out of adventure" stuff. Unless the adventures we were playing needed to be played one after the other for plot related reasons, I rolled a 1d4 to determine how many weeks passed between adventures. We didn't needed rules for that.

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Gammadoodler said:

I'm having a difficult time understanding how real-world logic would provide any helpful baseline in interpreting the biomechanics of a 10 foot acidic animated gelatinous Platonic solid.

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