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

[Alzrius]

They do have a climb speed

At a cursory glance, the 3.5 gelatinous cube doesn't, and the 5E gelatinous cube doesn't seem to either.

 

[FrogReaver]

The format of 4e, IMO, encouraged the reader to ignore the fluff and focus on rules and effects, especially in the powers, with their italicized one sentence descriptions.

Wasn’t that itself a rule in 4e? Powers do what they say regardless of fluff?

 

[FrogReaver]

TBF it has a lot of rules and content for outside combat. The Skill Challenge system is the most developed system any edition has ever had for extended task resolution outside of combat or a single skill check. I think a lot of folks see the big lists of powers and their eyes glaze over a bit, where in other editions that kind of content is mostly confined to the spell lists.

Or feats. Dont forgot the metric crap ton of feats.

 

[billd91]

It would have helped to know if 4e is really a "failure", as many claim. Because yes, you can say that 4e sold less than 3e, but that wasn't something exclusive to 4e. Every edition until that point has been selling less than the previous one.

I'm not sure a raw number is going to tell you anything significant about success/failure or on what level it succeeded or failed any more than "less than previous edition" will. That's what the rest of the context of "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" is really all about. Less than previous edition AND all this other stuff... and maybe we'll have a better understanding of what the heck happened and how it affected decisions afterward. Because I can tell you that there are a lot of us who have questions about what was going on, so I hope Riggs has some good insider (at the time) sources to offer their perspectives.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know, when it came up in a 4e game, we decided that prone applied to a Gelatinous Cube just meant it was flipped onto it's side. There's no reason to expect all faces of the cube can propel it forward- since it has no ability to stick to walls or ceilings, it may very well have an "upright" position. And tripping isn't the only way you can knock something off-balance.

You might expect that a cube would be hard to topple, but for all we know, a gelatinous cube might not weigh very much or be top-heavy. There's always explanations for things that "don't make sense", the issue, I've found is, unless there's a canon explanation written down, people create their own in their heads and seem to not want to accept an alternative.

Prone has been a funny condition since it's inception; it says it means being knocked on the ground, but really designers use it as an "unstable of off-balance" condition. Hence why you can (sometimes) knock flying or swimming creatures prone and make them fall, or (sometimes) knock creatures prone without legs.

I remember Pathfinder 1e being a bit confused about this; you couldn't knock flying creatures prone, and some creatures with tons of legs or no legs couldn't be tripped (like say, Merfolk)...but not all of them.

As an aside, I remember a funny 3.x discussion about the difference between going prone and kneeling being extremely fuzzy, and it being a move-equivalent to stand up from either state.

Rules aren't always going to line up with fluff, nor are they meant to (unless you're, say, playing GURPS). Gary Gygax himself says as much in the 1e DMG that the rules are a necessary abstraction of what is really occurring in the game world. Lots of things happen in the normal course of play that don't make much sense. Or, to paraphrase MST3K:

If you wonder how dragons fly or breath fire, or other science facts (la, la, la, la), then repeat to yourself "it's just a game, I should really just relax".

I don't accept that it just doesn't matter, as your MST3K quote is designed to posit. All they would need to do is say that certain creatures just aren't subject to every condition. Later in 4e they even added such a rule to the statblock of the crawling god (don't remember the name), so they can make rules about this sort of thing.

But barring that, DMs can and should look at a situation and use their judgement to determine whether or not a rule makes sense in any given context, and if in their view it doesn't, then it won't.

 

[darjr]

At a cursory glance, the 3.5 gelatinous cube doesn't, and the 5E gelatinous cube doesn't seem to either.

But 4e does. The one that can be tripped.

And with 4e, it’s all part of a tightly weaved whole. Being able to trip it is important and so is that climb speed. It’s important for the interaction of the rules and it’s important for some character builds. Forget it in play and you’re possibly cheating a player out of their fun. Something they may have worked hard to choose the right mix of powers and feats.

While the latter part of the above is true to some extent in 5e it isn’t nearly as bad, by a lot. On top of which the cube movement and trippiness is more like it’s always been. And in my book more like what is expected.

And finally I dint need to go to a large effort to justify it in the fiction in 5e like it seems some need to in 4e.

And that to me is the key downfall of 4e. This incongruity with the in game fiction in service to the tightness of the rules is a constant and I got rather tired of it.

 

[Zaukrie]

But 4e does. The one that can be tripped.

And with 4e, it’s all part of a tightly weaved whole. Being able to trip it is important and so is that climb speed. It’s important for the interaction of the rules and it’s important for some character builds. Forget it in play and you’re possibly cheating a player out of their fun. Something they may have worked hard to choose the right mix of powers and feats.

While the latter part of the above is true to some extent in 5e it isn’t nearly as bad, by a lot. On top of which the cube movement and trippiness is more like it’s always been. And in my book more like what is expected.

And finally I dint need to go to a large effort to justify it in the fiction in 5e like it seems some need to in 4e.

And that to me is the key downfall of 4e. This incongruity with the in game fiction in service to the tightness of the rules is a constant and I got rather tired of it.

Trip, prone and grapple stink in every edition from a fiction standpoint, imo.

 

[darjr]

Trip, prone and grapple stink in every edition from a fiction standpoint, imo.

Inmho it’s worse in 4e and in a way that seems endemic of a lot of it.

OK except maybe AD&D and 3.0. As raw rules criticism of 4e trip I do have to say it’s a world better than what came before.

 

[Zaukrie]

Inmho it’s worse in 4e and in a way that seems endemic of a lot of it.

OK except maybe AD&D and 3.0

I love 4e, and I agree that conditions were too important.....

 

[darjr]

I love 4e, and I agree that conditions were too important.....

FYI see my edit if that post. Not a big deal I just wanted you to see it.

I LOvED 4e and ran a sheer ton of it. I’m not kidding when I say that. Several games a week including encounters. Several long hours of several games at conventions and game days.

It’s probably my second most run edition.