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

[fluffybunbunkittens]

There's other stuff like their excuse for not including gnomes as a PC race option was because they didn't see the point in them. But they explain how tried so hard to come up with a reason to but couldn't think up one.

What IS the point of gnomes?

 

[James Gasik]

What IS the point of gnomes?

Gno one seems to gno. One of the 4e devs had a funny rant about this, which I'll paraphrase:

They're short and live underground...but they're not Dwarves!
They're short and mischievous...but they're not Hafllings!
They live in the forest and are gifted with magic...but they're not Elves!

I don't hate Gnomes (one of my favorite characters is a Gnome Fighter/Priest in 2e, and I had a Gnome...well ok, Svirfneblin...maybe that's cheating...Shepherd Druid in 4e who used her bear as a mount), but they don't really have a niche that's particularly their own. Gnome hatred has become a meme, since the most flavorful Gnomes are the very polarizing Tinker Gnomes, who likely only come second to Kender and Drow for the most-derided race in D&D history.

I know others will disagree (and it's their right to do so!), but in my mind, I haven't ever had too many character concepts where I said to myself "man, this character would be so much better as a Gnome.

All that gets tossed out the window in Eberron though. The Gnomes there are spymasters and information brokers and They. Are. Awesome!

 

[thenightgaunt]

...Gnome hatred has become a meme, since the most flavorful Gnomes are the very polarizing Tinker Gnomes, who likely only come second to Kender and Drow for the most-derided race in D&D history.

I know others will disagree (and it's their right to do so!), but in my mind, I haven't ever had too many character concepts where I said to myself "man, this character would be so much better as a Gnome.

All that gets tossed out the window in Eberron though. The Gnomes there are spymasters and information brokers and They. Are. Awesome!

I think a big part of the gnome hate in 4e's design there was their desire to avoid gnomish inventors. That same section you quoted is where they say the tossed that entire popular image because World of Warcraft had done it. So because WoW did it, they decided to erase a bunch of their own games' of any reference to the most popular modern interpretation of gnomes.

DRAGONLANCE presented an iconic image of the gnome, but the concept of tinker gnomes and their crazy machines has now been thoroughly used by games such as World of Warcraft, and many D&D players dislike the technological element that version of the gnome brings to the game.

It's definitely a thing that got carried into 5e IMO.

Crawford and Mearls chopped Tinker Gnomes down from their own unique race to just a flavor of Rock Gnomes. And Crawford made sure they carried that decision through to the 5e Spelljammer reboot which tried hard to pretend Tinker Gnomes did not exist (despite having Giant Space Hamsters and Autognomes) and the 5e Dragonlance reboot which had some gnomes but tried to pass them off as just regular gnomes who liked inventing which is really infuriating.

They introduce a gnome, Tatina Rookledust. But she's a ROCK GNOME not a tinker gnome. Sure she lives in a house covered in crazy contraptions, but she's a WIZARD. And yeah she has robot chickens that attack for her, but they're MAGIC. Oh...she's from Mount Nevermind...well she's not a tinker gnome, she's an artificer who manifests her spellcasting through her tools and devices...wait crap she's stated as a wizard...um...well she's sure as heck not a tinker gnome!!! Ok...sure there's a gnomeflinger in another part of the book, and it says it was invented by tinker gnomes...but...um...POCKET SAND! (runs away).

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think a big part of the gnome hate in 4e's design there was their desire to avoid gnomish inventors. That same section you quoted is where they say the tossed that entire popular image because World of Warcraft had done it. So because WoW did it, they decided to erase a bunch of their own games' of any reference to the most popular modern interpretation of gnomes.



It's definitely a thing that got carried into 5e IMO.

Crawford and Mearls chopped Tinker Gnomes down from their own unique race to just a flavor of Rock Gnomes. And Crawford made sure they carried that decision through to the 5e Spelljammer reboot which tried hard to pretend Tinker Gnomes did not exist (despite having Giant Space Hamsters and Autognomes) and the 5e Dragonlance reboot which had some gnomes but tried to pass them off as just regular gnomes who liked inventing which is really infuriating.

They introduce a gnome, Tatina Rookledust. But she's a ROCK GNOME not a tinker gnome. Sure she lives in a house covered in crazy contraptions, but she's a WIZARD. And yeah she has robot chickens that attack for her, but they're MAGIC. Oh...she's from Mount Nevermind...well she's not a tinker gnome, she's an artificer who manifests her spellcasting through her tools and devices...wait crap she's stated as a wizard...um...well she's sure as heck not a tinker gnome!!! Ok...sure there's a gnomeflinger in another part of the book, and it says it was invented by tinker gnomes...but...um...POCKET SAND! (runs away).

I've always loved tinker gnomes. Still a thing in my Dragonlance and Spelljammer.

 

[Zardnaar]

Lead up to 4E only thing I saw was the Elf preview.

Bought the books blind essentially and missed the final 3.5 books as I stopped buying them after the 3rd book if the second complete series.

So yeah no more buying editions blind. Bought 5E after mate messaged me from Australia saying tgey look alright near release in 2014.

 

[Irlo]

What IS the point of gnomes?

It's the thing on the top of their heads. They wear a hat to cover it up.

 

[pemerton]

4e's marketing was very bizarre. My personal "favorite" was the "preview" books. "Hey, let's sell people entire books to tease our new game!". WTH, who's the target audience there? Gamers who want coffee table books?

Worlds & Monsters is one of the best bits of GM advice published for D&D. As I posted closer to the time,

Worlds and Monsters has pages and pages telling a GM what sort of play points of light will support, how it can be used, how the different fantasy elements - fey, demons, undead etc - can be used to create a fantasy game experience using the "just in time" techniques that 4e's situation-based design works well with.

But for some reason they chose not to include this sort of stuff in the DMG. The DMG has a lot of advice on the metagame of building combat encounters, but almost none on the metagame of building and running a skill challenge (there are general guidelines, but no almost no details at all), of designing and resolving a non-railroaded scenario, etc.

Worlds and Monsters. Good art, interesting stories, and (most importantly for a GM) good discussions of the way in which those stories have been designed to help make an interesting game. Big chunks of this book should have been incorporated into the 4e DMG, in place of (what are in my view) unnecessary or overlong parts of it like the tedious discussion of giving adventure locations personality and the random dungeon generation. If they had been, that would have gone some way - though not all the way - to helping GMs run games in the sort of fashion that the rulebooks seem to intend.

Worlds and Monsters is an honourable exception, but its candidness about the way in which monsters and other game elements are intended, by the designers, to be used by a GM in running adventures is reflected in only one part of the core 4e rules that I can recall - namely, in the DMG's brief discussion of languages. EDIT TO THIS: of course the DMG makes it very clear how monsters are to be used in combat encounter design and resolution - but I'm talking about the use of game elements to create an FRPG experience - indeed, the fact that the DMG goes metagame only in relation to combat, but not in relation to GMing overall is part of the problem.)

 

[James Gasik]

I think a big part of the gnome hate in 4e's design there was their desire to avoid gnomish inventors. That same section you quoted is where they say the tossed that entire popular image because World of Warcraft had done it. So because WoW did it, they decided to erase a bunch of their own games' of any reference to the most popular modern interpretation of gnomes.



It's definitely a thing that got carried into 5e IMO.

Crawford and Mearls chopped Tinker Gnomes down from their own unique race to just a flavor of Rock Gnomes. And Crawford made sure they carried that decision through to the 5e Spelljammer reboot which tried hard to pretend Tinker Gnomes did not exist (despite having Giant Space Hamsters and Autognomes) and the 5e Dragonlance reboot which had some gnomes but tried to pass them off as just regular gnomes who liked inventing which is really infuriating.

They introduce a gnome, Tatina Rookledust. But she's a ROCK GNOME not a tinker gnome. Sure she lives in a house covered in crazy contraptions, but she's a WIZARD. And yeah she has robot chickens that attack for her, but they're MAGIC. Oh...she's from Mount Nevermind...well she's not a tinker gnome, she's an artificer who manifests her spellcasting through her tools and devices...wait crap she's stated as a wizard...um...well she's sure as heck not a tinker gnome!!! Ok...sure there's a gnomeflinger in another part of the book, and it says it was invented by tinker gnomes...but...um...POCKET SAND! (runs away).

Heh, yeah, for all the "4e is World of Warcraft" nonsense, here we have a case of them trying not to be anything like WoW.

 

[James Gasik]

Worlds & Monsters is one of the best bits of GM advice published for D&D. As I posted closer to the time,

I'll concede that your points are fair, but from the perspective of someone who was playing and running 3.5 at the time, the book didn't tell me anything I wanted to know about the new edition itself!

The advice given here wasn't something unique to any edition, so if this book was an advertisement or something to make me hyped about a new version of D&D, it failed to sell me on it.

 

[pemerton]

I'll concede that your points are fair, but from the perspective of someone who was playing and running 3.5 at the time, the book didn't tell me anything I wanted to know about the new edition itself!

The advice given here wasn't something unique to any edition, so if this book was an advertisement or something to make me hyped about a new version of D&D, it failed to sell me on it.

I was not playing and running 3.5 at the time. I was reading about the development of 4e in 2007/8 and quite interested by it. I saw W&M in my local game shop and thought it looked pretty interesting, and so bought it. And it did get me hyped about the forthcoming edition - and not just, or even primarily, because of the content it presented, but because of the way it showed D&D was being (re)designed from the ground up with an eye on actual play.