D&D 4E Keith Baker on 4E! (The Hellcow responds!)

[Hellcow]

For you. Maybe for the majority of potential D&D buyers -- that's WOTCs gamble. Not for everyone. My pre-order for Traveller 5, all 1,000 gloriously crunchy pages of it, says all you need to know about my tastes.

Yup. And as I've said from the start, I DON'T expect it to be to everyone's tastes. It's the hero's journey, not the weighty world simulator. But personally, I think it's a decent gamble... just as I think it makes sense for some companies to stand by 3.5 and continue to cater to those who dislike 4E.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

What I really like about the Raise Dead issue is how it allows me to create an adventure or entire campaign out of returning a person to life.

This idea keeps running around my head so I thought I would share it.

Say a king is killed. He is in the prime of his life and well loved by the people. He can't be raised though because he has no destiny.

Well the characters could change that. Adventure to the outer planes and find a god of fate (or any similar deus ex machina). The deity forces them to complete a task for him if they want the Kings fate to be changed. When they succeed they can raise the King. Now he even has a destiny to fulfill.


Yes, I realize I could have done this in 3e or any other rpg. But now the rules give me a reason to do so. No more hearing players ask why their divine magic doesn't work in this situation. Now it is simple the King has no destiny unless the players can change his fate.

In my opinion this is a good improvement for the system.

Later,
Rzach

Oh, fun! And the destiny they create for the king is one in which he discovers a trove of evil books that turn him into a major villain, so that the PCs end up having to kill him later to prevent him from fulfilling his world-conquering destiny.

I love it when stuff like that happens.

 

[Dragonblade]

Yes, and it is. You can multiclass at first level if you choose. The key difference between 4E and 3E is that there is a difference between a ranger who's multiclassed to paladin and a paladin who's multiclassed to ranger. The paladin is still first and foremost a defender, the ranger a striker. But the ranger-paladin is distinctly different from a ranger-rogue - or a ranger who hasn't multiclassed at all.

I wish I could lay out all the options that are available, because there are a few things I really like that make characters of the same class completely different from one another. You haven't seen them, because what you've seen are the base characters from DDXP. So you don't know how multiclassing works, what options feats provide, and so on. But there's ways to make three paladins very different from one another (and I don't mean "One took Power Attack and the other took Dodge"); they simply don't involve taking a LEVEL of ranger.

Looking back to SWG: I'll note that I never said you HAD to be a janitor - I said you COULD be a janitor. And that KotOR does not give you that option. It's a difference in design goals, and SWG put a great deal of design time into supporting the "world sim" role. KotOR focused on the hero experience, and that's what 4E is doing.

But beyond that - Lizard, you see to be under the impression that you CAN'T stat out NPCs in 4E. Why is that? In the campaign I'm running at the moment, I've got a large cast of NPC characters. A few are statted out with all the detail of PCs, and in fact I've used the PC class system for them - just as if I was making a NPC with PC class levels in 3E. A few are statted out at the level of the typical monster: critical skills and powers, ability scores, hit points. And a few are background characters I haven't bothered to stat - names, treated as minions if they get attacked.

4E doesn't provide special CLASSES for these characters. I didn't have to say "Hmm... I guess he'd be an expert instead of a commoner, because I've given him four skills and Heal isn't a commoner class skill." It hasn't devoted significant design space to NPC classes - although as a disclaimer, I have not seen the DMG and thus don't know exactly what is said about creating NPCs. But I do know that NPCs are not supposed to be treated as interchangible cogs with identical ability scores; you simply don't have a twenty-level class system tied to them.

Oh, and as an aside, you DON'T have to have an epic destiny. I probably shouldn't say more than that, but it's not like lightning strikes every character at level 21; that's the point at which it is POSSIBLE to discover your epic destiny.

At the end of the day, it's true: 4E is more like KotOR than SWG. It's designed to let you play a hero, and if you WANT to play the janitor, it's not the right game for you. It doesn't provide all the options of 3E, because unlike 3.5, it's not an evolution of 3E; it is a new game, which shares some basic principles but completely redevelops others (for example, magic). For you, that may make it a flawed system, and that's fine; you can stick with 3E. Meanwhile, I WANT to play a hero - and 4E, IMO, does a much better job of it than 3E. I'm having more fun than I ever did with 3E. But, of course, I had more fun with KotOR than I did with SWG. So I think they are focusing on a particular flavor of play - focusing on the hero's tale as opposed to the world simulation tool. But essentially it's a question of doing one thing well instead of being a jack of all trades and master of none. And if you think 3E DOES do all things well, no one's going to stop you from playing it, and some companies are going to continue to support it. Me, I'll be playing 4E. I've got an epic destiny to fulfill.

And let's face it, we're talking about a core system here. All it takes is a single rulebook - "The Anti-Epic Handbook" - to provide a commoner class, 0-level characters, and supporting rules, and you're good to go.

Nice! This post is made of pure awesome! Thanks, Keith!

I'm even more psyched about 4e now. Didn't think that was possible.

 

[Vempyre]

For you. Maybe for the majority of potential D&D buyers -- that's WOTCs gamble. Not for everyone. My pre-order for Traveller 5, all 1,000 gloriously crunchy pages of it, says all you need to know about my tastes.

It's not a gamble at all to think way more ppl will prefer a fun action n magic game to an awkward magic n simulation game. Not even close to being a gamble.

 

[Lizard]

It's not a gamble at all to think way more ppl will prefer a fun action n magic game to an awkward magic n simulation game. Not even close to being a gamble.

Then why was 3x -- much more simulationist and less abstract than 2e -- so popular?

The market may have changed a lot since 2000, but in 2000, more rules and more detail was what people clearly wanted, or 3e would have flopped. (4e is still more detailed and simulationist than 1/2e, which were very abstract.)

 

[Dragonblade]

Then why was 3x -- much more simulationist and less abstract than 2e -- so popular?

Two reasons. It was and still is a good system. And it was the only system really. TSR was defunct and 2e was basically dead.

I just think 4e will be a better system.

 

[Vempyre]

Then why was 3x -- much more simulationist and less abstract than 2e -- so popular?

The market may have changed a lot since 2000, but in 2000, more rules and more detail was what people clearly wanted, or 3e would have flopped. (4e is still more detailed and simulationist than 1/2e, which were very abstract.)

3E's popularity had everything to do with the simpler and more consistent D20 rules (compared to 1e/2e's many subsystems) than the fact it seems to have rules for almost everything (especially after 3.5).

So it was the simpler core mechanic (D20) that attracted ppl to 3E, not the dozens of interminable layers of rules that were added to it to try to cover most situations, nor the fact it kept vancian magic (which aways sucked) or the Great Wheel cosmology.

That's why 4E is a no brainer. It's taking what made 3e a success and refining it.

 

[Lizard]

That's why 4E is a no brainer. It's taking what made 3e a success and refining it.

What made it a success for me was that it was the first version of D&D that let me tell the stories, build the worlds, play the characters I wanted to, gave me the freedom and tools other games I liked gave me. Maybe Keith is right and all that's still in 4e, just hidden away where we can't see it just yet. Maybe it's not. We'll know in a bit over two months.

Don't assume everyone likes the things you like for the same reasons you do. 3e got on my personal radar when I saw things like Profession and Knowledge skills on the preview character stat blocks. It told me that the game was acknowledging a world outside the dungeon for the first time in mechanics. I started worrying about 4e when I took a good look at SWSE, trumpeted as a 'prototype' for 4e.

 

[Hellcow]

3E's popularity had everything to do with the simpler and more consistent D20 rules (compared to 1e/2e's many subsystems) than the fact it seems to have rules for almost everything (especially after 3.5).

This was certainly true for me. From the very begining, the things I liked about 3E were things like:

• The fact that all abilities followed the same modifier/penalty structure.
• The fact that all classes used the same experience structure.
• The way in which BAB and saving throws simplified multiclassing.
• BAB and saving throws chucking all the separate tables for each class out the window.
• The fact that feats allowed me to make two fighters feel different from one another.

(... and more, of course, but that's a starting point.)

I never particularly liked 3E's combat system. It felt to me as if it had been designed by an entirely separate team - that one person had actively set out to streamline character generation, while someone else had sought to add layers and layers of complexity to combat.

I liked NPC classes (and still do), not because I wanted an accurate way to simulate the life of the farmer, but because for me they call out the fact that PCs are special and superior to NPCs - that 90%+ of NPCs are commoners, and that there's no expectation that the bartender is going to be a 10th level fighter. Essentially, NPC classes showed me that a PC IS a unique snowflake... because he's a rogue, not an expert. Hence any Eberron product I worked on emphasizing significant use of NPC classes by NPCs.

4E keeps the things I like. Abilities use the same modifier structure, and actually, abilities are now more broadly useful than they used to be; every character has something to gain from Charisma aside from just skill modifiers. There are still ways to differentiate characters from each other, and while multiclassing is very different in its effect, it is easy to use. It's just that now, for me, combat and character generation feel as though they follow the same philosophy.

And personally, I'm just not going to miss dealing with the Shifter Monk 1/Ranger 2/Barbarian 1/Fighter 2/Frenzied Berserker 2/Warshaper 3 characters. Yes, the multiclassing/prestige class system can be seen as allowing you a tremendous amount of personalization. However, it's also a game balance nightmare... and more than that, if I want a game where I can have absolute personalization, I'll play Hero (and I do!). The "roles" of 4E are essentially the same basic principle of fighter-rogue-magic user-cleric we had all the way back in 1E, even if we might have a warlord in our group instead of a cleric or a ranger instead of a rogue; I'm content with a D&D system choosing to cleave to those roles. 4E provides me with enough versatilty that we can have two paladins in the party and have them feel unique, with different options and abilities (something 1E had trouble with). But if I want ultimate versatility, I'll play Fantasy Hero; it's not what I expect from D&D. You can't make the ranger 1/paladin 1/monk 1 who (aside from initial skill points) has absolute equal weight towards all of these classes; at the heart, you're going to be a ranger or a fighter or whatever. But you can certainly add unique flavor and options to your character - and you can still be a ranger-paladin, it just has a different meaning than it used to. Paragon paths are more limited than prestige classes, but that also means that they're going to be far easier to balance - no more "If you combine one level of this with one level of this with one level of this, you get the crazy combo no designer ever intended or considered" - and they still serve the purpose of providing unique flavor to each character. It's true, 4E doesn't provide as many options. But I don't need 4E to become GURPS or Hero - because I've got GURPS and Hero already. Instead, it takes the fighter-rogue-cleric-MU roles that have always been part of D&D and embraces them.

 

[DandD]

I got into D&D 3rd edition because of the really simple D20-rules-mechanism. I mean, really, just adding a modifier to a D20-result? Sure, it's simple and makes gameplay really fast.
D&D-style Vancian Magic and all that other silly stuff still was the that I never wanted to know, which is why I don't play mage classes in D&D, while in other games, I have no problems with spellcasters. I sure hope that 4th edition will cater to my taste.