D&D 4E Mike Mearls on how 4E could have looked

[Garthanos]

Now, I think its fine to do something akin to what the Berserker does in HotFW, make a 'switching' class that can toggle into a different role when it makes thematic/narrative sense. It is still hard to pull off well, and you won't suddenly stop being an X just because you are now in Y mode, but you can certainly go from 'high damage melee striker' to 'front line leader' or something like that and its workable. .

The Berserker has an advantage with powers which adjust between 2 roles not just the outer brush (making the switch less shallow if you will)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The Berserker has an advantage with powers which adjust between 2 roles not just the outer brush (making the switch less shallow if you will)

Right. It is still hard to pull off though. TBH, in a 4e-like paradigm where the expectation is a team of diverse characters with different roles I don't think it is critical to be able to switch. I also don't think, if the game is designed so that classes don't require a huge amount of work to implement, that there's a reason to make 'switchable classes' at all. Obviously Mike is right that 4e lacks the 'easy to implement' feature (though I will note that as time went on they did figure out how to make various 'subclasses' which leveraged a lot of existing class infrastructure, though this can still fall prey to the difficulty of making a whole new role without all the color and mechanics of all new power lists).

Anyway, HoML seems to improve on 4e in terms of ease of creating new stuff, so I just make a new class when I want to have something like "A fighter but he's a controller instead of a defender" kind of thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For me 4e to the contrary created context for many things to make sense. Using just one attribute for attacks is now a simplified expression of fighting style instead of feeling like treating all combat as based on brute force.

It brought home advancing hit points as realization of the legendary and mythic nature of the big damn heroes and well hit points feel as the abstraction is fully embraced. In 1e there was a split personality going on where the above was happening and yet there was a plethora of save or die effects (so the awesomeness of Gygax describing how Conan didnt fall to some critical hit ie that narrative immunity part from the felt hollow)

For me 4e realized many of the premises in 1e and 2e as well which for the most part while expressed conceptually never actually made it functionally into play... Anything from the fighters defender role to his warrior lord role much later.

Without 4e I am pretty sure I wouldnt have had much renewed interest in D&D and I might have never introduced it to my kids but went with various indie games (like Fate or Burning Wheel or other things). My first experience with rpgs was not "just D&D" but rather included exposure to other ways of looking at things RQ was not vastly different but enough so to imply other possibilities in the 70s and that some might make sense so DnDisms might not have taken a seat as the only way to reach the goal.

I have to agree with this:

4e is coherent! 2e, 3e, 5e, not coherent. Every rule and game system in 4e is in service to its goals and work in harmony to attain them. If a rule would detract from that, then it is restructured to conform with the whole. AD&D certainly lacked this. Many rules simply existed because (apparently) they 'sounded good', or were 'common sense' or 'realistic' or some other befuddled notions. 1e, being closer in spirit and mechanics, to the origins of D&D as a pure dungeon crawling game with open-ended elements, was considerably more coherent, but even it reflected a lot of ad-hoc design and choices which don't seem to have really been well considered WRT the whole.

3e and 5e seem to try to serve multiple masters. I think, with 5e at least, you can treat it as a moderately coherent game, but there are still some aspects which simply don't fit and seem to have been inserted merely for the purpose of appealing to specific desires for things to be more 'old fashioned' (or perhaps other interests, but not any kind of coherent game system).

So there is something fundamentally different with 4e, which I recall identifying as soon as I dived into the rules back in '08. It really is distinct from all other D&D's in this respect!

 

[MichaelSomething]

So is there a demand for a supplement all about doors and how describe them based off the DCs to get pass them??

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This is also true in my case. For nearly 20 years my primary RPG was Rolemaster. I also played various games on the side: AD&D, and various BRP variants like Stormbringer/Elric, CoC and RQ. I noticed the arrival of 3E, and played a small amout of it, but it didn't seem super-exciting to me.

The announcement of 4e came at the same time as a second long-running RM campaign was coming to its conclusion, and also as our group was undergoing reconfiguration due to some members moving to the UK, resulting in merging two groups (with some overlap in membership, and the other of which had been playing 3E) into one.

It was obvious from the get-go that (i) 4e would have a mechanical heft comparable to RM, and (ii) it would be almost the opposite of RM in its approach to mechanics, adjudication and the relationship between these things and the fiction.

Over the past decade or thereabouts I've often posted that 4e fully delivers on the Gygaxian conception of hp and saving throws as a "fortune in the middle" mechanic that can be narrated as skill, luck, verve, and anything else that contributes to staying power.

And I've also often posted that it delivered on the promise of Moldvay Basic's foreword:

4e delivered.

Gonna chime in in agreement, especially with the beginning and end of this post.

I played 3/.5 DnD because it was what my friends wanted to play, and the game is fun as long as the people at the table are fun, not because I thought it was a good game. Same with 2e, really. Before that, DnD was a thing I didn't know the rules of, at best. I was introduced by way of HeroQuest, and then video games, to DnD, and played 2e the first time I played proper DnD.

4e made me care about DnD, as such. 4e was, and to some extent still is, the game that made me realize just how good a roleplaying game could be. It's the game that made me realize that a game could actually support my concept with mechanics, and thereby make gameplay more narrative. I still don't see any narrative appeal to so-called narrative games, because the last thing I want is for dice to tell me the narrative. I want mechanics to distinguish between one concept and another, and then leave us to determine the narrative with those tools.

4e delivered on that.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Right. It is still hard to pull off though. TBH, in a 4e-like paradigm where the expectation is a team of diverse characters with different roles I don't think it is critical to be able to switch. I also don't think, if the game is designed so that classes don't require a huge amount of work to implement, that there's a reason to make 'switchable classes' at all. Obviously Mike is right that 4e lacks the 'easy to implement' feature (though I will note that as time went on they did figure out how to make various 'subclasses' which leveraged a lot of existing class infrastructure, though this can still fall prey to the difficulty of making a whole new role without all the color and mechanics of all new power lists).

Anyway, HoML seems to improve on 4e in terms of ease of creating new stuff, so I just make a new class when I want to have something like "A fighter but he's a controller instead of a defender" kind of thing.

I still think that they could have built an excellent martial controller in 4e, and the only reason not to do so was to avoid being accused even more of grid filling.

But I do wish that they'd simply made new classes less dense, by sharing some powers based on power source and role.

 

[pemerton]

I still don't see any narrative appeal to so-called narrative games

What RPGs do you have in mind here?

Narrative is an ambiguous term in these contexts, but when I think "narrative RPG" I tend to think anything by Ron Ewards, Vincent Baker or Paul Czege - and then things like Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, Marvel Heroic/Cortex+, HeroWars/Quest, and other "indie"-style games.

4e brought some of these sensibilities into a "mainstream" RPG.

 

[pemerton]

With respect to this martial controller thing, I feel the game already provided it - the fighter in my game, especially when he switches from mordenkrad to polearm (he is a dwarf who can work with both hammers and axes), is a controller. It's almost impossible to get past him, or to get out once you go in close. (Forced movement, stopping movement, immobilisation, prone, slow - in effectively unlimited quantities.)

Admittedly this didn't come online until late heroic, and then really took off in paragon - maybe that's the point I'm missing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

What RPGs do you have in mind here?

Narrative is an ambiguous term in these contexts, but when I think "narrative RPG" I tend to think anything by Ron Ewards, Vincent Baker or Paul Czege - and then things like Burning Wheel, Prince Valiant, Marvel Heroic/Cortex+, HeroWars/Quest, and other "indie"-style games.

4e brought some of these sensibilities into a "mainstream" RPG.

Things like FFG's narrative dice mechanics, mostly. Give players ways to directly impact the narrative as storytellers, don't make it a matter of what symbols show up on the dice.

With respect to this martial controller thing, I feel the game already provided it - the fighter in my game, especially when he switches from mordenkrad to polearm (he is a dwarf who can work with both hammers and axes), is a controller. It's almost impossible to get past him, or to get out once you go in close. (Forced movement, stopping movement, immobilisation, prone, slow - in effectively unlimited quantities.)

Admittedly this didn't come online until late heroic, and then really took off in paragon - maybe that's the point I'm missing.

That's a big part of it, yeah. There are plenty of concepts for a level 1 martial controller, and not all of them involve making things come at you.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I still think that they could have built an excellent martial controller in 4e, and the only reason not to do so was to avoid being accused even more of grid filling.

But I do wish that they'd simply made new classes less dense, by sharing some powers based on power source and role.

I fall into the camp which says "A martial controller IS a defender!" At least there's so little light between these that it makes more sense to call them defenders. "Battlefield Control" has always traditionally (in terms of the understanding of tactics which, say, the US Army would understand) been a function of longer ranged and more individually powerful weapons, for the most part. A machine gun is just not the same as a rifle, it does different things and fills a different role in combat. If you give a rifleman an automatic weapon, he's still not the same as that machine gun. He might sometimes be able to achieve the same effects, but its still 2 roles.