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

OK on this "I would’ve much preferred the ability to adopt any role within the core 4 by giving players a big choice at level 1, an option that placed an overlay on every power you used or that gave you a new way to use them."
Basically have Source Specific Powers and less class powers. But I think combining that with having BIG differing stances to dynamically switch role might be a better idea so that your hero can adjust role to circumstance. I have to defend this NPC right now vs I have to take down the big bad right now vs I have to do minion cleaning right now, I am inspiring allies in my interesting way, who need it right now.

and the obligatory
Argghhhh on this. " I wanted classes to have different power acquisition schedules"

And thematic differences seemed to have been carried fine.

 

[Imaro]

The fiction was very much supposed to change by level ie you are right it was a confusion but always seemed an intentional one from people playing the game "Edition war".

I don't know whether it was intentional or not for specific people, I can't speak to everyone else but I can state that for me some examples of what constituted say a Heroic tier difficulty door that had a DC of 8 vs one with a DC of 26... would have went a long way to not only reinforcing this assumed fiction change but also provided some guidance. It also didn't help that many of the objective DC's they give didn't necessarily align with what I would have assumed their DC to be based on the DC by level charts...

Finally another sticking point for me and one I'm still not sure the answer to is whether a DC 26 moderate paragon door vs say a DC 26 Epic tier easy door are the same fiction wise? If not what is the difference? Also I'm using door as a shorthand for any general obstacle one wishes to substitute.

 

[Imaro]

i do not want my Paragon PCs to feel challenged by things that challenged them 10 levels ago.

Why not? Especially if it's something they aren't skilled or trained in? Also there are gradations to "challenged by" even in 4e... did you choose not to use the minion rules?

EDIT 1: This is easy enough to do in 5e as well... just don't have heroes roll for DC's under a certain number once they reach a particular tier.

EDIT 2: Maybe this has something to do with the type of fantasy you are trying to run but for swords and sorcery and even most fantasy adventure fiction this isn't how it works. Even in LotR Orcs stay a credible threat, especially in numbers for the majority of heroes throughout the entire saga.

 

[Jester David]

Coming back to this

Note - I do not like the 5e short rest mechanic I find it harder to visualize than what we were discussing or the 5 minute one in 4e - I always visualized a short rest being what you do after a decent distance sprint in athletics activity, The sprint is an exertion that takes a hit on you cannot manage it again immediately but it don't have to have an hours break to redo 5,10 or 15 maybe but an hour and only a couple of times a day?...nyeh not unless you pulled a muscle which also seems closer to a daily kind of limit/although heros being heros? who knows.

There's lots of different ways to do "encounter" powers in 5e. I'm fond of "you can't use this power again until you roll initiative" or "when you roll initiative..." It's a bit gamist, but it works. Similarly, the text I dropped where "Once an enemy who has seen you use this feature, they can't be targeted by it", which is a little more complicated but effectively means the same thing in more narrative terms.

Short rests in 4e vs 5e are very different beasts. The 4e short rest was automatic. It was always expected. You stop for an arbitrary length of time (5 minutes is given, but that feels too long) and powers recharge. It very much was catching your breath after a sprint or surge of activity. You pause just long enough for your heart rate to drop/ stabilise then continue.

The problem comes because the 4e short rest is meant to feel insignificant, it's still up to 50 rounds. That's a lot of time for the enemy next door to get ready. For someone you're chasing to get away. Playtesters in 5e commented about this (and even a proposed 10 minute short rest) that they were never certain how much could/should change during a rest, if anything. If it was enough time spent in one place to trigger a random encounter or things in the dungeon to shift.
This led to the 1 hour short rest. It was meant to be a longer period where players and DMs could feel certain events could occur. As such, you tend to take a short rest ever couple encounters.
This makes powers that recharge on a short rest =/= to encounter powers.

The 5e short rest is less catching your breath after a sprint, and more pausing for launch after a marathon. You do it when you're exhausted and/or injured, and need to spend some serious time bandaging cuts and scratches.

i do not want my Paragon PCs to feel challenged by things that challenged them 10 levels ago.

Then... don't put them the same thing in your adventures twice...


The lack of autoscaling actually works nicely in the game. The wall the fighter is climbing doesn't get steeper and steeper, the locks don't suddenly get harder, etc. Instead, those PCs succeed more often and feel more heroic. They're not challenged by the same thing that challenged them 10 levels ago: they are treating the thing that challenged them 10 levels ago as a speed bump.
Really, the way to look at it is instead of the odds of success at a given task staying the same for the character specialising in that activity (say 50%), they stay the same for someone who isn't investing any resources in that activity but decrease for the person who is specialising.

Which has the added bonus that when confronted with a gorge you have to cross, the fighter can almost auto-succeed and can help the struggling wizard. Opposed to the reverse where the fighter still struggles against even odds while the poor wizard almost needs a 20 to have a chance.

 

[MwaO]

Maybe I'm wrong, but that's what I've been led to believe bounded accuracy is, that no matter the level, the difficulty remains the same rather than an ever increased DC based on the level of the party/challenge.

Right. And because 5e changes the difficulty over level in most ways, it doesn't actually use Bounded Accuracy. Monsters get proficiency based on CR as an example and bumps to AC = proficiency+expected stat boosts. Higher level games feature DC 15 and DC 20 skill checks where lower level games feature DC 10 and DC 15 ones and mid-level games have more of a mix of all three. The 'typical campaign' on page 133 of DMG might not ensure that the weapon user gets a +3 weapon over 20 levels, but odds are really high that they get somewhere between a +2 to +4 bonus to hit/damage from a weapon. And because this is a 'typical campaign', that's the baseline assumption.

i.e. both 4e and 5e assume that if you make a meaningful, important check, you ought to succeed about 65% of the time. The problems that happen in 5e are when legacy elements of Bounded Accuracy from Next weren't fixed stayed in the system by proficiency being a last minute addition or people believe a Next element stayed in the game and it didn't.

 

[Garthanos]

But is that not what the minion mechanic does? It allows monsters/creatures in the MM to stay relevant longer.

They are not relevant or challenging in anything approaching the same way (and quick easier mechanics show that)

 

[Sadras]

So I found this interesting...

The best moments in a performance can be entirely related to the performance as a performance. (snip)

I have no idea why you would think or assert that the performance of any system cannot involve change, or variation, or highs and lows, or better or worse examples. That's not true in sport. It's not true in music. It's not true in spaceflight. Why would it be true in RPGing?

Are you seriously suggesting the experience of playing a game of Dungeons & Dragons is directly comparable and analogous to playing a game of football? Or watching a performance of Les Misérables ?
And, by extension, that playing that game of football is the same as performing Les Mis?

I haven't played it. I'm familiar with the concept of a MMO. Wikipedia tells me that "As in previous The Elder Scrolls titles, gameplay is mostly nonlinear, with a mixture of quests, random events, and free-roaming exploration of the world." The word fiction appears nowhere in the Wikipedia entry.

Given that you think I would get what I want out of RPGing from playing the Elder Scrolls online, but I know that I wouldn't, you obviously have little grasp of what I'm talking about when I talk about the way a RPG system works to generate a play experience. That you continue to insist that I will get what I want from playing a game that I know has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm looking for in RPGing is just bizarre.

So you've never played it but have declared it "not an rpg" and you "know" it can't deliver what we were discussing (awesome moments of play through leveraging the system)...

 

[Garthanos]

Why not? Especially if it's something they aren't skilled or trained in? Also there are gradations to "challenged by" even in 4e... did you choose not to use the minion rules?

Combat adversaries become gradually less of a threat till it makes no sense to use the same mechanics for them anymore. Do you want what should be minions stunning the heros because they could at low levels? Or do you like enemies without interesting mechanics. (cause that seems a 5e monster feature)

EDIT 1: This is easy enough to do in 5e as well... just don't have heroes roll for DC's under a certain number once they reach a particular tier.
Or have the heros actually gain general competence as they level instead of being overly specialized schmucks. If they were challenged by things at low level they should be learning work arounds. RuneQuest had a system that the things you do you get better at.

EDIT 2: Maybe this has something to do with the type of fantasy you are trying to run but for swords and sorcery and even most fantasy adventure fiction this isn't how it works. Even in LotR Orcs stay a credible threat,

LotR is mocked by many saying Gandalf was a 5th level cleric. Basically pointing out that it was actually a low level adventure in D&D land... and to me Orcs did not seem a credible threat as Legalos and Glimli count them off with good natured comradery. And none of the characters in Wheel of Time are at all bothered by low level threats like Trollocs after a few books. I think you are wrong.

Maybe those who want to play low levels ALWAYS could just slow the advancement?

 

[Garthanos]

There's lots of different ways to do "encounter" powers in 5e. I'm fond of "you can't use this power again until you roll initiative" or "when you roll initiative..." It's a bit gamist, but it works.

Well might as well just call that an Encounter power our other ideas were about making things that show how it makes sense for something to be an encounter power NOT embracing the gamist.

Similarly, the text I dropped where "Once an enemy who has seen you use this feature, they can't be targeted by it", which is a little more complicated but effectively means the same thing in more narrative terms.

You could label such as tricks.

Short rests in 4e vs 5e are very different beasts. The 4e short rest was automatic. It was always expected. You stop for an arbitrary length of time (5 minutes is given, but that feels too long) and powers recharge. It very much was catching your breath after a sprint or surge of activity. You pause just long enough for your heart rate to drop/ stabilise then continue.

The problem comes because the 4e short rest is meant to feel insignificant, it's still up to 50 rounds. That's a lot of time for the enemy next door to get ready. For someone you're chasing to get away. Playtesters in 5e commented about this (and even a proposed 10 minute short rest) that they were never certain how much could/should change during a rest, if anything. If it was enough time spent in one place to trigger a random encounter or things in the dungeon to shift.
This led to the 1 hour short rest. It was meant to be a longer period where players and DMs could feel certain events could occur. As such, you tend to take a short rest ever couple encounters.
This makes powers that recharge on a short rest =/= to encounter powers.

The 5e short rest is less catching your breath after a sprint, and more pausing for launch after a marathon.

Right but a 1 or 2 minute battle having a move that generates a marathon degree of fatigue?

You do it when you're exhausted and/or injured, and need to spend some serious time bandaging cuts and scratches.

Kind of works for wounding related effects but less so on the actual abilities which might be more like winding and simple muscle fatigue. Like I said if your super leap does
generate stress on the order of a pulled muscle. Then the 5e short rest could work ok.

 

[Imaro]

Combat adversaries become gradually less of a threat till it makes no sense to use the same mechanics for them anymore. Do you want what should be minions stunning the heros because they could at low levels? Or do you like enemies without interesting mechanics. (cause that seems a 5e monster feature)

Not sure what the point is here...unless it's to take a dig at 5e monster features?? Don't goblins and goblin minions in 4e have the exact same abilities? Goblin Tactics and it is in no way affected by character level... apparently a paragon adventurer still hasn't learned just how slippery those little buggers can be. Or a better example the Troglodyte stench... as a minion it does the same thing that the standard Trogs stench does. So maybe I'm misunderstanding what this post is trying to communicate but your stun example seems to apply to 4e minions and 5e monsters.

LotR is mocked by many saying Gandalf was a 5th level cleric. Basically pointing out that it was actually a low level adventure in D&D land... and to me Orcs did not seem a credible threat as Legalos and Glimli count them off with good natured comradery. And none of the characters in Wheel of Time are at all bothered by low level threats like Trollocs after a few books. I think you are wrong.

Honestly Legolas (and Gimli to a smaller extent) are the only ones able to handle them with such ease. I think this says more about the uber race elves in Tolkien's world than rather they stay a consistent threat for the heroes (which include humans and hobbits as well) as a whole... especially since the entire group spend large swaths of the films fleeing and hiding from them. If they are that inconsequential... why??

Maybe those who want to play low levels ALWAYS could just slow the advancement?

No one is arguing for this...

 

[Garthanos]

Not sure what the point is here...unless it's to take a dig at 5e monster features?? Don't goblins and goblin minions in 4e have the exact same abilities?

All Goblins are level 1 or 2 a level 10 goblin was being referred to... so I was assuming a DM converted a more powerful Goblin ie Minionized them like one of the Solo Goblins. And there is sort of a general rule (that isnt always necessary depending on the ability) to remove some of the features that a lower level Solo or Standard or Elite might have or simplify so the battle isnt over complicated by having 4 to six instance of it happening. When you convert them to minions or swarms and if you intend monsters to be used exactly as is over a wide range of levels you very much NEED to not include things which like that. They kind of have to be less interesting.