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.

 

[Lanefan]

As far as theatre of the mind is concerned, whatever floats your boat. In AD&D I don't bother tracking precise distances because they don't matter - there is no tracking of in-melee movement in AD&D, so the only question is whether someone is close enough to shoot or close enough to be engaged in melee.

Or close enough to be clipped by the area-effect spell that just hit nearby: this is IME the most significant reason to need to know where characters (and their opponents!) are at any given time.

 

[Imaro]

I dont know how typical your example of a skill challenge is but for many Fighters the chances of adding a success look pretty grim with the given examples of skills to use. Given that you need to hit between high 20s to low 30s for a success the player needs to come up with a narrative way they can swing an Athletics or Survival check into convincing the Aspect of Moradin to help.

Well here's a list of examples and there usage in another Epic skill challenge from the epic tier adventure "Test of Fire" where both Athletics and Stealth uses are suggested... again in a totally mundane...but with bigger numbers...type of way. I just find it strange that if mythic feats like the one [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] described (shoving one's hands into a furnace to hold an artifact while it is being forged) are the inherent fiction in epic level 4e... well why do the examples in official adventures seem so mundane? It's almost as if it isn't inherent in 4e but instead what pemerton has chosen the fiction to be in his epic level 4e games (which is a great thing but again something that can be done in 5e as well)... I mean when using stealth why aren't the characters commanding the stuff of shadows to cloak themselves? Why when using Athletics do they need to leap from barge to barge or find a narrow point to leap the length of the canal shouldn't an epic warrior with athletics just be able to make a leap across it's entire breadth at even it's widest point?

[sblock]
Skills
Use the following general descriptions as a guideline
for the types of activities the heroes can attempt with
each of this challenge’s primary and secondary skills.
All checks in the challenge are made using an
adventurer’s normal skill check bonuses, as each
check represents the sum of the character’s actions
over an extended period. Powers or magic items that
grant a temporary bonus to a skill check or affect how
a skill is used (including effects such as invisibility)
cannot be used in the challenge.

Primary Skills: Athletics, Bluff, Intimidate,
Stealth.

Athletics: The heroes attempt to avoid trouble
by moving quickly, by scaling walls or buildings to
bypass patrols and guarded intersections, or by jumping
roof to roof to avoid the chaos on the city’s streets.
Athletics also allows characters to cross the city’s
canals by hopping from barge to barge or jumping the
entire breadth of a canal at a narrow point.

Bluff: The adventurers try to keep a low profile amid
the chaos by pretending that they are travelers to the
city, conscripted to military service during the current
crisis and on some errand by order of the city guard.
Intimidate: Fear of the harsh laws of the efreets
keeps the folk of the city in line. By making use of this
universal attitude of “might makes right,” the heroes
can bully their way through potential altercations
with slave troops and guards.

Stealth: The characters blend in with the movement
of the slaves and other non-efreets in the city.

Secondary Skills: Insight, Perception, Streetwise.
All secondary skills in the challenge are made
alongside a primary check. With a successful check,
an adventurer gains a +2 bonus to the primary check.
With a failed check, a character takes a –2 penalty to
the primary check.

Insight: By careful assessment of guards and
other officials, a character can lessen the chance for
confrontation.

Perception: Looking for patterns in the movements
of city patrols gives the heroes a chance to avoid those
patrols.

Streetwise: By picking up snippets of information
overheard in the chaos around them, the adventurers
can adjust their route to avoid trouble.
[/sblock]

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Was that encounter in the context of 6-8 combat encounters with maybe a short rest...?


Thing is, the game is balanced are ne a pretty strenuous "work day," and anything less strenuous will play in the players favor. Not that there is anything wrong with that, if folks don't want so much combat.

Yeah, WotC seems really obsessed with the "work day" idea, but I think it's a chimera in many ways. Ultimately who really cares how long the "work day" is? I suppose it matters if there's a lot of kicking in the door dungeon grind expected. What you're really trying to avoid is the party totally going nova in the one fight they have. The real balancing is done by the action economy. Characters who can do too much in a round or, vice versa, too little, are the real problem IMO. For the most part, 5E got the action economy right (unlike some really notable bad examples in 4E... I'm looking at you bard, barbarian, and avenger).


There are encounter designs that really stress a character in one encounter and some characters are markedly more short rest dependent than others. Compare a party with a fighter, warlock, and monk to one with a paladin, sorcerer, and cleric. The latter benefits very little from short rests while the former is highly dependent on them and a big nasty fight is going to exhaust the resources of that party first. In a mixed party you can end up with some strange interactions and often pointless friction between character types. Of course, the issue of short rests in 5E has been an evergreen topic, so I won't go forward with it.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I am disappointed in Mike. I do not see the virtue in continuing to re-spark the flames of the edition war every 3-6 months like this. What's the end game here?

Well he was responding to a question, so that's part of it. I also suspect that there's an edition update in the works. Part of this is experience learned with the ruleset, and part is the business model pushing to the spot where getting folks to buy new rulebooks is where it is.

Now there are fanboys who think 5E is perfect, but I do think there are some spots that could use work and I guess he was musing about the parts of 4E he wish he'd brought over or parts that didn't work as well. He's said similar things about 5E, if not as strongly, for instance not liking cyclic initiative. Since 4E isn't a going concern for WotC and edition wars are engaged in by a pretty small number of hyper-engaged online people, it's not a huge deal from his perspective.

 

[Jester David]

Codified frameworks of the sort that have been a focus of discussion for the past many pages of this thread - in 4e, taking the form of a DC-by-level chart that feeds into a skill challenge system - don't limit options or reduce player choice.

That’s nice.
I disagree. Completely.
And, as you say, this argument has been going on for many pages of this thread, I am not alone.

At the end of the day, I and others like me feel our choices are reduced. That we have less room to improvise.
Just because you haven’t personally experienced it doesn’t mean we haven’t.

I personally don't think this is a very plausible claim for combat-type powers either, provided there is - as there is in 4e - a robust improvisation framework that builds on the DC-by-level chart.

1) If there’s such robust improvisation, why argue so hard for codification?
2) You forget the damage-by-level for improvised attack on that chart. Which, as was noted at the time, fall far below what you could do with an Encounter power at your level. The book is literally telling you that improvising attacks is inoptimal and encouraging you to look solely at your character sheet.

And to look at it another way, I've read many many discussions of "creative spellcasting" but have very rarely seen it argued that D&D would be better if (in lieu of spells) it adopted some version of the Ars Magic approach to casting.

Pass.
I prefer not to engage in Whataboutism.

 

[MwaO]

So the answer was become a caster... and/or get a bonus to skills any other class could take and increase their number as well... still leaving a fighter with the lowest number of skills.

Again, ritual casting is rarely used.

The only reason that's true about skills is that classes with a particular focus in 4e would usually get an extra skill — often in a skill that would be kind of useless, such as Religion on a non-Int-based PC. But plenty of options had the exact same number of skill choices as Fighter, particularly Hybrid builds. And in 5e, that turns itself around by putting PCs such as Clerics and Paladins, who might not have good mechanical reasons to pick Religion as a skill, to feel compelled to pick it anyway. Where Fighter can freely choose to pick appropriate mechanically useful skills.

 

[MwaO]

It's almost as if it isn't inherent in 4e but instead what pemerton has chosen the fiction to be in his epic level 4e games (which is a great thing but again something that can be done in 5e as well)... I mean when using stealth why aren't the characters commanding the stuff of shadows to cloak themselves? Why when using Athletics do they need to leap from barge to barge or find a narrow point to leap the length of the canal shouldn't an epic warrior with athletics just be able to make a leap across it's entire breadth at even it's widest point?

Because games are dependent on shared fiction of the table, not individual campaign's shared fictions across everyone else's. And if you're publishing an adventure, you don't shame the table that wants to just use skills in a semi-realistic fashion into being fantastical. As I described earlier, why can an Epic Wizard be the equivalent of a Heroic PC in terms of say Athletics? Well, maybe they have a magic trinket or cast an unlisted cantrip. Perhaps they rewrite the universe to make tasks easier for them. Or maybe, over the course of all those adventures, they became 'trained' in it even if they're not actually good at it.

Just 4e describes over the course of DMG that you might want either of those choices and why and 5e tries to avoid describing it at all.

 

[Parmandur]

The way that it came up in this thread was that a poster - [MENTION=37579]Jester David[/MENTION], I think - said that the 4e system (of codified powers, codified DCs, etc) inhibited player choice.

I disagreed. Nothing in the intervenig 500 or so posts has changed my mind, because all the 5e posters seem to take the view that the examples that I have in mind as illustrating what 4e permits, and as thereby marking the difference between the systems (eg 15h level fighters cutting down phalanxes of hobgoblins (statted as swarms), the forge scene, etc) are properly not feasible in 5e (because even a 15th level fighter should be threatened if surrounded by 20 hobgoblins, should most likely have his/her hands burn off if shoved into a forge, etc).

I don't care whether or not anyone else wants to play a game in which 15th level fighters are capable in that sort of way. I'm simply explaining why the 4e framework makes stuff possible - encourages it, even - which the 5e framework does not. I want that stuff even if no one else does.

To put it even more bluntly - I'm not trying to show that 5e players are irrational. I'm rebutting the suggestion that 4e does not offer anything different from 5e. It obviously does, and this thread has only underlined that fact.

What seems strange to me here, is that this is one area where the games aren't much different at all, just 5E accomplishes the same thing with an economy of numbers. Player declares action, DM sets DC, roll determines success or failure. The rest is detail, and the same things can be accomplished in either system, at the DMs discretion.

 

[pemerton]

That’s nice.
I disagree. Completely.
And, as you say, this argument has been going on for many pages of this thread, I am not alone.

At the end of the day, I and others like me feel our choices are reduced. That we have less room to improvise.

Are you able to explain how closed scene resolution gives you less room to improvise - eg an example of an action that you might want to declare but can't?

 

[Cergorach]

I've read many many discussions of "creative spellcasting" but have very rarely seen it argued that D&D would be better if (in lieu of spells) it adopted some version of the Ars Magic approach to casting.

Let me be blunt, most people can't handle that much freedom, either creatively or mentally. Besides D&D having certain 'holy cows' which create a certain expectation in it's customers, there is also a balance that needs to be reached. D&D doesn't work for the majority of the players as either a total freeform game or a completely codified game. If you disagree, just look at the sales/revenue in the 4e era and now in the 5e era, sales say so much more then hypothetical discussions on an Internet forum.

As for 'creative spellcasting', there is a big reason why Vampire The Masquarade was so much more popular then Mage The Ascension, sure Vampires attract a certain kind of Goth and with attractive Goths follow the nerds, but the spellcasting system was much more relatable then in Mage. I'm a very creative person who also sees interesting things in codified rules, but due to my creativity I had such an advantage in Mage over my fellow players that were purely 'rules lawyers', it wasn't funny and in the end not fun. Even in something like Vampire there are so many opportunities to creative power usage that it requires a creative, smart and overall good DM to run a good game it creates a pretty big hurdle for most gaming groups. The same is true to a certain extent for D&D, it's far more forgiving for DMs...

D&D is simpler in this regard, especially with the introduction of 3E or even the 2E tactics books D&D could have certain sections of the game that were heavily codified, effectively making combat a kinda boardgame like HeroQuest with more options/complexity. For the groups I've been part of that often was a good compromise between codified vs. freestyle gaming.

There are of course markets for extremer versions of either type of game, but both are far more niche. 3E and 5E was able to settle in the middle and get a large portion of the consumer base. 4e was too much too one side to get that large consumer base. I would even go so far that the true adoption is even far lower then the sales numbers seem to indicate because a lot of folks started buying it anyways because it was D&D before giving up on it, and some (like me) even continued to buy it because it was D&D (just not playing it).

As for changing anyone's mind, not the objective. I can't (or want to) make a pro codified gamer a pro free form player. The objective is that there are multiple points of view that are valid to a certain extent. The only 'truth' is that 4e was selling badly, 5e is selling extremely well.