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.

 

[MwaO]

But the mechanics of the powers still speak to that type of fantasy... earlier someone quoted something along the lines of "When you die for the first time today..." It's pretty hard to refluff casual self-resurrection as "realistic"... even D&D realistic

Three options off the top of my head:
Don't take an Epic Destiny with a casual self-resurrection option. There are plenty of them and they're often usually better — simply because options that trigger only when you die tend to create reasons why you might die in the first place. Destined Scion is a great ED as an example — if you're unconscious, once a day, you get back up on your turn.

You have a magic item that explains X, but it isn't actually listed on your sheet. You, yourself, can't self-resurrect, but that magic charm you found at 24th level does it. And your DM, because they're interested in a realistic outcome and you described your choices, helps make sure that happens.

Death in D&D is often a Schrödinger's cat problem for realism anyway. 1 hp PCs basically fight as well as they do when at max hp. They just go down much easier. So a realistic explanation for hp is that when someone is dying, we don't know if they're actually dying or not. We just know there's a chance they could die. How do we know if they died normally? They failed a certain number of death saves or dropped to a particular number of hp. But when you're an Epic PC, once per day, those aren't sufficient for certainty.

Honestly this is baffling me we have [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] claiming mythical fantasy is an inherent part of 4e but then you're saying it's casually easy to remove it... which one is it?

He's not claiming that? 4e strongly supports a mythical fantasy type of game by offering choices that support that style of play. You don't have to do that unless you want to do that. And again, that's a decision made by the table. Which can mean the DM enforcing a style of play or the table as a whole deciding to do that. But the table knows that at 1st level, not because the player gets surprised at say 7th level that they're not allowed to do cool things because the DM has decided Come And Get It isn't sufficiently realistic.

 

[Greg K]

4e gave you one choice... implement mythical fantasy or stop playing at a certain level... which probably rubbed those not looking for mythic fantasy the wrong way.

I am one of those people, but then I also disliked paragon paths as well and wished both had been optional as were 3e PrCs.

 

[Imaro]

Three options off the top of my head:
Don't take an Epic Destiny with a casual self-resurrection option. There are plenty of them and they're often usually better — simply because options that trigger only when you die tend to create reasons why you might die in the first place. Destined Scion is a great ED as an example — if you're unconscious, once a day, you get back up on your turn.

You have a magic item that explains X, but it isn't actually listed on your sheet. You, yourself, can't self-resurrect, but that magic charm you found at 24th level does it. And your DM, because they're interested in a realistic outcome and you described your choices, helps make sure that happens.

Death in D&D is often a Schrödinger's cat problem for realism anyway. 1 hp PCs basically fight as well as they do when at max hp. They just go down much easier. So a realistic explanation for hp is that when someone is dying, we don't know if they're actually dying or not. We just know there's a chance they could die. How do we know if they died normally? They failed a certain number of death saves or dropped to a particular number of hp. But when you're an Epic PC, once per day, those aren't sufficient for certainty.

The first option seems like it's addressing an example vs. the wider issue, mainly that epic or mythical powers are inherent in most if not all Epic destinies? Time travel, stopping death, resurrection and more would all have to be vetted as unusable.

The second option isn't just refluffing it's more akin to houseruling as these objects would (I assume) ignore rules many of the 4e rules that apply to objects. But yes this may be viable as long as you are running in a high magic/high fantasy campaign.

The last option... redefine the mechanics of the game so that the nature of death/dying changes for a PC once per day (or however many times the PC can use said power).

I'll just say these options don't seem anywhere near as easy as choosing not to use Epic Boons.

He's not claiming that?

You sure about that?

4e strongly supports a mythical fantasy type of game by offering choices that support that style of play. You don't have to do that unless you want to do that. And again, that's a decision made by the table. Which can mean the DM enforcing a style of play or the table as a whole deciding to do that. But the table knows that at 1st level, not because the player gets surprised at say 7th level that they're not allowed to do cool things because the DM has decided Come And Get It isn't sufficiently realistic.

Epic Destinies are part of the game... you are required to select one... correct? That's not strongly supporting that's requiring it. Sure anything can be changed with enough houserules and reskins but the point is that that isn't easy and 5e doesn't require that level of tinkering to get either style to work.

 

[Jester David]

I don't have any views about 3E. I've played only a very small amount of it, and as a design I think it has a number of well-known problems.

So then why are you weighing in when I talk about codification limiting imagination in 3.X?!?

The most interesting thing to be about 3E is that if you apply a level-bonus to AC but call it "natural armour" then many RPGers will regard that as a simulation even though it is just a label with no meaning in the fiction whatsoever (ie the best possible magic armour is +5 plate for around +14 AC, while there are natural armour bonuses in the 30s - what is "natural armour" that is so much better than what the best smith can possibly forge?). Mutatis mutandis for many other aspects of 3E.

Again, the edition wars are so 2010.
I don't feel the need to discuss the benefits and cons of simulation and narrative in "natural armour bonus" vs "item bonus to armour". (The games I play use neither...)

I agree with @Hussar (from past threads, not this one) that PC build in 4e owes quite a bit to 3E. But encounter build/design and action resolution in 4e is wildly different from 3E - very much to the benefit of 4e!

4e is very much a direct evolution of 3e. You can easily chart the through-line as the splatbooks evolved and WotC watched how adventures and encounters were designed for organised play.
The problem was the majority of fans didn't buy all the splatbooks. They bought the core rulebooks and maybe the initial accessories and just used those. Without seeing the gradual evolution over five years, the gulf from 3e to 4e was massive.

The encounter building of 4e is pretty much identical to a variant used in 3e's Unearthed Arcana. I've repressed how 3e's encounter building and experience awarding actually worked.

 

[MwaO]

The first option seems like it's addressing an example vs. the wider issue, mainly that epic or mythical powers are inherent in most if not all Epic destinies? Time travel, stopping death, resurrection and more would all have to be vetted as unusable.

Nope. There are a ton of Epic Destinies that are simply 'you are better because of this'.

The last option... redefine the mechanics of the game so that the nature of death/dying changes for a PC once per day (or however many times the PC can use said power).

Mechanics, sure. Just as all kinds of other things. But it doesn't redefine the story of realism — namely that most cases of dying in D&D are not dying at all, but merely that the PC is unable to act. Which is why when they get back up and fight as if they weren't just gushing blood, it is 'realistic'.

I'll just say these options don't seem anywhere near as easy as choosing not to use Epic Boons.

I've literally played hundreds of games of 4e. I've never played Epic. I don't really have a lot of desire to play it either. I'd guess that's probably true for 99% of groups out there for roughly the same reasons no one plays much of level 15+ of the other editions. If someone is not playing 4e because of Epic play, that's along the lines of not playing 5e because 9th level spells exist and Wish is really poorly written given things such as Leomund's Tiny Hut and Simulacrum exist.

You sure about that?

Yes. Pemerton is not telling you how to play your table. He is saying what works for his and how 4e in particular supports what he wants to see.

Epic Destinies are part of the game... you are required to select one... correct? That's not strongly supporting that's requiring it. Sure anything can be changed with enough houserules and reskins but the point is that that isn't easy and 5e doesn't require that level of tinkering to get either style to work.

No, you don't have to use Epic Destinies. You will still gain new feats and powers. You don't even have to use Paragon Paths. There are tons of incentives to take them within game, but game still functions without them.

 

[Jester David]

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?

Example Time!
Working on a revision of my Tactician class. (You can see earlier iterations somewhere in this thread.)

I'm poking away at a better 10th level ability for the "lancer" subclass. Little features that improve defence or mobility. And I had the idea for a pole vault feature. You plant your lance and add it's height to your high and long jump abilities.
That sounds pretty cool, right?
But... if I codify that, it means prior to 10th level, you cannot pole vault. And since it's a class feature, presumably you can't pole vault without that option or a comparable class feature. Suddenly, I've taken away a potential improvisational move, locking it behind a class feature.

That's the problem...

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

You can totally ignore that type of mythic fantasy in 4e too. Refluffing is a thing in 4e, make good choices that reflect realistic options, get table agreement that's the style of play that is supposed to happen. Done.

I think you could at the lower levels but it became increasingly implausible at higher levels and fairly ludicrous at epic tier. I played a good bit of 4E and generally felt that the game ran best in levels 4-15. In many respects, D&D's "sweet spot" has always been those mid levels over all editions, where PCs are tough enough to given and take a beating but not so full of abilities they bog down. 4E tried to extend that downwards with 1st level being quite a bit tougher, with mixed results and my experience (as a player) with the really high levels was that it too bogged down.

Note: I disliked DMing 4E, though I did do it a good bit.

 

[Lanefan]

I think that the problem with this approach - though well-intentioned it may be (as I too love the idea of emergent play) - is that players do and will frequently think about their characters long-term, often because their sense of character concept may be tied to long-term goals that cannot be realized at the point of character creation.

In some cases, yes.

In others, however, they'll look at the long term in part because the system kinda tells them to. It's a bit hard to explain, but in 0e-1e-2e the game was open-ended - sure you could set a goal for a character but it wouldn't necessarily be tied to level or whatever, as there'd be no way of knowing how high a level the game would reach and-or how long it'd take to get there. 1e's name-level stronghold idea was a bit of an exception, but even there the only real mechanics involved were character level; and the character could still be played during and after that process - it wasn't an 'end' so much as a 'stage' or 'phase', and the game could in theory go on forever. Other than that, you couldn't really plan ahead very much and had to take things as they came and work with that.

But 3e, echoed by 4e and 5e, is presented as a more closed-ended system: 1-20 in 3e, 1-30 in 4e, back to 1-20 in 5e*. This changes the perception a surprising amount, telling the player in effect to expect a certain number of levels and thereby implying that planning out your PC's development through those levels is accepted, if not outright expected. Paths and Destines just push a little harder in this direction, as did the concept of prestige classes in 3e.

* - yes these systems all have options for beyond-the-end or 'epic' play for levels higher than the stated limit, but out of the box they're presented as closed-ended.

And we can see this problem in 5e as well. I may see my character as an Arcane Trickster, but assuming that I do not take alternative routes,* it will take me until reaching rogue level 3 before I get the bare minimum to reach my character concept.

Taking a while to reach one's full character concept is kind of a fact of life in many cases in all editions, and I'm cool with that as part of the fun can be watching your character grow into itself, as it were.

That said, while I liked the idea of prestige classes when I first saw them the bloom has long since gone off that rose, largely for just the reason you state: to become one thing you have to spend a bunch of time as something else. I'd far rather have all classes start at level 1 and have done with it. (and even with the 1e Bard, the original prestige class, I long ago redesigned it to be its own class just like the others)

IME with 4e, however, most players were not pre-planning their Paragon paths or Epic destinies. They would certainly have several in mind, particularly when it comes to prerequisites, but it's generally not pre-planned. Again IME, most players in 4e were looking at their next few levels of powers that they could potentially choose rather than long-term destinies.

Good to hear.

Re the party lost in Niflheim:

Sounds more like a buzzkill campaign.

End of party didn't mean end of campaign - they all had other PCs in other parties in the same world and overall story, so we just jumped to one of those.

There was even some talk later of sending another expedition down to try and rescue the first one, once those still alive had realized their comrades had been gone a long time and done some divination to find out what became of them, but the overall campaign ground to a close before anything ever came of this.

 

[MwaO]

I think you could at the lower levels but it became increasingly implausible at higher levels and fairly ludicrous at epic tier. I played a good bit of 4E and generally felt that the game ran best in levels 4-15. In many respects, D&D's "sweet spot" has always been those mid levels over all editions, where PCs are tough enough to given and take a beating but not so full of abilities they bog down. 4E tried to extend that downwards with 1st level being quite a bit tougher, with mixed results and my experience (as a player) with the really high levels was that it too bogged down.

If you're doing a 'realistic D&D campaign where PCs with martial explanations can't take all powers', one of two things is happening:
Everyone is abiding by a set of self-imposed limitations that are the rough equivalent to what the martials have to deal with. Then things work.
No one is playing martials.

This is reasonably common to see in other editions — if the casters can blow apart the system as they can in not-4e at high levels, then either no one plays high level martials in campaigns, the people who play casters don't blow apart the system, or the entire campaign collapses in a huff when people passive-aggressively decide to leave.

In any case, Fighter is reasonably easy to do this as some of the best striker focused powers are straightforward martial style powers with no real special effects. Rain of Blows as an example.

 

[BryonD]

The most interesting thing to be about 3E is that if you apply a level-bonus to AC but call it "natural armour" then many RPGers will regard that as a simulation even though it is just a label with no meaning in the fiction whatsoever

Can you show me these many? I don't think you can.
I think you are in this place completely guilty of doing what 4E fans routinely accuse its critics of. That being, you are calling out one thing and then framing that as how "those guys" do things.

"Natural Armor" is a HUUUGE handwave. Big dinosaurs are also good at getting out the the way of fireballs because they have REF saves tied to their HD.

There are major warts in places of 3E. I have never, ever, heard anybody celebrate those warts "as a simulation". The system as a complete system *IS* very much celebrated as a embrace of simulation. But in the end it remains a practical game. These imperfections exist and are either simply accepted and ignored or, in some case, house-ruled around.

If you want to talk about natural AC in a vacuum then, yes, it is a complete failure of simulation. There are certainly specific cases where it makes sense. But those are solidly the exception.
But they are sacrifices to practicality in a system that truly makes an overall effort toward "simulation".

And, I agree with Jester David, the edition wars are over. The marketplace had its say. So no need to dwell on that.
But, cherry picking a specific issue and then claiming that people you disagree with celebrate *that issue* is wrong, unjust and unfair.