D&D General New Interview with Rob Heinsoo About 4E

[see]

It’s wild and sad that people are entirely unaware of a time before the OGL. Other games flourished. Other games were played more than D&D. D&D was nearly dead and gone. The only thing that saved it was the OGL. There was a bright and glorious time in the late 80s and 90s when D&D was not king. One game to rule them all. Sigh.

That's rather exaggerated.

I grant the Comics Retailer data as re-reported for people outside the industry by Ken Hite in his "Outside the Box" column had serious issues, but they are the numbers we have. And in 1996, TSR was about 44% of the market, White Wolf 23%, Palladium 11%, and FASA and WEG about 6% each.

If you want to say that at almost half of all RPG sales D&D wasn't king, sure, okay. But even in the year that sank TSR (WotC announced its purchase of TSR on April 10, 1997), D&D was hardly "nearly dead and gone".

 

[Undrave]

It may be metagame, but it is perhaps one of the very few consequences of a fight that definitely put the fear of god in the players (the other being mostly equipment loss to rust monsters).
It was, however, terrible metagame and I thought 3e/PF had a start on a better idea for by tracking negative levels that progressively penalize you without initially taking character levels and affecting max hit points, skill investments, and other level-up benefits.

That feels like a pretty meta way to look at it. Seems to me the appeal isn't the condition itself, but rather it's duration. 4e had the disease track, which could be used for curses and long lasting injury and I think that mechanic REALLY should be brought back.

Have we had a session focusing on roleplaying, exploration, or investigation in 4E? No.

I have my 4e books at home

 

[Belen]

What do they say when you ask which of them can run for a while?

The last time I asked was after both my parents died within a year of each other. One guy said he could DM for a while, maybe, and there was no game again until I was ready to run again.

 

[overgeeked]

This.

I will admit that 4e was focused on eliminating bad DMs. It was hard to be a bad DM in 4e because the game was designed to provide a base experience. So a bad DM in 4e was mediocre.

That said, I also felt that great DMs were hamstrung by the rules at times because they tried to corner you into a set path or provide an on rails experience.

That is why I felt that 4e was not my D&D. I could no longer run the games in the same way that I or my players enjoyed.

To me, that is a sign of a restrictive interpretation of rules. You can only do what the rules say, nothing more. The rules are the end, not the beginning. They're set in stone, not flexible. We didn't have that problem. Our referee was an old timer so rules be damned. If the rules got in the way of our fun, we ignored them. We were not beholden to what the book says. They're guidelines, not a straight jacket. I forget who mentioned it up thread, but the idea of not being able to use powers outside of combat is just mind boggling.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Wait - you haven't DMed at all because you're afraid that it will mean that you will have to DM forever if you do?

Huh. That's... unfortunate.

No. I have not tried to DM 4e for complete strangers on the thin hope that if I do so I will eventually have a group that will instead run 4e for me.

I am a DM. I run a Dungeon World game for friends.

How do you play now? I assume that would mean that you have a DM. Would that DM happily give up DMing forever the second you offer to do it?

I am in a 5e game, offered very kindly by Hussar of these very forums. I would not normally play 5e, but his genuine compassion in making the offer in the first place (and him choosing to be very gracious about some requests on my end, which he was under no obligation to fulfull) convinced me to accept.

I feel very lucky that my group has 3 people that are happy to DM. I do it 70% of the time because I like to DM. But I can sit back and play whenever I finish a story arc.

I have exactly two friends who DM. Neither of them has any interest in running 4e (one doesn't even like D&D in general, regardless of edition or flavor.) Other than those two, no one has the slightest inclination to run any tabletop game at all, and if they did, they would 99.99% run 5e.

If it were not verboten to do so, I would envy your situation. I've never had anything even remotely like "four friends who all enjoy DMing and all like similar game systems." DMs are an incredibly rare and precious commodity, and if you find a good one, you sure as hell don't let them go if you can avoid it.

 

[MwaO]

[bold for emphasis] Well, using any skill you wanted to horn in there because you're good at it was a kind of dumb idea. It was, at best, an empty attempt to appease the numbers game in the skill challenge while still involving everybody, whether it made sense in that particular situation or not. Limiting a skill challenge to two skills (diplomacy/bluff) is also bad, just in a different way. It just highlighted the fact that skill challenges, as initially included, were half-baked.

That kind of scene is described as a bad skill challenge in DMG too. Point being, if you have a bad skill challenge to deal with due to an adventure or DM, the point isn't to punish the players, the point is to let the players figure out a way to deal with it. If you have a good skill challenge, where the intent is to challenge the party, you put it in there.

If you don't have something designed to challenge all the members of the party, that's not a skill challenge, so just have whoever seems appropriate make the rolls. This again, all in DMG, but people didn't read the section and adventures didn't make it clear what the rules in DMG were.

 

[DEFCON 1]

but the idea of not being able to use powers outside of combat is just mind boggling.

This is I think where "natural language" helps in the various abilities and/or spells you find in 5E, 3E and before. 4E's powers were 90% the mechanical structure, with only one line or two of narrative fluff. Which meant unless you really worked at it, it could become too easy to just gloss over the fluff and only focus on the mechanics. And in that regard the mechanics would not inspire thinking necessarily of use outside of combat.

For instance, most of the fire spells in 5E specifically mention being able to light things on fire. Now while a DM might not have every single thing burst into flame each time a fire spell is used... having that detail written into the spell as part of the readable natural language can go a long way to remind players of this fact each time they pull up the spell to remind themselves how it works. Such that at some later point they might think "Oh! We want to set that things over there alight! I think one of my spells can do that!" And sure enough, it probably can.

Whereas a 4E player who had unfortunately skipped over the one sentence of fluff too often when looking at 4E powers... all they end up seeing when looking at some fire spell is the Target, the Attack, and the Damage (with or without special feature or damage on a miss). Thus the idea of being able to use the spell to set something on fire "outside of combat" gets missed because it isn't read or put in a prominent position within the write-up. Sure, some players will think of it anyway... but too many players perhaps would not or did not.

It's nobody's fault that this occurred... but it did change perhaps how people looked at the features in 4E differently than they might have in 3E/5E.

 

[overgeeked]

And perhaps it's my lack of imagination

If you're running RPGs, I highly doubt that's the issue.

, but I've been running the game weekly for around 6 months now. Let's say we're having 2 combat encounters per session on average. That's around 48 fights I've created and run. That's battles with brutes protecting back ranks of artillery. That's waves of minions. That's a couple solo boss monsters. That's some with dangerous terrain and some with elevation changes.

But it's just not enough ... at least for me.

Exactly. That's why every single fight needs to be filled with dangerous terrain, traps, skill challenges, secondary objectives, etc. Basically the advice from the DMG. Treat every fight like a boss fight, even if it's just a couple brutes guarding the artillery. Combat encounter as center piece. That combat is the show. Either go wildly overboard or skip it. It's not worth the handling time to work through a less than utterly spectacular combat.

There are only so many battles I can run with different types of enemies that give the illusion of a thrilling, life-or-death combat that ultimately takes all their Encounter powers, 2-3 Healing Surges, and 0-1 Daily Powers.

Exactly. You've looked behind the curtain and you see it for what it is. An illusion. That's what I'm talking about. That's why I prefer old-school games or turning combat into a skill challenge. The system I've been working up is literally that. Everyone makes a roll and based on the results, you spend resources to win. The end. No hours long pointless slog.

There's only so much that the robust combat system can do for you before it feels like you're playing a miniature skirmish game.

Again, exactly. It is a minis skirmish game. You can't hide that. Even making every fight over-the-top highlights rather than obscures that fact. The other way to go is stop doing the grindy combats. Stay out of fights. Only use the skill challenges (hopefully looser than as written, without the bad math). It's an RPG. It can be whatever you want. If you don't like the fights, skip 'em. Or rely on them less. Do more social and exploration. Etc.

To me, 4E is the best WotC-era D&D. I love everything they did with that game. But combat is just way too involved and takes way too long. Their standard combat is what a campaign ending BBEG fight should look like to me. Everything short of that, the combat system is overkill.

The plot is a ribbon to tie together the battles. The character customization and roleplaying is the skin for an avatar.

Only if you let it. Only if you focus on combats. Condense fights. Skip fights. Run fights as a skill challenge. Etc. There's lots you can do. You don't have to play as written or run modules as written. Just because 4E is a giant blinking neon sign pointing to minis skirmish combats doesn't mean you have to focus there. It's just as much an RPG as any other RPG. So stop focusing on the combat.

Have we had a session focusing on roleplaying, exploration, or investigation in 4E? No.

Is there anything preventing me from doing that? Also, no. Except I will say that it would feel out of place in a way that it doesn't in any other edition of D&D (or Warhammer Fantasy, or Call of Cthulhu, etc.) It feels like adding role-playing to Hero Quest.

Yeah. I get that. We fell into the exact same trap. But, and this is important, if you want it not to feel like a minis skirmish game...that's exactly what you have to do.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The plot is a ribbon to tie together the battles. The character customization and roleplaying is the skin for an avatar.

Why would you choose to run it that way? The books don't tell you to do that. The advice points rather dramatically in the other direction. Skill challenges and player quests point in the other direction.

Why would you want to run the game in a way you know feels bad, if you aren't required to?

Have we had a session focusing on roleplaying, exploration, or investigation in 4E? No.
Is there anything preventing me from doing that? Also, no. Except I will say that it would feel out of place in a way that it doesn't in any other edition of D&D (or Warhammer Fantasy, or Call of Cthulhu, etc.) It feels like adding role-playing to Hero Quest.

I just...why? Why does that feel out of place?

Do it! It's fun! That's a crucial part of making a good gameplay experience, variety and intrigue!

This is like saying that because you have a fancy new oven that works really really well, you can't serve salads anymore, because salads don't use ovens. Just...do it! Serve a salad! The oven isn't going to get mad at you because half of your meals don't involve using it.

 

[billd91]

I think they were overcompensating for earlier edition stat block bloat. I think there were two things they wanted to do with stat blocks. a) Make them smaller, and b) Make them less reliant on external info (like spells listed separately).

I remember thinking that the presentation of monsters in the monster manual was a bit weird, but it was such a long time since I read those.

After seeing the 3.5e stat blocks of Kyuss and Demogorgon in Dragon Magazine, I can understand the impulse to cut things down. Overcompensating seems to be the right description.