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

[Kaiyanwang]

If 4E was just essentials at launch, and if the online component completed, the game would have been successful.

Really? As you can read above, is not my favorite edition but between PH1 and Essentials, I would go PH1 without a second thought. it's overall more interesting and more... for lack of a better word, "confident" about its design principles.

Thinking that the Essentials Slayer would be preferred by 3ed players because is "similar" to the 3ed (or earlier editions) fighter kind of misses what made the new 4ed combat less interesting to some, and misunderstands what people find enjoyable in 3ed melee (which is different things for different people BTW).
3ed framework with "powers" is something that people with a 3ed preference enjoy. Not me, but think about how many love Tome of Battle. When PF1e came out, Dreamscarred produced a PF1e version.

 

[Argyle King]

Edit: I forgot - the preview books and the tone they were written with did not help. At all.

I'm lot 100% sure what you mean by that, but I really liked the tone and style of the 4E preview books.

I wish more of that aesthetic had made it into later 4E products.

 

[Alzrius]

I just listened to an interview with Rob Heinsoo, lead designer on 4E and 13th Age, on episode 191 of the Mastering Dungeons podcast, which included his thoughts on 4E itself. I thought some of you may find it interesting:

• Dave Noonan identified problems with D&D that 4E should be designed to fix.
• Rob was the only member of the design team with extensive experience with games other than D&D.
• Rob speculates that he was chosen to be lead designer because he is not a nostalgic person and wouldn’t keep rules around for the sake of tradition.
• The initial design ideas for 4E were very experimental, but reined back in during development.
• Rob credits the negative reaction to 4E being because it changed both the rules and the setting, saying that it might have been better received if the setting stayed the same while the rules changed.
• He disagreed with the idea of using PC powers as the means to drive sales of supplements, though he believes the supplements that were made were quality products.

I'm very curious if the idea of changing only the rules and not the setting would have made 4E more palatable to D&D fans. It seems to have worked for Pathfinder 2E, which changed the rules drastically but kept the setting largely the same.

This lends credibility to what Ben Riggs talked about at Gen Con 2023.

 

[Kurotowa]

I'm lot 100% sure what you mean by that, but I really liked the tone and stole style of the 4E preview books.

I wish more of that aesthetic had made it into later 4E products.

I too really enjoyed the two preview books. It's why I went all-in and preordered the complete Core box set. And maybe I'm an oddball, or maybe Heinsoo is misreading the situation, but I loved the setting changes while finding the mechanics deeply unsatisfying when my group sat down to play it.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think it’s obviously true that 4e would have been received better by long-time fans if it hadn’t changed the setting, but I’m skeptical that it would have made enough of a difference to save the edition in the eyes of enough of those fans. And there’s every chance that it might not have resonated as well with the folks like me who really like the edition. It’s good to reflect on the decisions made with 4e and think about what could have been done better, but I think it’s folly to believe that you’ve figured out the One Thing that would have made 4e a huge hit.

 

[Shardstone]

I think it’s obviously true that 4e would have been received better by long-time fans if it hadn’t changed the setting, but I’m skeptical that it would have made enough of a difference to save the edition in the eyes of enough of those fans. And there’s every chance that it might not have resonated as well with the folks like me who really like the edition. It’s good to reflect on the decisions made with 4e and think about what could have been done better, but I think it’s folly to believe that you’ve figured out the One Thing that would have made 4e a huge hit.

Nah Im a god so I know exactly what 4e needed.

 

[overgeeked]

Around the 30 minute mark Teos asks Rob about the OGL. It’s a great response. The point was to “monopolize the industry’s creativity. Everybody does D&D.” It’s refreshing to have people just say the quiet part loud. Ryan Dancy has said similar things before. It’s weird how other people don’t believe him (or Rob) when they say things like this.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Avoid setting changes (or at least more than very, very minor ones), give the books another year, (apparently) don't just nudge the HP of all monsters up a whole bunch(???), and emphasize presentation, presentation, presentation in the final publication. Avoid the GSL, avoid the murder-suicide that destroyed all future potential of the digital tools, avoid Silverlight which further strangled whatever minimal tools potential remained. Brace for the financial meltdown and focus on low-cost, easy-use books.

The rules would always be controversial. Can't help that. But you can attempt to address the myriad of problems, at least half of which were literally stuff WotC couldn't have known or controlled for.

Oh...and don't write such absolute $#!+ early adventures. Seriously, Keep on the Shadowfell and Pyramid of Shadows are horrible rotten garbage I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and they made a terrible first showing for a brand-new edition.

Without the GSL, Paizo almost certainly never makes PF, but instead makes more 4e content. Lacking a rallying flag and having fewer complaints (because of the lack of setting changes), the grumbles remain mostly just that--grumbles.

 

[Mistwell]

I don't think setting alone was a major factor. A huge amount of the objection to 4e was tonal. The rules didn't just look like a wargame, they read like one also. Some of the Essentials direction was better, but they needed to go even further. Classes should not have looked so similar to each other. They didn't focus enough on making each class unique, and hard coding roles was a mistake. Your Wizard CAN be a controller, but that label shouldn't be there and the players should choose the role for that particular PC without the intentional and explicit "pulling back the curtain" on that level of design. There was just too much of a gamification tone to the rules.

 

[GuardianLurker]

I know for me that setting didn't even enter into it. The rules and gameplay were enough to put off my group. We played a session of the 4e rendition of B2 and said NAH.

I said then, and I stick to it, 4e isn't a bad game - it just wasn't DnD to me. In fact, I'm a big fan of the skirmish boardgames that were released back then (which are just a light reskinning of 4e itself). The other thing I've come to say over the years is that 4e had great ideas, and did a really good job of analysis. It just failed in the implementations. But I'll stop there.

As for the setting, like I said, I never got exposed to it back in 4e proper, but the mark in left in 5e WRT to the other planes isn't one I like. And again, we'll leave it there.