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

[TiQuinn]

Let's Read the 4E Monster Manual: lamia



5e returned the lamia to the attractive half-human/half-beast that it had been in 1E-3E (which is similar to the original Greek mythology origins).

The scarab swarm was an interesting idea for a monster but why they called it a lamia seems nonsensical and random.

That’s a cool idea - basically a riff on the Worm That Walks but why take a known monster and rename it? That’s just being contrarian for the sake of it.

 

[SteveC]

Never call me unwilling to debate an issue, even an old one, but I don't think we're going to solve any of the issues about 4E that haven't been solved already. I'm just suggesting that we're not going to resolve anything. I love 4E. Others don't. It's interesting to see what Rob said about the changes to the system versus the Realms, but it just seems to be bringing back discussions that didn't get us anywhere when it was the active edition. I suspect many old axes will be taken out of storage to be ground once more.

 

[Clint_L]

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.

But...not totally inaccurate. Speaking from experience.

 

[Minigiant]

Fixing problems that not everyone had and claiming it's simply "better designed" is not appreciating the diversity of what people want out of D&D and the different design goals that they have.

You have to remember 4e was made after late 3.5.

The problems of 3.5e players had with late 3 5e were now and common. Most fans did have these problems and used house rules to fix them.

4e showed the drawback of hyperfocusing on the flaws of the previous edition.

And Heinsoo said 4e was the lighter version. They had internal versions of 4e that went harder at 3e's flaws

 

[I'm A Banana]

Except that for all of those things besides games, avoiding any such reveal consistently and almost universally makes them better, and nearly any sacrifice necessary to avoid such reveals is worth making.

This is true for RPGs, too. Well, more precisely, it's true for why some people play RPG's. My guess is, it's true for a rather large portion of D&D's audience, even if most of them can't exactly articulate it like this.

Actively sabotaging the functionality of rules in order to never, ever let someone think they're playing a game will destroy the ability to play the game effectively. It will still be "playable" because "playable" is a below-rock-bottom, Mohorovicic-discontinuity standard, but it will actively and aggressively prevent enjoyable gameplay. Games need rules, and unless you're playing Mao, players need to know the rules in order to play.

Who is proposing to get rid of rules entirely?

The suggestion is merely that it makes sense that some people playing a game would like to use the rules like paper, or like a camera, or like paints, or like a stage. That for them, the game is there, and it's useful, and you can use it in fun and interesting ways, and it supports the whole work, and puts some interesting creative constraints in place, but it's the medium that the story is told through, not the story itself.

You can never not have at least some awareness that you're playing, unless you're genuinely deceiving yourself. Hearing a story told, or watching a movie, etc., you can at least pretend that the tale is not constructed by the teller, that it's a genuinely faithful recounting of a real event. Playing a game, you are necessarily using rules to affect the game. There is no physical or mental possibility of believing that an icosahedron showing 20 is faithfully recounting the tale of a warrior landing a telling blow against his enemy.

Yeah, we can all see the wires Peter Pan uses to fly, we all know the dude in the leotard isn't actually a cat, and we all understand that a tree that you paint onto a canvass will never grow and die.

But humans are imagining creatures, and if why you pick up D&D is to do something narrative with your imagination, seeing a die roll a 20 becomes, in the narrative, a warrior landing a telling blow against his enemy. Just as reading the sentence "the warrior landed a telling blow" becomes an image in your head when put into the context of a novel, and just as a splash of red paint becomes the blood of a warrior in a painting, and just as two people flailing foam swords at each other on a wooden platform in a dark room on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon in Springfield becomes a duel to the death for two rivals in a far-off land that never truly was.

For a lot of people who play D&D, the rules are mostly the tool you use to tell the story with your friends. The game is the medium. And like with any medium, it affects the stories told through it, and you can also tell stories with it that are kind of ABOUT the medium itself, but I don't think most D&D tables are looking to create the fantasy RPG equivalent of John Cage's 4'33". I think a lot of the time, a good chunk of the player base just wants the rules as a space that is used to tell a story. That space isn't nothing. It's not silent. But it's also not the focus. It's the thing we all mostly pretend isn't really there so that we can enjoy the story being told within it.

 

[Minigiant]

I don't really think the problem was that fans didn't want to see the game

I think the problem was that a large percentage of fans wanted the same classic ideas injected in their D&D but export a different D&D without the same problems.

It's the Druid Wildshape problem.

Fans want the druid to Wildshape into real star blocks of every beast in the game BUT don't want it to bog down play, rewrite all the beasts to be weaker,, not invalidate skill characters,and not have a power gaming mini game of choosing the best beast.

There are many solutions to that problem but you'll never get the majority on board on one. So if you tackle the issue, you will upset 25-75% of the community.

4e in a way was The Druid Problem the Edition. Everyone knew the problem. Everyone didn't agree on the solution

 

[Vaalingrade]

And Heinsoo said 4e was the lighter version. They had internal versions of 4e that went harder at 3e's flaws

I feel like if pressed, I could identify at least twenty points where they didn't go too far enough and map them to my original review on the old Wizards boards where I pointed out that didn't go too far enough.

Things like the rogue weapon restrictions that had no justification, the surviving alignment restrictions on Divine characters, and the first crack they took at Magic Missile.

 

[Undrave]

is the sort of language that got 4e that reputation for badwrongfun-ing people who were perfectly happy without things like tightly defined combat roles. Not every table had a problem with group cooperation that needed to be solved in such a strict way.

Well... If nothing else it was HONEST game design. It didn't try to trick you into thinking that you could do everything with one class. It told you from the get go what you were getting into so if you didn't like that you'd knew right away.

And D&D is supposed to be a group activity, a team adventure, but few versions were as geared towards team synergy as 4e.

 

[Undrave]

Things like the rogue weapon restrictions that had no justification, the surviving alignment restrictions on Divine characters, and the first crack they took at Magic Missile.

You mean the Cantrip?

 

[overgeeked]

Well... If nothing else it was HONEST game design. It didn't try to trick you into thinking that you could do everything with one class. It told you from the get go what you were getting into so if you didn't like that you'd knew right away.

And D&D is supposed to be a group activity, a team adventure, but few versions were as geared towards team synergy as 4e.

Exactly. D&D has always had front-line tanks, damage dealers, and heals/buffs. In other editions, they’re ever so vaguely hidden behind game mechanics. In 4E, they straight up tell you. That was great.

As much as I loved the synergy in 4E, it was kinda wonky. You’re 100% right. 4E did synergy better than the rest. But the synergy wasn’t that good.