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

[Oofta]

It’s wild how willfully blind people choose to be. Basic math shows the wizard is the most powerful. Basic system knowledge shows the wizard is the most powerful. The designers of the game flat-out say the wizard is the most powerful. And yet people still refuse to acknowledge it. So weird. They must be getting something out of the charade. Otherwise they wouldn’t keep it up.

In my last game that went to 20th level, if I added up the damage dealt the fighter would have come out on top. Utility wise, that's harder to say but probably the bard or rogue.

Declarations of personal opinion and experience does not make other people "willfully blind" to your truth.

 

[Oofta]

Yes, it does explain (to some extent) 4e.

You can pretend to please people, while fixing nothing. Or you can fix things, and necessarily piss some people off. Pick your poison.

When coupled with the other, actually irrational positions (like the need for Wizards to always be the best class in the game, as Heinsoo himself reported following 4e's launch), explosive responses are guaranteed.

Or you can come up with an edition that pleases very few people and drives off the old customer base.

 

[overgeeked]

The wizard always has ended up the most powerful.

For me the question is about at what level?

Most of us barely play to double digit levels. Tier 1 I don’t see an issue. At what point in tier two do folks things go off the rails?

In my experience it’s not the whole career of a wizard. Are we sure folks are blind? I am not talking level 18 fighter vs level 18 wizard…

But do wizards overshadow everything before most people quit?

(Not asking rhetorically but to hear at what level folks see the power balance shift)

I have only played 5e to 13th before we switch things up

It’s instantaneous. From the jump they have access to spells that simply end encounters. All you have to do is read the spells and the S-tier stuff shines like a blinking neon sign. It only gets worse from there. But it’s really over once wizards hit 5th level and get access to fireball, lightning bolt, invisibility, and fly. The first two were intentionally overtuned and the designers even flatly said they did it on purpose in 5E. At least in AD&D the wizard being quadratic was solely the fault of a Monty Haul referee. In 5E, it’s baked into the class design.

 

[Staffan]

Is it really irrelevant? Isn't relevancy dependent on the purpose you intend to put them to? If you're excising abilities based just on their relevance to a combat encounter with 15th level characters - that's pretty much the myopia I was talking about with 4e. And it's not like 5e has completely recovered from that mindset - though I would still argue the patient has much improved.
And sure, I could ad hoc up whatever I want, but at some point I'm fighting too much against the grain of the edition and it's a bad fit. I'm doing that a lot less in 5e than I'd have had to in 4e.

Yes, I believe they are irrelevant in 90%+ of all cases. 2e and 3.0 monsters, particularly planar monsters, had ridiculously long lists of spell-like abilities. The problem is that this looks simple, but it creates a lot of cognitive load on the DM. Look at that marilith list again: animate dead, cause serious wounds (reverse of cure serious wounds), cloudkill, comprehend languages, curse (reverse of bless), detect evil, detect magic, detect invisibility, polymorph self (7 times per day), project image, pyrotechnics, and telekinesis: that's 12 abilities, plus the three every tanar'ri gets. If you were to expand that list to include the spell descriptions, that'd probably be like three pages or so. So if I'm running a marilith in combat and it's my turn, I look over that list and go "Animate dead: useless in combat. Cause serious wounds: What does that do? Something like 3d8+3, right? That's way worse than just hitting people. Cloudkill: Does pretty much nothing against high-level characters. Comprehend Languages: nah, it's already telepathic and doesn't need to read anything right now. Curse: Spend a round to inflict a -1 penalty? No thanks. Detect Evil, Detect Magic: Nah. Detect Invisibility: maybe if it suspects something invisible is around but no. Polymorph Self: Maybe if it's infiltrating stuff but right now it's mid combat. Project Image: No, that's something you use to start a fight and make the opposition waste resources but we're past that now. Pyrotechnics: Yeah, right. Telekinesis: OK, that might be useful if it needs to attack at range or deal with heavy stuff. Nah, I think I'll just attack seven times.

And that's me having quite extensive knowledge of the game. If I were to need to look up all those spells, the process would take even longer. So, I think it's better to have the monsters with a short list of impactful special abilities, that are on par with or better than their regular attack, and then if needed have a section with other stuff they can do.

 

[Alzrius]

It’s wild how willfully blind people choose to be. Basic math shows the wizard is the most powerful. Basic system knowledge shows the wizard is the most powerful. The designers of the game flat-out say the wizard is the most powerful. And yet people still refuse to acknowledge it. So weird. They must be getting something out of the charade. Otherwise they wouldn’t keep it up.

It's not a math problem. It's a terminology problem, or an expectations problem, or a problem of charting the gap between theory/design and the course of play. But you can't really reduce a game whose central premise is "anything can be attempted" to "fixing the math (and some people can't do math)."

A while back I linked to a PhD dissertation on the creative benefits of open licenses in general, and the OGL in particular. In that paper, Mike Mearls is quoted (from an old livejournal piece that he wrote) as saying the following:

In table top gaming, "open source" became a value neutral entry fee to gain access to the D&D mechanics. We never saw the iterative design process embraced by software developers primarily because RPGs lack easily defined metrics for quality, success, and useful features, a big shortcoming compared to software.

Now, while that's particular to the OGL (and I suspect will apply to the ORC and CC licenses as well), it highlights one of the primary issues under discussion here: that your definition of "better" or "stronger" or "balanced" or any other such point is going to be different from mine (in the general sense of "you" and "me"), and so any discussion about whether or not something is "more powerful" is going to suffer from the two of us using the same word and yet attaching different meanings to it, to say nothing about how much emphasis/importance we attach to that particular aspect of the game anyway.

Now, in a sense that's a strength to the RPG community as a whole, because it ensures that there's always going to be innovation happening. But we're doing so based on intuition more than any kind of cerebral understanding, having little idea of what we're looking for, why something does or does not work for us, and struggling to communicate those concepts and ideas to each other in ways that aren't misunderstood.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

The first two were intentionally overtuned and the designers even flatly said they did it on purpose in 5E.

Source?

 

[Kaiyanwang]

"Animate dead: useless in combat. Cause serious wounds: What does that do? Something like 3d8+3, right? That's way worse than just hitting people. Cloudkill: Does pretty much nothing against high-level characters. Comprehend Languages: nah, it's already telepathic and doesn't need to read anything right now. Curse: Spend a round to inflict a -1 penalty? No thanks. Detect Evil, Detect Magic: Nah. Detect Invisibility: maybe if it suspects something invisible is around but no. Polymorph Self: Maybe if it's infiltrating stuff but right now it's mid combat. Project Image: No, that's something you use to start a fight and make the opposition waste resources but we're past that now. Pyrotechnics: Yeah, right. Telekinesis: OK, that might be useful if it needs to attack at range or deal with heavy stuff. Nah, I think I'll just attack seven times.

I have several issues with this.
First and foremost, A.D. is not exactly useless because while preparing the corpses is laborious, the reanimation itself is a standard action, on a monster that has at will teleports and Projected Image. Which is an amazing spell that you dismiss in a completely preposterous manner. And once again, this thing TELEPORTS. No combos here, in your opinion?
How complex is the terrain here to adjust to a monster with such incredible movement abilities? Did you consider that?
Cloudkill is a continuous save-or-con damage, is not exactly doing nothing especially because is also a fog effect. I posted already, you ignored it. Dismissing Detect Invisibility betrays expecting a combat with no tactics, which is not what an high level encounters should be, at least usually.

But more importantly: those are all spells that the players and DM progressively got acquainted with levelling up. You frame it as if these are new powers that for some reason are written on other books and pages, while this is far from being the case.
On top of that, these are demons that can be bound (18HD or less) or gated, which then can lead to the caster asking to use a specific out-of combat ability for story reason.

 

[Undrave]

Is it really irrelevant? Isn't relevancy dependent on the purpose you intend to put them to? If you're excising abilities based just on their relevance to a combat encounter with 15th level characters - that's pretty much the myopia I was talking about with 4e. And it's not like 5e has completely recovered from that mindset - though I would still argue the patient has much improved.
And sure, I could ad hoc up whatever I want, but at some point I'm fighting too much against the grain of the edition and it's a bad fit. I'm doing that a lot less in 5e than I'd have had to in 4e.

Well the purpose of the 4e Monster Stat Blocks was to be easy to use a DM without needing to reference anything outside the block itself. Could they have added more stuff outside the stat block? Probably. But the stat block itself was built for a specific purpose and it worked great at that.

which could be still done in 3e adding 1-2 levels to the marilith and using either Dragon Magazine or ToB.

This sentence just makes me react like this:

“Oh the barmaid is a Monk 3/Kensei 5/Milk Maid 6 with a Half-Dragon and Half-Giant template applied and chain fighting feat chain” is a sentence created by the utterly deranged.

It’s wild how willfully blind people choose to be. Basic math shows the wizard is the most powerful. Basic system knowledge shows the wizard is the most powerful. The designers of the game flat-out say the wizard is the most powerful. And yet people still refuse to acknowledge it. So weird. They must be getting something out of the charade. Otherwise they wouldn’t keep it up.

All Wizard player dream of the same moment:

DM: Ah ha! There is an obstacle in your way!
Fighter: Curses! My might is useless!
Rogue: Curses! My lock pick is useless!
Bard: Curses! My social skills are useless!
DM: Bwahaha! You'll have to complete a lengthy sidequest with lots of NPCs to get past the obstacle!
Wizard: Stand back, my underling. I have the PERFECT SPELL prepared for this situation!
DM: Curses! Foiled again! You're too clever for me!
Party: Hurray for Wizard! Hurray for the best and smartest player at the table!

Nobody can convince me otherwise

The fact that they resisted changes doesn't directly mean "it must be the best class" - this is misconstructing things, sorry.
EDIT: reading the other comments on "people getting angry" or "plausible deniability" I am compelled to question if a certain fandom of a certain edition, in fact, has any intention of discussing this with the required serenity.

Heinsoo has stated before he had to constantly rein back his team who wanted to buff the Wizard.

Look, I understand that you want to see dissociated mechanics everywhere because it's annoying to read it about 4e, but then again, this is not the case.
In-universe, you spend different resources, as an example, to write a scroll of level 1 compared to level 6. The difference exists there even ignoring other factors like the level of knowledge and power required to cast them. Certain spells ARE more powerful and even if the creature in the world don't call it (again) "level", the difference exists in-universe.

Where is this explained? How does the 'resist X level spells' mechanic works in-universe? What even IS a spell, in universe? You're just blinded by your familiarity with the system.

 

[overgeeked]

This was actually also an issue in the switch from PF1 to PF2. There were a lot of designers at Paizo who were apparently kicking and screaming about the wizard's power being tuned down any or not having "all the spells," especially when it came to curtailing the Arcane spell list. Whether they succeeded in appropriately balancing the Wizard is certainly debatable, as the community still does, but the point stands.


It feels between PF1 moving towards 4e but not necessarily between 4e and 5e. Even then, I think that the problem is that sometimes PF2 rubs me the wrong way when/where PF2 is like PF1/3e and when/where it's more like 4e. In some ways, PF2 still feels "cowardly" in a reluctance to embrace anything that could be perceived as "too 4e," likely in how the PF brand and its audience was initially rooted in anti-4e sentiment. I think that it's a good game that is well-designed, but I don't think that it's quite for me.

Right? It’s so ironic they broke away because of 4E and were sustained by anti-4E sentiment, and when it came time to redesign PF, they moved in many of the exact same directions as WotC did with 4E.

 

[Vaalingrade]

My favorite useless ribbon spell they always put on monsters when they had to add X cantrips because PCs at that level got X cantrips, but only one was thematic and would ever be used by the creature was light. Because a night stalking superbeast with darkvision needs a flashlight attachment.