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

[Vaalingrade]

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.

I told them that was going to happen on their forums. Everyone said 'never'.

Now the people who said never 'don't remember' ever saying that.

 

[DEFCON 1]

The way some of you get so worked up about all the rules makes me wonder why you still keep playing D&D to begin with.

 

[Aldarc]

Source?

I'm sure people will be better at this than I am, but trying to find a quote on the Internet can be a challenge. But Mearls said that Fireball was intentionally overtuned because it was an iconic spell. If you look at the spell creation guidelines in the 5e DMG, Fireball does more damage than it should based on these guidelines. There is even an article on D&D Beyond from James Haeck talking about how Fireball is unbalanced on purpose.

 

[Cadence]

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.

Can things with darkvision read street signs on a moonless night without a light?
(Is there a way to paint them so that Daredevil couldn't read them by touch?)

 

[Oofta]

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.

If a fireball "ends an encounter" it's not the fault of fireball.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

“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.

I think I will keep doing math because I passed elementary school. Also that's another strawman because all those classes and rules at once is way more complexity than adding 2 levels of fighter and use a dragon magazine mini-feat chain of two to add a parry mechanic. I encourage you to do better than this, especially of you take the effort to post such image that compares that "real math" to sums and subtractions and the occasional, please don't be intimidated, multiplication.

Which also is a suggestion to reread what I wrote about the "immune to level x spells". I am sorry you never noticed spell levels exist in unverse, but ignoring this very important element doesn't add any validity to the point you are trying to make, especially because it was just triggered by me pronouncing the forbidden D word.

And also: "he said she said" is no proof. I want evidence for this now pretty disturbing pro-wizard conspiracy, thank you. Because to me sounds, among other things, a pretty nice excuse to avoid Hanlon's Razor.

 

[overgeeked]

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:



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.

Not, really no. The wizard is better than every other class because it has more options, more powerful options, and can easily overshadow other classes in their core competencies. There’s a whole thread dedicated to this tangent.

 

[Cadence]

And also: "he said she said" is no proof. I want evidence for this now pretty disturbing pro-wizard conspiracy, thank you. Because to me sounds, among other things, a pretty nice excuse to avoid Hanlon's Razor.

For one of them:

"The sheer power of fireball is central in many fun D&D stories, as reported by playtest information from the playtests that gave form to fifth edition D&D. The designers saw fireball (and to a lesser extent lightning bolt) as integral to the experience of playing a wizard in D&D, and chose to improve its destructive power to encourage players to learn that spell over other less iconic ones." - James Haeck

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/177-spell-spotlight-fireball

 

[Alzrius]

And also: "he said she said" is no proof. I want evidence for this now pretty disturbing pro-wizard conspiracy, thank you. Because to me sounds, among other things, a pretty nice excuse to avoid Hanlon's Razor.

Minor nitpick: I think you mean Hitchens's razor.

 

[Cadence]

Not, really no. The wizard is better than every other class because it has more options, more powerful options, and can easily overshadow other classes in their core competencies. There’s a whole thread dedicated to this tangent.

Would this be fixed a bit if they had made it truly Vancian casting - only four (maybe five) per day.
Or would the truly Vancian be loaded down with magic objects too and end up in the PF 1e trouble?