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

[Alzrius]

I just do not see a lot of people play full casters.

We actually had a thread a little while ago about how (using a sampling of characters made on D&D Beyond) fighters were the most popular class.

 

[SteveC]

You know what beats DPR? Side-stepping entire combat encounters entirely with a spell. This is why damage meters don't tell the full picture. It's also why Fireball, although powerful for a 3rd level spell, doesn't generally enter most conversations about a spell ending an encounter, as per your earlier pithy remark.

This is such an important detail and one area that's very different between 4E and 5E. In a recent game I was playing in, we had 12 opponents show up. I did Hypnotic Pattern as we really didn't want to fight them, and they all failed their saves. The encounter was over. We had just leveled and hit the point where I got that spell, and it blindsided the DM. He rolled with the punches as an old pro, and we moved on to what was next.

We would not have done that in 4E.

 

[Oofta]

Yes, because 5e is not designed in a way that supports meaningful punishment for this, unless the DM becomes actively hostile and clearly playing fast and loose with diegesis (because three hour-long short rests have no consequences, but one eight-hour long rest is totally a bridge too far, every time, forever? And that's somehow not blatantly and aggressively gamist?)

Despite the use of a $20 word (which honestly I don't even know how diegesis applies), I am not actively hostile nor do I control the narrative flow of the game. Yet I don't find it that hard to balance things out.

The way 5e combats are designed? I mean kind of. Fireball has a 20' radius. That's easily 40 five-foot squares. Not hard to catch the enemy in a 20' radius explosion.

Assuming you aren't also catching your allies, assuming they're all approaching from the same direction, assuming that this is an indoor location that is fireproof, on and on and on.

Not sure how that's actually relevant. The vast majority of locations aren't meaningfully occupied with flammable objects to begin with.

Buildings made of wood aren't flammable? Trees? The McGuffin the party needs to retrieve?

Rarely, because counterspell is both dull and tedious. There's a reason it's frequently complained about by 5e DMs.


Then pick a different spell. Two or three solid damage spells is enough to avoid most relevant resistance. E.g. fireball and, say, ice storm.

Assumes that you know what you're going to be facing and then have time to take a long rest.

I find many Wizards do not consider this a meaningful disadvantage.


What Fighter is this? Because 8d6 to a single target is only if you hit with all four attacks with a great sword at max level. Even if we factor in static damage (so 2d6+5), you're still talking about an 11th level Fighter, at which point the Wizard is dropping (up to) four fireball*s a day, plus three 4th level spells, two 5th, and one 6th. Even if the Wizard is foolish enough to waste a *fireball on just two targets, and one of them saves (or three targets that all save), that's still 12d6 = 42 damage from an action they can perform four times a day (without considering Arcane Recovery.) 168 daily damage. At that level, a Fighter even with a 75% hit chance (70% hit, 5% crit) is doing .7(12)+.05(17) = 9.25 average damage per attack, or 27.75 damage per round. It takes her five rounds, counting Action Surge, just to make up for one poorly-used fireball. That's 20 rounds of combat per day, just to keep up with 4th level spell slots used in fairly inefficient situations, despite assuming extremely high accuracy and a high rate of enemy saving throws (50%). Champion doesn't meaningfully affect this (hence why it's not a very good subclass), BM helps but not a ton, as it rarely gets more than about half the described fireball (two targets, one saves, or three targets where all save), at 82.5 average extra damage per day.

Apparently you've never had a fighter using sharpshooter or GWM. But my 5th level fighter with 2-weapon fighting is doing over 25 points of damage with an 18 strength and no magical weapon. Also assumes I'm not action surging that combat. They have to hit, but the fireball does average 28 points of damage if the target(s) fails their save and is not resistant. If the wizard can catch a large number of opponents in fireball formation of course it will do more damage. Quite frequently I don't have that many enemies on the field and they're spread out.

Again, under certain circumstances they do great.

And that's JUST using four (rather poor) *fireball*s and otherwise leaving all other resources untouched. This Wizard can bring two more *fireball*s, or an extra 5th and 1st spell, with just one short rest, and has several 4th level spells to bring to the party as well. And all their 1st and 2nd level slots can be used for... whatever. Without even considering rituals on top of that.

When paired with the fact that most groups don't actually have 6+ combats per long rest, nor 2+ short rests per long rest, I think you can see the shape of the issue. And yes, this is a real thing. Crawford himself explicitly said so, when talking about how some classes, like Warlock, get left behind because they aren't given enough short rests to keep up with Wizards.

People wanted nearly the same rules as 3e, without LFQW and the 5MWD. And guess what we got! Wizards still grow faster than Fighters can keep up, and the 5MWD is still a pervasive problem.

I think there should be options for spell and resource recovery based on the type of game you play, but even 4 fights per day can tax a wizard's resources. Again, if I want an objective measurement I go back to the Solasta video game. The wizard is effectively never at the top of the DPR list, even if I take long rests after every couple of fights.

 

[Undrave]

You see here? Are you sure that was the actual issue?
To me is more like the sterile format and the elimination of any spell and effect that was vague but great for the play and RP - this is what they said, to my understanding. Which if this is the case, is not the same thing. You are framing it as " clarity is an issue", sorry.

It's sterile because it's clear, to the point, precise and unambiguous rules. So yes, clearly the clarity of the rules bothered people.

Also, Rituals had all the fun RP spells. They were just not linked to your combat resources. Rituals became a group resource because people could pool their money and even help each other perform better. Sure, the Ritualist was casting the spell, but alone they wouldn't have been able to afford the reagent and maybe the duration would have sucked without the Cleric or Bard pitching in an Arcana Roll. 5e Rituals are a mockery of the 4e rituals.

Is not a matter of numbers but of the mindset behind the rule writing, being it style (which is frankly secondary to me) and overall (forgive me if I use such brutal oversimplification, but for lack of a better vocabulary) "gamisms" or perceived such.

Yes. They are game rules who don't pretend to be anything but game rules. That's why they feel gamist. The lack of pretending to somehow not be game rules is why people didn't like them.

This. There are absolutely situations where powerful spellcasters (not just wizards and sorcerers) can dramatically alter the game. But there are also plenty of situations where they wind up contributing very little, due to having the wrong spells selected, clutch saving throws being made (or legendary saves being used) and so on.

Dramatically altering the game is essentially the class fantasy of Wizard players. They want to do that as often as possible and whine when the game makes it harder for that to happen. They want ALL the spells to make it easier to have the right one and they want ALL the slots to cast them with.

In Martial terms, they want to crit on a 15 and are angry when they only get to crit on an 18 while everybody only crits on a 20.

 

[Minigiant]

This. I rarely see people play Wizards. They do not like the hassle especially if the DM enforces spell components and costs.

In the past, I tagged spells as common vs uncommon vs rare so a Wizards can easily find and learn a common spells when they level but have to work to get others.

I just do not see a lot of folks even think about playing a Wizard.

Designing your game on the hope that few people play the broken classes because they are boring or complicated sounds like a disaster waiting to happen

 

[niklinna]

The question I'd like to ask is should both of you play D&D?

Together? Maybe well not.

That said, there's no reason game text can't have flowery text and mechanical bullet points in the same entry. In fact, 4e power descriptions do have flavor text, well set off form the mechanical details, which were also distinctively typeset. The flavor text is, however, often no more than a sentence, maybe two, and visually it's the opposite of prominent, being on a colored background and typeset in a lightweight italic font. That is, the design favors the eye skipping over it to the boldface text on a bright white background, so if you want to read the flavor text, it's more effort. The inconsistent alternating shaded bands, I think, were a design mistake.

Edit: Updated reference to alternating shaded bands in power descriptions (not the green/red/black for at-will/encounter/daily).

 

[Kaiyanwang]

It's sterile because it's clear, to the point, precise and unambiguous rules. So yes, clearly the clarity of the rules bothered people.

Yes. They are game rules who don't pretend to be anything but game rules. That's why they feel gamist. The lack of pretending to somehow not be game rules is why people didn't like them.

Not necessarily. A lot of stuff that was beyond "movement/damage + movement/effect" was trimmed because it didn't fit the mold and wasn't made for rituals either. And those were rules too, which 4e failed to reproduce, intentionally or not.
This is a massive limitation and framing it as "not pretending to be anything but game rules" doesn't make it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Last time I checked the reason I, and the people I play with, play the game is to have fun. If it's fun, it's good design as far as I'm concerned.

Winning is fun. Losing is not fun. Therefore, every fight should be won, because that will be fun.

You already know the problems with this logic.

How do you measure power? If it's DPR, I don't see it.

Then you are not looking at the numbers, or you are actively changing the rules so that the cost of doing the thing most people actually do is no longer trivial. As it stands, few groups do more than 5, maybe 6 combats per long rest on average, most groups take only one short rest per long (or occasionally 2), and most combats are only a few rounds long (maybe 5 for a relatively long combat). This, plus the tedium of actually countering spellcasters meaningfully and the deep unrealism of maintaining constant time pressure all the time that never causes problems from short rests but consistently penalizes long rests, leads to precisely what I described above.

If it's bypassing obstacles, it seems to be more theorycrafting than anything I've ever seen.

That you have not seen it does not mean it cannot be done. The example I gave above is a Wizard holding their own in damage with only four 3rd level spells. They have four 1st and 2nd, three 4th, two 5th, and one 6th to play with, along with six spell levels from Arcane Recovery (max slot of 5th level.)

"I don't see Wizards solving problems excessively, thus no one does" is not a compelling argument.

Occasionally players of all classes figure out how to bypass obstacles so good on them.

Is the Wizard prevented from doing so without expending spell slots? Because if not, I'm not seeing how that is a benefit to anyone. You are just stating a thing all people can do in addition to the other stuff. Since it is shared, identical across all classes, it is not under consideration. It would be like saying that person A and person B have the same financial treatment when A gets 401k matching and stock dividends while B does not, because B could always just work another job that does those things (or by spending the income from that job on such.)

If it's page count, all I can say is that more complexity has little to do with power.

It's not complexity. It's depth and versatility. Even if many spells suck (and many do!), having 300+ spells and counting is significantly greater than having 80 feats or 20 maneuvers, especially since feats and maneuvers are rather more hit-or-miss than spells. (And yes, the 300+ isn't a joke. The Wizard has 312 non-cantrip spells, counting only first-party books. A further 19 can be found in the third-party official supplements.)

 

[Undrave]

I also do not care that casters get more content. Most of it goes unused.

Most options go unused but more option means it's more like for there to be one you want to try. If your favorite class never gets new options you won't find new stuff to experiment with.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Not necessarily. A lot of stuff that was beyond "movement/damage + movement/effect" was trimmed because it didn't fit the mold and wasn't made for rituals either. And those were rules too, which 4e failed to reproduce, intentionally or not.
This is a massive limitation and framing it as "not pretending to be anything but game rules" doesn't make it.

Since you are keen on requesting citations:

What, exactly, was "trimmed" as you describe? Since you have said "a lot of stuff" meets this description, I'm sure you can give us at least a handful of examples. Perhaps three or four?