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

[Kaiyanwang]

Again: literally in the DMG. and in the Penny Arcade game run by the actual designer.

The 4e people created to rail against was pretty terrible compared to the one that saw print.

Last time I checked, spells and powers were in PH.

Because 4e died before they got to it.

That and niche protection. They didn't want wizards to easily be able to everything well. That was half the point of 4e.

A lot of things should have been in the PH1 but they went with the same prince and 60% of the pages.

You have to adapt your fiction around how being a better athlete doesn't help you do more damage.

It really doesn't. Your strenght does, you skill as athlete can be tangential at best. Stuff that help youe endurance lice your Con score will help both.

It's a simple answer: you use it, and other skills, all the time for all sorts of reasons.

But never in a consistent way, which damages immersion and people bailed from the game for this reason.

But a lot of 4e's spells, from Phantom Steed to Teleportation Circle were rituals. And almost all rituals were based on skill checks, with the majority of them being Arcana checks.

Were illusions and polymorphs rituals? what about summons? Were the summonable creature as varied as in 3e?

Because here something surreal is happening: you guys are talking to me as if 4e just came out and I should try this awesome game. It's been a while guys, it bombed, and I and others are desperately trying to let you understand why.
The very thread started because the very designer didn't get it yet, which is telling.

 

[SteveC]

It really doesn't. Your strenght does, you skill as athlete can be tangential at best. Stuff that help youe endurance lice your Con score will help both.

So, let's apply the same reasoning to magic. The real answer is that skills in D&D do different things than your ability to attack. That is true across editions.

 

[Kaiyanwang]

So, let's apply the same reasoning to magic. The real answer is that skills in D&D do different things than your ability to attack. That is true across editions.

And this shows that using Arcane for Diplomacy is logic because...?

 

[Staffan]

And this shows that using Arcane for Diplomacy is logic because...?

 

[Vaalingrade]

Last time I checked, spells and powers were in PH.

That's nice. How to adjudicate and encourage skill use is in the DMG.

 

[SteveC]

And this shows that using Arcane for Diplomacy is logic because...?

I will explain it, but I am getting the impression you don't have much experience with game systems other than D&D. Replacing a skill or attribute on a check with a power is a relatively common design feature. The first time I remember seeing it was Fate, but a lot of other games do it. PF2 does, PbtA games do, and Fabula Ultima does as well. So, this isn't a new or cutting-edge design.

So, we use the skill system to handle social matters like persuasion. Normally, that means the Diplomacy Skill and the Charisma ability.

We have a spell, Suggestion, that enables you to convince people of things. Now we could, and in other game editions, use a spell attack/DC against a target number.

What 4E does is say instead of that target against a Save, we will use the Skill system. The strength of the spell will be a skill check, but we're using the Arcana skill, the skill a wizard uses to do stuff and will be good at rather than Diplomacy, which they are not likely to be as good with. Since we're using Arcana, we're also going to use Intelligence.

To me this works elegantly in the Fiction. Instead of needing to be charismatic and persuasive, the wizard casts Suggestion, and uses the power of magic and their mind to reinforce the words. The best example I can think of this is when Sauraman keeps Theoden under control.

As a bonus, replace Diplomacy and Charisma with Athletics and Strength. You can have a Spiderclimb spell with that combination. If you think about it, many popular spells can use this method. You would use this to design things once and apply them to many different cases.

 

[niklinna]

Again, no one is advocating for never engaging with the rules. It's a strawman you've brought up twice now.

The point I'm making is just that it makes sense that some players would want those rules to fade into the background. That some players' goal when playing D&D is not to engage with the rules. And as a corollary, that "wanting to pretend they're not playing a game" is an entirely logical and desirable thing for these players, just as pretending you're not looking at words on a page is an entirely logical and desirable thing for people who read books.

The goal for these players is to move beyond the rules, just as the reader moves beyond the words written on the page.

The reader moves beyond the words by being fluent in the language—familiar with its particulars and details to a degree that they don't need to think about them consciously. Words and language are cognitive handles for great piles of knowledge and shared experience, neurologically bound (at fluency) to immediate association with the represented concretes and concepts.

The way many RPG players seem to want to move beyond the rules is by pointedly ignoring them ("not engage with") and hoping they'll go away, but they'll settle for putting all that burden on one person at the table (on top of everything else that person has to do). If you want to converse in a foreign language, well, you have to learn that language, however rudimentary or elaborate that language might be.

 

[Staffan]

Were illusions and polymorphs rituals? what about summons? Were the summonable creature as varied as in 3e?

Some illusions were rituals. The PHB had Hallucinatory Creature and Hallucinatory Item, and I'm sure other books added to that tally. Others were powers, such as Disguise Self or Blur. The same goes for some summons, such as Animal Messenger and Phantom Steed. Combat-worthy summons are powers, though I don't think the PHB has any (because they're kinda complex, and I don't think they had figured out how they wanted them to work yet) and summon a specific being as defined by that one spell (or other power, I'm sure non-arcane classes also got summons). 4e generally doesn't do long-term summons along the lines of 3e's Planar Ally or Planar Binding.

Polymorphing is generally a thing for Primal classes in 4e, taking on the aspect of a natural creature or phenomenon as part of various powers.

 

[Manbearcat]

There was zero percent chance this thread wasn't going to be an absolute train wreck. But here is a perfect example of why.

EzekielRaiden said:
You have to adapt your fiction around how being a better athlete doesn't help you do more damage.

It really doesn't. Your strenght does, you skill as athlete can be tangential at best. Stuff that help youe endurance lice your Con score will help both.

ER is 100 % correct (and the analogy is the killshot for your efforts here).

Kaiyanwang, your mental model for how athleticism translates to martial prowess is so unbelievably decoupled from reality that its hard to even engage with. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that you've never been a martial artist (or at least to any degree), you've never wrestled, sparred (on the ground or on your feet), or been in a fight with someone who is more physically capable than you (particularly when you have more technical capability compared to them or more experience in the fight game).

Various explosivity indices, the increasing ability to harness and deploy kinetic energy in striking/takedowns/sprawling (due to technique, due to where the muscle is attached to the bone, due to the amplifying factors of increasing power, due to the accuracy of a well-trained cognitive loop and spatial perception gains), body control/awareness, and trained understanding of position/distance/angles are 100 % correlated to performance combat sports and "The Real McCoy" in the streets.

Being a better climber 100 % translates, right out-the-box, to Brazillian Jiujitsu.

Having a better broad jump and vert (whether that comes from track-and-field or football/basketball whatever) 100 % translates, right out-the-box, to kickboxing.

Pain tolerance and dealing with simultaneous physical and mental duress (which are gains from so many sports athletic endeavors) absolutely translates, right out-the-box, to Brazillian Jiujitsu and to combat sports generally.

Being possessed of the innate and honed cognitive loop and hand-eye coordination of a football QB or a baseball hitter absolutely translates, right out-the-box, to boxing.

The extraordinary array of movement skills, proprioception, and flexion of a dancer 100 % translates, right out-the-box, to every combat sport ever.

I can't even imagine what would possess you to put the claim out there that "being an athlete (both innate athleticism and various forms of specialized training; both the mental and physical components)" doesn't translate (directly, indirectly...take your pick...its both) to fighting. If D&D wasn't a game which is very interested in having a functional user interface for play, of course training in Athletics must amplify all manner of combat statistics. But D&D, and TTRPGs generally, must have concerns with systemitizing a functional (for several values of "functional") game layer first and foremost...because they're...games. Combat statistics indexing Athletics training comes at significant cost...the trade-off isn't worth it for D&D's game engine...hence...D&D doesn't do it.

 

[Minigiant]

Because here something surreal is happening: you guys are talking to me as if 4e just came out and I should try this awesome game. It's been a while guys, it bombed, and I and others are desperately trying to let you understand why.

4e didn't bomb.
4e didn't make absolutely crazy amounts of money WOTC wanted and the book schedule was not sustainable.

Almost every other game company would have loved to get 4e numbers.

The problem, as usual, is WOTC wanted ALL THE MONEY.

ALL OF IT!​