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

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'd phrase that same complaint in reverse. 5e doubled down in the worst part of 4e's skill system, replacing the entirety of specific actions with generic DCs. Skills are significantly more powerful in the 3.x environment, because they allowed players to make specific function calls to specific rules.

3e's skill system is a hot mess. There's no limit to the list of skills, so who knows what core basic 'everyone can do this' competency will suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke because someone decides to name a skill for that? WORSE, you can only advance if you have some skill points to burn on whatever it is, otherwise you simply sink into incompetence over time. Many skills ambiguously overlap other skills, making things even worse, because we now have to guess which one the GM will decide applies in any specific case.

And this is all ON TOP OF the issues shared with the 5e skill system, which is that skills actually don't mean a thing, technically. There's no way of knowing how much impact any given skill check might, or might not, have within the fiction of the game. Since there's no overarching structure into which they fit, you just have to hope that the GM is actually going to let you reach the other side of the river when you succeeded in that swim/athletics check. Or maybe he'll demand another one halfway across, who knows?!

I was going to say something about skill challenges earlier, but then 20 pages passed while I was working. 4e started a trend that accelerated into 5e (and arguably moved from a design element to a norm), where the rules were designed not as a thing players used to achieve what they wanted, but instead as a mechanism to interpret player declarations. The whole point of the skill challenge is to be able to provide a reasonable output from a large variety of player declarations.

The purpose of the SC system is to insure that the player gets his money's worth when he risks spending actions on skill checks (or outside of combat just generally initiates some actions that could have negative consequences). It is that simple. It means the player knows, "If we succeed 4/8/10/12/15 times we're going to make it down the river." This is HUGE, it means skills actually have a point, they fit into the game in a way that actually has systemic meaning instead of being nothing but a vague prompt to the GM.

Which is a whole different orientation. The 3.x skill rules are written to be used by players looking to get specific results, not by GMs to interpret player actions. Skills aren't powerful if they aren't consistent and preemptively knowable to the player, who can them opt to make a skill to get an outcome they want.

No, the 3.x skill rules are written to give the GM ample room to fudge things up any old way they wish, and to insure that most ideas that players pull out of their hats are basically instantly sunk on the rock of "no, nobody has the skill for that."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

This is fundamentally the way the entire ritual system works in Heroes of Myth and Legend. All a ritual is is a substitution effect which creates some specific fiction that provides the position needed to enable use of skill/ability X instead of Y. It is beautiful because it ties directly and seamlessly into both the SC system and the combat system (sadly 4e muffed the equivalence of attack and skill checks, so it doesn't quite work in 4e as smoothly, but still pretty well). And, obviously, you can also invent powers which do the same thing, just with a slightly higher opportunity cost. In fact in my design rituals ARE a type of 'power' (it isn't an exact equivalency). It works great, and you don't have to assume magic, either, you can have practices that work the same way, so the ranger can simply learn the "Ancient Face Technique" and use Nature to disguise his face instead of Bluff.

 

[niklinna]

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!​

 

[I'm A Banana]

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.

I don't think anyone is advocating for making the rules go away, but I can see how that could use some clarification.

Like, if you are a fan of how movies tell stories, then you're a fan of the Kuleshov effect. It's a rule of the medium, a sudden cut to a different image that carries some meaning given its context. It's analogous here to a game mechanic, say the d20 roll for success in D&D. They are tools of their mediums used to tell a story.

When you watch a movie, you're not usually consciously aware of the Kuleshov effect. If you're a cinephile and you're aware of it and you're paying attention, you can probably notice how a filmmaker uses it. But for everyone else, it's just a tool of the medium for creating a certain emotion while watching a story. It's subsumed into the narrative.

Similarly, the d20 roll for success has certain traits and features that game design nerds like me can see and use in certain ways. Like, the nat 1/nat 20 function being a 5% occurrence, or how the range of numbers can create big swings in results, etc. But for a good chunk of D&D players, it's just the game mechanic you use. It's subsumed into the narrative of how our cool OC's go kill a dragon.

The idea isn't to get rid of the game mechanic. The d20 roll for success is (debatably) as important for the storytelling of D&D as the Kuleshov effect is for cinema. We use the mechanic. We use the medium. We like what it brings to our stories.

But doing a d20 roll for success also isn't the point. For instance, we have a rule that says we only roll the dice when success is uncertain. We can choose to put away that mechanic for the sake of the story we're telling. We let the narrative context decide success/failure, instead of the dice. The goal isn't to roll a d20 for success. The d20 roll for success serves the narrative we're telling.

In most of the movies you watch, the Kuleshov effect isn't the point. It's a tool you can use to tell your story, and it serves the narrative you tell. We don't want to watch movies without it. We don't want to get rid of it. But we don't need to point at it like that Leo meme, either.

Extending this to classes with defined combat roles we can maybe see why a lot of tables didn't like it. The point of the Fighter isn't to be a Defender. Fighters being good defenders is a tool you can use to tell your story of your fighter, if it serves your narrative. But being a Defender isn't the point. It's something that also can be put aside for the purposes of your story. A 5e fighter can be a good defender, but they don't have to be, and it's a better design for a D&D class, because it doesn't imagine that being a defender is actually the reason you're a fighter.

 

[Pedantic]

3e's skill system is a hot mess. There's no limit to the list of skills, so who knows what core basic 'everyone can do this' competency will suddenly vanish in a puff of smoke because someone decides to name a skill for that? WORSE, you can only advance if you have some skill points to burn on whatever it is, otherwise you simply sink into incompetence over time. Many skills ambiguously overlap other skills, making things even worse, because we now have to guess which one the GM will decide applies in any specific case.

And this is all ON TOP OF the issues shared with the 5e skill system, which is that skills actually don't mean a thing, technically. There's no way of knowing how much impact any given skill check might, or might not, have within the fiction of the game. Since there's no overarching structure into which they fit, you just have to hope that the GM is actually going to let you reach the other side of the river when you succeeded in that swim/athletics check. Or maybe he'll demand another one halfway across, who knows?!

Terrible example. I know exactly how far a swim check in 3.5 will get me, it's 1/2 my land speed, assuming a full round action spent swimming, checks are made 1/round. A character specializing it and not wearing armor can easily take 10 to hit the calm water DC indefinitely, and after a few levels or with specialty equipment probably can't fail to hit the rough water DC.

I know that, because it's written in the skill description and when the DM describes a river, I can ask "how wide is it?" and then determine precisely how I'd interact with swimming it, down to my chance of success on each individual action. The swim check is something I, the player, use against the obstacle, and can weigh the costs of deploying vs. other approaches.

The purpose of the SC system is to insure that the player gets his money's worth when he risks spending actions on skill checks (or outside of combat just generally initiates some actions that could have negative consequences). It is that simple. It means the player knows, "If we succeed 4/8/10/12/15 times we're going to make it down the river." This is HUGE, it means skills actually have a point, they fit into the game in a way that actually has systemic meaning instead of being nothing but a vague prompt to the GM.

This is the precise opposite. The obstacle does not have exploitable properties, it does not yield in different ways to different interactions. The skill system is a tool for the GM to pace player action declaration, instead of a tool for players to deploy to best overcome obstacles.

No, the 3.x skill rules are written to give the GM ample room to fudge things up any old way they wish, and to insure that most ideas that players pull out of their hats are basically instantly sunk on the rock of "no, nobody has the skill for that."

It's exactly the opposite. Being good at swimming incentivizes a character to use swimming to do as many things as possible, and when faced with a swimming related situation, players know precisely what risks they're running when they engage with it. It's written in the book ahead of time.

I'm not defending the specifics of implementation here, there's plenty of nonsense numbers in the DCs and durations, but the transition from "skill as a specific coded set of actions players can use" to "skill as a generic resolution system" started in 4e and accelerated in 5e. I very much think the commonality is going the other way.

 

[niklinna]

I don't think anyone is advocating for making the rules go away, but I can see how that could use some clarification.

Like, if you are a fan of how movies tell stories, then you're a fan of the Kuleshov effect. It's a rule of the medium, a sudden cut to a different image that carries some meaning given its context. It's analogous here to a game mechanic, say the d20 roll for success in D&D. They are tools of their mediums used to tell a story.

When you watch a movie, you're not usually consciously aware of the Kuleshov effect. If you're a cinephile and you're aware of it and you're paying attention, you can probably notice how a filmmaker uses it. But for everyone else, it's just a tool of the medium for creating a certain emotion while watching a story. It's subsumed into the narrative.

Similarly, the d20 roll for success has certain traits and features that game design nerds like me can see and use in certain ways. Like, the nat 1/nat 20 function being a 5% occurrence, or how the range of numbers can create big swings in results, etc. But for a good chunk of D&D players, it's just the game mechanic you use. It's subsumed into the narrative of how our cool OC's go kill a dragon.

The idea isn't to get rid of the game mechanic. The d20 roll for success is (debatably) as important for the storytelling of D&D as the Kuleshov effect is for cinema. We use the mechanic. We use the medium. We like what it brings to our stories.

But doing a d20 roll for success also isn't the point. For instance, we have a rule that says we only roll the dice when success is uncertain. We can choose to put away that mechanic for the sake of the story we're telling. We let the narrative context decide success/failure, instead of the dice. The goal isn't to roll a d20 for success. The d20 roll for success serves the narrative we're telling.

In most of the movies you watch, the Kuleshov effect isn't the point. It's a tool you can use to tell your story, and it serves the narrative you tell. We don't want to watch movies without it. We don't want to get rid of it. But we don't need to point at it like that Leo meme, either.

Extending this to classes with defined combat roles we can maybe see why a lot of tables didn't like it. The point of the Fighter isn't to be a Defender. Fighters being good defenders is a tool you can use to tell your story of your fighter, if it serves your narrative. But being a Defender isn't the point. It's something that also can be put aside for the purposes of your story. A 5e fighter can be a good defender, but they don't have to be, and it's a better design for a D&D class, because it doesn't imagine that being a defender is actually the reason you're a fighter.

Great clarification, thanks!

 

[Vaalingrade]

Off the top of my head:

Skill system

Not really. Trained or Untrained, I'll grant you, but the usages were expanded and we didn't have some skilled inexplicably turned into tools and kits.

Monster design

Lord I wish.

Approach to setting- far more about it being about a place to adventure than world building

It's rather non-committal here with a lot of 4e planes still here but the great Wheel trying to reassert itself on some level.

Fast healing

4e's healing writ large works a lot differently though.

A shopping list of effects with no in game relation

Not sure what this one means.

Monsters and pcs use different rules

Less a commonality an more game design marching on for once. But monsters got back their useless spells they'll never use and that make the Dm flip through the PH!

Greatly reduced lethality

Good.

To me, it’s baffling.

It's not really baffling when you realize that most 4e'isms that 5e has are wildly different from how it actually worked in 4e, usually being much watered down or only being the same in concept.

 

[Manbearcat]

Extending this to classes with defined combat roles we can maybe see why a lot of tables didn't like it. The point of the Fighter isn't to be a Defender. Fighters being good defenders is a tool you can use to tell your story of your fighter, if it serves your narrative. But being a Defender isn't the point. It's something that also can be put aside for the purposes of your story. A 5e fighter can be a good defender, but they don't have to be, and it's a better design for a D&D class, because it doesn't imagine that being a defender is actually the reason you're a fighter.

A suite of features that work in concert to generate a compelling game layer for a class archetype isn't "the reason you're a Fighter." Its not that way in 4e nor any other edition of the game. This is the how you're a Fighter (and more on that at the bottom).

The reason (why) you're a Fighter in 4e is the intersection of how (a) the enormously conflict-rich nature of 4e's setting conceits marries to (b) the motivating premise/theme of PC Background & Race & Class + (c) their Quests and Goals (big "G" for Skill Challenges and Quests and small "g" for win cons in combat) + (d) the embedded premise of Theme (Heroic) & Paragon Path (Paragon) & Epic Destiny (Epic).

That generates "the reason why I'm a Fighter" in the course of the actual play of the game. The story of that why is the blow-by-blow of play and the composite of it that we land on once play is finished.

And regarding that how you're a Fighter (the suite of features that work in concert)? The first 4e game I GMed 1-30 featured a Fighter, Ranger, Warlord. Another solo PC, Heroic Tier game from level 5-9 featured a Fighter. Just because the Fighter can dominate the melee with variations of control and punishment and catch-22s...just because the player's decision-space is enormously rich with respect to that...that isn't all that 4e Fighters can do. They're enormously capable combatants as both Skirmishers, Strikers, and Leaders as secondary roles. The Fighter in my 2nd game was Dex based and routinely employed Ranged attacks to begin combat, to assassinate Minions, and to kite.

And this is before we even get into the how of a Fighter in noncombat conflict resolution. That is enormously rich, versatile, and multiple. Its without parallel in D&D's history before or after.

 

[Staffan]

Extending this to classes with defined combat roles we can maybe see why a lot of tables didn't like it. The point of the Fighter isn't to be a Defender. Fighters being good defenders is a tool you can use to tell your story of your fighter, if it serves your narrative. But being a Defender isn't the point. It's something that also can be put aside for the purposes of your story. A 5e fighter can be a good defender, but they don't have to be, and it's a better design for a D&D class, because it doesn't imagine that being a defender is actually the reason you're a fighter.

The thing is that I think 4e expects you to go in the other direction. You start with the decision to be a Defender. What kind of Defender? Well, the core rules offer the Fighter or the Paladin, and other books offer the Warden, Swordmage, and Battlemind.

Given infinite development resources, I think a better call would have been to steal another mechanic from World of Warcraft, namely having role tied to your sub-class rather than your class. For example, the WoW warrior class has three specializations: Protection (one-hander and shield, tank), Arms (two-hander, DPS), and Fury (dual-wielding two-handers, DPS). Then you could have offered both Defender and Striker fighters, and maybe Leader fighters as well (eating the Warlord's lunch). The different roles would have had different core powers (so the Marking ability would be for the tank fighter, and the Striker fighter would get some ability to boost damage). You could also continue on the already existing path of having some powers do additional things based on subclass.

But I think abandoning roles altogether, the way 5e does, is a mistake (at least if you like tactical fights). Having a role communicates both what you are supposed to be doing in a fight, and lets the designers make sure you have access to the tools to do that. For example, all Leaders have some ability to let others use healing surges mid-fight. That's what makes it so the Warlord can replace a Cleric in the traditional party in a way a druid or bard couldn't really do in 3e, and would be hard-pressed to do in 5e.

 

[Hussar]

Vibes > words in the book

Yet funnily enough when I suggest that the primary issue with 4e was presentation and not substance, I’ve had people flat out block me for it.