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

[niklinna]

Except that's not entirely true. It felt like it in many places, particularly before the Eternal September.

Haven't heard that mentioned in a while. Eternity turned out to be a pretty short time, at least with regard to what Eternal September was about. Now I'm the one who doesn't get modern social media.

 

[Clint_L]

I never choose a character based on combat role. I choose based on the type of character I want to play.

A DEX-based fighter is easily viable in 5e. They can be a much better archer than a ranger.

I never, ever think about the combat role I play when picking a character. The concept of defender, controller, leader, or striker is so foreign to how I go about choosing what to play.

I usually don't think about combat roles specifically, but I do think about my character's likely niche in the overall party composition. I can play any class pretty easily, because I mostly DM, so when I do get to play I always offer to play whatever the party needs. If there's no one with high charisma or intelligence, I'll try to fill that niche, for example. But we are less combat-oriented, so I'm thinking more in terms of "who will investigate for traps?" or "who will be able to read arcane lore?"

However, if the party doesn't have an obvious tank, I will offer to play someone beefy. That's the one combat role that I do pay attention to. But 5e allows you to tank and be good at other stuff too, if you want. Like, I could go full tank and be a bear totem barbarian or something, or I could go moon druid and be more of a utility tool that can take a lot of punches.

 

[Staffan]

Hm, I had the opposite problem. I found the class descriptions pretty flavorful, but the mechanical bits at the end of that section, just before the power catalogue, were mushy and ill-defined as far as I was concerned. As has been pointed out before, though, so much of that stuff is all about combat. Blades in the Dark, for all its faults in organization, really won me over with its playbooks and special abilities that could be about so many more things than whacking somebody.

That's a good point: 4e classes are basically all about combat, which is probably also why they are so closely tied to roles who are also all about how you play in combat. So if you expect your class to tell you non-combat things about your character, 4e will disappoint you. That doesn't mean that the game is all about combat, just that the non-combat mechanical parts primarily lie outside of your class (mainly skills and rituals). I don't know if the later addition of themes did anything to change that, because by that time my game group had decided that 4e wasn't for us.

One issue here is that most D&D settings give classes diegetic representation within the setting. Being a cleric doesn't just mean that you channel divine power in order to guide and support your allies, it usually brings with it a role within an organized church of some sort, and the important people of that church will predominantly be clerics and maybe paladins. Being a wizard doesn't just mean you cast spells that either hurt multiple opponents or confound and harry them in various ways, but also that you're part of a tradition of scholarship that dates back to the ancients, and that you're a frickin' nerd. Being a warlock doesn't just mean that you use magic to inflict horrible damage and curse your enemies, it also means that you have struck a bargain with some form of otherworldly being in exchange for power. The martial classes have somewhat less of this, being more of a blank slate where you can write your own story, but they still have some of it.

One of 4e's mistakes here was probably to (a) hardcode this connection between story and role, and (b) not do all that much with the story part. One way of fixing this would have been to lean harder on the story part and give that some mechanical heft, while at the same time providing different in-class methods for fulfilling different roles. If going down that path I would take care not to add story stuff to the sub-classes – it's cool if you have some "hype man" bards who uplift and support their allies and other "dis track" bards who bring down and befuddle their foes, but they should not be in different "bardic colleges" or whatnot. They should just be different approaches to bardery. Another way of fixing it would be to separate story and role entirely, but I think that would be really difficult to do in a satisfying way.

Edit: Come to think of it, I think 5e tried some of that last thing with backgrounds. The idea being that what made you part of organized religion was the Acolyte background and not the cleric class, and your Urchin Cleric might just have been some dude that got randomly blessed by Olladra. But that doesn't really feel right – if you have divine powers, shouldn't you at least need to have some form or relationship with the appropriate church? Even if you aren't into the hierarchy, it seems you're either going to have to join or explicitly reject it – either way, it remains a relevant thing.

 

[jayoungr]

This is a very good point, but it's also a bit of a problem, because D&D in every edition has defined its character classes 90% in relation to combat (or getting around obstacles).

But the difficulty of the combats or obstacles is up to the DM. If you want to play a class in a sub-optimal way, and the rest of the players don't mind, and the DM is willing to adjust for this ... then nobody is doing anything wrong.

 

[niklinna]

Here I really strongly disagree. In WoW, every fight looks basically the same for each player, and it is determined 100% by their role. In our raid group, I was typically melee DPS, and my job was to manage my cooldowns to absolutely maximize my DPS, while making sure to hit a few, very specifically prescribed mechanics (typically something like an interrupt, or moving to the right spot at exactly the right time).

And then we would run the fight over and over until we could execute well enough to finally get down a tough boss. For Lich King 25, we literally spent months getting it right.

That would be incredibly boring for a TTRPG. The fun of a cooperative tabletop game is that you have the freedom of imagination. Trapping everyone within a narrowly defined role is the antithesis of what makes games like D&D so fun, IMO. The best combats are where things go completely sideways and everyone is improvising. In WoW, that is a guaranteed wipe. In D&D, it is where the magic happens.

Trying to restrict players to MMORPG roles, complete with encounter powers that echo cooldowns, and so on, is my biggest single beef with 4e's design.

I can relate to this in a lot of ways. But, in WoW (vanilla/BC) I played a warlock, and I had a lot of tools and several roles I could take. Quite a lot of boss fights involved spamming shadow bolt, sure. I did have the tools to do other things in combat though—off-tanking Garr's minions in Molten Core, blowing Hellfire on the lava hound packs, crowd-controlling via seduce/banish/enslave, or fear-juggling adds (which always freaked out folks who hadn't run a dungeon with me before ). And then there were the out-of-combat utilities like summons, underwater breathing, and Eye of Kilrogg for scouting.

I found playing most other classes pretty dull by comparison, but especially the martials. WoW Warlocks even outdid mages in versatility, I think. Or at least the kind of versatility I found fun. I'd take summoning players over being a food & drink vendor any day!

To tie this back to 4e, I think it depended on the class there too. Our party leader started out as a Paladin, and found it pretty dull. He switched to Warden partway through the campaign, and dang that class was a versatile powerhouse. My character was a one-note whiffer in combat. I didn't play enough to know if the designers really hit their stride in class design with PHB 2 & 3, but as has been said, first impressions matter. I think several of the PHB 1 classes had serious problems.

 

[Chaltab]

God this thread is a blast from the past and not in a good way. Maybe the Edition War is a chapter that shouldn't be re-opened.

 

[SteveC]

it sold less than any other edition, including 3e

I keep seeing this. Multiple people from WotC who were there at the time have said that each editions core books have sold more than the one before it. By the time we're getting to Martial Power 2, you're 100% correct. If we're comparing the core three, that's false. Just like 5E sold more than 4E core, but how are the modules published in the last couple of years doing? And I strongly suspect that the new core three will sell more than 5E.

WotC was using a different publishing model back then. We had books being released monthly. And for player material, as long as you had the character builder, you had all of the character crunch available to you, too. I had a lot of 4E books, but even I stopped when I could just update my CB file and have all the content. For free.

WotC changed strategies before a lot of good books came out. There was going to be one about non-combat abilities and crafting, for instance that was dropped. That one book could very likely have changed the perception of the edition, but we didn't get it.

 

[niklinna]

I don't think it's for purely legacy reasons. I think it is mostly for class identity and balance reasons. Wizards can do lots of stuff, but if you want to be a healer, pick a different class. There are tons of options. My Mercy monk is a capable healer in a clutch situation, which is really the only time healing matters in 5e anyway.

Or the new monk. Or a moon druid. You can make a surprisingly tanky wizard or bard if you really want to commit, though you give up a lot of the utility that normally makes those classes appealing, IMO.

Or a rogue, or a dex-based fighter. I would argue that a battlemaster fighter can be the most effective bow-wielder in 5e. Again, options. A great strength of 5e is that it opens up a lot of design space for players to figure out how to solve problems.

I'll agree, although I still don't like that I have to work by combining packages that bundle things I don't want or care about along with what I do. It's like trying to figure out which cable TV plan (or combination of streaming services) causes the least pain. I'm cranky enough that I don't subscribe to any of them, and I generally avoid class-based RPGs! I want to be able to build my character to my specifications—in bespoke fasion, to use the term more in its proper sense.

This has been true of every edition of D&D, of course, and while 4e provides lots more options to some classes, you still have your lane and you must stay within it. One reason I like games like Blades in the Dark is that their playbooks offer a minimal package to start with (XP triggers,initial pips, a special ability or two, a bit of unique gear), but from then on you can expand in any direction you like, and even change some of the starting package by talking with the GM. (That latter is a personal thing of course, but I've seen way more DMs who don't go for that.)

 

[niklinna]

I don't.

You've said quite a few critical things about 4e yourself in this very thread, and agreed with quite a few critical things others have said—when it was true. And, I haven't seen you argue with opinions and personal reactions.

Because they repeatedly did so all throughout the D&D Next playtest, talking about how past games had influenced future games, about how they were staying true to what was great about what came before.

Except 4e.

Sometimes silence is very conspicuous.

 

[SteveC]

Have you looked at the indie RPG "Strike!"? It does something similar, with a tactical module inspired by 4e.

I just want to second this. If you want to see where 4E could have gone, I think this is a great product. Now I'm not overly fond of the production values for the game, but the design really gives you something to think about.