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

[pemerton]

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

<snip>

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 don't understand how your first two sentences are contrasting assertions. Combat role is a part of the character one wants to play - eg do I want to play a skirmisher, an archer, someone who wade into the thick of melee heavily armed and armoured?

Maybe that's not something you think about. Speaking for myself, 4e D&D was not the first time - in the context of party-based, combat-heavy FRPGing - that I thought about PCs as archers, heavy melee, skirmishers, healers etc. It did systematise that thinking.

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

Yes. 5e D&D is not the same as 4e D&D. 4e D&D also permits a viable, non-magic-using, DEX-based skirmisher and archer. You just need to use the ranger rules rather than the fighter rules to build that character.

In 4e D&D, a high CHA, low STR and DEX paladin is quite viable (I know, I GMed a game from 1st to 30th including that sort of character). I don't think that would be a very good build for a paladin in AD&D or in 5e D&D.

And I can easily play a healing INT-based magic-user in some FRPGs. But not so much in D&D, which tends to make healing the province of clerical types and, more recently, bards. An exception, of cousre, is 4e D&D which permits completely viable low-INT and low-WIS healers (namely, Warlords).

I don't see what is meant to follow from any of this, other than pointing out that different sets of class-based rules have different ways of using their classes to carve up the terrain.

 

[Neonchameleon]

This.

It makes no sense that a bunch of bandits are going to focus on the guy none of them can hit while the other folks slaughter them.

Which is why having too high an AC was considered a textbook mistake made by 4e defenders. If you were too hard to hit enemies frequently simply ate the mark penalty and attacked the soft target.

Smart enemies will focus on the person they feel is the top threat to them. A taunt mechanic does not make a ton of sense in an RPG unless you are playing it for the tactical combat.

Just as well 4e Marks weren't taunt mechanics. They were "do you really want to try it?" mechanics and all the class based ones had a consequence attached. There were occasional ones that were just distractions (bards, notably, could take a power to have one of their allies count as having marked a foe although almost all I saw preferred Vicious Mockery).

A mark, generally with a punishment attached for violating the mark represented doing things to make you appear more of a threat to a specific foe and distract them from your allies.

 

[pemerton]

The sense to be made here is that marking - or even DEFENDING - was not something that a big portion of the player base associated with fighters in the narrative of what a fighter was.

Well, to the best of my knowledge the marking mechanic was novel to 4e. I could be wrong about that, though - my knowledge of post-2001 3E D&D is pretty thin.

But the idea that a heavily armed and armoured warrior might hold the attention of foes in melee, and prevent them breaking through a "line" to archers or wizards behind them - that goes back to classic D&D. Classic D&D tended to use marching order and rules for moving through corridors to achieve the result - marking rules seem to me to be aimed at producing the same fiction in a context where marching order and corridors are no longer central to the game play.

So the reaction of a lot of players to the strict "A fighter's job is to be a Defender" was something along the lines of "I never applied for that job!"

And for the record, a bow-using wizard, a tank-y rogue, and a bow-using fighter are all relatively viable builds in 5e. ESPECIALLY that last one. Not that you wouldn't engage with the spells or sneak attacks in the others, though, just that these might not define your take on the class.

But I want to play a rogue who doesn't use sneak attack, and who can fight toe-to-toe against a knight or a dragon. Like Conan! 5e doesn't fit my narrative!

 

[pemerton]

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.

This is pure legacy. In T&T, for instance, wizards both heal and use Take That, You Fiend.

 

[Neonchameleon]

And 4e was wonderful for giving folks that tactical challenge. The entire edition was focused on that style of play to the detriment of all other styles.

I hated it. I am not a fan 3.5/PF13, 4e tactical maneuvering with combats that take 1-3 hours.

I am not a dungeon crawl type of DM and I like D&D when the system is broad and flexible enough to serve multiple styles of play.

The main way of course 4e deterred other playstyles other than the Weird Wizard Show was by making combat fun. It's actually a horrible game for dungeon crawling for much the same way you rapidly get sick of it if you have just dessert for lunch; I run it and 5e in very similar ways with adventures and capstone fights every other session or so, and the main differences being that Spellcasters don't dominate and that after second level or so the 4e fights are about 25% longer but twice as cinematic and memorable.

 

[pemerton]

when I read the D&D 4 rules, and played them, I realized in what way it was in a tradition of D&D very well: It was pretty much a response to D&D 3E, and fixing all the problems we experienced after playing it for many, many years, so for me it felt like "in the tradition of D&D, but improved in all the areas that bothered me after a few years of play"

I never played more than about 10 hours of 3E D&D.

When I read the 4e D&D rules, they reminded me of D&D - especially the Foreword to Moldvay Basic:

From Tom Moldvay's Foreword to the Basic Rulebook (page B2, and dated 3 December 1980):

I was busy rescuing the captured maiden when the dragon showed up. Fifty feet of scaled terror glared down at us with smoldering red eyes. Tendrils of smoke drifted out from between fangs larger than daggers. The dragon blocked the only exit from the cave. . .

I unwrapped the sword which the mysterious cleric had given me. The sword was golden-tinted steel. Its hilt was set with a rainbow collection of precious gems. I shoulted my battle cry and charged.

My charge caught the dragon by surprise. Its titanic jaws snapped shut just inches from my face. I swung the golden sword with both arms. The swordblade bit into the dragon's neck and continued through to the other side. With an earth-shaking crash, the dragon dropped dead at my feet. The magic sword had saved my life and ended the reign of the dragon-tyrant. The countryside was freed and I could return as a hero.​

From the Introduction to the same book (page B3):

In the D&D rules, individuals play the role of characters in a fantasy world wher magic is real and heroes venture out on dangerous quests in search of fame and fortune.​

From the Introduction to Gary Gygax's Player's Handbook (p 7):

ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is a world. Of course, this world is not complete. It needs organizers and adventurers to order and explore it. It neds you! . . . Into this world of weird monsters, strange peoples, multitudinous states, and fabulous treasures of precious items and powerful magic stride fearless adventurers - you and your fellow players.​

Under the heading "The Game" in the same book (p 7):

[O]ne player must serve as the Dungeon Master, the shaper of the fantasy milieu, the "world" in which all action will take place. The other participants become adventurers by creating characters to explore the fantastic world and face all of its challenges - monsters, magic, and unamed menaces.​

Moldvay's Foreword is the most evocative of these passages, but all seem to me to very strongly imply that the PCs are protagonists in a fantasy adventure. The PCs venture out on dangerous quests in search of fame and fortune, striding through the world created by the GM (Gygax's description of this is reminisicent of Conan as described in the Nemedian Chronicles), exploring that world and facing all of its challenges.

4e D&D looked like it was intended to actually deliver on this promise of D&D as larger-than-life heroic FRPGing. And it did.

 

[Staffan]

This.

It makes no sense that a bunch of bandits are going to focus on the guy none of them can hit while the other folks slaughter them.

Smart enemies will focus on the person they feel is the top threat to them. A taunt mechanic does not make a ton of sense in an RPG unless you are playing it for the tactical combat.

And 4e Defenders generally skew that threat feeling rather than "taunting" MMO-style. What they generally do is applying a Mark, which gives the target -2 to attacks that don't involve the defender, and have some form of punisher mechanic that hurts the Marked target if they attack someone else. So the bandit is free to attack someone other than the fighter, but they'll do so at a disadvantage and they will face consequences for it.

You might think this is highly gamist, and to some degree you're right. But it's also a consequence of the limits of the combat system, where each combatant takes a mostly uninterrupted turn that lets them both move and attack and maybe do some other things too. For example, take the following situation where the green fighter is trying to defend his blue wizard ally from the red bandit:

In this situation in 5e, it is trivially easy for the bandit, on their turn, to just move around the fighter and attack the wizard:

There's nothing the fighter can do about it. But in a real-world situation, the fighter would have a pretty good chance of intercepting the bandit before they get to the wizard and either stop them or at least make them pay for ignoring the threat that's in their face over the threat that's distant. That's the kind of thing a mark is representing.

 

[SteveC]

Accepting that premise I argue that if everything is OP then nothing is. In that context OP itself becomes irrelevant, unless you argue that the player characters were OP relative to the monsters in the monster manual.

Except I'm pretty sure that 4E was known to be fairly balanced from the GM perspective aside from the monsters in the first Monster Manual.

Your point seems nonsensical. You seem to insinuate that people liked 4E because it was overpowered.

There were definitely better and worse choices for feats and powers. And some of the qualities were changed by errata. One character I had was a Drow Thief who had the Duelist Prowess powers. It initially didn't have the weapon keyword, which would have made it useless. It was updated to include that online, but WotC never included an official errata. I ran into Mike Mearls at Gen Con and he signed a sheet saying "SteveC can use this feat errated this way." Since he wrote the original article, it was pretty definitive. And if you're wondering about one of the reasons I like Mike (who I'm sure has long forgotten this conversation ever happened)... this is it.

Personally, I know that a lot of feats in 5E are great, and a lot are terrible at the moment. Treantmonk is doing a series of videos ranking all of them, and the S Tier is about the same size as the F tier.

Should we decide to nerf the S tier feats? I'm playing in games that use them and those characters aren't running over everything. I'd say a much better idea would be to improve the bad feats.

The trouble is going to be that we have said "you can use either 2014 content or 2025" so if we nerf it, I suspect people will just use the old stuff.

 

[mamba]

When you say "everything" you can only mean every player option, because otherwise it wouldn't make sense, really.

yes, that is what I was referring to

Accepting that premise I argue that if everything is OP then nothing is.

the player options then aren’t relative to each other, but they are relative to eg the monsters

Your point seems nonsensical. You seem to insinuate that people liked 4E because it was overpowered.

it was more about them choosing the opposite option of everyone else in the scenario they presented

 

[pemerton]

It makes no sense that a bunch of bandits are going to focus on the guy none of them can hit while the other folks slaughter them.

Smart enemies will focus on the person they feel is the top threat to them. A taunt mechanic does not make a ton of sense in an RPG unless you are playing it for the tactical combat.

Marking is not a taunt mechanic. It's a skill mechanic. Skilled warriors force their enemies to engage with them. (This is more-or-less how blocking and tackling work in field sports too.)