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

[GMforPowergamers]

How can an arcana skill be used for diplomacy. I ask again - what happens in universe.

it is a spell... trying to explain it is the same as trying to explain every spell.

what happened is you were a caster that is bad at talking to people (low cha untrained) and you used a spell that let you be better at it (aka use the better stat and trained skill)

 

[MwaO]

Somewhere I heard that it was a failure because you can subscribe for a month, get all books, and unsubscribe. Not a sign of it making a ton of money…

You might want to get find sources that are not contradicting easily verifiable facts.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I wish everyone on both sides would admit we don't have access to the real numbers... we can't say it bombed or blew away or was a success or fail except in our own opinions...

every edition has outsold the edition before it... so if saying 5e out sold 4e meant 4e failed that also means 3e, 3,5. 2e, 1e, Basic all failed too.

it will most likely (looking into my crystal ball for a second) mean that by this time in 2026 5e(2014) will have been a failure cause the 2024 books will out sell them.

 

[mamba]

You might want to get find sources that are not contradicting easily verifiable facts.

what easily verifiable facts are you thinking of? So far I have not seen any facts for 4e being a success, let alone the best selling WotC D&D ever at the time

 

[MichaelSomething]

Only allowing primary skills on 4E skill challenges and wondering why there's no player creativity is like only having one fight in a 5E adventuring day and wondering why combat is too easy.

 

[Undrave]

I'm prepping to run a 4e session tomorrow with a gargoyle in an encounter.
This is an example of something I dislike about the system.
The gargoyle can spend a standard action to turn to stone. On its next turn, it can leave stone form as a minor action and if it hits with an attack, it deals +20 damage.
In the fiction of the world, how do I convey this added threat to my players? How do the characters know the gargoyle has gotten more dangerous? How do they know to avoid the attacks or to target the super-charged gargoyle?
Because to me, the only way it makes sense is to say, "this gargoyle is a Lurker monster. It spends one round hiding or otherwise positioning itself to do additional damage to your characters." And to convey the information in this manner, you are reducing everything about the world to miniatures on a grid and statblocks. It's the same experience as playing Necromunda (which I'm also doing this weekend) - except with D&D, it's weekly for 4 hours and supposed to last a year or more with 6 participants.

You don't have to tell them anything, just let them discover - and get nailed - by the Gargoyle's springing from stone attack. One of the fun part of 4e, either as a player or DM, is being surprised by what the opponent can do. When I DMd I never bothered to learn my PC's powers or what they did, even if it sometimes allowed them to obviate challenges, because it was fun for the players to get one over me. Meanwhile I surprised my players by having my skeletons use their own ribs like throwing knifes.

If you don't do a knowledge check you're bound to be surprised by the monsters. If someone stand too close to the stone form Gargoyles, well too bad.

while I agree that it does not have to be mind control, the below certainly does sound more like mind control

No because they can still refuse to follow the Swordmage.

Just for the love of Gygax stop telling me that I just don't understand how these things work because you happen to think the game mechanic is a good one to have. I simply don't want to play a game that takes the approach 4E does ever again.

I give you some of the powers look like mind control but calling marking 'mind control' is just misrepresentation of 4e.

Right. That would make more sense. But this isn't an ability on the first round of combat.

Why not? The Gargoyle can take the action to turn to stone before the PC gets there.

From what I can tell, WotC shoved the Avenger and Warden into the Paladin to create, respectfully, the Oath of Vengeance and Oath of the Ancients. I don't particularly think that they succeeded in recreating those classes. I don't think that the 5e Oath of Ancients Paladin feels anywhere near the "nature warrior" as the 4e Warden did.

The Warden would work WAY better as a form of Barbarian where they get posessed by Primal Spirits while in Rage, thus getting the Warden's forms. Whenever you rage you would chose a form to take.

 

[SteveC]

I wish everyone on both sides would admit we don't have access to the real numbers... we can't say it bombed or blew away or was a success or fail except in our own opinions...

every edition has outsold the edition before it... so if saying 5e out sold 4e meant 4e failed that also means 3e, 3,5. 2e, 1e, Basic all failed too.

it will most likely (looking into my crystal ball for a second) mean that by this time in 2026 5e(2014) will have been a failure cause the 2024 books will out sell them.

100% this. By the time you're late in the edition, sales are way down. That's why you're doing a new edition. Nothing ever sells like the core three books. So the new edition will very likely sell more than ever before. The key difference, I suppose, is how will it be doing 5 years from now? If WotC doesn't produce a lot of product, and that product is mostly adventures, there will be a lof of PHBs sold and not many adventures. The key difference is that in 4E they were still making player facing product late in the edition. And if you had the character builder, you could get all of that content for free.

The 5E core sold a ton of books. It was in the Amazon top 100 last year. I'm going to be honest and say I don't have any idea why, since that means we're constantly getting a huge new group of players (or I suppose people's books are regularly disintegrating). Where is that onboarding coming from?

At the same time, the adventures WotC has been creating are not selling well. at least in comparison to originally. I suspect that's because of both fatigue and adventures never selling well. But, I don't know.

That's a lot of "don't knows".

 

[Oofta]

It works really well in a tactical grid. The mechanics played beautifully as a tactical miniatures game. It felt like the old D&D miniatures game that I ran extensively at game stores as a WOTC rep.

I see a lot of people say, hold the line. This works on a grid or in a narrow space like a dungeon. It is less so when there is more open space to maneuver.

Now, I could see having some additional "defender" options in 5e such as using a reaction to use your remaining movement to block an attacker etc. That would make sense to me.

There are similar features in 5E. Of course there's also things like sentinel and others. You can play a cavalier fighter or path of the ancient ancestors barbarian which have mark-like abilities. But the barbarian is explicitly supernatural, and I'm okay with some fighter subclasses have things that are a bit questionable.

So marking, to me anyway, is a gray area. But any time you have a rule system that implements something like combat there will always be compromises, it's just a matter of scale and ubiquity. For example I'll likely never play a battlemaster fighter because maneuvers just feel too much like powers to me but at least they're flexible, if I want to do two disarming strikes in a row, I can. That, and several of the subclasses are pretty explicitly supernatural which is why I have no problem playing a Runecaster.

But many, many 4E fighter features went way beyond what is physically possible and people still claim that they were not supernatural because they had a martial power source. As if the label makes a difference to my impression of whether the power is something that would look beyond natural, or at least out of place in an action movie. If it didn't bother you, that's fine. Just don't tell me that my opinion is wrong because I don't know how to read a power source.

In any case the other restriction I didn't like about the AEDU structure were the strict limitations. Why could I only use any and all encounter powers only once per encounter? Glancing at my runecaster fighter I have some abilities that I can use once per short rest, once per long rest, or multiple times per long rest. That flexibility opens up so many options we didn't have in 4E for reasons that never made a lot of sense to me.

 

[mamba]

I wish everyone on both sides would admit we don't have access to the real numbers...

agreed, we do not have full and accurate numbers

every edition has outsold the edition before it... so if saying 5e out sold 4e meant 4e failed that also means 3e, 3,5. 2e, 1e, Basic all failed too.

this is blatantly false, it is pretty much the exact reverse of what the numbers we do have tell us. While these numbers are not 100% accurate, they are good enough to know that this is false. At best 4e could tie with 3.5 for the worst selling edition because we do not have precise numbers for either, but that is the most level of uncertainty we do have

 

[GMforPowergamers]

But many, many 4E fighter features went way beyond what is physically possible and people still claim that they were not supernatural

warriors rogues and every other class in every edition can do things no real person can...

just off the top of my head I would say get a full rest in 8 hours every night seems almost supernatural to me in 2024