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

[Oofta]

don't want to go case for case house rule by house rule and stat for stat... but characters in this game do things no one can do in real life and as such in real life we would call it supernatural... the 'tags' we use just say "in this D&D world a trained blank can do that"

I do it is my favorite edition of the game

so is challenging a ton of guys to charge you then... look I don't want to go point by point this is dumb... can we agree that action movies have a wide array of things happen (along with every type of story) that in the real world would be un able to be done.

no one (that I have ever seen going back and forth for 10 years with you and others about this) says you are wrong to dislike it... you are wrong to say it "HAS to be supernatural"

Once again. If you like 4E, great. I actually had fun for a while but eventually burned out on it and don't want to play it again. I've tried to explain why, only to be told I just don't know what I'm talking about. I don't think there's anything wrong with liking or not liking any specific game.

IN MY OPINION many fighter abilities in 4E were supernatural. They felt supernatural to me in a way abilities for fighters in other editions did not. Some abilities are extraordinary, some abilities are explicitly supernatural in nature. Some, in 5E, are borderline like the battlemaster's commander's strike but that is a rare exception.

If you have a different opinion, more power to you. Different people can have different opinions, it's not the end of the world. What I don't get is why people can't just say "I disagree, in my opinion..." and why some supporters of 4E are so vindictive and insulting.

 

[Pedantic]

Come And Get It I'll agree is supernatural. And Tide of Iron action movie physics. But the basic mark/combat challenge would be at home in a grittily realistic game.

This is just another manifestation of the mundanity problem. The aesthetic of the "mundane" character in D&D is fixed to general systems. If marking were a generic action in a combat chapter, Fighter abilities were written as riders to it, or perhaps if it was expressed inverse, as the Fighter claiming space around them or protecting an ally it would have gone down a lot easier. 4e was really useful in demarcating the popular boundaries of the Fighter's aesthetic, as annoying as it clearly was to learn what precisely those limitations were in many other player's minds.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Come And Get It I'll agree is supernatural.

If Come and Get it is supernatural, the ads on the side of this page are outright spells.

Influence is not mind control.

 

[Cadence]

If Come and Get it is supernatural, the ads on the side of this page are outright spells.

I think you're right. If someone ever wanted to stealthily hide something somewhere I would never see it, internet ads would be the place! It's amazing how quickly the brain can completely tune them out - especially ones that always show up in the same place.

 

[mamba]

This just gets a sigh out of me. On the one hand, we don't have the numbers, on the other hand, we know enough to call something blatantly false.

I said we do not have exact numbers, but we have relatively good numbers, good enough to know that what you said is blatantly false

This is what you want to be true.

speak for yourself, you do not even have any numbers for your theory, and the numbers we do have contradict it

The "edition I hated is the worst selling ever" is just tiring

I do not hate 4e, I do not care about it one way or the other, but this ‘it was the best selling edition ever, if only WotC did not have these unreasonable, greedy goals’ is what is getting tiring for me

 

[mamba]

So what's the holdup?

the effort in creating one for no good reason whatsoever as far as WotC is concerned?

 

[Neonchameleon]

If Come and Get it is supernatural, the ads on the side of this page are outright spells.

Influence is not mind control.

If the ads on the side of the page were anything like as reliable as CAGI I'd agree. Influence is not mind control - but influence also influences and offers dilemmas.

 

[mamba]

That's an excellent point. What they could do at zero effort was to make it known that 4E could be used in the same manner as OSR games. There's no OGL for 1E and 2E but you see a ton of games using that material.

these were retro-cloned out of the 3e SRD, they do not simply copy 1e / 2e. Apparently no one went through that effort for 4e…

 

[Cadence]

these were retro-cloned out of the 3e SRD, they do not simply copy 1e / 2e. Apparently no one went through that effort for 4e…

Some 4e things are mentioned at: Reddit Link on Various Clones for Different Editions


When it's come up in the past, I think one of the 4e clone issues was really wanting the online character builder to go with it.

 

[pemerton]

I think 4E marking is borderline, but other fighter features are absolutely over the top game mechanics in my opinion. It's fine to say that I can influence another human in a one-on-one fight. But on a battlefield against multiple opponents? Sure there's a fighter guy in heavy armor but there's also the raging barbarian about to chop my head off. Why should the fighter be more threatening.

The fighter is not necessarily more threatening. They are more skilled. They dominate the field.