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

[Retreater]

So leave the dungeon and go back to town. In my experience, 4E absolutely sucks for dungeoncrawls for exactly the reasons you’re complaining about. All combat and nothing else.

They're going to the dungeon to find an artifact for a quest that's been building up for months IRL.
I don't think there's a way out without just ending the campaign. I can re-write the encounters in the dungeon, trim out some of the areas, I guess.

 

[mamba]

The quote.

I am not sure what you are referring to. You did not provide a quote, you just disagreed with what you quoted from my post, so provide your facts that contradict it

EDIT I am pretty sure it was about being able to lapse your subscription and still have access to the compendium by downloading it first. I can find an offline version even today, just googled it, so that seems to verifiably be true…

 

[GrimCo]

Precisley. Dungeon crawl is, by it's design, hack&slash. Go in, avoid traps, kill monsters, take their stuff. Rinse and repeat until you reach end boss or you find McGuffin. The end.

If you miss stories and role play, ditch dungeon crawls. Or fast forward them. Narrate it without playing it out.

It's not system fault. It's game type fault. Also, maybe miss match in expectations about what you want from game vs what players want. If they want to play Diablo and you want to play Diplomacy, that's people problem, not system problem.

 

[Retreater]

And now I see your problem. You've been dropping four cloned orcs into a featureless room and considering that good.

No. I was giving that as an example of quick design a lot of people do. I haven't designed encounters like that since I was 12.

Seriously, what do you think worldbuilding is and what the point of it is if it doesn't lead to you having bad guys that aren't clones of each other and allow you to populate environments with interesting things?

Let's see. I have the leader of a rival town who has come into their city and declared martial law - who they haven't engaged with. A faction of rebels trying to overthrow him - who they haven't engaged with. An aboleth in the sewers trying to take over the thieves guild with mind control - who they haven't engaged with. The dark thane of the duergar who is weaponizing the dwarves of the nearby mountains.
There is a lot of stuff going on. When I give them the opportunity to talk, it's all reduced to "you can fight agents of enemy x but these guys do ongoing fire damage." Why? Because they look at their sheets and see "blazing doom of the void" or "fire shroud."
It's that old saying, when you have a hammer, everything's a nail. They have 6-page character sheets, with 5 pages dedicated to attack powers. There's one block of skills on the front page. There's an empty box on page two for personality and backstory.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Which I find using an online tool on my computer. So I have to scroll through hundreds of choices, pick the brutes, pick the artillery, etc, copy/paste all of stat blocks into a Word Document and print it.
Sure, I have like 4 books of monsters, but do I want to be page flipping every encounter to look at the stat blocks from multiple pages. Especially when you can't get enough variety or suitable enemies from one book. (And half the books have the "bad math" anyway.)

I thought I'd lay out what I'd do. There are six monster books for 4e. We can discard the MM1 and MM2 for having the old math. MM3, Dark Sun, Monster Vault, and Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale. We'll drop MM3 for being monsters that weren't high priority enough to get into the MM1 or MM2 (although there's some great stuff), and Dark Sun for being world specific. This leaves us precisely two monster books to use. And two of the best ever written for any D&D.

But the ask is four orcs, and I'm coming at this cold. I'm going to start with Monster Vault. Orcs are on P225-229 of Monster Vault. If I want four orc equivalents I could easily use p226-7 of Monster Vault and take eight Minion Savages, lead by a Reaver, with an Archer as the second in command/specialist. Boom! We're done. No need to turn over. This has taken me only marginally more time than looking up stats for cookie cutter orcs and we already have a much more varied fight.

But what if we want more variety than the seven(!) statblocks in Monster Vault? Simple. We supplement it (and have some nice worldbuilding thrown in for free) with Threats to the Nentir Vale because that is a book about organisations for monsters from the Monster Manual, and contains an orc tribe. Clan Bloodspear takes two double pages and has a further eight stat blocks including two named orcs (Queen Msuga and Rohka the Blood Witch). It also contains a bit of lore and the fract the the half-ogre ogrillons and the half-trolls are part of Rokha's experiments.

I would then, using just these two books, be able to have anything up to nine monsters open in front of me (p226-227 or p228-229 for MV and p36-37 for MV:TttNV). Nine stat blocks would be far too complex of course; I don't recall ever needing more than four in an encounter.

Don't go through and pick the brutes and artillery. Just pick the orcs. They have automatic thematic synergy with each other. And most of the sociable races will have a spread of roles.

Like, I believed 4e was easy for more than 10 years. Just like you folks. Now that I'm running it again, it's probably the most difficult system I've tried to organize and run in 30 years of DM experience.

Were you doing this time you weren't last?

We just started a new adventure that's a dungeon crawl with no roleplaying opportunities. By default, everything has turned evil.
Guess I can re-write this "classic" adventure ("the best of 4e") that I've been prepping for a month.

Which adventure was it? Because some of the 4e adventures are bad.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

My players "think" they want tactical combat options and told me they like 4e, but they don't interact with the system well.
I know that I miss telling stories with my friends. I miss feeling like I'm creating interesting NPCs to interact with. I miss world building. There's simply not time for anything but prepping encounters, and no time at the session for acting but fighting encounters and rules speak

This is very strange to me, because...I mean, 4e was designed with the idea of making that easy. That's why you have things like the MM3 on a business card. It's a very simple formula to get an effective, basic monster. Spend another 5-10 minutes coming up with a quirky thing a couple of the monsters can do, an interesting terrain effect or two, and maybe a trap or hazard to deal with. If you're feeling fancy, spruce the environment up with destructible/consumable things that could give people (not necessarily the players) an advantage.

 

[zakael19]

I’ll say that DM side 4e is super easy, the offline compendium is so fast to filter & grab stuff from. Reskinning takes a minute to tweak for theme if you need too. Math is bounded and set as well. SCs take seconds to put together, just throw out the absolutely absurd concept of tying explicit skills to them and let your players get an obstacle for each step and figure out how to overcome.

Player side in combat? That’s far harder if you don’t have people willing and ready to track modifiers. This has been my parties struggle - they don’t really want to hold all that stuff in their mental space. I can’t argue that, my experience with a lot of players they just want to restart each round with what’s on their sheet and go. 4e wants you to think deeper, and punishes more if you don’t.

Now the DMG recommends enlisting an engaged player or 2 to track monster HP/ modifiers for just this reason!

 

[Retreater]

Don't go through and pick the brutes and artillery. Just pick the orcs. They have automatic thematic synergy with each other. And most of the sociable races will have a spread of roles.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't tend to "math out" appropriately. Here's what I mean.
Orc brute might be level 1, orc artillery might be level 2, orc minion might be 4th level. That orc shaman might be 7th level. So you're designing an encounter for a 1st level party, which in my case might have 4, 5, or 6 players depending on who is able to show up.
If you put in 50 XP over what the baseline for an appropriate encounter is, everyone can tell, like princess and the pea. Don't ask me how. It's ended up being the difference between "a thrilling encounter" and "being completely overwhelmed fleeing for our lives."

Were you doing this time you weren't last?

The online tools that let you +/- enemies are gone. What I have access to now is functional, but not fully featured.
Main difference is that I had players who thought about the game outside the sessions and tried to synergize instead of being individual superheroes.

Which adventure was it? Because some of the 4e adventures are bad.

Madness at Gardmore Abbey - which is widely regarded as the best adventure for 4e.

 

[Belen]

Player side in combat? That’s far harder if you don’t have people willing and ready to track modifiers. This has been my parties struggle - they don’t really want to hold all that stuff in their mental space. I can’t argue that, my experience with a lot of players they just want to restart each round with what’s on their sheet and go. 4e wants you to think deeper, and punishes more if you don’t.

Now the DMG recommends enlisting an engaged player or 2 to track monster HP/ modifiers for just this reason!

I think we may just have the 4e folks keep explaining why the system failed to capture the D&D audience. The last few pages have been perfect.

Players often do not want to engage at this level. A DM may be lucky to have 1 person in the group that operates at this level.

This is why you do not get more people who become DMs. They just want to play.

Now, if everyone at the table had a device that did all the math and tracked everything, then 4e could have been more viable. The devices would have done the work that a WoW server accomplished.

However, the last few pages of discussion just prove why I dislike 4e.

 

[GrimCo]

The problem with this approach is that it doesn't tend to "math out" appropriately. Here's what I mean.
Orc brute might be level 1, orc artillery might be level 2, orc minion might be 4th level. That orc shaman might be 7th level. So you're designing an encounter for a 1st level party, which in my case might have 4, 5, or 6 players depending on who is able to show up.
If you put in 50 XP over what the baseline for an appropriate encounter is, everyone can tell, like princess and the pea. Don't ask me how. It's ended up being the difference between "a thrilling encounter" and "being completely overwhelmed fleeing for our lives."

Yes, math for 4 and 6 player is different. Challenging encounter for 4 players becomes walk in the park for 6, but one designed to challenge 6 becomes deadly to 4.

The online tools that let you +/- enemies are gone. What I have access to now is functional, but not fully featured.
Main difference is that I had players who thought about the game outside the sessions and tried to synergize instead of being individual superheroes.

And that, my friend, tells you that you have players whose play style is not really aligned for 4ed. As i said, you have problem with players, not the system.