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

[Undrave]

They didn't focus enough on making each class unique, and hard coding roles was a mistake. Your Wizard CAN be a controller, but that label shouldn't be there and the players should choose the role for that particular PC without the intentional and explicit "pulling back the curtain" on that level of design. There was just too much of a gamification tone to the rules.

Roles were a good thing actually and made for better designed class. It also meant that no class was designed to play in isolation and that teamwork was rewarded all the time.

But really it's that last part that was the big rub wasn't it? That the GAME treated it's rulles like the rules of a GAME. That it said 'here's how you play the game and here's why we made them like that to make the game better'. People playing role playing games didn't want to be reminded they were playing a game.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I use skill challenge like structure in games on a fairly regular basis, but I run them similar to chases. So there are obstacles to overcome, and I make suggestions about what they could do and of course they can make other suggestions.

What it isn't, is X successes before Y failures. It may be that the bad guys are getting catching up, you take damage from falling rocks and so on.

I try to make it dynamic and interesting, using a variety of skills and abilities. But skill challenges as presented in 4E? Nah.

Sounds like we do it pretty similarly. I'm actually not surprised. In spite of getting into a few debates with you, I think that we're more similar then it can sometimes appear.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I thought I was clear I was just expressing my opinion on Skill Challenge? In my experience you're right, running it too formally just feels like another combat encounter, that's why I suggested not drawing too much attention to the structure. For what it's worth, my PC actually enjoyed realizing they were in a skill challenge after a few rolls and got more serious in their attempt to engage the challenge in front of them.

I'll admit a good skill challenge is really hard to do and it's a concept that was revisited multiple times because of that. The expression "An attempt was made" was basically invented for Skill Challenges. Good idea, terrible incarnation.

Yeah. I think good skill challenges are actually pretty easy to do, but NOT if you follow the 4e rules as written. And REALLY not if you use any of the ones directly from the 4e Adventures and run those as written.

I recall that when I first read about skill challenges in the lead-up to 4e, I ran a bunch that worked out GREAT. Then the books came out, and I read the full rules, and I had a HARDER time running them well. THEN, I tried to run them from the Adventures, and they got even worse. THEN, I gave up on the letter-of-the-rules and started to run them freeform, and they got decent again.

 

[I'm A Banana]

People playing role playing games didn't want to be reminded they were playing a game.

That makes sense. People watching a movie don't want to be reminded they're watching a movie. People reading a book don't want to be reminded they're reading a book. Performers on stage don't want the audience to see that it's just a stage. If you're telling scary stories around a campfire, no one wants you to point out that you're statistically very unlikely to encounter a mass murderer out here in the woods. The point is the feeling, the engagement, the way the world melts away when you're telling a story with your friends.

It also meant that no class was designed to play in isolation and that teamwork was rewarded all the time.

I think the main stumbling block here was tying role to class instead of tying this to actions. "All fighters are Defenders" is a narrow hole. "A fighter can be the best Defender if they choose to do that on their turn" is a thing that you can choose to shine at if you make the choice to. Because of the above point where people don't really want to see the wizard most of the time, "being a defender" wasn't something that all players were actually all that interested in doing. The goal of the class isn't a combat role. The goal of the class is actually a narrative. A combat role is not relevant when choosing a class for a big swath of players.

Which means that this

Roles were a good thing actually and made for better designed class

is the sort of language that got 4e that reputation for badwrongfun-ing people who were perfectly happy without things like tightly defined combat roles. Not every table had a problem with group cooperation that needed to be solved in such a strict way.

Fixing problems that not everyone had and claiming it's simply "better designed" is not appreciating the diversity of what people want out of D&D and the different design goals that they have.

 

[Ogre Mage]

Weird that the day before this thread began, 4E appeared in my life again. Our current DM (running a 5E game) said he would like to take a mini-break and have someone else run for 2-3 sessions. One of the other players offered to run "lair assault" which I had never done. And then he said it was 4E.

My stomach tightened and I said "I played 4E and it wasn't my favorite."

Sorry Rob H., but I didn't like the 4E rules. None of the 4E DMs I played with used the setting lore (though perhaps that is a telling point). I did find some of the lore changes strange. Like when they changed the lamia from the half-woman/half-beast of 1E-3E to an insect swarm? That was ... odd.

I do wonder how my attitude toward 4E would have been different if I came into it with no D&D experience. As it was, I arrived with substantial 2E and 3E experience. The game I knew and liked wasn't there.

 

[TiQuinn]

Like when they changed the lamia from the half-woman/half-beast of 1E-3E to an insect swarm? That was ... odd.

Wait what?

 

[JEB]

Wait what?

Honestly, the monster itself is decent, but I'm baffled on why they insisted on calling it a "lamia" instead of, well, anything else.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That makes sense. People watching a movie don't want to be reminded they're watching a movie. People reading a book don't want to be reminded they're reading a book. Performers on stage don't want the audience to see that it's just a stage. If you're telling scary stories around a campfire, no one wants you to point out that you're statistically very unlikely to encounter a mass murderer out here in the woods. The point is the feeling, the engagement, the way the world melts away when you're telling a story with your friends.

Except that for all of those things besides games, avoiding any such reveal consistently and almost universally makes them better, and nearly any sacrifice necessary to avoid such reveals is worth making. Actively sabotaging the functionality of rules in order to never, ever let someone think they're playing a game will destroy the ability to play the game effectively. It will still be "playable" because "playable" is a below-rock-bottom, Mohorovicic-discontinuity standard, but it will actively and aggressively prevent enjoyable gameplay. Games need rules, and unless you're playing Mao, players need to know the rules in order to play. You can never not have at least some awareness that you're playing, unless you're genuinely deceiving yourself. Hearing a story told, or watching a movie, etc., you can at least pretend that the tale is not constructed by the teller, that it's a genuinely faithful recounting of a real event. Playing a game, you are necessarily using rules to affect the game. There is no physical or mental possibility of believing that an icosahedron showing 20 is faithfully recounting the tale of a warrior landing a telling blow against his enemy.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Weird that the day before this thread began, 4E appeared in my life again. Our current DM (running a 5E game) said he would like to take a mini-break and have someone else run for 2-3 sessions. One of the other players offered to run "lair assault" which I had never done. And then he said it was 4E.

My stomach tightened and I said "I played 4E and it wasn't my favorite."

Sorry Rob H., but I didn't like the 4E rules. None of the 4E DMs I played with used the setting lore (though perhaps that is a telling point). I did find some of the lore changes strange. Like when they changed the lamia from the half-woman/half-beast of 1E-3E to an insect swarm? That was ... odd.

I do wonder how my attitude toward 4E would have been different if I came into it with no D&D experience. As it was, I arrived with substantial 2E and 3E experience. The game I knew and liked wasn't there.

Did you respond by offering to run a 2E game instead???

 

[Ogre Mage]

Wait what?

Let's Read the 4E Monster Manual: lamia

In 4e they’re a type of fey whose true form is that of a swarm of large black scarabs wrapped around a skeleton, but who can disguise itself as an attractive humanoid.

5e returned the lamia to the attractive half-human/half-beast that it had been in 1E-3E (which is similar to the original Greek mythology origins).

The scarab swarm was an interesting idea for a monster but why they called it a lamia seems nonsensical and random.