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

[Zardnaar]

I tried. Over a year of trying. Discord, forums, VTTs, Reddit. I tried.

This "unprecedented access and availability" got me diddly-squat.

You might have to run it. Get a stable group someone steps up to DM.

I've been doing that since the 90s. This year I've played CoS, run 2E, Castles and Crusades and 5E. 2 games I could do a third except time.

Small city New Zealand 130k. Before then small town 12k.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Well... If nothing else it was HONEST game design. It didn't try to trick you into thinking that you could do everything with one class. It told you from the get go what you were getting into so if you didn't like that you'd knew right away.

And D&D is supposed to be a group activity, a team adventure, but few versions were as geared towards team synergy as 4e.

The last few years here have shown me that that honesty was exactly the problem.

4e sat down an explained that this was a game and a story and showed all the levers and moving parts and how they worked in terms of game mechanics and narrative. It recognized that classes were packaged mechanics to achieve a character concept rather than a discreet setting element. It leveraged a single mechanics base to grant all characters abilities.

But there are a lot of people who vehemently do not want to see D&D treated as a game or as a communal story that runs on a narrative. They don't want classes that let you know how they work, or for all characters to get abilities.

And they fought hard to make that stop. For years. For over a decade. They're still fighting, likely because PF2 and a few elements from later day 5e show that those philosophies could still come back.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is true for RPGs, too. Well, more precisely, it's true for why some people play RPG's. My guess is, it's true for a rather large portion of D&D's audience, even if most of them can't exactly articulate it like this.


Who is proposing to get rid of rules entirely?

The suggestion is merely that it makes sense that some people playing a game would like to use the rules like paper, or like a camera, or like paints, or like a stage. That for them, the game is there, and it's useful, and you can use it in fun and interesting ways, and it supports the whole work, and puts some interesting creative constraints in place, but it's the medium that the story is told through, not the story itself.



Yeah, we can all see the wires Peter Pan uses to fly, we all know the dude in the leotard isn't actually a cat, and we all understand that a tree that you paint onto a canvass will never grow and die.

But humans are imagining creatures, and if why you pick up D&D is to do something narrative with your imagination, seeing a die roll a 20 becomes, in the narrative, a warrior landing a telling blow against his enemy. Just as reading the sentence "the warrior landed a telling blow" becomes an image in your head when put into the context of a novel, and just as a splash of red paint becomes the blood of a warrior in a painting, and just as two people flailing foam swords at each other on a wooden platform in a dark room on a perfectly nice Saturday afternoon in Springfield becomes a duel to the death for two rivals in a far-off land that never truly was.

For a lot of people who play D&D, the rules are mostly the tool you use to tell the story with your friends. The game is the medium. And like with any medium, it affects the stories told through it, and you can also tell stories with it that are kind of ABOUT the medium itself, but I don't think most D&D tables are looking to create the fantasy RPG equivalent of John Cage's 4'33". I think a lot of the time, a good chunk of the player base just wants the rules as a space that is used to tell a story. That space isn't nothing. It's not silent. But it's also not the focus. It's the thing we all mostly pretend isn't really there so that we can enjoy the story being told within it.

You can tell a story without that story requiring ANYTHING but the visual in your head. You engage with nothing else except the spoken (or written) words, or the visuals and sounds presented to you.

You cannot play a game without engaging with the rules of that game. You have to actually pick up and throw a die, or tell a computer to do so. You have to actually add up a number. You have to actually tally experience.

Do you disagree with either of these things?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

You might have to run it. Get a stable group someone steps up to DM.

I've been doing that since the 90s. This year I've played CoS, run 2E, Castles and Crusades and 5E. 2 games I could do a third except time.

Small city New Zealand 130k. Before then small town 12k.

Again: Not happening. As stated, my heart would not be in it. I would be doing a hollow pantomime for selfish, and frankly petty, reasons. I refuse to inflict that kind of experience on anyone.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Thanks, but I'm good.

Wait a minute, it was @EzekielRaiden , he was the one who couldn't find a 4E game! If you really want to play 4E, I could run a few games of it for you? I could run 4E for the "still in development" GenCon online replacement event August 1-4?

I tried. Over a year of trying. Discord, forums, VTTs, Reddit. I tried.

This "unprecedented access and availability" got me diddly-squat.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Wait a minute, it was @EzekielRaiden , he was the one who couldn't find a 4E game! If you really want to play 4E, I could run a few games of it for you? I could run 4E for the "still in development" GenCon online replacement event August 1-4?

I mean, if you're offering, I won't say no. Mondays and Tuesdays are booked for me (that's Hussar's game and my own DMing respectively), but if you've got any other day that works for you, I'm game.

 

[Nilbog]

I definitely get what you're saying here. In the 4e MM, to use an example, the efreet has a variety of combat abilities - but pretty much nothing else. The flavor text says that efreet hate servitude but are often called upon by mortals to do favors. OK, great. That's similar to other editions. But they're called on by mortals to do... what? Given how they're statted up, apparently beat people up?
Contrast with AD&D, 3e, and even 5e where the efreet have other things they can do that aren't focused on combat. And the efreet isn't the only critter affected this way.

And I found the same with much of the adventuring rules that are out there compared to AD&D, 3e, and 5e. The 4e ones always seem more fixated on encounter-level involvement than other editions. But that's 4e's particular myopia - it's THE edition focused most tightly on providing a particular combat encounter experience.

And, ultimately, another reason Rob Heinsoo's analysis about the disapproval aimed at 4e falls short.

I totally agree with this, and I loved it. I run my homebrew world where monsters do what I want them to do, all I need is the mechanics, so it was great for me, I do however realise that by and large it's not good for most people and doesn't give a great feeling around the game (it definitely feels dry)

I believe if they'd released a 4th core book that was based around the POL setting and this had information regarding monster ecology, it would have helped a lot

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I totally agree with this, and I loved it. I run my homebrew world where monsters do what I want them to do, all I need is the mechanics, so it was great for me, I do however realise that by and large it's not good for most people and doesn't give a great feeling around the game (it definitely feels dry)

I believe if they'd released a 4th core book that was based around the POL setting and this had information regarding monster ecology, it would have helped a lot

What's hilarious to me is, the signals WotC got loud and clear in response to the early 4e books were exactly the opposite of the "how DARE you take out the flavor!!!" stuff.

Because WotC did that at first. They gave examples that had flavor blended in with mechanics, explaining connections to organizations and environments and the like. And people hated it. They screamed bloody murder about Golden Wyvern Adept. So WotC listened. They kept the flavor skirt-length, ensuring that anyone could project whatever flavor they wanted onto the mechanics because the mechanics stayed out of the way of flavor stuff.

And then 4e was absolutely skewered up one side and down the other for not having enough flavor.

Yes, I am more than a little bitter about this fact.

 

[Hussar]

wow, 14 pages of responses in 24 hours.

I wonder if people have strongly held opinions.

Sorry, not going to get into the actual debate going on here, but, IMO, I find it kinda funny that 5e and 4e were both "perfect storms" but in opposite direction. Virtually everything that could go wrong for 4e did. Between the murder/suicide, impossible goals (hey, grow the RPG market by twice the size it's ever been!) set by Hasbro, some incredibly tone deaf marketing, on and on and on. Every single thing that could go wrong did.

Then, you get 5e. You get the rise of streaming and the rise of high speed internet to allow streaming. You get Covid which certainly was a HUGE bump for D&D. You get all these things over the years which do nothing but help D&D.

Missteps? Sure, I'm not going to pretend it's been all smooth sailing, of course. But, 5e's "OGL Debacle" came after eight years of consecutive MASSIVE growth. 4e's GSL happened within a handful of months of release.

Funny old thing.

 

[Aldarc]

The last few years here have shown me that that honesty was exactly the problem.

4e sat down an explained that this was a game and a story and showed all the levers and moving parts and how they worked in terms of game mechanics and narrative. It recognized that classes were packaged mechanics to achieve a character concept rather than a discreet setting element. It leveraged a single mechanics base to grant all characters abilities.

But there are a lot of people who vehemently do not want to see D&D treated as a game or as a communal story that runs on a narrative. They don't want classes that let you know how they work, or for all characters to get abilities.

And they fought hard to make that stop. For years. For over a decade. They're still fighting, likely because PF2 and a few elements from later day 5e show that those philosophies could still come back.

I actually appreciated this. At the time, True20 was my game of choice. The True20 Companion was a book that pulled back the curtain and taught you about the balancing act behind the scenes. It made a lot of the game transparent so that you could tinker at your leisure. So when 4e came around and showed the game as a game, it was exactly what I wanted.

Moreover, what I find interesting is that with Shadow of the Weird Wizard, Rob Schwalb was debating how to present spells and abilities in the game. He offered the choice to playtesters, which basically amounted to 5e style laden with flavor text or the straightforward 4e style, except he didn't say that it was 4e or 5e style The playtesters overwhelmingly chose the 4e style, most of whom had no experience whatsoever with 4e. Once they did, Schwalb came straight out saying that he was scared to do the second option (i.e., 4e style) because of the vitriol directed towards 4e.

I believe if they'd released a 4th core book that was based around the POL setting and this had information regarding monster ecology, it would have helped a lot