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

[Neonchameleon]

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

I'm boggling; this has absolutely nothing to do with the 4e I enjoy. Prepping encounters is a snap to the point that I've done it at the table on days when I'd forgotten my rulebooks. Admittedly I'm adept with math and kinasthetic visualisation, but prepping encounters takes no time at all. I just need to pick the monsters and draw the terrain. And everything a monster does is right there in the statblock, not on another page buried in a section of text.

Interesting NPCs I find faster and easier in 4e than other editions; I basically just need to picture what they should be doing.

And no time for acting? This sounds to me like the "Dessert is great at this restaurant so we'll just order four desserts for the meal".

Seriously, nothing you say is inherent to what I get out of 4e.

 

[billd91]

Seriously, nothing you say is inherent to what I get out of 4e.

Well, you’re not Retreater and his players. Nobody expects you to have the same perspective or experiences. Are you denying he could be experiencing what he’s experiencing?

 

[overgeeked]

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

So stop running only combats. Take a few sessions of just RP or next session have only one combat.

 

[MwaO]

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

The quote.

 

[Retreater]

I don't understand this. 4e makes encounter creation trivial?

Not actually. You need varied monster roles that synergize with each other. You need traps and hazards and interesting terrain to make the fights dynamic. Hopefully it's all thematically appropriate. You can't just "add up 4 orcs and you're good."

Do you have at least 2 players running strikers who are using either a simple class (if they're not engaged), or a high output one?

Avenger (striker) - engaged
Barbarian (striker) - not engaged
Hexblade (striker) - engaged
Wizard (controller) - engaged
Cleric (leader) - not engaged
Ardent (leader) - not engaged
No defender, because no one will play one (despite my begging them for 6 months)

 

[Neonchameleon]

Well, you’re not Retreater and his players. Nobody expects you to have the same perspective or experiences. Are you denying he could be experiencing what he’s experiencing?

No. Neither am I denying that someone could hit themselves in the balls when they use their hammer.

But when someone complains that they hit themselves in the balls when they use a hammer I consider it entirely reasonable to point out that that isn't to do with the fact it's a hammer, it's to do with the fact they are wielding the hammer oddly. And that most people who know how to use the hammer don't do that.

The experiences of 4e Retreater has have come from how Retreater is using 4e. This doesn't mean that they don't exist. They are however issues that Retreater can either continue to suffer and complain about or check what other people who do not experience these issues have and try to do that.

 

[zakael19]

Not actually. You need varied monster roles that synergize with each other. You need traps and hazards and interesting terrain to make the fights dynamic. Hopefully it's all thematically appropriate. You can't just "add up 4 orcs and you're good."


Avenger (striker) - engaged
Barbarian (striker) - not engaged
Hexblade (striker) - engaged
Wizard (controller) - engaged
Cleric (leader) - not engaged
Ardent (leader) - not engaged
No defender, because no one will play one (despite my begging them for 6 months)

All that is trivial though, using the digital tools. They’re all there, ready to filter and pick with profiles you can scale up & down by level using the hand cheat sheet. It took me longer to build the tokens for an encounter then to put it together with a hazard + mixed monster group (one elite scaled down, everything else on level), and redo the hazard into something on theme.

I’ve been running 4e for … 5 sessions?

Two unengaged leaders are going to make level+ encounters hard, since you need buffs to make up for the math disparity.

 

[Retreater]

And everything a monster does is right there in the statblock, not on another page buried in a section of text.

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.)
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.

So stop running only combats. Take a few sessions of just RP or next session have only one combat.

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.
Dammit, I hate being a DM. Nothing works for these people.

 

[overgeeked]

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.
Dammit, I hate being a DM. Nothing works for these people.

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.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Not actually. You need varied monster roles that synergize with each other.

The only thing you need here is to not have all the monsters in the encounter be effectively clones of each other. Every 4e combat role synergises with every other role because they all have strengths and weaknesses.

You need traps and hazards and interesting terrain to make the fights dynamic.

Where "traps and hazards and interesting terrain" just means "Not using featureless rooms". Seriously, I've had a fight on a dockside be interesting and memorable because four people got pushed off it. I've had fights in city streets where the hazards were the open sewer. Rolling hills? Check. Tables and a mess on the floor? That also works. And if you happen to have a pit trap monsters go in it.

Hopefully it's all thematically appropriate.

Yeah, that's a good place to start. Thinking about how your encounters are thematically appropriate. Where they are set and who the opponents are.

You can't just "add up 4 orcs and you're good."

And now I see your problem. You've been dropping four cloned orcs into a featureless room and considering that good. And your players much prefer 4e because you put in the absolute bare minimum. I mean you have literally said that 4e forces you to not just "add up 4 orcs and you're good", and that you need terrain rather than empty spaces.

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? Players don't care about the sort of worldbuilding that leads to deep backstory. They care about the sort of worldbuilding that leads to them interacting with a textured and nuanced environment. And when you have a textured and nuanced environment it should become easy to not just put four orcs fresh from the cloning vats into an encounter.