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

[billd91]

Take as an example Pathfinder 1e. You have the Rogue and the Fighter in the Core Rulebook. The Rogue has 10 Talents, which allow the designer to always add a power that is required for a specific concept, or even re-work failed concept with a stealth buff. The Fighter cannot do that because the designers forgot to give the class this "scaffold".

No scaffold for fighters???
This "scaffold" was, in many ways, an outgrowth of the fighter gaining a ton of combat feats as bonus feats above and beyond the feats every other character got.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Look, man, I still have players confused by “you add proficiency bonus to attacks, but not to damage”, and we’ve been playing almost ten years.

If there’s any hint of math at all, some people are going to need it simpler.

I still have players who played 2e before me in 1995, and they ask things like "Why if I am prof in my armor do I not add my prof bonus?"

 

[Kaiyanwang]

No scaffold for fighters???
This "scaffold" was, in many ways, an outgrowth of the fighter gaining a ton of combat feats as bonus feats above and beyond the feats every other character got.

I think that this is what the designers thought, and I cannot blame them (or you), but this led to two issues, one practical and one conceptual.
The practical one was the way feat chains worked. Feat chains are not inherently bad. Some (SOME) feat should be gated, other should be linked conceptually. But PF1e split some feat (maneuvers, but this is an oversimplification to be honest on top of the fact that you don't always need a maneuver feat to attempt a maneuver) and introduced others that should have auto-scaled (e.g. Vital Strike). This led to the scaffold being "burned through" quite quickly.
The conceptual issue is that once archetypes with special moves for specific weapons were introduced, these cannibalized the remaining class features on top of "freezing" the fighter on a single strategy. Which is counter-intuitive to the fact that the Fighter is supposed to be a weapon master (of multiple weapons, see how the PF1e Fighter Weapon Training works) which, if well-built, can adapt his feat combinations to more than one technique unless you WANT to over-specialize (which is what online communities focus on to be honest). Even if you over-specialize, you can still grab Power Attack and Deadly Aim to be decent at something else.
The "freezing" leads to a contradiction - you have the feats to be flexible, but not the class features.

 

[Undrave]

Given the nature of the AEDU system these features will only come up once per fight each unless they are at-wills, meaning they are less likely to be memorized through repetition. That can be a lot for a player to keep track of themselves, much less reminding their fellow players of. I can see how these kinds of effects promote both teamwork and engagement and like these in a vacuum, but I think the system could have benefited from fewer, more consistent ones.

Well, if I play a support character I actually WANT to be engaged in its mechanic and make it my job to remind folks of my buffs.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Well, if I play a support character I actually WANT to be engaged in its mechanic and make it my job to remind folks of my buffs.

I do, too. I just think that the more individual effects there are the easier it is to either forget those yourself or having to feel that you have to constantly remind other players to keep them from forgetting. When playing a Peace Domain Cleric in 5E for a one-shot I ended up taking some time to create and distribute reminder cards to the other players for the benefits my character could give out. If I had to do that for more than a couple of class features it would have gotten a bit inconvenient.

 

[SteveC]

Well, if I play a support character I actually WANT to be engaged in its mechanic and make it my job to remind folks of my buffs.

In Pathfinder Society games I play, one of the other players is a bard. They typically do "Inspire Courage" (the old name), which adds a +1 bonus to attacks and damage. They bought a big foam finger that they wear and held up when the buff is active, and someone makes an attack. It really works.

 

[Pedantic]

If we're going to take the "a spectrum is needed" response seriously, there needs to be a spectrum across thematics, not just in the generic. There needs to be at least one spellcaster that is comparably simple to the Fighter, even if it's still a little more complex (e.g. Battle Master level).

This is the problem I was talking about earlier with the mundanity trap though. The 4e fighter's lesson is that theme (particularly in the fighter's case) is fairly tightly bound to mechanics, and that the more generic your martial character's theme is, the less space you have to add mechanics beyond the system's rules for general interaction. No one will object to higher numbers, but there's a tiny window for acceptable resource systems.

I think you lose more than you gain by having a Fighter at all. You'd have an easier time selling the Battlemaster as a base class than a subclass.

 

[Pedantic]

Look, man, I still have players confused by “you add proficiency bonus to attacks, but not to damage”, and we’ve been playing almost ten years.

If there’s any hint of math at all, some people are going to need it simpler.

Having played a lot of 3e and now 5e, I've found the level of incompetence weirdly static. The player who can't figure out how to add their proficiency to their skill check results is the same player who couldn't remember whether Power Attack was x1, x2 or x1.5, but did know how to roll their full attack and add up the damage. Seems like there's just always someone floating right below the baseline expectation of play.

 

[overgeeked]

Having played a lot of 3e and now 5e, I've found the level of incompetence weirdly static. The player who can't figure out how to add their proficiency to their skill check results is the same player who couldn't remember whether Power Attack was x1, x2 or x1.5, but did know how to roll their full attack and add up the damage. Seems like there's just always someone floating right below the baseline expectation of play.

There is also something to be said for how complicated many of these games are. They could be a lot simpler with a lot less math. It's one of the ways gamers seem to think casual gatekeeping is perfectly acceptable.

 

[Pedantic]

There is also something to be said for how complicated many of these games are. They could be a lot simpler with a lot less math. It's one of the ways gamers seem to think casual gatekeeping is perfectly acceptable.

Eh. I'm a big proponent of accessibility, but there's real design costs to simplicity that start to be very constraining. You get the impression the issue for some people is having any rules more complicated than "roll high."