WoTC Interview with Rob Heinsoo

[gribble]

We want all D&D characters to have the option of feeling heroic, to keep fighting and adventuring until they are truly too beat up to continue, and not to stop as soon as they have used up their only cool powers.

Consider the goal FAILED. My group stops on Action Points and Dailies. Two encounters, the day is over. Though I suppose part of that is a practical consideration: "It's already 5:30, if we get in another fight, I'll be here 'till 8:00 at least!"

I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking this! For all the talk of 4e solving the 10 minute adventuring day, I've found in practice it has actually made it a lot worse. A couple of reasons:
1) Rather than just wanting to rest when the wizard/cleric is out of spells, every class now has daily abilities. Typically, at least one PC is out of dailies after 2-3 fights.
2) Healing surges are the killer (literally). At least in 3e, a party could reasonably continue on potions, scrolls and/or wands for quite a while... normally in the ballpark of 4-6 encounters per day before resting. But in 4e, once any single character is out of healing surges, the party pretty much has to take an extended rest. Pressing on at that point, without that character being able to heal at all during an encounter, is akin to that characters death sentence... I've found in our mid-late Paragon game that that point now seems be be about every 2-3 encounters.

 

[Scribble]

I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking this! For all the talk of 4e solving the 10 minute adventuring day, I've found in practice it has actually made it a lot worse. A couple of reasons:
1) Rather than just wanting to rest when the wizard/cleric is out of spells, every class now has daily abilities. Typically, at least one PC is out of dailies after 2-3 fights.
2) Healing surges are the killer (literally). At least in 3e, a party could reasonably continue on potions, scrolls and/or wands for quite a while... normally in the ballpark of 4-6 encounters per day before resting. But in 4e, once any single character is out of healing surges, the party pretty much has to take an extended rest. Pressing on at that point, without that character being able to heal at all during an encounter, is akin to that characters death sentence... I've found in our mid-late Paragon game that that point now seems be be about every 2-3 encounters.

I haven't noticed it with the dailies, well I DID, but my group got over that one after a bit. Dailies stopped seeming so important. They DO, however, still seem to cower away after they've used up their last healing surges. Sometimes they'll press on a little longer, but any damage with no healing surges left sends them into instant rest mode.

The number of encounters varies for me because the difficulty of the encounters varies for them as well.

 

[Ariosto]

Gribble & Scribble: I've got some mainly 3E/4E players in my OD&D game, and was not too surprised to find them acting as if sleep were the only spell in their grimoires. Seeing that actually got me thinking about a funky "free casting" variant based on what was once (when I was but a hatchling "grognard") an actual reading of the original rules.

Anyway, what was surprising, based on what I had read (but not seen) of 4E strategies, was that they did not call it a day after using those spells!

In fact, the biggest problem I've seen arising from application of a 4E education to a 0E environment is that (like cats up trees) the players don't seem to have a reverse gear. The DMs in a local home-brewed 4E campaign routinely come at least thrillingly close to TPKs just by counting on that.

 

[Plane Sailing]

D&D has always had these hidden traps: thieves gain nothing at high level to begin to compensate for powerful magic like Heal, Teleport, or True Seeing. No fighter can deal the massive damage potential of Cone of Cold, Harm or Disintegrate (not to mention the one-hit kills anything of SoD spells).

A couple of things come to mind here - firstly that in 3.5e Cone of Cold and Disintegrate (Fort save for 5d6?) were laughably poor in terms of causing damage compared to equivalent level rogues or fighters. Harm was still a damage king, but that's cleric for you.

In many ways even in early editions, at high level a party needed all the members to survive. Certainly more so in 3rd edition. So where is the difference with 4th edition roles? A party can still function when missing one of the roles (especially controller seems dispensible at the moment), but doesn't function as well by any means.

(BTW, I don't think I've ever seen a SoD actually land on a target. Between spell resistance and high saves, throwing SoD spells was largely a case of wasting effort round after round!

Cheers

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think you re-state it the wrong way. It doesn't make sense for a new player to see that what made his character unique being gone after one fight, while the rest of the party can still do their shtick.

This is a very 2009 mindset though, and seems informed more by recent history.

Considering that 1e was the heydey of D&D, highly successful, enjoyed by tens of thousands (if not more), who are you to say that it didn't make sense, or was in some way un-fun?

I don't think there is much disputing the fact that 1e remained the most popular of all RPGs by quite a long shot.

Cheers

 

[Ariosto]

Re combat power: A lot depends on the fights you get into. In RPGA, unfortunately, that's basically just Hobson's choice.

A tag-team of "strikers" can really open up a can of whupass in the right situation!

Under less conducive conditions? Not so much.

 

[MerricB]

(BTW, I don't think I've ever seen a SoD actually land on a target. Between spell resistance and high saves, throwing SoD spells was largely a case of wasting effort round after round!

You didn't have the right (wrong?) players.

 

[Remathilis]

(BTW, I don't think I've ever seen a SoD actually land on a target. Between spell resistance and high saves, throwing SoD spells was largely a case of wasting effort round after round!

I did. In 2e, I saw it enough to recall a lot of first-round kills (to be fair though, mundane poison was nearly as deadly, as was near-deaths like paralysis or petrification) to recall hording in save-boosting items (even if they didn't stack with your magical armor). In 3.0 I saw them A LOT because of the disparity of Save DCs to Weak-save progression. Thanks to the nerfing of Spell Focus/Greater, Fox Cunning, and other Int-boosters (or wis, or cha), It was less prevalent, but not enough to forget not seeing them.

Remember, if you cast fireball 2 rounds in a row and one round the creature saves and next it fails, you've taken two rounds to deal 75% of your potential damage (or less, if the target has evasion/improved) which may/may not kill the foe. If you do the same with Finger of Death, you took two rounds to kill the creature. Period.

 

[gribble]

Gribble & Scribble: I've got some mainly 3E/4E players in my OD&D game, and was not too surprised to find them acting as if sleep were the only spell in their grimoires.

Don't get me wrong, it's not like the players use 1 or 2 dailies and then decide to call it a day, but more that after 2-3 encounters most dailies are gone. While a 4e character is perfectly feasible without dailies, we've found that the daily powers are the most fun (aka, result in the least grindy combat), and a lot of the pressure to push on comes not from character effectiveness concerns as much as "not fun to push on" concerns.

In 3e, when it was just the wizard and/or cleric, the non-spellcasters in the party would tend to shout them down, call them names and generally convince everyone to "push on" for one more encounter.

In 4e, the players look around the table, say "we *could* push on, but it'll probably be a long and grindy combat" and collectively decide they should stop for the night.

It's more the lack of healing surges that seems to put a hard cap on effectiveness. I remember after one particularly harrowing fight against wights we decided to stop for the day after the 2nd encounter. Most of us still had a daily or two left, but 2 of us were out of healing surges so the group decided it'd be suicide to push on!

 

[Branduil]

This is a very 2009 mindset though, and seems informed more by recent history.

Considering that 1e was the heydey of D&D, highly successful, enjoyed by tens of thousands (if not more), who are you to say that it didn't make sense, or was in some way un-fun?

I don't think there is much disputing the fact that 1e remained the most popular of all RPGs by quite a long shot.

Cheers

That's specious reasoning. Something being immensely popular does not mean aspects of it cannot be criticized or improved upon.

I think it's safe to say that while D&D has always been popular for lots and lots of reasons, balance between classes, across all levels, has never been a particularly strong selling point.