WoTC Interview with Rob Heinsoo

[billd91]

And when the wizard and cleric were cashed, you rested. Period. You hopped in your rope trick, played cards for 8 hours until the real party memebrs were ready to do the heavy lifting and moved on.

Oh right, you never rested in 1st/2nd edition...

That is a characterization I never saw in 20 years of 1e and 2e. Rather, the fighter-types and thieves were always on duty and were, in fact, the ones doing the heavy lifting consistently. The cleric backed the fighters up and the wizard tossed around large spikes of damage infrequently. And when they were out of mojo, they relied on wands and darts.

The party stopped to rest when the fighters were low on hit points and the clerics were out of healing... in other words, when the heavy lifters could no longer protect the rest of the party.

 

[Mournblade94]

Its been my experience that everyone min-maxes, or "optimizes". First edition was easier to break, because it was so poorly designed in regards to balance (among other things). I also didnt see many fighters running around using daggers over longswords.

I have had straight class fighters use only daggers. In fact this is an EXTREMELY common fighter type. I have encountered it often. One time granted it was a fighter mage bladesinger. The 3rd edition I am running now, currently has a straight class fighter who has all specializations in the throwing daggers. I am sure a min maxer would label him 'Stupid".

No hardly everyone min/maxes. I would not even say MOST players min/max. The character concept has always been more important. I have seen many occasions when the min maxer of the group would complain about someone's character choice. There is playing for min.max, and then there is the character concept.

And when the wizard and cleric were cashed, you rested. Period. You hopped in your rope trick, played cards for 8 hours until the real party memebrs were ready to do the heavy lifting and moved on.

Oh right, you never rested in 1st/2nd edition...

There are plenty of tournament style modules that did not allow for this. When the cleric and wizard were done, and the rest of the party was good, we would often push on. You cannot say that once the cleric or wizard is done it is over.

The only time I ever played the way you describe was by playing the video game Baldur's Gate or Never Winter Nights. On the table top, I did not have the same habits. I fear too much of the video game strategy has encroached upon the table top game strategy.

I am not a grognard in that respect at all. I am a hard core video game gamer. I recognize though what makes a good video game does not make a good Table top game and Vice versa.

 

[Sadrik]

Fun is not a bad word in and of itself, when used as a comparative such as this is more fun than that it runs into the highly speculative. Rob appears to have done that.

 

[Ariosto]

Using crossbow is not a problem when MUs are limited to daggers ...

 

[JVisgaitis]

That was a great read. Why didn't they do something like this before the game was released? A lot of interesting info in there...

 

[Storminator]

I certainly think that a trained up wizard having to badly wield a crossbow is a problem.

Crossbow?!?

PS

 

[catsclaw227]

See, that's something I don't like. I don't like the idea that at some point, character advancement by level simply ends.

See, that's something I don't like. I don't like the idea that at some point, the game simply ends. That's like a board game. I don't mind if a company doesn't want to support a game beyond a certain point, but at least leave it open-ended (as 1E/2E/3E are) so that creative DMs at least have the tools to play beyond official support. (Or, you can do the 1E/2E XP progression, where it simply takes a long time to advance levels past a certain point.)

Now, now DaveMage. You know as well as I do that in 1e there were level limitations. Racial and Class level limitations.

How did a dwarf become an 10th level fighter? Or what level of Druid did I take after 14th level?

You might counter with "Then dual class!!" or "Multiclass!". If I am not mistaken, multiclass was something you could only do at first level, and you had to be a non-human and there were only specific combinations available, and these were based upon your race.

With dual classing (humans only), you were denied the use of all your abilities and benefits when you changed classes (except HD and HP). So, I spend 3 years of gaming and 14 levels to become the greatest druid in the gameworld and then (because if course, I didn't want to be saddled with level limitations. I only have 1,500,001 XP and the M-U can get 3,000,000+ and be 18th level!) I became a magic user. I now couldn't use ANY of the abilities of the Druid and if I did, all the XP for the adventure would be lost.

So how are these rules good? My 9th level dwarven fighter is the best he can be. Ever. I would much rather be able to be 20th level or 30th level.

I played and DMed 1st edition for a long time. These rules always sucked. And almost every table I played at dropped the racial level limits not because we wanted the ceiling opened up to infinity, but because we wanted to ceiling raised to the same level for everyone.

 

[catsclaw227]

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.

This hasn't been the experience in the two 4e campaigns I have run. Our mid-level paragon game regularly had the PCs going 4-6 encounters at a time. Dailies weren't the deciding factor, surges were.

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.

This is the case for us, but we still go 4-6 encounters. Maybe the DM is throwing too many "hard" encounters and not enough "easy" and "normal" ones?

 

[Thasmodious]

Crossbow?!?

PS

Heh, yeah, too many years of 3e. But the older options were even worse. "Oh dear, I seem to have run out of spells, time to hike up my skirt and wade into the front lines with my 'trusty' quarterstaff."

 

[Ariosto]

If Wizards Did Call of Cthulhu

Library Use as a key skill? No way! Investigation is no fun; shootouts are fun!

It's no fun playing an author, journalist, lawyer, professor or historian/antiquarian. Let's replace those occupations with types like Doc Savage, the Shadow and Tarzan.

It's no fair that cultists of the Great Old Ones get all the best magic. Add "good guy" Elder Gods.

Getting driven insane is no fun. Dump the Sanity rules.

One blast from a 12 gauge shotgun can kill a character? How can anyone have fun playing someone who can't take a couple of bursts from a tommy gun and keep going?

Some of the monsters are just too tough. If you can't kill Cthulhu, then what's the point?