WoTC Interview with Rob Heinsoo

[Mournblade94]

Oh come on.... just because a player doesn't like the fact that they are a less effective doesn't make them a min-maxer.

I have DMed many groups of VERY good roleplayers that have, on more than one occasion mentioned how much they felt behind the other players in the group (in 1e, 2e and 3e). Even if I counter it with "Well, just think of all the roleplaying opportunities it will open up", they say "I would rather have some great roleplaying opportunities and also feel like I am contributing with my class abilities like the other guys."

I have been Dming since 1982, so I am behind you. I never remember a single player feeling less effective because of their CLASS. Maybe abilities, magic items, on occasion WIzard specialty class, but never due to class. Oh yeah... It happened with one of my friends Billy Stacy for the 1st edition MONK. Other than that, I have not experienced the compaint.

Perfect balance may not be what some people like. Maybe some like the major imbalances of class and race in 1e, but very, very few of the players I DMed in HS, college and afterwards were OK with it.

As stated before, why play a fighter when you can play a fighter-cleric? Oh yea... because in 1e only non-humans can be multiclassed. And a dwarf fighter cleric can be no higher than Ftr9/Cle8. Oh wait, in 1e only NPC dwarves can be a cleric.

I never let humans multiclass in the 1st edition, but I completely did away with level restriction. I thought that attempt at balance was ridiculous. With that said, I DM'd plenty of straight class fighters, and plenty of Fighter/Cleric/MagicUsers. It depended on what the player wanted. Most players had a concept in mind before they rolled up the characters (not saying that yours did not.)

I have never as a fighter felt less effective. In fact I was often the party leader. I am mostly speaking of 3rd edition, anyway not 1st edition though my statements apply to that as well. I stopped playing 1st edition when 3rd edition was released because I liked the system better.

Most players I games with, without question, preferred balanced PCs over unbalanced ones. Yes, its only my experience, but I've been DMing since 1978, so that's a lot of players.

The players I gamed with wanted balance with the opponents they would face. I can't remember occasion when I got a player complaint about balance within classes.

OK, so at 3rd level, when the magic user in 1e used up his two 1st and one 2nd level spell, he was bonking with his quarterstaff and no armor for the rest of the game session until the part rested. In 1e, we rested a lot too. often 3-4 times a "day". He/She didn't trundle along with the fighter and stand back hoping to roll a 19 or 20 to hit. That did suck, and I had a few new players stop and ask to play a different character (or stop playing altogether) because they didn't quite grok the roleplaying part but felt useless as a character.

You will remember from those days, that was the cost of playing a mage. Most players I had stuck to it. SOme scrapped the character. One of those mages actually lasted to be converted to a 3rd edition archmage. It depended on what the player wanted. I had some players that would only play high level mages, and some players that only wanted the flashboom mage. Those were usually the minmaxers, and though (unless I am playing video game D&D like Baldurs Gate) is contrary to my play style, though I can still accomodate it.

Your experiences are valid, but I am not sure that most players from the old school would agree with Heinsoo's philosophy. From the players I talk to in my social circle, and gaming store most have tried 4e and are reverting back to 3rd edition.

 

[Dragonblade]

Precisely. D&D appealed to certain tastes, and 4E appeals to different ones. The trouble comes from slapping the "D&D" name on it.

What a load of garbage.

Whenever I read posts like this, I really wish WotC did have edition ninjas they could send out to confiscate people's books.

 

[Branduil]

Precisely. D&D appealed to certain tastes, and 4E appeals to different ones. The trouble comes from slapping the "D&D" name on it. Spirit of the Century is (from what little I've seen) a splendid game, but so is CoC -- and SotC is not CoC (or Daredevils, or Justice Inc., or anything but itself).

But 4e is D&D.

It may not be what you think of as D&D, but to someone like me, it is more D&D than any previous edition. If we're going to mythologize D&D as some kind of abstract ideal, then it's just as valid for me to say that only 4e is true D&D as it is for you to claim a previous edition is.

 

[Ariosto]

You could really make the case for AD&D not being D&D because of its divergences from oD&D (and there are some big ones).

As I recall, Gygax did basically that in Dragon magazine back in the day. He called them as different from each other as either was from competing RPGs. The "Advanced" part of the name was, I think, included throughout the rule books and other products as consistently as editors could ensure.

One difference between then and now is that the "Original Collectors Edition" remained in print.

How much can something change before it's considered something else? As a practical matter with a game, that's up to the players (who may well disagree). It can be a bit of trouble when not everyone agrees that the new thing is a fit replacement for the old. From the commercial standpoint, that might lose sales.

The existence of a d20 CoC game is not to my mind a bad thing, because it does not replace the classic game. In the latter context, I don't care which of the six(?) editions someone uses; the only big deal is that (IIRC) characters had more HP in the very first edition.

On the other hand, it matters quite a lot which "Traveller" game is to be played. There are several that have little in common except reference to the Third Imperium setting -- which did not appear in the original Traveller set! It makes a great difference whether one is playing, say, d20 System or GURPS. I'm not about to trade the "Classic" rules for either of those, but the new game from Mongoose is probably close enough for my taste (although I have no reason to switch).

As for 4E appealing to different tastes, well, it was designed to do so! Gygax did not set out to create a game that was not fun, and it did not become the tremendous success it did on the basis of players considering it not fun. People who didn't like AD&D bought and played other games (RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, Rolemaster, etc.) instead.

When the same thing gets called a "feature" by one person and a "flaw" by another, they have different tastes. That's just a fact of life.

 

[ppaladin123]

As for 4E appealing to different tastes, well, it was designed to do so! Gygax did not set out to create a game that was not fun, and it did not become the tremendous success it did on the basis of players considering it not fun. People who didn't like AD&D bought and played other games (RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, Rolemaster, etc.) instead.

What if I enjoyed previous editions of D&D but enjoy 4e more? What if I thought previous editions were fun but thought they could be more fun?

You are treating each edition of d&d like a monolith. You either enjoy the system and every one of its aspects or you don't. That's not the way it works. I dislike Vancian magic but enjoy playing 2e and 3e. I could have enjoyed 2e and 3e even more with a different magic system (and I did switch to magic points along with UA). I enjoy 3e but dislike 3e grappling rules. I was happier with simpler grappling rules. Hell, I enjoy 4e but dislike the "padded sumo" effect of granting monsters so much HP.

4e is designed to appeal to different tastes regarding particular aspects of the game system. It's not like the designers decided that fantasy roleplaying was no longer fun and decided to make a sports game with the same name. It is still a fantasy roleplaying system. The designers apparently believed that most of D&D fans would view the changes as improvements to their D&D experience. They believed that they were correcting flaws/annoyances in what was otherwise a fun system.

You can dislike the changes. You can argue that in fact most d&d players dislike the changes, or thought of the "flaws" instead as "features," but I don't know where you get off telling us that 4e is no longer D&D...because it obviously is to a lot of us here.

 

[Ariosto]

OK, so at 3rd level, when the magic user in 1e used up his two 1st and one 2nd level spell, he was bonking with his quarterstaff and no armor for the rest of the game session until the part rested. In 1e, we rested a lot too. often 3-4 times a "day". He/She didn't trundle along with the fighter and stand back hoping to roll a 19 or 20 to hit. That did suck, and I had a few new players stop and ask to play a different character (or stop playing altogether) because they didn't quite grok the roleplaying part but felt useless as a character.

By the book, rest was a requirement -- and a lot more often than 3-4 times per game day! If you were recovering spells more than once per game day, then you were breaking the rules as written.

That's quite all right! You changed the rules to suit your taste, which is pretty easy to do with such a basically simple and modular game. A lot of folks simply ignored mechanics they didn't like. It was your game; that's what you were supposed to do (although AD&D did not encourage it quite as enthusiastically as D&D did).

It might not have been worthwhile to try to house-rule AD&D into the game you wanted. I cannot see myself trying to approximate the AD&D experience by modifying 4E (although others might give it a go). If one finds oneself often compelled to change a rules-set because one considers it "broken," then it may be that one is playing the wrong game.

It's great that 4E pleases many people. It's not so great that it pisses off many people by being represented as a "better version of D&D" when they consider it perhaps not worse but something else. I like lasagna, but it's not what I want to get when I order fettucini carbonara.

Fortunately, the OGL means that there's Pathfinder for 3E fans, OSRIC for 1E fans, Labyrinth Lord for Moldvay Basic fans, and so on!

 

[MerricB]

Gygax did not set out to create a game that was not fun, and it did not become the tremendous success it did on the basis of players considering it not fun. People who didn't like AD&D bought and played other games (RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls, Rolemaster, etc.) instead.

When the same thing gets called a "feature" by one person and a "flaw" by another, they have different tastes. That's just a fact of life.

I think there's a big difference between the entire game being "fun" and individual aspects of it being "not fun".

AD&D as a whole is an enjoyable game. I played it for many years, and occasionally return to it. However, that doesn't mean that there are aspects of it that detract from the whole. In general, players work around those aspects that they don't like.

I played magic-users back in the day (these days, on the rare occasions that I play, I'm more likely to play Clerics, Bards or... Wizards).

My first experience as a magic-user was having my one offensive spell being... shocking grasp. In the days of AD&D, as a first level magic-user, it wasn't a good spell. Why did I have it? Because my DM had used the rules in the AD&D DMG for determining starting spells for my magic-user.

Yes, I had a spell that did 1d8+1 damage to one opponent, whom I had to hit first. No touch attacks back then! My best attack was actually less effective than the fighter's meat and potatoes attack. He had a 17 strength, so was 2 better at hitting than me and did the same damage with his longsword.

Yes, I should have had the sleep spell. For me to fulfill my role as a 1st-level magic-user, I needed that spell. I didn't have it because the rules as written gave me a spell that was, ahem, sub-par. Call that fun? Because I didn't. (That magic-user died fighting an ogre in his first session).

A later session where I was playing a first-level magic-user under a DM who had slightly more clues about how to treat them, I had sleep as my spell. And, wonder of wonders, in one of my first encounters I found a wand of paralyzation with seven charges. Joy of joys! All of a sudden I wasn't useless any more!

That magic-user finally reached 12th level in that AD&D campaign before it ended, and never really overshadowed the other members of the party, mainly because I didn't play it that way.

Cheers!

 

[tmatk]

.....
It's great that 4E pleases many people. It's not so great that it pisses off many people by being represented as a "better version of D&D" when they consider it perhaps not worse but something else. I like lasagna, but it's not what I want to get when I order fettucini carbonara.
.....

Seriously! I mean they design a new version and start telling us it's an improvement!?? What marketing genius thought that one up?!?!



Sorry, I couldn't resist the sarcasm! Do you really expect Wotc to not represent the new edition as better? They are trying to sell the thing!

 

[catsclaw227]

By the book, rest was a requirement -- and a lot more often than 3-4 times per game day! If you were recovering spells more than once per game day, then you were breaking the rules as written.

That's quite all right! You changed the rules to suit your taste, which is pretty easy to do with such a basically simple and modular game. A lot of folks simply ignored mechanics they didn't like. It was your game; that's what you were supposed to do (although AD&D did not encourage it quite as enthusiastically as D&D did).

It might not have been worthwhile to try to house-rule AD&D into the game you wanted. I cannot see myself trying to approximate the AD&D experience by modifying 4E (although others might give it a go). If one finds oneself often compelled to change a rules-set because one considers it "broken," then it may be that one is playing the wrong game.

Many of the people that I have played 1E AD&D with had oodles of house rules, from adding in mana, tweaking the magic items, removing racial limitations, changing multiclassing rules, mixing in Arduin Grimoire rules, changing monster stats, taking out weapon speed and weapon vs. armor class adjustments, weapon proficiencies, encumberance, how morale and "obedience" worked, etc... Most had a LOT of house rules.

I don't remember one game that was played just by the 1E RAW.

Sometimes we would take the house rules to extremes, sometimes we would dial them back, but there were always house rules.

I have been Dming since 1982, so I am behind you. I never remember a single player feeling less effective because of their CLASS. Maybe abilities, magic items, on occasion WIzard specialty class, but never due to class. Oh yeah... It happened with one of my friends Billy Stacy for the 1st edition MONK. Other than that, I have not experienced the compaint.

it wasn't so much class specifically, as it was a class choice compared to another player's class choice. When one player was done with is single 2nd level spell, and had to throw a dagger (only to miss almost every time) the other player was gleefully pounding away or bonking with his mace or sneaking around hiding in shadows. Even though the player acted like they didn't mind, just looking at their face while they had to play for 2 more hours ineffectively, wasn't very cool as a DM. I used to fabricate situations to keep them engaged (which, according to the "Why the World Exists" sandbox guys is a big no-no. Don't ever do anything that might alter the outcome of the game for the players!)

I never let humans multiclass in the 1st edition, but I completely did away with level restriction. I thought that attempt at balance was ridiculous. With that said, I DM'd plenty of straight class fighters, and plenty of Fighter/Cleric/MagicUsers. It depended on what the player wanted. Most players had a concept in mind before they rolled up the characters (not saying that yours did not.)

I have never as a fighter felt less effective. In fact I was often the party leader. I am mostly speaking of 3rd edition, anyway not 1st edition though my statements apply to that as well. I stopped playing 1st edition when 3rd edition was released because I liked the system better.

Fighters were great in 1E until they weren't nearly as powerful as the Magic User was at mid levels (10th or so) Then it was a quick slide into being very substandard.

OK, so one class is as good as or better than many other classes for the first 10 levels, but then is not nearly as effective afterwards. ANother class is WAY underpowered at the lowest levels and then is almost godlike at higher levels compared to the other classes.

I don't see the good in this.

I enjoyed 1E for many, many years. But then, as I grew older, my tastes changed, my idea of what was enjoyable (simultaneously) for all players at the table changed and the number of house rules were feeling unwieldy. It wasn't really even 1E anymore.

The players I gamed with wanted balance with the opponents they would face. I can't remember occasion when I got a player complaint about balance within classes.

As I said, it was more about how they compared to their fellow adventurers that mattered. They didn't really know if they were balanced with the monsters or their opponents because so much of the game was hidden from players behind the screen in those early days.

 

[Ariosto]

No, I am not at all surprised that WotC presents 4E as "better" than 3E; they've backed themselves into that corner by presenting it as a replacement for 3E.

Chaosium had no need to present Stormbringer as better than RuneQuest. It was possible (and indeed desirable from the business perspective) that people would be pleased to buy both, which indeed many did. The foreword to the 1993 Elric! game noted that it is was not a rewrite of Stormbringer but a new game, and that "information exists in [Stormbringer] and its supplements nowhere else available. Conversion of scenarios from it is mostly simple and quick; see pages 148-149."

The conversion issue provides a fairly objective measure of difference. I can take a module written for any major pre-3E version of D&D and use it with any other -- with few (if any) substantive changes. Introduction of a "foreign" player-character may entail a bit more work, but conversion is largely just a matter of noting race, class, level and ability scores, then applying game factors derived from those in the rules set at hand.

Conversion between AD&D and 3E can be a bit tricky, especially as levels get higher; I find it easier to go from 3E to AD&D than vice-versa. How about conversion between 3E and 4E? As I recall, the advice from Wizards was strongly to start with all new 1st-level characters rather attempt to convert a campaign from 3E to 4E.

The acid test: How about conversion between AD&D and 4E?

Maybe you have a different standard than I have. That's fine! It's not up to either of us how Hasbro uses the Dungeons & Dragons trademark. By that (even more objective, if arbitrary) standard, 4E is certainly D&D.