D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

[Justice and Rule]

My feeling is that 4e, PF2e, 13a, and 5e just occupy certain spaces within the range of reasonable D&D-esque, d20-derived, systems, but within that space they're not especially close. So, 4e is over to one edge on "shared class structure" and the other 3 are over in the 'not shared' category, with some variation, for instance. BA is an odd concept that only 5e, of any D&D-like that I know of, has really ever tried. I'm not particularly enamored of the results. The skill system that came out of it is rather bad in some ways, for instance. The problem fundamentally is, if you are going to have a certain range of power levels within the game, you need a certain degree of progression, and the VERY VERY simplest way, which actually seems to work fine in the other 3 games, to do that is a monotonically increasing attack and defense bonus.

They're all trying for very different things. 13A is one I want to try but is definitely the most different, seeming to move away from the class skeleton while keeping with how powers are built. PF2 feels like "What if 4E was closer to 3E in concept", where it's got a lot of design aspirations from 4E but is still trying to keep the idea of 3E. And 4E... well, 4E kind of broke the ground for the mainstream on that, didn't it? Not that others didn't do such things, but rather the biggest game out there doing it was a big deal. Really sad there isn't a proper 4.5E out there.

I mean, I get the theory, a whole bunch of orcs can threaten a 10th level fighter! Yeah, in theory... But have you ever tried to run 50 orcs? I mean, it gets old quickly and they can only actually threaten the fighter if they can all focus attacks on him, which is unlikely to transpire in any decently designed scenario. Within the limits where such things are likely to be actually reasonable, 4e manages to handle it anyway, you can have level 1 goblins jumping a level 5 party. It will be fairly predictably a lopsided fight, but I actually did it, with goblins! It worked. Heck, amusingly the goblins dice got hot and the PCs discovered that their steamroller had sprung a bit of a leak... Pitted a Carrion Crawler (level 7 standard Soldier) against a level 1 party and that worked too! So I never was sold on it that much.

It's interesting to see how certain systems deal with and others don't. Minions in 4E are a great example of solving things without having to really mess with the math: You don't need to raise someone's damage output so much that it can one-shot an Ogre no problem. Instead, at a certain level you can just do it. It's a good solution.

PF2 attacks it from the other angle: your damage does go up, as well as your ability to hit and cause criticals. Thus you end up demolishing lower-level enemies while not having to change their stats or something because the math is designed to let you do it. And if you want to do hordes of little enemies, they basically have large blobs of them that act and strike together called "Troops" that represent entire units of enemies that shrink as you whittle their HP. At a certain point your fighter isn't attacking individual skeletons, but demolishing a skeleton troop where his damage output represents him swiping away 3-4 skeletons every time he hits.

I actually like BA and dislike 5E skill system which I don’t blame on BA.

I like BA because it makes sense of why a world has level 1 up to level 20 beings seemingly living side by side. PF2 you can send a bill on orca at a level 10 PC and they won’t break a sweat. Both solve math problems of the past in different ways. So largely it’s a matter of how you want the power fantasy and/or setting sim.

Slight exaggeration, but yeah, that's kind of the idea. I do think that halving PF2's level bonus would probably be a good middle ground for both systems, but I have never attempted to math it out.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I actually like BA and dislike 5E skill system which I don’t blame on BA.

I like BA because it makes sense of why a world has level 1 up to level 20 beings seemingly living side by side. PF2 you can send a bill on orca at a level 10 PC and they won’t break a sweat. Both solve math problems of the past in different ways. So largely it’s a matter of how you want the power fantasy and/or setting sim.

Sure, there are various ways to skin each cat, and we each like a bit different ones. Here maybe I AM more of a traditionalist too, D&D has always, in every edition until 5e, had roughly a +1/level attack bonus increase (in TSR D&D this was only true of fighters and similar classes, others were a bit less). Defense/AC is a bit murkier, as there wasn't a bonus at all in TSR D&D, just an expectation that characters will get enough magic items to create the correct 'curve'. 4e actually carefully reproduced the attack side of that almost exactly!

And to me, that's a core part of the progression engine! This is why I say it is bad for 5e's skill system, peasants and heroes are not the same thing, and D&D doesn't really measure them on the same scale, but 5e does....

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's plenty of that in every edition in my experience, but I see it frequently used as the default way to knock down complaints.

As long as people will over generalize from playing a few sessions of a game, or from not playing it at all, that's always going to be a thing people drop into. If you've heard the sort of claims that don't seem to sync up a dozen times, the fact this time the person may have been both sincere and not jumped to conclusion is not going to jump out at them. The fact is sounds like the same old song and dance will.

 

[Lanefan]

And, honestly, 'legacy' TO ME is not much of a word. I have my Holme's Basic book, my LBBs and supplements, my 1e and 2e books, I can play those anytime I want. I don't need every new D&D game to slavishly stick to the letter of whatever was decreed in 1974 on the back of a napkin. So the entire argument that it is some 'betrayal' or something (note @Imaro's statements) is ludicrous in my mind. WotC owes nothing to older editions, they stand on their own. Heck nowadays they'll even sell you PDFs of large parts of the TSR back catalog!

I disagree. Like it or not, with their purchase of TSR WotC made themselves custodians and curators of the game's entire history, not just the eiditons they themselves put out. As such, I feel they have a duty to support them all; similar perhaps to a car manufacturer having a duty to provide replacement parts for older models.

That they've on the whole done a very mixed (at best!) job of this doesn't excuse them from the duty.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I disagree. Like it or not, with their purchase of TSR WotC made themselves custodians and curators of the game's entire history, not just the eiditons they themselves put out. As such, I feel they have a duty to support them all; similar perhaps to a car manufacturer having a duty to provide replacement parts for older models.

That they've on the whole done a very mixed (at best!) job of this doesn't excuse them from the duty.

I have to point out almost no manufacturer of, well, anything, maintains parts and support for their past products indefinitely. After a while it aftermarket or nothing.

 

[Lanefan]

I like BA because it makes sense of why a world has level 1 up to level 20 beings seemingly living side by side. PF2 you can send a bill on orca at a level 10 PC and they won’t break a sweat.

Well, not unless the bill is excessively high or the orca decides it's hungry...

 

[Lanefan]

I have to point out almost no manufacturer of, well, anything, maintains parts and support for their past products indefinitely.

My stance is that it's their duty to their customers to do so for a much longer period of time than is often the case.

After a while it aftermarket or nothing.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My stance is that it's their duty to their customers to do so for a much longer period of time than is often the case.

That may be your stance, but since no other industry does it, I'm not holding my breath to expect it here.

 

[Yalım]

Can you link to the thread so we can see it ourselves? Cherry-picking a single comment from Reddit is not exactly a convincing argument.

In a vain attempting at preventing this from becoming a multiquote lollapalooza, I'm going to consolidate the two source requests.

I definitely don't mean to imply that my 5-odd quotes were the definitive representation of every comment about every D&D discussion I've read online, which seems to be what you're aiming at with notes about "the actual picture of the actual community". I'd say that a dismissive comment along the lines of what I posted gets trotted out at least once or twice in every reddit thread that discusses the edition, but my highest-effort experience with those involves copy/pasting the funnier ones to share and then moving on. I was able to find one of these with some search-fu, but I can't pull the other up despite my best efforts.

But more importantly, I don't really want to convince anyone here that their experience is fake or wholly non-representative or whatever. I see comments here that I think are pretty reductive or cherry-picked (and its weird that those seem to get liked in some places and questioned in others), so all I'm trying to do is lend a small voice in a sea of dissenting opinions.

And now that I've cleverly delayed my one actual link (I am bracing for its inevitable dissection...), here's the thread complaints of inter-class gameplay being too similar. Tried to zoom in enough to keep it focused, but out enough to give some context: link

I honestly don't see what's wrong with this. Sometimes people have in-built biases that make it hard to actually see how the mechanic works or prevents them from using it as intended. That's not meant to be insulting, but simply that sometimes people don't realize they are doing something wrong or missing something because they aren't looking for it in the first place. This is pretty common in PF2 because things are relatively similar, but different: my immediate thought is to how AoOs are rarer but more important in the action economy and activate more often, which means things like tripping take on new value compared to 5E. It's something that you might miss (in fact, a mid-sized YouTuber missed it when talking about PF2), but it can really change how you use certain tools.

Certainly, but when someone mentions not enjoying a certain element of gameplay, assuming it's because they're bad isn't the most clever play. Understandable? I guess. A little cringe-worthy? I think so. Notable enough remark on it once or twice in the 300th-ish page of a 350-page thread? Sure.

I mean, that's not my experience from being online for 15 years now, but sometimes you don't see certain things because your biases simply conceal them. As someone who didn't like 4E and over time came to really appreciate it, I really don't share your opinion and I've seen way more unfair criticism of 4E than any two other systems out there. I'm not even in love with the system, but I know who catches what online, and there's nothing quite like watching dozens of people say "This is just a wargame" that probably makes people a bit more stiff in their welcomes when you come at them with old arguments.

Yeah, that was the point of my comment. The folks who are posting here don't have the same experience as me. Some of the enworld threads linked here are older than my account! I think your note on bias is probably relevant to those threads, but it's not really my place to tell you (or Hussar, or whoever else that's complaining about being yelled at for badwrongfun) that the conversations you're tired of never happened. I just want to give you my perspective: I've been on D&D related social media a similar amount of time, and I like to think I've formed a nuanced opinion of its positives (which exist!) and negatives (which also exist). I've found that reasoned criticism of 4e was frequently shouted down in some very unfair ways, ranging for passive-aggressive insults to outright hostility. It's the only edition that I still can't have a reasoned discussion about in any discord server. At least one person got banned from one of my discord servers ("my" as in I'm on it, not that I run it) because they were so obnoxious to other members.

Do my 10~20 years of talking about D&D on the internet mean that your personal experience is fake? I don't think so. Does yours make mine fake? I certainly hope not.

If that's the worst 5E got, then honestly it should count itself lucky.

No worries, it wasn't

As long as people will over generalize from playing a few sessions of a game, or from not playing it at all, that's always going to be a thing people drop into. If you've heard the sort of claims that don't seem to sync up a dozen times, the fact this time the person may have been both sincere and not jumped to conclusion is not going to jump out at them. The fact is sounds like the same old song and dance will.

That's the funny thing. If it were an issue with just a few sessions, I'd see this behavior in every game. But (again this is my experience!) I don't see it with 3e, with 5e, with most Apocalypse games, with Blades, with Infinity. I just see it with the tactics-heavy games. Couldn't tell you why.

 

[Gilladian]

Right, there's always people who are happy with the game they have already. My sister @Gilladian ran 3.x for years and never really left. She played 4e and liked it and bought at least a couple of the books, but never saw a big reason to run it. I don't think that's philosophical or dislike especially, just no need to change. She has the 5e stuff and ran 2 long 5e campaigns for us. But her regular group still plays 3.5 and I guess that's just fine for them, they all know it and have tons of books etc. Even PF1e didn't really apparently do anything they care about.

It's not due to some principal though, we are doing regular sessions of Agon and Stonetop right now, and she's the one that got me to play Dungeon World too. I'm sure she'd have fun with BitD etc. as well.

Out in the real world this whole thing with editions and this or that type of game is largely moot. Look at her posting history, I highly doubt there's anything theoretical or arguing any point of view. It's all adventure advice and such. That's the reality of the vast majority, even of people playing for 40+ years.

Well, no I don’t care much about philosophy of games. I like what I like. 5e is okay, but we (my particular gaming group core of 3 people) are happy with 3.5, which we play like we played 2e. 4e was my least favorite edition. As my brother says, I did play it, own a few of the books, but would NOT play again if given any option. My main reason? The PH is indecipherable to me. I simply could not read it and make sense of creating a character.