To help you through the reorganization, here’s the new 4e PHB FAQ, oddly squirreled away in the Help section of the Wizards site, NOT in the main Products… FAQ section, which only has the old 3/3.5 FAQs. Then, there’s a separate place where they’re posting PDF “Updates” to the books (a more positive way of saying “Errata.” There’s 3 pages of PHB errata already!
Sadly, prolific game designer Erick Wujcik (Amber, TMNT, Rifts, etc.) has passed away after a long battle with cancer. Our sympathies to his family and friends. Read more.
We’re closing in on the end of our chapter by chapter dissection of the Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. This time – combat!
Much of this chapter is familiar to players of any edition of D&D; I’ll stress the differences (being an intro to D&D for noobs is beyond the scope of this readthrough). Most of it is familiar, only different in the fine implementation details. As we get started, everything sounds familiar:
Much of the meat here is in the definitions. 4e isn’t’ quite as “definition based” as Spycraft 2.0, which went from a good game to an exercise in tedium in one version, but it makes a stab at it – your old Magic: The Gathering playing skills will serve you well in terms of strict interpretation.
After the awfulness that was the magic item section, we resume our readthrough of the new Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook.
The first section is “Quests.” These are the new way they’re factoring adventures, into multiple “quests,” where a quest has a goal and a reward. It refers to the DMG for more, but I don’t really like the MMORPGey feel – a player can propose a quest for the DM to vet to get a “stake in the campaigns’ unfolding story.” Maybe it’s grumpy grognard-itis, but I don’t recall my characters needing specific rewards offered to “find my mother’s remains in the Fortress of the Iron Ring.” I’ll withhold judgment till DMG readthrough time.
Next, they discuss encounters, artificially separating them into combat and noncombat types. This seems like an odd artificial distinction to me, but is apparently because the DMG has separate rules for “skill challenges”.
Experience points. They cap out at 1 million (30th level). Same deal as in all previous editions otherwise. Except that when you level you go “ding”, glow with yellow light, and immediately go to max hit points. (No, not really.)
Over on Game Playwright, Jeff Tidball has a good post on the ‘flow’ of a game and how it gets disrupted, in as annoying a fashion as disruptions in a movie, by people doing other stuff and the omnipresent jokesters.
I have found this to be very true. In one long-term heavy RP campaign I ran, the group agreed to several rules that were specifically designed to address this.
Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition has hit stores, but as my readthrough review shows, you probably shouldn’t bother with it (see the “4e PHB Readthrough” posts on this blog for the nitty gritty). It’s a World of Warcraft-inspired tactical combat game, very unlike (and incompatible with) previous editions of D&D.
Many people love to attack the bearer of bad news, so let me be clear about my background. I’m not one of those D&D-haters, or someone who has only played Third Edition and therefore can’t believe anything might be an improvement. I’ve gamed since the early 1980s, starting with Star Frontiers and quickly moving to the D&D Basic set, and happily migrating to AD&D first edition, AD&D second edition, and D&D third edition. Each time, the new version of D&D, with its improved elegance and increased options, easily sold me on being an improvement on the previous version, and I was happy to upgrade! My bookcases still bear the weight of more Second Edition gear than anything else, just because they published the most product ever in that generation – but except for repurposing adventures those books lay fallow after the upgrade. I view players of “1e derivative” products like Castles & Crusades and OSRIC with pity; I enjoyed my First Edition days but I don’t find that I want to go back there.
I’m also not a D&D-only guy – I’ve played everything from Deadlands to Feng Shui to Call of Cthulhu – I have several Cthulhu Master’s tourneys under my belt and have playtest credits in things as farflung as “Wraith: The Great War.” Check out my RPG reviews – they’re pretty widespread. I also can’t be accused of being just a “collector”, I play all the time. So I think I know RPGs in general, and D&D in particular. I don’t have a (previous) bone to pick with WotC. I helped launch 3e as one of the original Living Greyhawk Triads at Gen Con 2000. OK, so enough about my credentials.
4e is the first time I thought of D&D, “Whoa – this isn’t going in the right direction.”
In this installment of our read through of the Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook, we take a look at equipment. Every class starts with 100 gold to equip themselves, a welcome reduction in complexity from the class-based random roll that still persisted in 3e.
Armor has the first big changes. It’s divided into light or heavy. With light armor, you add your Int or Dex modifier, whichever’s higher, to your AC. With heavy armor, you don’t.
Even mages are proficient with cloth armor, which though it doesn’t give an armor bonus, can be made of special materials or gain enchantments that do. That’s pretty elegant.
Another day, another twenty pages of the D&D Fourth Edition Players Handbook, read and broken down for your deviant pleasures. This time, it’s Chapter 5: Feats.
Feats were the “big addition” in the Third Edition rules. Other games had done them, but this was the first time D&D had done anything like it.
As expected, you get many more feats in 4e. One at every other level, and one at 11th and 21st to boot. They break feats down into Class, Divinity, Multiclass, and Racial. There are also general feats, but that’s not officially a category. They are also broken up into Heroic, Paragon, and Epic levelled feats – you can’t take feats from a higher tier.
Welcome to the latest installment in my blow-by-blow readthrough of the new Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. Or as those of us “in the know” (read: geeks) call it, the D&D 4e PHB.
Chapters 1-3 started out promising enough, until the classes section in Chapter 4 took a far left turn for World of Warcraft territory. Let’s see how skills work now in 4e.
For those of you who are “utes,” back in the day D&D didn’t have anything like skills. They were introduced in rudimentary fashion in Second Edition and became a full-fledged system in Third Edition.
Chris Pramas, Nicole Lindroos, and Erik Mona talk about open gaming – OGL, GSL, 4e, Pathfinder, True20, and more in this podcast! Get a free 1 1/2 hours (maybe from not going to see the new Indiana Jones movie) and listen to it! Yes, Wizards is still sitting on the new GSL, so much is speculation, but it’s a good overview.
I got a batch of books at Half Price Books the other day – you can find such great stuff there. In this case, the personal memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant! I had to laugh; his very first assignment was here in Texas for the Mexican War, and he was travelling from Corpus Christi to San Antonio and thence Austin. Grant notes, “The journey was hazardous on account of Indians, and there were white men in Texas whom I would not have cared to meet in a secluded place.” Woot for violent white Texans! Scaring Yankees since 1845.
There’s nothing like reading about events from the perspective of the great men who participated in them. In many ways Grant parallels the standard “adventurer” career path! Aimless at first and ending up in the Army by no fault of his own, “levelling up” fairly quickly in rank, and ultimately deciding the fate of a nation, by force of arms and the grace of God.
Alas, his “epic destiny” was to die sick and poor; in the real world that is second only to death by violence in the most popular fates of heroes.
The buzz has been all about 4e lately. But much better are my recent RPG purchases from my FLGS, Rogue’s Gallery, here in Austin (well, Round Rock), Texas.
Geek Related 