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.
The excellent blog Kill the Wizard First is wrestling with a lot of the same 4e shortcomings I am; he’s even trying to come up with fixes. I’m not sure it’s worth the trouble, but check it out!
Welcome to the second installment in my read-through of the new Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. This time, we’ll go through Chapter 4: Character Classes.
“Just one chapter!?!” you cry? Well, this one chapter is 125 pages long; the first three chapters combined were only 49 pages. It’s more than a third of the total book, and by far the meatiest. So buckle up, buttercup!
The classes in 4e are: cleric, fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue, warlock, warlord, and wizard. The venerable barbarian, druid, monk, and bard have been jettisoned and the warlock and warlord (was: marshal) have been imported from the 3e splatbooks. The sorcerer is gone too – or really, as we’ll see later, the new wizard is a sorcerer and the old wizard is dead.
As I read through the 4e PHB, I bring to you a play by play commentary. I’m trying to wipe what I already think I know and just take the book as it comes.
First Impressions. The layout is decent, though unexceptional – you’d think the RPG with the most money thrown at it would look the best. I am not sure I like the art style – it’s too “busy” for me, and all the characters look stiff or stilted, not natural. But for the record I didn’t really groove on the 3e “spiky partial pencil sketch” model either. So that’s a wash.
Chapter 1 – How to Play. Part of this chapter is the usual intro to roleplaying for newbies complete with the de rigeur “children’s game of make-believe” comparison. The couple interesting bits are “A Fantastic World,” where they set the stage for their “points of light” setting. I don’t really think D&D needed a default setting more hardcoded into its pages, but I reckon it’s not too hard to ignore it and swap it out. The other interesting part is in the description of the DM, where they’re careful not to say that the DM sets the rules. He builds the adventures, plays the monsters, and “referees” how to apply the rules when it’s unclear. That concerns me a little, the “DM is at the mercy of the rules” thing was previously limited to the pages of Knights of the Dinner Table.
Some preorders have accidentally shipped early, so 4e books are already showing up. And the core books are already available as torrents on all your favorite torrent sites. Be advised! Fly from evil! (S. John Ross, if the phrase “fly from evil” somehow attracts your attention via the power of the Interwebs – finish the damn game!!!)
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