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!!!)
In an interesting post, Order of the Stick creator Rich Burlew says that the popular webcomic won’t be converting to 4e – kinda. He’ll transition to making 4e jokes as they occur to him, but he’s been using rules less and story more. And he notes that a lot of the specific fundamental shifts in core races, classes, etc. would cause too much story disruption to incorporate. (That’s one of my 4e gripes – existing campaigns, campaign settings, etc. can only adapt with significant self-violation…)
I let the new D&D Fourth Edition excerpts on the Wizards of the Coast site gather up this time since the first couple weren’t too notable.
Fallcrest is the new “default starting town” in the 4e DMG. It’s fine, it’s a generic small town, D&D style. I still wonder why they felt they needed to so totally cut bait with all the rich legacy of older editions. Why not Hommlet? Why not Saltmarsh, they revamped it and put it in the 3.5e DMG2 after all. But, whatever. 3/5.
Rituals are the new way you cast ‘big spells’ in D&D. Crafting magic items and raising the dead are rituals, not spells or feats. Rituals come in scrolls and books, which work like magic scrolls and books (one use vs reusable). Actually, as I read on – rituals have been used to replace any spell with a permanent effect, or even an effect that lasts more than a couple rounds. Cure Disease, Detect Secret Doors, Silence, Endure Elements, Water Breathing, and Knock are now rituals, not spells. Basically anything you wouldn’t normally cast in combat (well actually, a lot of the above I would normally cast in combat).
The latest D&D 4e excerpt, swarms, doesn’t bear much comment. It’s swarms, same as they were in 3e. They talk a lot about their “research” and “insights,” but pretty much a swarm is the same with a 4e statblock.
They do “clarify” that you can’t bull rush a swarm, which I must say has never come up for me, because you don’t need to write down rules for things that are blazingly obvious.
The one thing I don’t like is how fast swarms move. One of the ‘signature’ aspects of swarms in the movies is that they kinda mill about a lot and though an individual component is fast, the whole swarm doesn’t really move super fast, due to the need of staying together and just being kinda dumb. These swarms shoot straight at someone like an arrow, eat ’em, and shoot at the next guy like an arrow, which would be fine for some special swarm but not for all of them. 3/5.
The newest excerpt from D&D 4th Edition, “Archons“, is kinda uninspiring. Some ice dudes. And some fire dudes. The thing I find the most humorous is that they brag, “Now that we’ve (thankfully!) separated the word “elemental” in the D&D sense from the classical Greek elements of earth, fire, air, and water, there’s plenty of room for archons of your own design.”
Apparently they haven’t changed it too much – in this excerpt and in Worlds & Monsters they show earth, air, fire, and water archons. Yay to their oft-repeated goal of “moving away from bogus parallelism.” Anyway, it’s hard to take them too much to task because I don’t mind the classical elements, it’s just funny to have such a trivial example of a common problem in 4e – how their design goals sound good but their implementation leaves you going “WTF?”.
Anyway, they have a page of PDF from the Monster Manual with two ice archons. As is usual for the new MM, it goes with their new weird super-trademarkey stat block format and little to no useful fluff. The archons aren’t bad, just “elemental soldiers,” but they’re certainly not groundbreaking. 3/5.
In the newest D&D Fourth Edition excerpt, “Minions,” D&D uptakes the old concept of the “mook”. I’m not sure if Feng Shui, a HK action movie game by Robin Laws, was the first game to use mooks, but it certainly popularized them. A minion, or mook, is an opponent designed to be one of those guys that goes down like tenpins in the movies.
And you know, they did a good job here! I know you’re getting used to me squealing like someone’s poking red hot nails through my nutsack at each of these 4e excerpts, but that’s only when they deserve it.
A minion is of a power level equivalent to any other monster except it has only one hit point. So it can still have a good to hit, a big attack, etc., but one hit takes it out.
Goodman Games has a Wicked Fantasy Factory line of D&D adventures where they had mook rules and “finishing moves” and other cool stuff. But actually these mook rules are better, because the point of mooks is little to no record keeping. In WFF, mooks still had hit points.
In the last excerpt for this week, “The Quest’s the Thing,” Wizards talks about questing in the new Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.
This is another area in which gamism has been enshrined in the place of a realistic game world, and also where they had a laudable design goal that they then screwed the pooch on in implementation. The two repeated themes of 4e, sadly.
“You and Your Magic Items” discusses the very real problem of how much gear makes the PC in D&D 3e. In earlier editions, you might have a boss magical item or two but the majority of your ability in a given area was from the character, not from magic plusses. 3e/3.5e reverses that to where at high levels the gear is what makes a character effective.
They say that they’ve fixed this in 4e – but that “only three magic items are important for your attacks and defenses to keep up with the escalating power of the monsters you face.” Frankly, I disagree with a design that requires any magic items to be competitive at your level. Anyway, the three are weapon, armor, and neck slot items. (Ah, how did we get along for 20 frickin’ years in D&D without official ‘item slots’? Oh, that’s right, just fine.) So basically your attack, armor class, and saves (“defenses,” in 4e-speak). In other words, everything except skills – sigh. It’s so frustrating to me that their design goals for 4e are so right, and their implementations are so wrong. It’s not worse than 3e but why squander an opportunity to improve it, especially when you clearly see what needs improving? 3/5.
Today’s D&D 4e excerpt, “Economy & Reward,” is emblematic of the core ethic behind 4e that makes it hateful to me.
Their new theory on giving out treasure is even more obsessed with everyone getting the same stuff than previous editions. So rather than random treasure, or DM-placed treasure without doing math (God forbid) to make sure every 5th-level PC’s net worth is identical, the DMG has a “fifth level treasure parcel,” containing everything a good little group of adventurers should get while they’re fifth level. It’s broken up into ten chunks, and you just place the chunks in encounters where you think they should go. So they’re guaranteed to get the planned cash. Because any 5th level character not having the exact same amount of treasure is wrong.
This time, we review epic destinies, orcs, and giants!
Epic Destinies. As we know from previous excerpts, in D&D 4e there are three tiers of play – Heroic (levels 1-10), Paragon (levels 11-20), and Epic (levels 21-30). Epic play ends with fulfilling your “epic destiny” and immortality (and character retirement). In other words, you can “win D&D.”
Several thoughts on this.
One, I started D&D with the Basic Set, so the progression from Basic to Expert to Companion to Master to Immortal isn’t unfamiliar to me, nothing wrong with it per se.
Wizards is printing more Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition excerpts leading up to the release. And they’re still suckin’. I’ll rate each from 1 (retarded) to 5 (good idea!) 3 means “not better or worse than 3e.” Let’s look at a long list – multiclassing, the warlord class, racial benefits, paragon paths, new monsters (the swordwing and the phane), customizing monsters, and powers.
Multiclassing. Summary: multiclassing is dead. You can’t multiclass, there’s just some feats that let you take one or two abilities from another class, and they’re heavily restricted. They say in the article itself that “this approach lacks the intuitive elegance of the 3e system.” No shit. Then why replace it? Answer: so that they don’t have to work too hard on the base classes and worry about “dipping” and all. 1/5.
The Warlord. Derived from the marshal of 3e, the marshal is more of a leader than a fighter. Actually, this one seems OK, besides the really wonky class design and power format, but that’s not unique to the warlord. 4/5.
Racial Benefits. They’ve added some racial feats, which is a good idea. They’ve done it by taking most of the benefits races used to get out, which is a horrible idea. Yes, you heard that right. So instead of a dwarf getting +4 AC vs giants, they can spend a feat to get +1 AC vs anything larger. And instead of them getting proficiency in dwarven weapons, they have to spend a feat to get that plus +2 damage. The redefinition of the power is fine, the practice of taking it out of the core and making you buy it sucks. 1/5.
I go away to Vegas for a week and suddenly Wizards decides to get right with God by talking about their GSL/OGL plans! Here’s the links.
The summary is that they’ve decided not to make their GSL license terms prohibit a company from publishing *any* open games under the OGL, only any open product in the same product line as any 4e D&D product, falling firmly between the previous “by individual product” and “by entire company” theories. As an example, Paizo Publishing has an OGL line of GameMastery adventures. So theoretically, Paizo could publish 4e adventures, but under a different product line (e.g. “NewFangledAdventurez”.) This is very good news! Not great news, but good news.
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