My copy of 4th ed. showed up Thursday, and I've been working through it since then. (By the way, why did it take until Thursday for the USPS to get a package to me when it was sent on Monday morning from Jacksonville?) I'm through chapter 4 (abridged) of the Player's Handbook along with some skipping around for context and curiosity. So far I have to say that while some ideas are good ones, overall I'm underwhelmed. I'm willing to be convinced that some of it isn't as bad as I think, and undoubtably some will look better under the light of real game play, but it looks to me like one giant leap backwards to highly restricted "one true class path" rather than an evolution of the flexibility that I loved about 3rd ed.
I skipped nearly all of Chapter 1 since it's mostly "What is a Role Playing Game" and "How do you play", along with the super exciting dice sidebar. I have to believe that anyone picking up the book who doesn't already know this stuff is going to get a less coma inducing version from the people they are playing with. Anyone using this as their introduction to RPGs is going to put the book back on the shelf and run away.
Chapter 2 is better since it actually contains useful information. Synopsis of race and class, which I'll talk about in their respective chapters. WTF is this crap about character role? You need a meat shield, a medic to heal the meat shield, a thief to scout and deal with locks and traps, and a wizard to make shit blow up. Controller, defender, leader, and striker? Someone (probably many someones) took this way too seriously. On to ability scores. Saves (now types of defenses, whatever) got a little help by being able to choose the better of two ability scores as a base. Wait a second, you don't even roll dice for two of the three methods? Guess they're planning to push Living XXXX even more. Fortunately, method 3 (aka deprecated) is ye olde 4d6 drop 1.
Huh, they did away with alignment tic-tac-toe. Five alignments now: Lawful good, good, evil, chaotic evil, and doesn't matter. The old system might have been stretched thin in places, but this seems overly simplified. Some new gods, some old ones, but fewer of them. Wait, no, they just gave second rate coverage to the evil gods. Was 3rd ed. this preachy about "characters really, really should be good?" Seems a bit early to be covering what is flavor for everyone but Clerics and Paladins. More flavor. I can only assume this was done with the goal of targeting first time gamers, but it just seems really out of place here. Languages, good to know, but still out of place. Ah, game mechanics. Still "roll high on a d20" but lots of things now advanced by 1/2 character level. How to level, rant about powers later. Retraining being officially recognized is nice since some character concepts just don't work, but it seems prone to min/maxing. They made no attempt to justify from a character's POV either. The character just forgets something they knew last night and in it's place is something completely different.
On to the One True Character Advancement Table. The first thing I notice is that ability scores advance a lot more frequently. +5 total in 20 levels (or +7 in 30) of 3rd ed, +14 (+24) in the same span now. Everyone gets powers, and a fair number of them, but we still have no idea what they do. They kind of look like spell like abilities since it's broken down as at-will/encounter/daily/ utility(?). On to a quick tour of a character sheet. The most obvious change is a drastic reduction in the number of skills, also indexed off of 1/2 character level, and trained appears to be a binary +5. Not sure what bloodied and surges have to do with hit points yet, and no clue about action points either. Whoever decided how big to make the equipment box never played in a "take everything that isn't nailed down, and if we can pry it loose it isn't nailed down" type party, which is pretty much every party in every game I've played. Ah, we've escaped chapter 2.
It's late, so I'll write more tomorrow.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
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1 comments:
Character roles don't bother me. They've always been there. If you played D&D for a while, you got what the breakdown was and didn't think about. But to someone new it's not so obvious.
As for alignments, I'm reading "Good" to mean "Chaotic and Neutral Good", while "Evil" means "Neutral and Lawful Evil", on the theory that the extremes were kinda silly. I find myself agreeing.
"Take everything that we can pry up," appears to be on the out in 4e, but frustratingly they never come out and say it. The closest they come is to say that you can sell non-magical, non-art objects, if the GM allows it. From a simulation standpoint this is obviously silly. Even if the little down doesn't need a pile of swords, the town blacksmith will probably buy them off you cheap to make horseshoes. However, from a story standpoint, carrying around piles of looted gear to make a bit more money isn't heroic in the slightest. And from a game standpoint, unless you're really into spreadsheets, it's not a fun game. Frustratingly, 4e is pretty clear on how much loot a party should have at a given level, but they ignore the issue of selling a pile of leather armor from bandits. At high levels that sort of stuff is worthless, but at low levels it could easily skew the numbers. So players have incentive to push for it, and the book only hints at the answers. Perhaps the DMG is clearer on this, but I'm still working on it.
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