Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition: Initial Impressions

[Alex_P]

Wow, is Alex_P ever the worthless Monty Haul player we were always trying to avoid if he believes that we should equate treasure with XP. There's a reason it's called a role-playing game - you role-play when participating in the game. Dur.

Jesus McFuck!

COLLECTING GOBS OF TREASURE AND THEN WASTING IT ALL POINTLESSLY IS WHAT A PULP FANTASY CHARACTER IS SUPPOSED TO DO!

Unlike you, I actually have a concept of "role-playing" that's more developed than "Oh, gee, role-playing is any time you talk in character!" Genre emulation -- trying to make the narrative of play resemble a particular style of fiction -- is most definitely an example of role-playing.

I don't actually like most of the pulp fantasy stuff that Gygax and his friends were emulating.
I can, however, look beyond my own genre preferences and say "Hey, this is a game mechanic that works well for the kind of role-playing they were trying to do".

-- Alex

 

[McClaud]

COLLECTING GOBS OF TREASURE AND THEN WASTING IT ALL POINTLESSLY IS WHAT A PULP FANTASY CHARACTER IS SUPPOSED TO DO!

Maybe it was that way back in the 1970's, but D&D has come a long way from that. I expect it to evolve somewhat. I expect it to be more than Chainmail and less than a LARP.

And nowhere in my response did I say that role-playing was merely talking in-character. I said immersion and atmosphere are important because when you are playing a game that involves one guy telling other guys what's going on while they tell him how their characters react requires the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the characters. Otherwise, what's the point? Go play a video game or something.

If you want to play a boardgame where the goal is to do better than other people, collecting gold and treasure, and leveling up, I have this game called Descent: Journeys in the Dark by Fantasy Flight Games that emulates that quite well without having to role-play at all. There's also a game called Dungeon and one called Munchkin Quest if you want to go the less serious route. Hell, I was even a part of the Descent beta-testing team. Those games do a better job of it than 4e does any day of the week.

Chibz -

Hey, sometime you should take a look at Paizo. They support people trying to write their own campaigns and such, and even have contests where they pick the best and actually print them. Even if you don't win, you get some recognition for trying.

EDIT: Ooops, just noticed you already play Pathfinder. That's Paizo right there.

 

[ultimaavalon]

@OP

Rule #1: The DM can change/add/remove any rule in any handbook

 

[Alex_P]

@OP

Rule #1: The DM can change/add/remove any rule in any handbook

Once you start changing most of the rules, though, you should just give up and find or write a different system.

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

Maybe it was that way back in the 1970's, but D&D has come a long way from that. I expect it to evolve somewhat. I expect it to be more than Chainmail and less than a LARP.

You misunderstood. I was specifically talking about "Gold = XP" as a mechanic from the 70s; that's why I signposted it as a feature of "old D&D".

Back then, your characters largely didn't have anything game-mechanically tangible to spend the money on, since your books didn't actually say anything about crafting or buying magic items. By default, miscellaneous treasure couldn't be simply converted into powerful magic like in 3e/3.5e/4e. It was just... loot. What you did with the gold once you acquired it was largely a matter of fluff.

"Gold = XP" is a mechanic targeted at role-playing, not wargaming. In the context of "I want to play Lord of the Rings" or "I want to play Elric" or "I want to play a Mercedes Lackey novel about psychic unicorns", this is a crappy mechanic. In the context of "I want to play basic pulp fantasy adventures full of greed, hedonism, and grave-robbing", this was a good mechanic. Because it encouraged players to make their characters act like greedy hedonistic grave-robbers just like the protagonists of the stories they were trying to copy. It gave you a reason to go out and acquire loot even though, game-mechanically speaking, loot did almost nothing once you had it.

Hell, it did this better than modern D&D's "spend loot on magic crap to make yourself more powerful" approach, because it encouraged the characters to build strongholds (role-playing) or blow it all on wastrel-icious entertainments (role-playing, especially in the context of the kind of fiction Gygax liked) rather than living like scavenging hobo-nomads in order to hoard all their money to buy the next plus on their swords.

It's a pretty silly and clunky mechanic, but I still think this is pretty much the best D&D has ever really done to align a player's game-mechanical goals with a character's in-fiction goals -- and, yeah, that's supposed to be a withering indictment of just how little D&D throughout the ages has actually done to "support" role-playing.

Forget about "munchkins" and "monty haul" and all the other modern-D&D-player orthodoxies for a second and just look at what the mechanic does in play, in the context of the early game that it was a part of.

If you want to play a boardgame where the goal is to do better than other people, collecting gold and treasure, and leveling up, ...

But I don't! I don't actually want to play gold-greedy pulp-fantasy heroes. I just recognize that some people did, and that it wasn't 'muchkinism' or 'poor role-playing' or whatever that motivated this.

That said, there is this simple little game called 3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars, which features competition to see who can level faster, who can get better gear, and who can achieve the highest rank, and it totally kicks D&D's ass as a role-playing-oriented role-playing game.

-- Alex

 

[McClaud]

@OP

Rule #1: The DM can change/add/remove any rule in any handbook

The problem with that is that so much of the 4e's rules are interconnected that if I were to remove or change one encounter power, or change how a stat works, the entire thing breaks down. 3.5 isn't much nicer, but at least if I move a stat or remove a feat, the game can still be played in the manner upon which it was designed.

I take away one thing a Warlord can do, or change his core stats or abilities, he stops working altogether.

Also, 4e should have just dropped alignment. Lawful Good and Chaotic Evil are not the extremes of the alignment scale, and trying to simplify that just proves the designers don't understand that mechanic at all.

That said, there is this simple little game called 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars features competition to see who can level faster, who can get better gear, and who can achieve the highest rank, and it totally kicks D&D's ass as a role-playing-oriented role-playing game.

Then you'd hate playing with me, since XP is like the hardest thing to achieve in my games. It's not about leveling up fast, it's about how you affect the world and change the overall story.

Case in point - my present campaign has been going on for two months now. The players are still level 3. The players have eliminated the goblin threat, allowing their town to now expand. They've helped establish a Guild in their home town and are presently riding on horses they were rewarded with to the nearest city to negotiate a trade agreement. They love it - their actions actually have an impact on the world at large, and they don't need a ton of loot or XP to actually accomplish their goals.

 

[51gunner]

I just started playing 4'th Edition, having never played 3.x or anything previous to that. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and because most of my experience with any kind of a role-playing game previous to this is an MMO, I'm happy as a pig in shit with all the freedom.

I've seen how steadfast some people can be in defending their previous editions, so I decided to take a look at it, and talk to my friend who's played since then, and it all sound complex to the nines. The streamlining of the rules stands as a good point in my books. I'm playing with a bunch of other new players, and while I've got a pretty good grasp on the rules, others do not constantly. I can see 3.X being a MUCH harder to pick up, and that's a fault in my books.

Also, about things like martial encounter powers, I've always figured that your enemy gets wise to that trick.

 

[Chibz]

Honestly, I'm not sure what to say if you thought third edition was complicated. It really, really isn't. Then again, some people found third edition GRAPPLY complicated. Which is also comical.

 

[Drake the Dragonheart]

My idea is that instead of playing them anymore, I could start ... designing them. Or at least the settings. There seems to be little interest around for Dark Heresy (a game I'm interested in). Maybe I'll start a thread...

Have you ever considered White Wolf's World of Darkness? Great for modern day campaigns, although it does have a markedly different style than D&D

 

[51gunner]

Meh. I heard that some things like grappling were just needlessly complicated where they didn't have to be. Something I neglected to mention was the things like save vs. death and item-eating monsters. I suppose it's all up to the DM on that though.

It's really all irrelevant though. I'm playing 4'th Ed, I'm enjoying 4'th Ed, and that's all that matters.

 

[Alex_P]

Honestly, I'm not sure what to say if you thought third edition was complicated. It really, really isn't. Then again, some people found third edition GRAPPLY complicated. Which is also comical.

The problem with grappling is that it's rarely used and works different from most other attack mechanics. I'm rusty on 3.5e mechanics, but I can't think of anything else that's resolved the way grapple is: AoO -> touch attack -> opposed check using a special set of modifiers. This is jarring, like suddenly having to roll under a target value in a game that is normally "roll over".

Grappling also comes up only rarely in most games, so people forget how it works.

It's like 3rd Editions' disease or poison rules. They come up infrequently and don't resemble anything else in the system so you have to go digging through the book to make sure you got the details right.

I don't think of 3e as particularly complex but I still consider it over-complicated. The rules are full of special cases and inter-related abilities and special exceptions that don't actually add much to the game.

-- Alex

 

[Alex_P]

Then you'd hate playing with me, since XP is like the hardest thing to achieve in my games. It's not about leveling up fast, it's about how you affect the world and change the overall story.

Case in point - my present campaign has been going on for two months now. The players are still level 3. The players have eliminated the goblin threat, allowing their town to now expand. They've helped establish a Guild in their home town and are presently riding on horses they were rewarded with to the nearest city to negotiate a trade agreement. They love it - their actions actually have an impact on the world at large, and they don't need a ton of loot or XP to actually accomplish their goals.

It really depends on the game. I like fast advancement. I like no advancement. I even like when character advancement is replaced with a painful inexorable decline. I'm generally wary of slow advancement because it means that the game is slow, too, but I'm not categorically opposed to the idea.

The key thing here is that games are better when the game mechanics, especially the reward cycle, directly address what the characters are supposed to be doing in the game.
 

3:16 is a game about kill-happy space-marine machismo. Your characters are some of the few that have left the veritable paradise of Earth to go explore the galaxy and destroy every single thing they encounter. To them, racking up Kills is like racking up points. The game mechanics reward getting the highest Kill count with a "level", which in turn makes it easier to rack up Kills -- this is the small-scale reward cycle at work. They're not really soldiers, they're semi-sociopathic monsters. It's not really a war, it's a game; it's not really a game, it's serial genocide. If the game-mechanics didn't make the players feel motivated to keep score while they commit genocide, then it would be a bad role-playing game. Dicking each other over while trying to see who can frag the most bugs is an essential feature of the characters you're playing.

In the long arc, 3:16 is a game about your characters realizing that they are semi-sociopathic monsters playing a sick game of genocide and seeing what they do about it. The game starts out with simple character stereotypes and has the players build them up in play, turning flashbacks that explore their personalities into their greatest moments of heroism or weakness. The PCs become more and more fleshed out while the missions and levels fade into the background and "Why the fuck are we doing this?" takes center stage -- this is the "Fruitful Void [http://www.lumpley.com/comment.php?entry=119]" circumscribed by the reward cycle.

"Let's see who can kill the most shit!" sounds mucnhkin-y and dysfunctional to a D&D player because you're used to a dynamic where that isn't part of any larger purpose and just distracts you from whatever heroic storyline you're trying to create. I love 3:16 specifically because it demonstrates that that doesn't have to be the case.

Played for laughs, 3:16 can make damn good black humor; it "out-Verhoevens Verhoeven", as one reviewer put it. Played for drama, it's sick, tragic, probing. And practically every element of the game is designed to do this -- specifically this. That's what I expect from a game.
 

Most of the games I bother to keep on my shelf do something like this with the reward cycle. It would be ludicrous for them to do it the way 3:16 does, of course, because they're not about the same thing. Examples:
- I've got a game about religion, community, and moral conflicts, where your characters can improve as a consequence of a failed conflict.
- I've got a game about serial sword-and-sorcery storytelling. Sessions are like short stories, so there is no traditional power-up mechanics. Instead, being the underdog in the narrative is rewarded with the opportunity for the character to return in next week's story.
- I've got a game about chivalric tragedy, where your characters grow in zeal through their steadfast devotion to a proud ideal and then inexorably fall as zeal turns to weariness and they see that their cause is lost.
- I've got a game about 20s-style pulp heroes: explorers and aviators and super-scientists and mystics and whatnot. By default, there is no character advancement. It's unnecessary. You can rejigger the power levels from time to time if you want but there's no reason for the characters to be gaining new abilities after every adventure together.

It frustrates me that, in 30-plus years of its existence, the D&D couldn't get any closer to this than the old "Gold = XP" rule, which only made sense twenty years ago before D&D drifted into the styles it is usually played in today. ("Roleplaying XP", the common ad-hoc solution, is a joke; it's arbitrary and clunky and has next to nothing to do with the game mechanics; since it's just feeding your ability to kill stuff, it doesn't actually close the loop and create a reward cycle.)

-- Alex

 

[jimduckie]

great to see that D&D is still played ,i haven't played in years it was and still is better than sitting alone in front of the tube as for new ideas in the game well when i played we always added changes to make it unique we even made a dm a mortal character that died and playing with more than one character per player was a blast usually 3 each and yeah you can do that if you want too the books are just a guide that's what is so fun about D&D

 

[TsunamiWombat]

I have absolutly NO idea how 4.0 can be converted to Ravenlofts campagin setting :\

 

[Simriel]

I stopped at Developers playing WoW.
I have to say, if you see how it resembles WoW, then you wanted it to resemble it.
Noone can ever back that statement up either. how does it resemble World of Warcraft?
D&D 4e is a return to form of what D&D started out as. Therein, a player centric war game. 4e is not some "fix" or some "add on book" to 3.5. Hell, when AD&D came out, everything from first edition became useless. When 3.0 came out, everything from AD&D became useless. Decrying fourth edition for cycling out your old books is an argument fallacy.
If you want to use your Tome of Battle, don't play fourth edition. Complaining that you can't use Unearthed Arcana with it, is like complaining that you can't use Races of the Wild with Werewolf: The Forsaken.

As well, d20, is not D&D. D20 is a system based in which all actions focus on the d20. keep that in mind.
Fourth edition was not made to "perfect" d20. It was designed so that players could work together, in an equal enviornment instead of melee classes becomming useless after level 6. It was also designed with the idea that every in game action should grant experience. From role playing, to combat, to the new skill challenges.

To answer your thign about spinning sweep: Power balance. Being prone grants huge bonuses, not to mention if you swing an axe at someone's legs, they'd probably come off.

Now, you talked about cut and paste abilities: Warlord to Cleric. Their powers that heal, are vastly different. The Cleric, gets ability bonuses to damage healed. Warlord does not.
Warlock to Wizard: Magic missile cannot have anythign added to it. Thus, the attack only rises when your ability does. Eldritch blast can have bonuses added onto it. Eldritch blast also gets bigger.
Different classes abilities function differently. If you play the game, you'll realise pretty quickly, that even in a group of 5, you'll need more than one healer. And two clerics, is useless. Warlord's also have ONE healign ability at 2nd level. Clerics have five, four if non human.
Your entire review comes reads of trying out the game with a disposition of already wanting to dislike it. It's a fantasy role playing game. Treat it as such. I don't decry World of Darkness because it's too different from D&D 3.5. If you hate it, do like I did with Magic: The Gathering. When what you liked about the game was nolonger allowed in Tournaments, stop going to tournaments.
Also: You are the first person I have ever seen compare Teiflings to Draenai. (And yes, I know it's what you meant because of the beard of horns.)
You also compared the combat to Wow, without once again explaining. This leads me to beleive you barely even played the game for more than an hour. Combat has the same flow of 3.5, it's just less complicated due to less, and easily understanndable abilities. This entire review is a complete fallacy.

For once Necros I agree with you. My GM for my Star Wars Saga game, compared the rule book for it, to the D&D 4th ed book (remember Star Wars Saga is based off of D&D 3.5). In order to work out ONE encounter it takes a GD/DM ten minutes to figure out ever individual attacker and what each attacker can do. whereas for 4th Ed D&D a GM can attack the player with ten of a monster and just flip to that monsters page, where everything it can do is described and laid out on the page.

 

[Alex_P]

My idea is that instead of playing them anymore, I could start ... designing them. Or at least the settings. There seems to be little interest around for Dark Heresy (a game I'm interested in). Maybe I'll start a thread...

Try reading some some "actual play" posts on RPGnet [http://forum.rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?f=68], perhaps? I find them to be a good way to see what's out there and get a vague hint of what it feels like.

-- Alex

 

[Chibz]

Honestly, I'm not sure what to say if you thought third edition was complicated. It really, really isn't. Then again, some people found third edition GRAPPLY complicated. Which is also comical.

The problem with grappling is that it's rarely used and works different from most other attack mechanics. I'm rusty on 3.5e mechanics, but I can't think of anything else that's resolved the way grapple is: AoO -> touch attack -> opposed check using a special set of modifiers. This is jarring, like suddenly having to roll under a target value in a game that is normally "roll over".

Grappling also comes up only rarely in most games, so people forget how it works.

It's like 3rd Editions' disease or poison rules. They come up infrequently and don't resemble anything else in the system so you have to go digging through the book to make sure you got the details right.

I don't think of 3e as particularly complex but I still consider it over-complicated. The rules are full of special cases and inter-related abilities and special exceptions that don't actually add much to the game.

-- Alex

Grapple is NOT complicated. It is actually a very simple mechanic.

1. Attack of Opportunity (Unless you have improved grapple feat)
2. Melee touch attack (Nothing completely out of left field so far)
3. Opposed grapple check. Calculation: BaB + strength modifier + special size modifier.
4. Movement is free into their square, opposed grapple each round.

Poison: Fortitude save vs DC for initial, save again minute later for secondary. Usually similar, but sometimes different effects.

Disease: Fortitude save to shrug off effects. If failed, take negative effects after incubation period. Each day, save or take damage again. On two successful saving throws, the disease was fought off and the player recovers.

I don't see how anyone could be confused by any of this, and just because YOU don't use half the means provided to challenge your players... Doesn't mean every DM's game is a total cakewalk.

 

[Chibz]

My idea is that instead of playing them anymore, I could start ... designing them. Or at least the settings. There seems to be little interest around for Dark Heresy (a game I'm interested in). Maybe I'll start a thread...

Try reading some some "actual play" posts on RPGnet [http://forum.rpg.net/forumdisplay.php?f=68], perhaps? I find them to be a good way to see what's out there and get a vague hint of what it feels like.

-- Alex

I decided to make a valiant attempt at having my own campaign setting published, for a competitor rule set. If you have any... interesting ideas you would like to contribute, I would certainly enjoy them (and give you full credit & thanks in publication).

 

[Alex_P]

I decided to make a valiant attempt at having my own campaign setting published, for a competitor rule set. If you have any... interesting ideas you would like to contribute, I would certainly enjoy them (and give you full credit & thanks in publication).

That "competitor rule set" being Pathfinder?

I suggest looking further afield, just for short while. There are some really crazy-different games out there. Many of them don't have more than one game book and don't require huge time commitments to master, and they can be a great source of inspiration for your D&D play or a useful diversion for when the whole group can't get together or you want a break from your current game.

If you're dead certain you want more stuff that resembles 3rd Edition D&D, take a quick look at E6 in addition to Pathfinder.

It's very easy. You already know 95% of the rules, probably by heart. You have all the books you need.

But it's totally different from playing 3rd Edition.

E6: The Game Inside D&D [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=352719].

-- Alex

 

[Chibz]

I decided to make a valiant attempt at having my own campaign setting published, for a competitor rule set. If you have any... interesting ideas you would like to contribute, I would certainly enjoy them (and give you full credit & thanks in publication).

That "competitor rule set" being Pathfinder?

I suggest looking further afield, just for short while. There are some really crazy-different games out there. Many of them don't have more than one game book and don't require huge time commitments to master, and they can be a great source of inspiration for your D&D play or a useful diversion for when the whole group can't get together or you want a break from your current game.

If you're dead certain you want more stuff that resembles 3rd Edition D&D, take a quick look at E6 in addition to Pathfinder.

It's very easy. You already know 95% of the rules, probably by heart. You have all the books you need.

But it's totally different from playing 3rd Edition.

E6: The Game Inside D&D [http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=352719].

-- Alex

I mastered Pathfinder's current beta in half an hour... So far, we're building the game world with a new list of base races. Why work using the game similar to 3.5E? Because 3.5E is pretty solid.

I'm not making a whole new game; just a campaign setting. Sort of like Forgotten Realms, or Greyhawk.