Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition: Initial Impressions

[The Medic Who Ubered The World]

I tried 4.ed but I feel quite limited by the new system. You had to spend much time(especially as a DM) to get the hang of 3rd ed but when you mastered it there were no limits but your creativity and DM skills. I also had no problems with overcomplicated rules(well apart from flying combat. i just simplified them for my group.
But it is much easier to simplify a complicated rule than working with the strict "You wanna have a fight with an elder void dragon on an asteroid closing in the planets atmosphere? You don't need that for your campaign, you see? Why don't you just [use standard situation]?




I also find it hard to accept what they did to Faerun in 4th ed.

"hey guys, we did supplements for almost every part of faerun now...every area has its own book, the history is detailed..theres a huge pantheon of gods...there's not much more to sell!"

And so they thought about that problem...
And their flawless solution:
"ZOMG SPELLPLAGUE!!!11
We kill off the godess of magic and with her all mages to justify the new mechanics of 4th ed in this setting! We get rid of most of the gods, characters, countries and organisations by nuking half of the map so we can fit these new manly dragon dudes in there!"

Next step:

"Lets set the time a few hundred years into the future that there is almost nothing recognisable left in this new points-of-light setting but Cormyr and Drizzt!"

"Wonderful! Now we can sell supplements again for years! And the hopefully new arriving Wow fans won't be distracted by the rich background and can concentrate more on bashing draenai sculls in the new Outland area"

And there was much happiness among the crowd.

They could have created a new exciting campaign setting for 4th edition but NO, they had to
eviscerate an existing old one :/ It's Forgotten realms:Burning Crusade
No thanks guys, I'm staying with faerun 3.5 or my own settings.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

I haven't actually played in a 4th ed game yet. I've GMed two short sessions, neither were very inspiring. The combat is nice and tactical, but lacks creativity. Similarly all PC's are pretty much the same. They're all more capable yes, but they are all much more boring.

I'll stick with SAGA edition for all my D20 needs, it's more fun AND more maleable.

 

[Chibz]

I tried 4.ed but I feel quite limited by the new system. You had to spend much time(especially as a DM) to get the hang of 3rd ed but when you mastered it there were no limits but your creativity and DM skills. I also had no problems with overcomplicated rules(well apart from flying combat. i just simplified them for my group.
But it is much easier to simplify a complicated rule than working with the strict "You wanna have a fight with an elder void dragon on an asteroid closing in the planets atmosphere? You don't need that for your campaign, you see? Why don't you just [use standard situation]?




I also find it hard to accept what they did to Faerun in 4th ed.

"hey guys, we did supplements for almost every part of faerun now...every area has its own book, the history is detailed..theres a huge pantheon of gods...there's not much more to sell!"

And so they thought about that problem...
And their flawless solution:
"ZOMG SPELLPLAGUE!!!11
We kill off the godess of magic and with her all mages to justify the new mechanics of 4th ed in this setting! We get rid of most of the gods, characters, countries and organisations by nuking half of the map so we can fit these new manly dragon dudes in there!"

Next step:

"Lets set the time a few hundred years into the future that there is almost nothing recognisable left in this new points-of-light setting but Cormyr and Drizzt!"

"Wonderful! Now we can sell supplements again for years!"

And there was much happiness among the crowd.

They could have created a new exciting campaign setting for 4th edition but NO, they had to
eviscerate an existing old one :/
No thanks guys, I'm staying with faerun 3.5 or my own settings.

Thanks for making me look up what happened to that particular campaign world. I only looked at the PHB, and this monstrosity. Right here.

Those are all the base fourth edition planes; all four of them, and a demiplane.

Yaaaay.

There's a very good reason why my party unanimously decided to avoid 4E like the plague.

 

[The Medic Who Ubered The World]

Look how lost Sigil looks now!

The Lady of Pain must be turning in her grave!(well i don't know if she's dead or if she could die but who knows what else the designers did)

Just wait till you see what 4th edition did to the blood war, and the relationship of gods, devas and devils...

*goes back to his own grimdark matrix setting, grumbling*

 

[Krakyn]

The obvious difference here is what you're looking for in a game: do you want more tactical gameplay or more creative gameplay?

Things that make people's creative side happy are always getting flak for being "unnecessary." So 4th edition shaved off the unnecessary parts, but that's what some of us who played 3.5 liked.

It's like your parents saying that video games are unnecessary; they are, but they make you happy. I don't care about power balance and true tactics, I care about killing an entire village by tangling it up in thorns with my Druid. It's fun.

 

[Chibz]

I care about my goblin wizard flying to a drow city, and making them bow before him or be destroyed by his spell-resistance piercing, maximized fireballs.

Then blowing them up anyways.

The only way to once-again bring the level of freedom allowed in 3.5 is to house rule a LOT. In the end, turning 4E INTO 3.5E.

So why bother.

Note: The dragon people suck.

 

[Alex_P]

The obvious difference here is what you're looking for in a game: do you want more tactical gameplay or more creative gameplay?

Things that make people's creative side happy are always getting flak for being "unnecessary." So 4th edition shaved off the unnecessary parts, but that's what some of us who played 3.5 liked.

D&D's "creative" side has always sucked, in my opinion.

I flat-out don't want to play 4e, but I don't see how they could've played to anything but the "tactical" side without chopping up the game entirely, which would've freaked out a lot more fans.

-- Alex

 

[Chibz]

I, personally, run a 3.5E (soon to change to pathfinder) game that plays to both tactical and creative sides.

It's done with surprising ease.

 

[Alex_P]

Thanks for making me look up what happened to that particular campaign world. I only looked at the PHB, and this monstrosity. Right here.

Those are all the base fourth edition planes; all four of them, and a demiplane.

Yaaaay.

There's a very good reason why my party unanimously decided to avoid 4E like the plague.

In the same sense that you can look at the map in the 2nd Edition Planescape boxed set and claim that there are only five planes (Prime Material, Astral, Ethereal, Inner, and Outer), yes.

The Abyss? Check.
The Nine Hells? Check.
Mount Celestia? Check.
Arborea? Check. So, hey, they named it Arvandor, after the elven realm -- pretty much the biggest selling point of Arborea.
The Gray Wastes? I'm guessing that's Pluton. Check.
Elemental Planes? I see fire, earth, air, water, even some ice. So: check. They jumbled them all up but, if you remember the old cosmology, they would all bleed into each other to begin with -- so here it's mostly a matter of semantics, innit? I'm not gonna miss Positive Energy; hopefully the Shadowfell serves as a more interesting take on the Neg'.
Limbo? Well the Elemental Chaos comes close. Close enough to put githzerai in there. Sucks if you like the plane-shaping stuff you could do with it but not a huge loss overall. Makes sense to a degree.
Tu'narath and Zerthadlun? Check. Clearly we still have a place for gith.
The City of Brass? Check.
Sigil? Kinda weird now. Then again, I think it sucked balls in 3rd Edition, so there's not much left to ruin.
The Astral Plane? CHECK! If anything, it would seem to be more prominent now.
The Plane of Shadow? CHECK! Looks like it's even more fleshed out. Cool.
Elysium? Honestly, Elysium's pretty bland and you can replace it easily with the Feywild.
Mechanus? Nope, gone. Kinda sucks.
Acheron? Nope, gone. Kinda sucks, too.

So, they rearranged some stuff again (like 3rd Edition did), but most of the essential concepts and the big brand-defining locations are quite intact. Breaking up the Great Wheel certainly feels like a big change but, enh, if we freaked out about every change to the fluff we'd still be playing in a slapdash nonsense world full of random allusions to pulp fantasy books that nobody reads anymore... (Oh, wait. There's still tons of that in D&D anyway.) As far as continuity-shredding changes go, I don't have a problem with moving the planes around like this.

Now, it sounds like they Infinite-Crisis-ed FR but that's generally the way FR works anyway. It sucks for FR fans, I'm sure. I'd feel better if they just left it alone and made a new setting. Asking the whole game to stay static just because a lot of people like a setting that was written around AD&D 2nd Edition is pretty much asking for the game to always be AD&D 2nd Edition.

-- Alex

 

[Chibz]

They turned entire sets of planes into relatively unimportant parts of other planes. Keeping the names identical is a feeble attempt at appeasing their players.

 

[Alex_P]

Look, I loved Planescape when they wrote it. It was rich and quirky and stylish.

I don't give a shit about keeping its memory alive by photo-copying the maps into a new edition. That won't actually bring it back.

The setting wasn't good because of how the planes were laid out, it was good because of what they did with them, which isn't something you can condense into a half-chapter of a game book that's all about orcs and dungeons and treasure. That's because the setting was very much about how all that orc-dungeon-treasuring was irrelevant, provincial, uncouth -- the stuff that small-minded backwater mortals who don't see the big picture dream about. It wasn't something that any edition of D&D's mechanics actually did all that much to support, either.

Do you care if the city of Dis is its own infinite layer of an infinite plane or just a really big finite thing that's part of a really really big finite thing metaphysically floating around in the Astral Sea? Either way it's just a short note in a book.

While we're at it:
Name as many of the Nine Hells as you can without looking in a book. Or, heck, just try to describe them. How many did you get?
How many topographical features of those places can you name?

-- Alex

 

[Drake the Dragonheart]

are my eyes deceiving me or has the abyss been turned into a giant tornado on that map? I haven't tried 4th ed yet, not sure if I will, my group has already heavily invested in 3.5 and with everyone saying that 4th renders 3.5 useless, (apparently just like with the exception of 3.0 to 3.5 each edition did to the previous one) it would be a waste So far my group can really adapt just about anything to fit our needs, (I just wish one player would stop trying to fight me on everything, but that is its own thread).

 

[Chibz]

I only remember the default names and basic traits.

Avernus: Mountains, lots of fireballs
Dis: City of iron, has the iron tower. I think.
Minauros: Swamp. Polluted.
Phlegethos: Haven't a foggiest. Lots of fire is an educated guess.
Stygia: Cold, icy. River Styx.
Malbolge: Rocky slope
Maladomini: Constant construction
Cania: Even colder than Stygia. Constant cold damage be here.
Nessus: Big, BIG canyons.

Seriously, it's been ages since this information has been ... relevant. Then again, my latest "foray" into different planes was into the abyss, which involved Llolth dying. But that's an different story.

For a different discussion about evil-aligned planes.

And on that note: 1HP goblins, stupid dragon-kin race. WTF?

 

[Alex_P]

Next questions: when's the last time any of that information actually mattered in-game?

-- Alex

 

[Chibz]

Next questions: when's the last time any of that information actually mattered in-game?

-- Alex

Whenever people do extra-planar campaigns. I do this on occasion, although I have an entirely custom set of planes, in an entirely home-brew campaign world.

Then again, I've done everything at least twice. Either as a player, or DM. Often both.

 

[Alex_P]

So, like, specifically, when did you last visit Dis in a game?

I'm going to bet that 999 out of 1000 players will answer "never".

Most setting material doesn't actually get used in play. People just sit around by themselves and read it.

-- Alex

 

[Chibz]

Yes, but that's no reason to cut it on the people who actually USE this material. If/when my books get published (some day...) the strict rule will be: Material goes in. No material comes out. And nothing (NOTHING) will get moved around/altered at the whim of another.

You created a spiffy new race, but I'd need to change my setting? I don't care. *mimes tossing something away*

 

[Ieyke]

4.0 is utterly retarded. It's LESS complex and interesting than Diablo 2 even when run by the most veteran of veteran DMs.

4.0 is checkers, 3.5 is chess, the only thing they share is the board (dice in this case).

4.0 directed towards action packed play? When? It's the blandest uselessness ever. 3.5 we could wage epic warfare on every level. We've had 3.5 D&D games that make LotR and 300 seem like documentaries about hippies. The SAME DMs who brought us that epicness tried it with 4.0 and we get something akin to a saturday morning cartoon.

Mind you I'm not saying this having only briefly skimmed the 4.0 rules or anything. We bought the books REALLY looking forward to playing it. We played in 4 campaigns as our uber-group and a couple games with other groups and other DMs in other campaign settings. Not a single one held a candle to what we can do if we scratchbuild an RPG rule set in an hour and a half.

I swear, every single member of my group has probably played more D&D than every single person who's posted here combined, 1st-3.5rd editions.....and SOMEHOW 4th Edition made us stop playing almost entirely. 4th edition is THAT type of epic fail.


That being said (all about the rules and mechanic mind you), I actually rather like the 4th edition basic campaign setting (Yay for Asmodeus finally being a god!).



And to answer your question about the last time that stuff was relevant: we go plane hopping semi-regularly. We've leveled all the way from 1 to 75 and personally cleaned out the 9 Hells and the famous bits of the Abyss.
We've dealt with the most of the Planes. Maybe never the Plane Of Earth or the Plane of Ectoplasm.... We VERY regularly deal with the Astral, Shadow, Celestia, Hell, the Abyss, Clockwork Nirvana, and the Eladrin plane (name escapes me atm). Sometimes we get to Hell as early as lvl 8 (all manner of reasons) and start killing Pit Fiends around level 16.
(I figured out a fairly simple way (tho it's a stupidly complex character build) to take on a Balor solo by lvl 13 in melee and win with ease.*)


*We're the kind of group who accidentally power-games when trying specifically to build weak characters....so yea...stuff like that happens.... I'm surprised we didn't invent Pun Pun...

 

[Chibz]

4.0 is utterly retarded. It's LESS complex and interesting than Diablo 2 even when run by the most veteran of veteran DMs.

4.0 is checkers, 3.5 is chess, the only thing they share is the board (dice in this case).

4.0 directed towards action packed play? When? It's the blandest uselessness ever. 3.5 we could wage epic warfare on every level. We've had 3.5 D&D games that make LotR and 300 seem like documentaries about hippies. The SAME DMs who brought us that epicness tried it with 4.0 and we get something akin to a saturday morning cartoon.

Mind you I'm not saying this having only briefly skimmed the 4.0 rules or anything. We bought the books REALLY looking forward to playing it. We played in 4 campaigns as our uber-group and a couple games with other groups and other DMs in other campaign settings. Not a single one held a candle to what we can do if we scratchbuild an RPG rule set in an hour and a half.

I swear, every single member of my group has probably played more D&D than every single person who's posted here combined, 1st-3.5rd editions.....and SOMEHOW 4th Edition made us stop playing almost entirely. 4th edition is THAT type of epic fail.


That being said (all about the rules and mechanic mind you), I actually rather like the 4th edition basic campaign setting (Yay for Asmodeus finally being a god!).

I RESENT that generalization, sir! I've been playing D&D almost since I was mentally capable of understanding the rules. Currently in four groups, two of them as the DM, two as players.

I compromised between 2nd and 3.x, if it comes down to using fourth or not playing; I'm not playing at all.

 

[Alex_P]

Yes, but that's no reason to cut it on the people who actually USE this material. If/when my books get published (some day...) the strict rule will be: Material goes in. No material comes out. And nothing (NOTHING) will get moved around/altered at the whim of another.

You created a spiffy new race, but I'd need to change my setting? I don't care. *mimes tossing something away*

This doesn't work. I mean, jeez. Look at comic books.

Continually adding stuff to a fictional universe over the course of several decades without replacing or deleting anything results in a muddled, byzantine, patchwork setting. How do you expect new people to get into that? How do you expect writers to be cool and inventive when all they're allowed to do is fill in a few narrow gaps?

If you like Dis, you already have two or three books with write-ups of Dis in them. Do you really want to see another one with the same old stuff? Just so it can be counted as "canon" again?

...

For good or for ill, D&D is the gateway pen-and-paper RPG and will continue to be that for at least the next half-decade. I want it to be the best damn gateway game it can be. Most people playing D&D aren't twenty-year veterans who've been playing in the same campaign world since Clinton was in office. They're high-school kids who want to try out something that sounds fun.

The current edition of D&D needs to not alienate new players and it needs not to brain-damage them with stupid ideas about "how to role-play". That's all I care about. I don't need D&D to cater to me. I can go find another game I'll like. I don't think new editions should try to please the diehards and grognards, either. They already have a game they like: whatever older edition happens to be their favorite. If their established-fan tastes conflict with what works best for new players, well, fuck them.

-- Alex