I think that's suitably ambiguous as either positive or negative.
Anyhow, I haven't read it yet, but how about a place for us to talk about the future of D&D, the complete burned wreckage behind us...and the colorful and bright shining city ahead?
Long rant to go here once I read the damn thing :)
My thoughts boil down to a few salient points:
1. The fundamental design philosophy has changed. There has been a marked shift away from 3.x thought and it shows from top to bottom. Further, there is a feeling of moving away from many old conventions, even ones that were sacred cows. The system largely runs with that and makes no apologies for doing so.
2. Negatives in general are angled to not exist. Instead of positives and negatives, it's more of choosing between positives. This filters through everything, often in very subtle ways.
3. There's no effort made to retain old edition players. They're presenting things as is, if you don't like it, there are no bones thrown at you to keep your attention. This goes from mechanics to flavor.
4. With those three things said, this game would be perhaps better off if it wasn't called Dungeons and Dragons. Like every grand change a franchise goes through, it mixes things up. However, when you factor 3 in, you come to realize there's going to be alienated players.
With all of that said? It's entirely a different game than 3.x. Crunch and flavor have both been wantonly changed, including things once thought sacrosanct. Without going into details for the moment, this is a game I simply don't care about, nor is it one I want to play. It's so radically different that I can't hate it. I just don't care.
About time I sat down and read it...
An as I read sort of mental diarreha is my style, so that's what's gonna end up here. Some will be positive. Some will be critical. :) After all, they got to sell me as a customer and I like being a hard customer to please.
Starting at character creation, I notice they lengthened the list and its now, strangely, longer than the list for creating a hero character by a few steps. Strange given that hero is generally a fairly complex flexible system and one of D&D's strengths has always been quick to concept.
They're definitely intending to try and integrate more folks into their community/additional sales aspects. I can understand why such advertisements are there, but a little noticible.
They kept the archaic alignment system around which is a bit unfortunate....except they sort of trimmed it. I'm pretty sure that's a good thing, but they needed to go back to the drawing board and find a better way to put it. Having a hollowed remain of a two axis alignment system just looks weird.
man, you need a table to figure out when you learn a new 'x'. Hope that's just naturally in its class's stuff, because that doesn't seem particularly win. Getting feats more often for everyone probably is. I appreciate that it makes their generic pre-class table of abilities have zero gaps in it, but wow that looks fairly complicated as a baseline before getting into classes. I'm not sure I'd want to intro a new player with this stuff.
I also see the no negatives all pluses setup... I tend to think at this point it's a good thing and hopefully will reduce the "I can't be x, because y race can never be good at x' mentality I've seen often. It seems they've also done away with the worship of str stat. Bless that as 3.0-3.5 handily did away with that being some superstat.
Half elves are still there. :P. Now we have 3 base elf classes, just in case folks forgot they wanted to be an elf. I appreciate that there isn't tremendous differences in speed this time around for races. That'll probably make smaller ones a lot more playable in practice.
Getting through the race section, I think it's kind of odd that they sort of plopped both tiefling and dragonblooded into human cities/shattered races deal. They definitely stand out as way different going through and it almost seems like they'd fit better in a cast where less than four races were near physically identical.
Not so keen on them sticking the explanation on powers in the front of the classes section. That felt weird organizationally and I don't think I'd look there to find it if I wanted to check it out. Also, glancing back up, it felt complicated...and it really must've been. They took 5 pages to explain how their tiny power boxes work.
At cleric, I'm pretty much going to agree with 1,2,3 and 4 of Dune's statements above. I don't think I'd blink at it being 'similar' to D&D if this came in a different name. This feels more like a final fantasy number switch, where some of the faces are the same, but everything is really different beside that. At the same time, from a business standpoint, I understand exactly why this happened like this did because WotC likely doesn't care to support multiple major games and the folks in charge here really wanted to do something more fundamental then a rewrite.
man, the cleric is fifteen pages long. Sure, at least its ordered by level, but fifteen pages. And the high level stuff is sadly weakly defined, mm, no I guess its just a couple of appends to the path. Dunno why its separate though when its so little. Overall HP seems like its going to be a lot flatter. Almost everyone in a given class will have exactly the same hp give or take 1-3 points.
Man, starting to read the fighter, this sounds like it'd be challenging to GM. Lots of specific rules and carry overs. I'm curious what framework they built to handle that.
They make a lot of nomenclatures. I don't think it really helps to have everything named differently beyond the power source definitions. It's clear encounters have to in general be larger rather than frequent, because if there's only one guy, there's no reason not to hit him with 'once per encounter' superpowers on every action.
Regeneration of 2+con is a level 2 ability? I hope bloodied has some definition beyond just hurt, cuz that sounds nutsy. I must be reading it wrong.
There's a fair number of reasonably cool abilities in the power sets so far. A lot of 'you miss, but hit anyway' on the fighter ones. Basically as I read, it seems like a basic move would almost never occur compared the sizable number of special moves you'd collect. I'm not sure that's a bad thing at all, particularly for those folks that always hated that 'fighter was just use your fighting attack', but yeah, I definitely would see this as a 'have a stack of abilities'. It almost seems like it'd play out better with cards. I wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that was part of the design process.
So far it seems the difference in hp between any class is insignificant.
Not quite sure how multiclassing would work in this environment that's so power driven.
Paladin seems to have a significantly better highest single brute attack then the fighter it compares with, but they're both ridiculously high level and seem relatively balanced going up the chain for taking the defender type spot.
Hospitaler is the worst class name evar. :)
They simply don't have the general structure that was so evident in 3rd. Or if they do, I haven't seen it yet, which means its likely not there. What I mean by that is that they generally could give you a formula to calculate out abilities over x. Here it's way more table based, something similar to 2nd ed, and almost entirely absent with good effect in 3rd. This has lots of layers of very specific case rules that I'm very sure is going to come back to bite them later. When you have baseline powers naming subskill types by name, you're basically setting something up that's going to be difficult to expand upon. Maybe they won't this time and will simply introduce new classes and things, but you know, I've never seen this company or its predecessor do that so I'm not expecting them to suddenly change tacts. They're going to publish rulebooks that expand on baseline classes and its going to be painful with them getting so far into specific rules (Move x overrules general y, and move x behaves differently if you are specific z) in the player handbook. Luckly the second and third layers of specification are more the minority case, but they shouldn't really be there at all.
Man, the character section is really long. I'm a hundred and fifty pages in and I'm still not done with it. I think it's complex enough to ensure the only decision most players will make is what class they are and just ride with it because everything is so specific to plan ahead and reading over all the classes is actually pretty hefty. At the very least, it seems like they plan for level 1-2 characters to be able to take 3-4 hits, which will make that section of the game way more playable.
I'll read more later. That took a bit too long.
Wizard seems fairly wizardly to me, with the previous 20 levels of spells seemingly mostly there and spread out among 30 levels. They don't have infinite utility anymore or the ability to basically prepare for any eventuality. I think this is an improvement in general as the whole "Batman" concept of it meshed a lot less well with other classes.
The Epic tier seems poorly defined. Maybe they felt they would go into it more later, but the archetypes there are amazingly narrow with the exception of 'don't have an archetype' archetype, which is the opposite and almost shouldn't have taken up space.
Skills seem better out of the gate hands down. Significantly less occurances of 'zero, zero, 35, zero zero' in skills with these rules, something that was absurd previously. There's also not a hundred of them, which was bothersome before rather than helpful. Acrobatics replacement of tumble seems not to actually give any meaningful advantage but is merely a dice roll to see if you're allowed to move in a cool fashion. That's kind of sad, even if the skill gives other uses. Mmm, they fall into the trap in SEVERAL places of giving flat DCs. I don't know why that kind of stuff is still there as you're having a regularly scaling effect. And they really don't give much of a framework for diplomacy, even though that's better than the insanity of before, I think they should be able to do better than "GM says how this works".
I'm starting to read the feats...and they kind of confuse me. They hint at some complex system. I'm about 200 pages in and I still don't know how combat works, so many of these feats don't make sense yet. I'll come back here after reading that. I do see a lot of racial/class requirements which I will say I don't like the sound of at all. They have a whole selection of abilities (Powers) that are class specific as it stands, so I'm not quite sure why feats also have a lot of these. And weapon specific ones too. Maybe this becomes clear with the combat and weapons section explained, but right now it looks like they're earmarking a considerable portion of the list as only gettable by a specific build.
I'm glad that they've pretty much solved the high tier currency being infesiable to carry problem. With gold sitting in the center, and the high end money unit worth roughly 5 million gp to the pound I think they should have plenty of flex room for explaining how adventurers can carry loot around without wagons.
aye-yi-yaaa.... Does eveeerything need to have stacks of rules on it? The powers, the feats, the items, the magic items, the skills. This isn't naturally coming together for me as much as it may or may not play well.
Okay, that was one of the worst structured Combat sections I've ever had the misfortune of reading. It was like it was written in a fashion designed to be poorly communicated. Many basics aren't even given in clear speech till the end. That was the second to last chapter too. Are they totally oblivious to what's important to know to pick up and start and what isn't? I certainly don't need to know about magic items to get rollin' or epic level shit, but a player can't start without the basics of combat.
I think my caring for the game nosedived at the end when I hit combat. So that's there for me. I suppose this is another thumbs down, but I might give it one try. Certainly don't want to GM it though.
Here's a thought, a strange one I had.
For 3rd ed, take the skill section from 4th ed. Very few things depend on specific skills there that can't be swiped into it and it's the only section that seemed to me hands down better in all things.
So last night, my younger brother cracked open the 4th ed 'starter set', which is a 1-3 adventure with premade character EZ-MODE GMing instructions, and a few simple how-tos of combat. Thanks to friends in Soulriders, I had a digital copy of the PHB, DMG, and MM. So, when he showed up I knew a bit more about it than he did, and all but one player, (more on this later), made their own characters instead of playing the pre-mades.
I won't go into quality of the pre-made setting, because our GM was ill-prepared, but even though we didn't go through any real skill rolls, we did CHARGEN and a single combat.
So, I made a fighter (defense role, in the new system). This was easy for me because i played WoW, and the two basic options for fighter are WoW's Arms/Fury warrior (DPS, what D&D 4.0 calls a Striker), or Prot, which is, protect your allies. So I just remembered which talents worked in WoW, and built my warrior as a D&D fighter. It took a bit to cludge through the horrific layout and find the information we were looking for, but considering that we went into this with a GM who had never run anything (at all!) before, and players who knew nothing about the combat system, turns in the new combat took this long:
Round one: Thirty minutes.
Round two: Ten minutes.
Round three: Five minutes.
Round four through seven: Three minutes.
This is with five players, so, I'm going to go and say that (in my mind), New D&D wins over Old D&D right there. Maybe it was just luck, or how many gaming systems everyone (except for the GM) had run through before, but combat is butter-smooth, fast, and no one has to be the 'bitch' role that 3.x required of 'well, no one's injured, I hold my turn'.
Now, I have been playing since Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (first edition, REPRESENT!). So the new changes are vast, but they've forgiven themselves the duty to try and model bad gaming ideas in new systems. IE., Quivering Palm Strike. Second ed was great; your target dies after you hit them. You decide when (or if; one week + your con mod before you have to touch them again).
There's a lot of small, simplification moves, and a lot of changes in how powers/attacks work ... but most of those are really awesome. Your fort bonus doesn't give you a fort save bonus, anymore. It gives you a fort defense stat, that acts like AC (it's a defense). Others have to use whichever attack power (presumably a spell, to be attacking your fort), and then they have to beat your defense stat to effect you. Instead of you needing to beat a value on a roll.
Now, we had a holdout in the group, who had the bottom line of, "Bards aren't in the game, it is the WORST GAMING SYSTEM EVAR." But, seriously. Bards are (in my opinion) the worst possible class in 3.x (and 2.x, and....), and require many times the attention any other class does to become badass (at late levels, replace 'badass' with 'viable'). Now, the Bard's 'buff the party by singing' power is gone, and the Warlord has it instead in the form of 'inspiring shouts'. These are a bit more awesome than the generic 'everyone gets +1 to kitchen sink', because the warlord can use different powers to give different, specific buffs, like AC, +to hit, ordering you to get a free melee attack, giving you a free melee attack because they flank something, making you heal yourself.... And once that player settled for a premade Paladin, he was at least enjoying the game, too.
And everyone gets to do awesome stuff like that. The Warlord is classified as the Leader role, which makes it (technically) a healer. But they aren't like 3.5 ''sit on the sidelines until we have a use for you" healers. They're 'make you kick-ass while juggling vorpal chainsaws on a unicycle' healers.
All in all ... I enjoy the new system immensely, because it just flat out destroys so many of 3.x's faults, flaws, and breaks.
All of this is, admittedly, before magic items, but at start, the system gave me more fun last night than 3.x has in ... well ... more than two years, to be honest. It was just that easy to play.
So, because it will become relevant later, though most of you should know this, POWERS. There are At Will (you feel like it), Encounter (once per fight), and Daily (take a nap!) powers. Your at will powers tend to be the meat and bones of your class, and are relevant to the role you've decided your class should be. IE., Tide of Iron, the fighter At Will ability to push a foe back one square on a successful attack. Your encounter powers are more useful, which for me was Covering Strike, which lets the fighter do weapon damage twice, plus a strength mod (one time). If you miss, you still get the other benefit of your power, which is ... your target can't take opportunity attacks against allies because you're spamming your weapon at him like a maniac. Then you get your Daily powers, which for my build was 'attack, and hit or miss, take a healing surge'. These things tend to be reasonable, and the 'on miss, you still do X' so far is good stuff ... like the paladin's ability to heal someone else when he makes an attack.
And Multiclassing is in, somewhat, but i imagine this is something people are curious about, so another digression so I can go into detail on that. Multiclassing requires a feat, with a pre-req appropriate to the class you're multiclassing at. Say you're a rogue (striker), and you want to multiclss fighter (because it's the only one I remember off the top of my head). You spend a feat if you qualify (STR 13), and now, you get to pick a single fighter skill as a trained skill (possibly awesome), and one fighter At Will power as a Daily power. You can only take one multiclass feat, and you can't multiclass to your own class.
However....
You can 'retrain' at level-up. Each time you level, you can trade in one feat, skill, or power, as long as you aren't giving up any pre-reqs. And you can change your multiclass feat when you level. Basically, muticlassing has gone from, "creative way to cheat", to "gain a tiny bit of utility from another class". Which to me seems perfectly reasonable, too. If you make a bad choice, or get an 'only good at lower levels' feat, you can replace it with something worthwhile when your lower levels are done. The most potent abuse I can find this offers is (theoretically), multiclassing to a different class every level. However, since that typically only rewards one class skill, and one class feature (which is a daily power), that's not so amazing ... and since retraining can replace lower-level encounter/daily powers with higher level powers, you probably wouldn't want to continually limit yourself with retraining that way.
Then ... there are the losses. There are no more gnomes, there are no druids, and no monks. Splat books, I am certain, will bring them back anyway, but some people will not forgive the disposal of what was holding the system back. And, that's fine. I'm sure there are people who refused to move on from 2.x when 3.0 was released. Heck, I hated 3.0 myself, until I tried it and found it an improvement.
They took a system that I stuck with because it was one I knew, which was cumbersome, required making your characters into different types of one-trick-ponies, had a million rules with that many more tiny abuses ... and then made it all very simple. Bottom line?
They turned a fantasy murder simulator into a game.
Thank god. If I want complexity, HERO is still my system of choice. If I want a fast, easy to play, everyone can have a good time without being a rules-laywer game? My 3.5 books are going with my second ed etc. books in storage. It's 4.0 from here on out for me.
Next?
Edit: Dracos is right, BTW, the PHB has a horrific layout; I've come to forgive the class section, because that's actually good -- your entire class is now in one place. Everything else ... they needed to higher a writer and someone who knew what a sensible layout looks like. So far the DMG has what LOOKS like a better layout.
I was cool with the class and even the skills section, even if I think they should've given a basic 'this is what is our terminology' section first. The combat section is the real offender and easily bogs down much of the comprehension of everything else. The remaining sections are just poor, rather than abysmal in organization.
Hopefully this can be run with a minimal amount of PHB referencing by everyone :D
Irony strikes!
Brian, your reasons are largely why I thematically and mechanically loathe fourth edition. First of all, you hit it right on the head. The influence of MMORPGS permeates design throughout. In spirit and often design, this game is an MMORPG flavored system. Everyone acts the same way - the design of at will, daily and encounter powers is absolute. Let alone the way the battles are set up for raid-er, team battles only.
Reading it, and seeing the way you cottoned to it in a MMORPG fan sorta way, really cemented my views. In short, if we wanted a MMORPG, we'd go play WoW.
EDIT - This isn't meant to take a shot at you or anything, Brian. It's just that I felt your opinion was incredibly illuminating in it's own ironic way.
I gotta tell you, I've been in a 4.0 game since the original 4.0 books came out, and it has been truly awesome.
I tried getting a 4.0 game going online, but without grid 4.0 falls flat.
Movement is even more critical in 4e than it has been in previous editions. Push and pull, man.
---
How big do you guys think the fanbase split is over 3.5 vs 4e?
While I do like a lot of the mechanics of 4e, I am probably never again joining a game unless I know there's a guaranteed grid to play off of and stable players. 4e fails -bad- without not just the grid, but also a lack of players because 4e is very much so the "party game" where missing one class can really hurt options. I think I honestly much prefer 3.5e.
Yeah. In 3.5 if you run with 3 of 4 players, it's not too bad. Just strip off a few monsters here and there. With 4e, if you run with 3 of 4 players, an entire area is likely closed.
And yes, I still dislike the sheer amount of special casing in 4e. Special casing in rulebooks about building characters is a plague for the most part. At the very least, use categories that are broad and well shared. Fighter Dwarves with Axes is not a category, it's a build.
I prefer 4th to 3rd. In 3.5 the lack of HPs makes the lack of a healer not just annoying, but crippling. Between action points, better starting HPs, and AC not requiring heavy armor, 4th has felt far more swashbuckling and avoids the "How long until my PC is competant" problem. During the practice fight I remember thinking "Wait a minute, my PC just did something cool. This can't be D&D; 1st level PCs don't get to be cool."
That is absolutely true.
Level 1-5 characters in 4E are far more plausible for play. And not just gritty play but play with them swinging around airships and being awesome. :)
Here's hoping 7th sea promotes that better yet :)