The adventuring advice seemed a bit perfunctory, but about as good as one could expect. Not much for experienced RPGers, but not totally useless either. Seemed like mostly good advice for newcomers.

As for rituals: I didn't expect to like them, but actually I did. Given that they wanted to separate combat and non-combat spellcasting, I think they did an excellent job on the non-combat side. A few oddities to be sure, and I would probably be a bit more restrictive on who can cast what if I run it, but quite a good system, I think. I must comment, however, that scrying seems quite expensive, and raise dead an amazing bargain at low levels.

radferth

To round out the classes:

Rogue and ranger seem fine, although not quite as good a fit for the system as the fighter. The ranger, in particular, seems like 2 half classes shoehorned together. The warlord, on the other hand, just struck me as really weird. It may work great in game for me to make a weak attack but grant a chr bonus to my ally, but I have no idea what physically is happening to effect this.

Wizard and warlock seem quite good. I would have been totally psyched to see spell casters done like this in a 3.5 game. The attack spells do seem to get a bit repetative, but overall I think they did a good job with these.

To sum up: Arcane: good, Martial: OK, Divine & Warlord: weird.

radferth

Okay, even after reading through the combat rules, the cleric seems really weird. Ditto the paladin. Every single attack they have is some sort of miracle. They may be fine in game, but they seem totally alien to me as a character concept.

Fighters on the other hand: give that you are going to have a combat system based on cool attack powers, they seem just fine.

I do find it ironic that although they claim to killed Vancian magic, one could argue that they have instead given everyone a watered-down version of it.

radferth

I read through the cleric class, but it made no sense, so I decided to read through the combat chapter and the basic equipment to see what some of the stuff meant.

Combat: I was fairly impressed. I had assumed that the combat would have been as thoroughly reworked as the characters, but the seem to have kept it largely the same. They did a good job of clean up from the proliferation of action types in 3.5. Some things were simplified or toned down a bit more than I might have liked (+2 AC for full defense), but this makes sense give the proliferation of character powers.

Equipment: just reading the basic equipment stuff, it seemed fine; although I was surprised how limited the armor selection was. I get the impression much was saved for future books, but this is fine for a starting selection. It does seem they have gone totally game-balance on the prices, but that bothers me much less here than in other areas.

Some general observations at this point: Since your level affects your to-hit and AC equally, it seems attacks boil down to your abilities + equipment to their abilities + equipment. Don't know what the implications for this are, but it seems like a very valid decision. Also, falling being increased to d10 per 10' tacitly admits to a roughly 66% inflation to hit points since first edition. That seems about right. (Maybe 3rd ed should have had d8 per 10', as there was certainly some inflation there, as well).

radferth

The whole "no penalties" thing seems a bit odd, but I suppose it all comes out in the math.

Dragonborn: Seem like they were designed by a focus group. Why do they have Predator dreds and breasts. Stat-wise, seems odd that they have a breath weapon, but nothing reflecting their scales and claws. I'd have preferred something more along the lines of R E Howard's serpent men, but that's hardly to be expected.

Dwarves: I miss the bearded women, but few others share that these days. I am not happy about them having only low-light vision, as opposed to some sort of dark vision. Seem fine overall.

Eladrin: Monochromatic eyes always screem "cut rate computer graphics" to me, but no big deal. I like the idea of them making high-elven types more fey than previous editions. I'm not big on the "cool racial powers" thing, but their fey step bothers me less than the dragonborn breath weapon. Oh, and I, of course, dislike the term Feywild. I'd assume call it Arcadia, or the faerie realm, as opposed to something so modern.

Elves: Fine, not sure about the +2 wisdom, but it makes as much sense as any other.

Half-elves: OK, I'm just not having half-elves any more. They are not much like elves or humans.

Halflings: Why the +2 charisma? Because they are cute? Seems like anything other than strength would make more sense, but I'm old, what do I know. I usually run halflings as being like the nelwins from Willow, with a bit of hobbit thrown in. I don't know who these are modeled on, other than Lidda.

Human: Why are humans so different? They will have worse ability scores than everyone else, and no cool racial ability, but extra other stuff. The extra at-will power seems like odd compensation, maybe its actually good in the game.

Teifling: The dragons don't have tails, but these guys do? Also, the horns seem too big. There powers seem a bit random, but I'd still rate them as making more sense than halflings or half-elves.

Overall, the general way they are do races seems fine to me, but I think they really phoned it in as far designing the actual races.

radferth

The opening stuff all seems fine, I didn't read it all that closely. I like that some sort of dark age with a preceding big empire is the default setting assumption. Good excuse to have all sorts of ruins lying about. No particular complaint with the three tiers, but I don't like that characters start off as heroes. Actually, starting off as heroes isn't the problem. I'm just assuming that if characters are fledgling heroes as even first level, the system won't support pre-heroic-level adventures easily, if at all.

Also, I hope the include the retraining bit in with the rest of the level-advancement stuff, as I'm too lazy to flip back here when leveling up.

radferth

Being an older, grognardy player; and having just got my 4e books from Amazon (sorry mostlyFLGS, you couldn't order the other books I wanted), I have decided to blog my impressions of the 4e core books as I read through them. I am quite into world building, and prefer to run C&C or T20 when I DM, but I'll try my best to judge 4e on its own terms.

When I first started to hear reports of what 4e was like, I was quite turned off. Having heard more details, I decided it was not a system I'd prefer to use for the campaigns I run, but might be quite a good miniatures/combat rpg.

First impressions upon scanning the books:
1) Art if pretty good, although I'd make Orcus look less Balrogy and more corpulently disgusting, although they did get the tusks right.
2) Minions have 1HP? Weird, but maybe it works fine in practice.
3) Names are bad. Seems like half the monsters names have marketing-department-created compound words as their names. At least they avoided acronyms.

radferth