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I'm curious, what makes a ranger "inevitably nature-themed"?
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And you raise a very good point. In 4e, rangers get a choice of Dungeoneering or Nature. Take Dungeoneering (what adventurer wouldn't want that?), ignore Nature, and don't look back. There. That's your nature-free archer / two-weapon combatant. Especially now that in 4e there are no default animal companions or nature spells for rangers.
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And you raise a very good point. In 4e, rangers get a choice of Dungeoneering or Nature. Take Dungeoneering (what adventurer wouldn't want that?), ignore Nature, and don't look back. There. That's your nature-free archer / two-weapon combatant. Especially now that in 4e there are no default animal companions or nature spells for rangers.
Actually, I think the 4e ranger is a good example of broken shackles. In 3.5e you were stuck with an animal companion and a spell list along with the two-weapon fighting or archery choice. Now you can build a martial woodsman or non-woodsman....animal companion and divine spell casting optional.
So, a few months before it came out, I went out and sold all my 3.x books to Half Price Books.
This was a mistake. If it's any consolation, though, you should now be able to get ahold of new copies of 3.x books cheap. And, if you refrain from buying back your entire collection, but instead only get the best/most useful books, you may well still end up ahead overall.
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1) The extreme cookie-cutterness of the characters. Every character seems to be plotted out in advance. You get 4 powers a level, each one similar, and two builds.
After eight years, didn't you find core-rules-only Fighters and Clerics and Wizards had become rather repetitive and dull? Because that's the point we're at now with 4e. The list of options will expand, probably quite fast, but for now it's necessarily limited.
(Whether the core-4e has fewer options than core-3e has been debated at length here before. IMO, it does, although some of those fewer options, notably Fighters, seem rather more satisfying than their predecessors.)
For the rest of your points, I have no comment. My group are yet to actually try playing 4e.
Every character seems to be plotted out in advance.
No where close to what 3E required, with planning for Feats, PrCs, etc.
I think you misunderstood him there... it's not like you have to plot them out in advance, as you surely had to (to some degree, especially when it comes to PrC) with 3E/3.5, but they already come preplotted right out of the box.
Bye
Thanee
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Hey man I feel ya, 4e is not any type of game I want to play.
Saleing your 3e stuff sight on seen was unwise though my friend
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"The Soul of D&D? It's rolling a natural 20 when you're down to 3 hit points and the cleric's on the floor and you're staring that sunnavabitch bugbear right in his bloodshot eye and holding the line just long enough to let the wizard unleash a fireball at the guards who are on their way, because they're all that stands between you, the Foozle and Glory." - WizarDru
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__________________ Remember kids whisky will not put out flaming mages ,but it will confuse the deathknight
"The Soul of D&D? It's rolling a natural 20 when you're down to 3 hit points and the cleric's on the floor and you're staring that sunnavabitch bugbear right in his bloodshot eye and holding the line just long enough to let the wizard unleash a fireball at the guards who are on their way, because they're all that stands between you, the Foozle and Glory." - WizarDru
Thank you Gary Gygax, for everything.
"Rock on, Paizo, for you rock mightily".- dragonlordofpoondari
Last edited by Hunter In Darkness; 1st November 2008 at 02:22 PM..
I am curious about why you sold your 3rd edition collection. I love 4th edition and have only ever made extensive used out about 4 non core D&D books (out of a fairly extensive collection) but I currently have no intention of selling any of it.
And you raise a very good point. In 4e, rangers get a choice of Dungeoneering or Nature. Take Dungeoneering (what adventurer wouldn't want that?), ignore Nature, and don't look back. There. That's your nature-free archer / two-weapon combatant. Especially now that in 4e there are no default animal companions or nature spells for rangers.
Add in thoughness and two weapon defense and that ranger is a pretty effective defender just not as sticky as a fighter.
IOW, his complaint is that Core 4Ed truncates choice in comparison to Core 3Ed...which is something that definitely turns me off about that game.
In the core rules of 3.0, 3.5 and back to the editions of AD&D, we had illusions for trickery, necromancy for creating undead minions, animal companions to accompany Rangers (and sometimes Druids), monks, and the ability of spellcasters to quickly cast spells other than purely combat magic. 4e gets rid of all that, things that had been pretty consistent in the D&D tradition, and promises us we can have it later. . .if we're just willing to keep shelling out for more splatbooks.
One of my big complaints about 4e is how it cuts out so many character options in the name of streamlined, precalculated fun.
Yes, WotC is a business and they don't make D&D as a charity, but making a whole new edition of D&D with fewer character options in the core and more restrictions on what you can do explicitly so they can sell more splatbooks makes me really not want to get on the splatbook bandwagon again and be happy with my 3.5. Then again, I'm apparently not the target audience for D&D anymore
I will never, ever understand why the internet gets so infuriated about the concept of a company striving to make money. I'm not sure what else is to be expected of a business enterprise.
The idea here isn't that a company is evil because it's striving to make money; it's that they're deliberately doing less than their best as an economic tactic.
Whether true or not, there's something of an ideal people have about businesses in the marketplace. This ideal is that companies that focus on doing the best that they can in providing a product/service will rise to success, and the money will follow as a natural consequence - in other words, that cream rises to the top.
When people seem to start getting upset is when they see companies deviating from that model, and embracing a different one. This alternate model eschews excellence, instead believing that greater money can be made by providing a flawed/incomplete product or service, because then this virtually guarantees sales of future goods in the name of "fixing" or "completing" the initial item. It's what people have been accusing Microsoft of for years - that they provide an OS that looks nice and performs well...or would if it wasn't bug-riddled and flawed, requiring that you purchase the next OS to get a cleaner, more stable version.
Whether true or not, this is how WotC looks to a lot of people right now. There's a strong impression that WotC didn't create the best game they could have with 4E - or rather, that things many people consider to be near-vital were deliberately held back from the Core Rulebooks to boost sales of later splatbooks. After all, we were told outright that several classic monsters wouldn't be in the MM simply so that they could be included in the MM2 to drive up sales. People simply feel that WotC is less concerned with releasing a great game, than they are concerned with releasing a flawed and incomplete game to better guarantee sales.
To summarize, people get upset when companies embrace the idea of non-excellence as a viable marketing tactic.
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The idea here isn't that a company is evil because it's striving to make money; it's that they're deliberately doing less than their best as an economic tactic.
Whether true or not, there's something of an ideal people have about businesses in the marketplace. This ideal is that companies that focus on doing the best that they can in providing a product/service will rise to success, and the money will follow as a natural consequence - in other words, that cream rises to the top.
When people seem to start getting upset is when they see companies deviating from that model, and embracing a different one. This alternate model eschews excellence, instead believing that greater money can be made by providing a flawed/incomplete product or service, because then this virtually guarantees sales of future goods in the name of "fixing" or "completing" the initial item. It's what people have been accusing Microsoft of for years - that they provide an OS that looks nice and performs well...or would if it wasn't bug-riddled and flawed, requiring that you purchase the next OS to get a cleaner, more stable version.
Whether true or not, this is how WotC looks to a lot of people right now. There's a strong impression that WotC didn't create the best game they could have with 4E - or rather, that things many people consider to be near-vital were deliberately held back from the Core Rulebooks to boost sales of later splatbooks. After all, we were told outright that several classic monsters wouldn't be in the MM simply so that they could be included in the MM2 to drive up sales. People simply feel that WotC is less concerned with releasing a great game, than they are concerned with releasing a flawed and incomplete game to better guarantee sales.
To summarize, people get upset when companies embrace the idea of non-excellence as a viable marketing tactic.
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