D&D 4E 4E tidbits from WotC blogs (Updated:David Noonan on Social Interactions)

[Odhanan]

Argh!

This attitude is seriously beginning to bug me.

High fantasy is crap. Give me realism.

Don't get me wrong, my friend: I'm not trying to "tell stories" with RPGs, and I don't believe RPGs should be treated like books or movies. Further, I don't believe in "realism" in a game where you reproduce real actions by throwing dice and scratching numbers on a character sheet. A "feel of believability"? Ok. "Realism"? No, Sir.

I'm using the term of "drama" as it is relevant to the players enjoyment of the game and the relevance of the NPCs/creatures to what's actually happening in the game.

Plus, in the context of Star Wars, it completely feels like the events of the movies, where stormtroopers just don't seem to get their shots right. I think the same thing can apply to D&D. I've never seen a player like it when his character is killed by a wandering monster critting his face. Dying at an important moment of the game, that's fun and cool. That makes from strong moments of action, role-playing, excitement, call it what you will. Getting killed by a moth in a dungeon's corridor... not so much.

 

[marune]

Argh!

This attitude is seriously beginning to bug me.

High fantasy is crap. Give me realism.

High fantasy is what D&D is.

Realism is boring.

What matters is having fun, which in a RPG means having various interesting storybuilding (or drama if you read the above post) tools.

At will / per encounter / per day abilities is a good move toward it, "custom-made" NPCs is another one.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Argh!

This attitude is seriously beginning to bug me.

Without using some massive house rules, D&D is not the game for you. Can d20 handle it? Sure, Black Company, Thieves World, A Game of Theons, and other low powered variants all show it can. Core d20? Not a chance without massive house ruling.

 

[Grog]

With all this focus on being pigeonholed into a particular role, are we going to see a return to the phenomenon, which 3.x tried to get away from (with some degree of success), that you need to have all the roles covered in a party or else be hamstringed by the missing piece? Will we see more players stuck having to play the cleric--or any role they're not interested in--than we do with 3.x?

Um, some kind of primary healer class is essential for 3.x parties, too.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

High fantasy is what D&D is.

Realism is boring.

And impossible to simulate, to boot. To make a game playable, you have to cut something out, or else you're just running algorithms that belong in a virtual reality simulator. If you have to cut something out anyway, it might as well be the boring, "okay, you hit another 1 HD goblin with your Sword of Greater Beheading. *roll roll* Nope, none of them hit you," bits of the game.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Um, some kind of primary healer class is essential for 3.x parties, too.

Not really. So long as you have someone who can use a wand of Cure X Wounds, you're fine. That includes paladins, UMD rogues, warlocks, artificers, favoured souls (who need not actually be able to cast any healing spells at all) or any character with cross-class ranks in Use Magic Device. Recently, classes like the favoured soul and dragon shaman have shown how you can include healing as a valuable part of a class without it turning into the only thing that the character does. Healing is something that's easy to come by in 3.x, and you don't need a cleric in every party, to which I'm sure many people can attest. I'm always seeing people post parties on these boards that don't have a cleric. It's not such a stretch. It just takes some preparation and teamwork to make sure everyone's standing at the end of the day.

 

[Shortman McLeod]

I find the game simple too. When 3e came out I learned it in a few days. When 3.5 came out I had it done in a day.
I almost never have to look stuff up. I dont understand the argument that its too complicated.

Well, unlike yourself, most of us are not of genius level intelligence.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

Then I wonder why they did just that.

They didn't, and you know it perfectly well, so stop being so damned facetious.

 

[Grimstaff]

Well, unlike yourself, most of us are not of genius level intelligence.

I have to think Arashi was either being wildly facetious, or was playing the game wildly incorrectly.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

On another note, the whole "abilities per encounter" thing really irks the crap out of me, as well. How does that make any sense at all? When did you, as a character, learn those things? Why do they suddenly "refresh" when you run into another group of baddies? Sure, game balance is nice, and all... but it needs to make sense and be logical in the sense of the world.

If you knew anything about the per-encounter abilities already present in the current edition upon which they are basing Fourth Edition per-encounter abilities, you wouldn't be so confused.

It's not some magical "Crap, new bad guys, but ooh! My powers have returned!" garbage. All it is, as the Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords demonstrates, is that characters have one- or two-shot abilities which they can have prepared, and which require a minute or two to recover or replace. You can't do that during a fight, but as soon as it's over you have time to catch your breath and prepare your abilities again.

Imagine that fireball is a per-encounter spell in Fourth Edition. All that means is that you no longer prepare two or three fireballs per day; now, you prepare one or two fireballs, and when you've used them in a fight it takes five or ten minutes to prepare them again from your spellbook.

That's it. There's no game-world definition of an encounter of which the characters are aware - it's all about catching your breath, recovering your energy, and re-preparing your abilities after a fight is over.

In the Tome of Battle, warriors had semi-mystical martial maneuvers which they needed to meditate upon to recover; I doubt that they'll have this exact sort of thing in Fourth Edition for your average fighter, but I can also see where a fighter might only have one or two Mighty Blows "in him" without a chance to catch his breath and rest his muscles between fights.