So, I just bought the 4e rulebooks and these are my impressions.
I would say that, to use D&D metaphors, it compares to 3rd edition much the same way that the Red Box Basic D&D set (which I first started playing in 1980 in elementary school) compares to the "Advanced" D&D rules (which I didn't really understand until I was in college).
The art is good, the books look good.
There is a predictable reduction in the number of "generic" monsters (the 3rd edition Monster Manual had a 40-page bestiary of normal beasts like lizards, hawks, sharks and monkeys for comparison values) and an expansion in the number of "branded" or "trademarked" monsters which are more exciting to 10-year-olds and can be made into exciting miniatures (Foulspawn! Abominations! Bone Horrors! Not just Lizardfolk, Blackscale Lizardfolk! Not just a Crocodile, a Visejaw Crocodile! etc.) This is understandable, although it does remind me a *bit* of Yu-Gi-Oh, with its intentionally obfuscatory names in order to be able to trademark the names of all the cards (e.g. "Misairuzame" instead of "Missile Shark").
The play experience is much simpler in a lot of ways. The DMG has a lot of good advice for beginner DMs, as it should. And the stronger 1st-level characters will eliminate a lot of disappointed "Why am I so weak?" complaints on the part of newbie gamers.
I have some problems with the character types, though.... although this is basically personal bias coming as someone who played 1e~3e. I disagree with Michael Zenke's assertion in the Wired review that "every character can now do something exciting instead of just hitting the enemy" -- that's not quite true, because although fighters, rogues and other wuxia-type sword-wielding ass-kickers have been given a lot of cool powers, wizards, clerics and other spellcasting classes have been MAJORLY reduced in complexity. (As I assume everyone reading this already knows...) The amount of book space devoted to wizards, clerics and their powers is a tiny fraction of what it was in the previous edition.
Zenke attempts to pass this off as an "advantage", but anyone I've known who ever wanted to play a wizard or cleric, adored the complexity and bookkeeping aspect. That's the whole point of playing one, or was. The real reason that their powers were cut back so much is, basically, (1) they took up an inordinate amount of space in the old rulebook, (2) they were the most powerful classes, which I always thought of as the fantasy-setting-appropriate due reward for players inclined to do the bookkeeping, but players of other types of characters may have seen as unfair -- do you see why I'm mentioning the personal bias element? ~_~ and (3) Mike Mearls is an avowed partisan who loves pure-fighting-type characters.
CLERICS: Why does the cleric's only 1st level "healing" power involve making an attack? WTH??? :/ Is the standard 1-3e "I run over to them and heal them with a touch" SO revolting to newbie players? Gimme a break! It's called choices, it'd be nice to *occasionally* have a choice of healing OR attacking! Healing OR attacking...! Oh well. I just find it bizarre that the paladin, with "Lay on Hands", now feels more like the "healer" class than the Cleric does. The lack of deity-specific abilities, apart from feats, is also completely lame.
WIZARDS: Like the clerics, totally nerfed... although actually I'd say the wizards came off a little better, they are a little closer to their recognizable core identity. But still, to me the stripped-downness of it all it's pretty shocking. I mean, so many similar spells... you don't even really *need* one spell called "Iceball" and one spell called "Fireball" and so forth. (Yes, I know this example doesn't actually exist in 4e.) All you need is a Feat called "Energy Substitution" and then you can be an ice wizard, fire wizard, whatever you want, just with one basic type of spell.... :/ but apparently this kind of customization is too much for D&D4e... Dude, I could play literally any kind of 4e wizard by just taking the "Energy Substitution" and "Sculpt Spell" feats in 3e... (and in fact, once I did, coincidentally).
The rituals are very cool, and make up for the nerfing of the aforementioned classes, to a great extent. (But huh, Raise Dead at just 8th level? ~_~ You can Raise Dead before you can Fly now?) But still, in both cases, classes which had hundreds of builds have been reduced to classes that have, maybe, a dozen or two dozen builds. For a newbie, it's not a big deal. But for an experienced gamer who is used to having lots of options, it really sucks. The vastly increased number of class-specific powers, at the cost of non-class-specific feats and spells -- at the cost of the whole idea of spells -- is to blame for this, I think.
Personally, I think the fighting-type characters' new powers are AWESOME. I think the pushing, pulling & sliding figures around the miniatures mat is AWESOME. The second wind ability is AWESOME. But the total nerfing of magical abilities is completely frustrating. Reading the Monster Manual was also a frustrating experience. On the one hand -- yes, every monster has lots of cool combat powers, it's awesome. On the other hand -- for someone like me who wants a SIMULATION (da-da-dum!!
) of a game world the lack of thorough stats for animals, etc. (as in 3e, one of my favorite things about the 3e Monster Manual) was a disappointment. Also, the monsters in general just come off as big bags of hit points and abilities, since every one of their abilities is combat-oriented. So yeah, in 3e a green dragon (for instance) can do weird stuff which never comes up in play, like use the "corrupt water" ability -- that's not necessarily meant to be used in combat, that's for out-of-combat stuff, that's so the DM has a better idea of what kind of evil crap the green dragon is getting up to when it's NOT attacking the player characters! ~_~ That's so you know just what the green dragon is capable of doing in The Ecology of Your Frickin' Game World! For my style of DMing, that stuff is USEFUL! And that's why the whole idea of a general spell list, like in 3e, is so fricking amazing -- because you have a magical list which includes Every Magical Effect You Can Imagine. Now, in 4e? You've got to rely on hand-waving. The bad guy summons a bunch of other bad guys? Hand-waving. The bad guy makes a minion's head explode? Hand-waving. The fact that Goblin #1 is a really wimpy Level 1 goblin and Goblin #2 is a Level 8 Goblin Skirmisher? It's not 'cause Goblin #2 has PC levels, it's hand-waving. Not a big deal, hand-waving is part of any DM's toolbox, but come on. A little more depth & consistency is nice.
In general -- the good thing about 4e is that it looks a LOT easier to pick up and play, and very well-presented. But the character creation options are SO much simpler and more limited than the 3e player's handbook, that to me as an experienced roleplayer, it's definitely the inferior game. For a newbie? Well, for a newbie, 4e is probably superior, because it's a lot easier to handle, a lot faster to make a character, a lot easier not to get drowned in choices.
So -- in my opinion -- looks fun. But looks more fun for newbies than for experienced players.
What I'd like to do is house-rule ALL the spells from 3e back into the game, and THEN play it.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON MINIATURES: In one major way, Wizards has made a big decision which will forever influence the type of people who play D&D and the audience they're aiming at... and that is, to emphasize miniatures and battlegrids to the extent that they do. To emphasize the whole tactical element. Of course, it was like this in 3e, too, but 4e goes a step further. I actually kind of like this tactical element myself, to an extent, BUT... BUT... there are tons of other role-players I know who have no patience for the "moving miniatures around on a mat" aspect and, although they may enjoy the aspect of "role-playing a character" and "rolling dice," seem to NEVER be able to get behind the whole aspect of the miniatures. ("I run up to him and attack him!" "Sorry, he's 7 squares away, and you can only move 6 squares!" "WTF!?? I hate this game! I can't be bothered to remember how many squares it is!" :/ ) These people may be excellent role-players and very fun to play with, but the miniatures are just A Bridge Too Far. Or rather, A Bridge Too Nerdy.
Seriously, in my experience, there really are a lot of role-players who dislike miniatures, or who can simply never be bothered to learn the rules about them. Maybe they're by definition casual gamers and won't buy any gaming stuff, so Wizards is intentionally not marketing to them. I dunno. I'm not one of 'em, but I know a lot of 'em.
So D&D has increasingly allied itself with the board-gaming and collectible-card-gaming aspect of the industry, as opposed to a RPG like, say, "Vampire" in the 1990s, which had very abstract rules and was very much about the social aspect. Can I blame D&D for taking this path? No, certainly not since the D&D game itself originally came from wargaming... and I also understand their pragmatic desire to sell more miniatures. And I do like the tactical number-crunch aspect myself. But I think the current edition suffers a bit much from presenting EVERYTHING in terms of numbers and "squares" and miniatures, and eliminating a lot of the more evocative and weird and "indefinable" powers in previous editions, which generally belonged to the spell lists of the wizard and cleric characters. Instead, in 4e, virtually everything has a combat application, and combat is ever more the core of the game. The result may actually be beneficial for the core D&D game as a game, but for people (like me) who became fond of using the d20/3e rules for simulations of various hodgepodge campaign worlds (like the Green Ronin Mythic Vistas books) it is much more difficult to use 4e for that purpose.
Okay, signing off!
I would say that, to use D&D metaphors, it compares to 3rd edition much the same way that the Red Box Basic D&D set (which I first started playing in 1980 in elementary school) compares to the "Advanced" D&D rules (which I didn't really understand until I was in college).
The art is good, the books look good.
There is a predictable reduction in the number of "generic" monsters (the 3rd edition Monster Manual had a 40-page bestiary of normal beasts like lizards, hawks, sharks and monkeys for comparison values) and an expansion in the number of "branded" or "trademarked" monsters which are more exciting to 10-year-olds and can be made into exciting miniatures (Foulspawn! Abominations! Bone Horrors! Not just Lizardfolk, Blackscale Lizardfolk! Not just a Crocodile, a Visejaw Crocodile! etc.) This is understandable, although it does remind me a *bit* of Yu-Gi-Oh, with its intentionally obfuscatory names in order to be able to trademark the names of all the cards (e.g. "Misairuzame" instead of "Missile Shark").
The play experience is much simpler in a lot of ways. The DMG has a lot of good advice for beginner DMs, as it should. And the stronger 1st-level characters will eliminate a lot of disappointed "Why am I so weak?" complaints on the part of newbie gamers.
I have some problems with the character types, though.... although this is basically personal bias coming as someone who played 1e~3e. I disagree with Michael Zenke's assertion in the Wired review that "every character can now do something exciting instead of just hitting the enemy" -- that's not quite true, because although fighters, rogues and other wuxia-type sword-wielding ass-kickers have been given a lot of cool powers, wizards, clerics and other spellcasting classes have been MAJORLY reduced in complexity. (As I assume everyone reading this already knows...) The amount of book space devoted to wizards, clerics and their powers is a tiny fraction of what it was in the previous edition.
Zenke attempts to pass this off as an "advantage", but anyone I've known who ever wanted to play a wizard or cleric, adored the complexity and bookkeeping aspect. That's the whole point of playing one, or was. The real reason that their powers were cut back so much is, basically, (1) they took up an inordinate amount of space in the old rulebook, (2) they were the most powerful classes, which I always thought of as the fantasy-setting-appropriate due reward for players inclined to do the bookkeeping, but players of other types of characters may have seen as unfair -- do you see why I'm mentioning the personal bias element? ~_~ and (3) Mike Mearls is an avowed partisan who loves pure-fighting-type characters.
CLERICS: Why does the cleric's only 1st level "healing" power involve making an attack? WTH??? :/ Is the standard 1-3e "I run over to them and heal them with a touch" SO revolting to newbie players? Gimme a break! It's called choices, it'd be nice to *occasionally* have a choice of healing OR attacking! Healing OR attacking...! Oh well. I just find it bizarre that the paladin, with "Lay on Hands", now feels more like the "healer" class than the Cleric does. The lack of deity-specific abilities, apart from feats, is also completely lame.
WIZARDS: Like the clerics, totally nerfed... although actually I'd say the wizards came off a little better, they are a little closer to their recognizable core identity. But still, to me the stripped-downness of it all it's pretty shocking. I mean, so many similar spells... you don't even really *need* one spell called "Iceball" and one spell called "Fireball" and so forth. (Yes, I know this example doesn't actually exist in 4e.) All you need is a Feat called "Energy Substitution" and then you can be an ice wizard, fire wizard, whatever you want, just with one basic type of spell.... :/ but apparently this kind of customization is too much for D&D4e... Dude, I could play literally any kind of 4e wizard by just taking the "Energy Substitution" and "Sculpt Spell" feats in 3e... (and in fact, once I did, coincidentally).
The rituals are very cool, and make up for the nerfing of the aforementioned classes, to a great extent. (But huh, Raise Dead at just 8th level? ~_~ You can Raise Dead before you can Fly now?) But still, in both cases, classes which had hundreds of builds have been reduced to classes that have, maybe, a dozen or two dozen builds. For a newbie, it's not a big deal. But for an experienced gamer who is used to having lots of options, it really sucks. The vastly increased number of class-specific powers, at the cost of non-class-specific feats and spells -- at the cost of the whole idea of spells -- is to blame for this, I think.
Personally, I think the fighting-type characters' new powers are AWESOME. I think the pushing, pulling & sliding figures around the miniatures mat is AWESOME. The second wind ability is AWESOME. But the total nerfing of magical abilities is completely frustrating. Reading the Monster Manual was also a frustrating experience. On the one hand -- yes, every monster has lots of cool combat powers, it's awesome. On the other hand -- for someone like me who wants a SIMULATION (da-da-dum!!
) of a game world the lack of thorough stats for animals, etc. (as in 3e, one of my favorite things about the 3e Monster Manual) was a disappointment. Also, the monsters in general just come off as big bags of hit points and abilities, since every one of their abilities is combat-oriented. So yeah, in 3e a green dragon (for instance) can do weird stuff which never comes up in play, like use the "corrupt water" ability -- that's not necessarily meant to be used in combat, that's for out-of-combat stuff, that's so the DM has a better idea of what kind of evil crap the green dragon is getting up to when it's NOT attacking the player characters! ~_~ That's so you know just what the green dragon is capable of doing in The Ecology of Your Frickin' Game World! For my style of DMing, that stuff is USEFUL! And that's why the whole idea of a general spell list, like in 3e, is so fricking amazing -- because you have a magical list which includes Every Magical Effect You Can Imagine. Now, in 4e? You've got to rely on hand-waving. The bad guy summons a bunch of other bad guys? Hand-waving. The bad guy makes a minion's head explode? Hand-waving. The fact that Goblin #1 is a really wimpy Level 1 goblin and Goblin #2 is a Level 8 Goblin Skirmisher? It's not 'cause Goblin #2 has PC levels, it's hand-waving. Not a big deal, hand-waving is part of any DM's toolbox, but come on. A little more depth & consistency is nice.In general -- the good thing about 4e is that it looks a LOT easier to pick up and play, and very well-presented. But the character creation options are SO much simpler and more limited than the 3e player's handbook, that to me as an experienced roleplayer, it's definitely the inferior game. For a newbie? Well, for a newbie, 4e is probably superior, because it's a lot easier to handle, a lot faster to make a character, a lot easier not to get drowned in choices.
So -- in my opinion -- looks fun. But looks more fun for newbies than for experienced players.
What I'd like to do is house-rule ALL the spells from 3e back into the game, and THEN play it.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON MINIATURES: In one major way, Wizards has made a big decision which will forever influence the type of people who play D&D and the audience they're aiming at... and that is, to emphasize miniatures and battlegrids to the extent that they do. To emphasize the whole tactical element. Of course, it was like this in 3e, too, but 4e goes a step further. I actually kind of like this tactical element myself, to an extent, BUT... BUT... there are tons of other role-players I know who have no patience for the "moving miniatures around on a mat" aspect and, although they may enjoy the aspect of "role-playing a character" and "rolling dice," seem to NEVER be able to get behind the whole aspect of the miniatures. ("I run up to him and attack him!" "Sorry, he's 7 squares away, and you can only move 6 squares!" "WTF!?? I hate this game! I can't be bothered to remember how many squares it is!" :/ ) These people may be excellent role-players and very fun to play with, but the miniatures are just A Bridge Too Far. Or rather, A Bridge Too Nerdy.
Seriously, in my experience, there really are a lot of role-players who dislike miniatures, or who can simply never be bothered to learn the rules about them. Maybe they're by definition casual gamers and won't buy any gaming stuff, so Wizards is intentionally not marketing to them. I dunno. I'm not one of 'em, but I know a lot of 'em.
So D&D has increasingly allied itself with the board-gaming and collectible-card-gaming aspect of the industry, as opposed to a RPG like, say, "Vampire" in the 1990s, which had very abstract rules and was very much about the social aspect. Can I blame D&D for taking this path? No, certainly not since the D&D game itself originally came from wargaming... and I also understand their pragmatic desire to sell more miniatures. And I do like the tactical number-crunch aspect myself. But I think the current edition suffers a bit much from presenting EVERYTHING in terms of numbers and "squares" and miniatures, and eliminating a lot of the more evocative and weird and "indefinable" powers in previous editions, which generally belonged to the spell lists of the wizard and cleric characters. Instead, in 4e, virtually everything has a combat application, and combat is ever more the core of the game. The result may actually be beneficial for the core D&D game as a game, but for people (like me) who became fond of using the d20/3e rules for simulations
of various hodgepodge campaign worlds (like the Green Ronin Mythic Vistas books) it is much more difficult to use 4e for that purpose.Okay, signing off!
Last edited:
