D&D 4E Concerned with 4e now, do you agree or not?

[Najo]

I don't think it's inappropriate to have a small amount of setting information in the PH, especially if it comes with guidelines for how to modify it.

For example, in the 3e PH there was a list of gods, complete with holy symbols and favored weapons. Was this inappropriate? No, because it was clear that if the DM wants to make god X then they just need to pick some appropriate domains and a favored weapon and they're good to go.

The PH had almost no feats for clerics, which was too bad. But if they did have a few of those nice feats powered by turning attempts, it would have made sense to name "Shield of Pelor" (grant energy resist to you and allies for X rounds) or "St. Cuthbert's Doom" (free sunder attempt on opponent's weapon that strikes you). At worst, having to change the name for your homebrew is slightly irksome. At best, it gives the DM another guideline on how to make their homebrew's religion more interesting to players; perhaps they'll come up with their own feats.

Well, this is the same thing. Now wizards have a "religion" of their own: a few examples in the PH of mystical orders that they might belong to. Each will probably have a handful of unique spells and feats that players can take if they want to show their devotion. The fact that they are given names that link them implicitly to the setting shown in the PH does not bother me. This is a guideline to the creative DM, not a straitjacket.

And finally, I always have more fun reading a rulebook with some fluff and setting information than a rulebook without. Since I doubt they will allow their writers to be as playful with language as Gygax was, some setting information is needed to keep the reader's imagination fired up. This will be particularly true for newcomers.

I agree that setting information helps keep it interesting. I also like the idea of setting connected game material. I like the idea of wizard orders. I even can live with Golden Wyverns. But what I don't want is a) forcing those things into my campaign by tying material player's have built in to their classes to those things and b) making it harder to remove those elements.

Another thing, I absolutely HATE that the 3rd party publishers can't use spells with copyrighted names, more specifcally, I think it is lame for WOTC to include that sort of material in the core books and then build the SRDs and have differences between them.

Shield of Pelor as a feat
Tenser's Flying Disk & Mordenkainen's Disjunction as a spell
St. Cthubert as a god
Son of Kyuss as a monster

All of these I think are great, but do not shove them into the core books and force me to use them by tying it to things player's can choose and that 3rd party publishers trying to support the products can't reference. I HATE that.

I think the new PHB, DMG and MM should have sidebars with examples of setting specific material. It should be optional, not mandatory.

Get the Golden Wyverns out of my core feats. They do not belong there.

WOTC didn't do that much of this kind of thing with 3.5, it is easy to swap out gods and ignore a handful of spells, even for the 3rd party guys. But what looks like is coming is a forced and contrived setting with 4e. This is not good for homebrews or official published campaigns.

 

[Jinete]

To 5: I don't know. But honestly, if I look at a rule book like from "Das Schwarze Auge" (Black Eye?) in Germany, I think many of the names suck, too. (They often sound a bit childish, like "Flim Flam Funkel" or "Blitz Dich Find"). Some names in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay books also sound bad (to a German Reader, at least).

But I agree, the Vancian Magic system can barely compare to Golden Wyvern - the Vancian magic limits the play style of D&D, while Golden Wyvern just doesn't sound good.
(But that's just because the word Wyvern itself sucks, in my opinion. )

Vancian magic is a game mechanic just like 4e different wizard types are a game mechanic. It could also limit the play style of D&D, though I'm sincerely hoping it won't.

My gripe is mostly with the name.

 

[Guild Goodknife]

Oh please, how many more Golden Wyvern threads do we need? Guess i should open one to discuss the 'gold' part of the name, and one for the 'wyvern' part. Yeah, now that i think about it i strongly dislike the wyvernish name of that feat! I mean, what's it supposed to mean anyway? Is it a feat only for Wyverns? And what's the deal with the odd color choice? I like my Wyverns brown and brown they shall remain and only brown! What's the deal with all that gold stuff anyway? Gold coins, gold dragons - gold, gold, gold that's all WotC cares about! Hngfnnghuwzptlk! I feel the need for more threads.

Edit: Oh noes - merge attack!

 

[Najo]

Threads merged. Please don't start a new thread if there already is a thread on the topic. Thanks.

Sorry about that. The new thread was meant as a message to WOTC, not to get lost in this thread. The two threads had some cross over, but different intents. The small third thread was a mistake, the one with no poll.

 

[Goken100]

The Greater Concern

The reason I've gone from 100% gung-ho to 50% about 4E is not because of these two points, but because of the idea of one rate of progression for all classes (attacks, defenses, etc).

I like the idea on the surface, and see how it can simplify things. But it IMPLIES that multiclassing must be very limited due to mandatory flat level 1 bonuses. I also IMPLIES that talents must be very crucial to giving classes their major advancement. Both of these things mean it'll be very hard to customize the system.

I find myself wondering if I'll have to end up just using 4E as inspiration for a 3E house rule system. Would be so sad...

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Yes indeed.

You're even ahead of a couple of technical writers who have spoken up in this thread-- but then, sadly, it's not uncommon to find technical writers on a different page than the audience.

Well, I do spend a lot of my time writing presentations in which I try to explain complex biological concepts to people who have limited familiarity with my topic. So I'm not coming out of left field here. My experience with teaching new people the game is that there is a hell of a lot of individual bits of information to remember...something that I had to figure out since I've known the game so well for so long I forgot what it might look like to a newbie. After a while Attack of Opportunity, Power Attack, Spring Attack, Combat Reflexes, etc. start to just blur together for someone who doesn't know the system inside and out. And those are names that contain some reference to their referent. Just speaking from experience, the less a new player has to remember in order to play, the better.

As I said before, I'm willing to cut WOTC some slack at the Paragon and Epic levels of play. By 11th and 21st level, the players (even noobs) should have internalized and contextualized enough of the setting that these feat names don't become an impediment to play.

(They still sound goofy, but that's a matter of taste I can also concede.)

I agree with this. I also think that it could be viewed as part of the reward for advancement that your powers start to sound kewler. (<--not actually a word) At low levels, you get "Disarm." At high levels, you get "Undoing Strike". At epic levels, "Fury of The Black Gods".

Also, I have to wonder, did WotC actually sit down and work out how they're going to unify the theme of their naming conventions? Because so far it seems somewhat haphazard. It sounds to me like they're leaving name design up to the individual designers, rather than putting their very busy heads together over what may be a low-priority issue, and making sure they have names that are both evocative and non-cheese-ball.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I agree that setting information helps keep it interesting. I also like the idea of setting connected game material. I like the idea of wizard orders. I even can live with Golden Wyverns. But what I don't want is a) forcing those things into my campaign by tying material player's have built in to their classes to those things and b) making it harder to remove those elements.

I don't mind that sort of thing in a game like Earthdawn, where the setting is a major selling point for the game. But D&D isn't that sort of game. The selling point is the rules. What differentiates 4th edition from 3rd edition will be the differences in rules and how they affect gameplay. We already have tons of settings, and the majority of players will keep playing in them. This new setting seems kind of tacked-on at the last minute so that there will, in fact, be an inherent setting of some sort. It also sounds like it was written by game designers rather than by writers, if you know what I mean.

Now, I don't have any problem with the setting. I won't use it, but I'm glad that there's a kind of "starter package" for DMs to get their games going with. I agree, however, that the mechanics in the PHB, which ought to be compatible with at least the major published settings, shouldn't be inherently tied to campaign-specific fluff.

Take a look at the example someone brought up: Clerics & gods. Now, you'll notice that in the 3rd edition PHB, the section on gods is basically a page with some holy symbols and a brief description of what the gods are about. Hardly any fluff at all. And, the section is segregated from the section of the book on clerics, which contains a brief list of the gods available in the implied setting. Now, imagine if the section on clerics had three or four different types of clerics, each dedicated to a specific god. You would have to choose to be a cleric of Pelor, a cleric of Nerull, a cleric of Heironeous, or a cleric of Kord, right from the point you decided to play a cleric. Your choice would determine which powers and abilities were available to you, and if you wanted to play a cleric of a different god, you would have to either rearrange the power lists (to questionable balance effects), file off the names and play a cleric of PelorSt. Cuthbert that performs identically to a cleric of Pelor, or come up with brand new lists of powers yourself...or wait until the eventual cleric supplement that contains a bunch of new cleric traditions.

It would have been much more difficult to customize the cleric for individual campaign styles if it hadn't been a really generic class with a big "insert god here" stamp on it.

St. Cuthbert as a god

St. Cuthbert isn't IP. He's a Christian saint. Therefore the name is in the public domain. Anything WotC has written about St. Cuthbert is IP, but his name isn't.

All of these I think are great, but do not shove them into the core books and force me to use them by tying it to things player's can choose and that 3rd party publishers trying to support the products can't reference. I HATE that.

To be fair, I would be very surprised if they tried to make Golden Wyvern into IP. I figure that one of the reasons why the names are so throw-away is because they plan on throwing them away into the SRD and so didn't bother to come up with names they're interested in keeping.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

Edit: Oh noes - merge attack!

It's super effective!

 

[Najo]

It's super effective!

If some one at WOTC reads this thread...


You hear me Scott?

 

[Najo]

Take a look at the example someone brought up: Clerics & gods. Now, you'll notice that in the 3rd edition PHB, the section on gods is basically a page with some holy symbols and a brief description of what the gods are about. Hardly any fluff at all. And, the section is segregated from the section of the book on clerics, which contains a brief list of the gods available in the implied setting. Now, imagine if the section on clerics had three or four different types of clerics, each dedicated to a specific god. You would have to choose to be a cleric of Pelor, a cleric of Nerull, a cleric of Heironeous, or a cleric of Kord, right from the point you decided to play a cleric. Your choice would determine which powers and abilities were available to you, and if you wanted to play a cleric of a different god, you would have to either rearrange the power lists (to questionable balance effects), file off the names and play a cleric of PelorSt. Cuthbert that performs identically to a cleric of Pelor, or come up with brand new lists of powers yourself...or wait until the eventual cleric supplement that contains a bunch of new cleric traditions.

It would have been much more difficult to customize the cleric for individual campaign styles if it hadn't been a really generic class with a big "insert god here" stamp on it.

And this is why these wizard orders need to be removed. They force wizards into prestige classes basically. They give them concepts that the player may not even want on their characters. Those sort of colorful, fluff driven material shouldn't be tied to any part of character creation or advancement unless your playing in a specific world and using its official sourcebooks. D&D 4e needs to remove world neutral in the building blocks that can't be removed.

WOTC is it so hard to leave the classes, feats, spells, talent trees and skills from core book 1 as open as possible? Use sidebars with optional rules to add flavor and special setting type rules & other extras please.