Essentials Paladin (Sentinel) is up

[Anathos]

And PHB1 may have been made with the idea that most pallys would be good or unaligned, but you can absolutely make an Evil Paladin of Asmodeus right out of the box. I don't see a good reason to take that away in Essentials, besides pandering to the older-editions crowd.

That's because there isn't one. Essentials is a blatant attempt to draw older players away from Pathfinder, and this is just one more element of that plan.

 

[DEFCON 1]

That's because there isn't one. Essentials is a blatant attempt to draw older players away from Pathfinder, and this is just one more element of that plan.

You say this like it's a bad thing.

 

[mkill]

You say this like it's a bad thing.

Especially if the opposite would be "a blatant attempt to drive older players away into the Pathfinder camp"...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You say this like it's a bad thing.

It will be a bad thing if it turns existing players off of 4e, yes. People like me got back into the game because 4e had dropped all the silly arbitrary restrictions.

That being said, I don't really have a problem with their being simply different types of paladin builds for different alignments all that much. The only issue I see there is if someone switches alignment then what? Still, I can live with that as long as there is some decent option for the group to decide what to do with. If the character becomes a 'blackguard' and gets slightly different powers, well we can go with that. We can ignore the whole rule if we want, so it certainly isn't a show stopper.

What it DOES tell me though is that the primary design consideration that brought me into 4e is no longer considered to be all that important. I'm not so happy about that. It is fine with me if people use Essentials characters, but the more open-ended 4e options have to continue to be recognized as first class citizens of the game and I'd appreciate it if flexibility in character concept and development was kept in mind.

It is all well and good for Mike to want to try to capture some sort of flavor of days of yore, but not all of us WANT it. We play too.

 

[Anthraxus]

Essentials is what 4e has been all along. The difference is almost entirely in presentation and restriction of options.

Ehh... I like more options(the more options the better), so from what I've seen of HotFL and the other Essentials previews, I see essentials is not my cup of tea.

 

[MrMyth]

It will be a bad thing if it turns existing players off of 4e, yes. People like me got back into the game because 4e had dropped all the silly arbitrary restrictions.

...

What it DOES tell me though is that the primary design consideration that brought me into 4e is no longer considered to be all that important. I'm not so happy about that. It is fine with me if people use Essentials characters, but the more open-ended 4e options have to continue to be recognized as first class citizens of the game and I'd appreciate it if flexibility in character concept and development was kept in mind.

It is all well and good for Mike to want to try to capture some sort of flavor of days of yore, but not all of us WANT it. We play too.

Sure, but... we already have options to suit us. That's what I don't get - as someone who was a fan of removing alignment restrictions and many of the other design changes of 4E, I already have a large library of 4E books that give me what I want. Offering some new classes to give those other options to those who want them does not impact me at all.

 

[Anathos]

Sure, but... we already have options to suit us. That's what I don't get - as someone who was a fan of removing alignment restrictions and many of the other design changes of 4E, I already have a large library of 4E books that give me what I want. Offering some new classes to give those other options to those who want them does not impact me at all.

I would rather have more options that I would like to use than options designed for other people. If this makes me greedy, so be it.

 

[Klaus]

I would rather have more options that I would like to use than options designed for other people. If this makes me greedy, so be it.

OTOH, warpriest clerics no longer need to share an alignment with their deities. You can have a CE warpriest of Bahamut and a LG warpriest of Asmodeus.

 

[Artoomis]

...As for disallowing evil paladins, it goes hand-in-hand with the PH1 discouraging evil characters. That's why the PH and HotFL list only the Unaligned/Good gods and the DMG and Rules COmpendium list all gods.

Absolutely.