D&D 4E New "Confessions of a Full Time Wizard" - 4e tidbits!

[delericho]

I wouldn't take it this far, certainly not cheating on my dice rolls...

It's the only roll I'll consider cheating on. I've actually had reasonable luck with rolled stats, and no other roll in the game actually has that sort of lasting consequence (failing a "save or die" sucks, but it tends towards funny stories, and only lasts until the new character is introduced. A PC with really bad hit points can cripple your fun for months).

But I don't lie when I say I have never rolled higher than a '1' for any PC I have actually been going to play since 1999. (Haven't had to roll for a few years now, hence my earlier "5 years" figure.)

Anyway, that's off topic for this thread.

 

[dmccoy1693]

Post Deleted. My post was in Bad Form.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

We've used point buy since the start of 3E, but I think moving it into the PHB is significant. As was said, it says "this is the preferred method," which is either good or bad, depending on how you feel about point buy. It also means that a player can get by with just one book, since some players may not have access to the DMG except in brief windows before or after a game.

 

[dmccoy1693]

The reason she put it in her article is (I'd assume) because she's less of a super-hardcore player than most of the Wizards guys, so she (gasp!) may not have even known that it was an alternate system in 3e. (Or if she did, she still thought this was worth mentioning because it's now in the "real rules.")

I'm not really sure how much of a sacred cow rolling vs point buy is anymore. I've had a total of 4 different DMs and only 1 one didn't use point buy and she was a brand new DM.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

20 mins is nothing. D&D is going to smoother its players with fluff, character concepts and story. Your D&D characters are going to not die as easily as you do in WOW. D&D is going to make the players the heroes of the story, and they won't have to kill boars for tusks...over...and over...and over...and over...

D&D is coming with a vengence

Man, if you think WoW characters are fragile or do demeaning collection quests, you should have played EverQuest I back in the old days.

Standing in the pitch black outside Qeynos, you got to fight rats, rats, some more rats, some bigger rats, a skeleton or two and a single suicidal gnoll pup that would spawn, yell, and then kamikaze on the guards once a minute.

And let's not even talking about farming endless quantities of bone chips.

To be as demeaned or as fragile as a WoW character, EQ1 characters had to get to level 10 or so, and that was with losing experience every time they died.

WoW: The 4E of MMORPGs

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Last I heard, she's a WotC Employee. I'd hope that all WotC employees have at least heard of most of the stuff in the DMG by now.

Why would the Pokemon guys be responsible for knowing the DMG? Or the Harry Potter card game guys?

She's not a veteran D&D player, which is precisely why she's been given a column. Her target audience just isn't you.

 

[Remathilis]

If 4E is suppose to be ALOT faster to at chargen, then I'm not seeing it.

To be fair, they never said it was faster in Chargen, just in actual play. I know creating a Star Wars SAGA Pc takes me longer than it did a Revised One, but the majority of that is reading and selecting Talents, picking Feats, reviewing force-powers, and checking out the PrCs to see what (if anything) I want to take at 7th level...

However, Saga has been incredibly fast to play, where revised require a lot more "what did that do again?" (opens rulebook) stuff.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Right, but the WotC boys SHOULD be dire half-dragon expert gamers. If it took them 20 min to come up with characters that they themselves developed and supposedly has been the WotC house game for 2 years now, then it should be ALOT faster for them. If 4E is suppose to be ALOT faster to at chargen, then I'm not seeing it.

If it took them 20 min to come up with characters, then how long will it take casual gamers?

Let's look at what she actually says about character creation. She picks a race and class, point-buys stats, chooses 4 spells, picks her class skills, and selects an extra feat.

On the face of it, this is pretty much the same level of difficulty as creating a 3e wizard. But she's also making her FIRST 4e character, which entails reading up on all the racial abilities, and carefully leafing through the entire list of feats, skills and low-level wizard spells. Two hours is a long time, but she admits to taking forever in any edition.

The other players are stated as taking 20 minutes. First off, this obviously isn't an exact figure; might have been fifteen minutes, might have been a half hour. Moreover, bear in mind that even if they've been playing 4e for two years, the rules are still in a lot of flux. They probably have to browse through the feats and spells themselves just to see what's changed. And some of them might be playing classes that they've never played in 4e before, so they're looking through the class special abilities for the first time.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I seem to remember polls on ENWorld that indicated that most groups used point buy -- that certainly matches my experiences with 3E D&D. It sounds like they're making the more commonly used rule the default one, which seems eminently reasonable.

More importantly, the method the game is actually PLAYTESTED around is the default method. Not to mention the one organized play uses. Note I said default. Leave the randomness as the variant for those who simply have to use it. Hell, let them randomly generate feat and skill selection too.

I assume random HP are also gone as default. Its hard to be a good defender when you rolled a 1 for your last 2 hit dice.

And to nip the argument in the bud.. no, we dont want to take your dice. I use a variant attribute system, and give max HP. However I roll random encounters, random treasure, and random skills, attacks, damage etc. Theres plenty of randomness IN GAME. I just dont like it in character generation.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

Fails Will save and gives into to the corruption of message board...

Opens draft of PHB, goes to chapter 1, page six, and looks at last paragraph regarding Determining Your Ability Scores and low and behold you can still roll dice to determine ability scores. It says so on page 7 in the third paragraph. But if you like to use the Standard Ability Array you can do that too, it says so on page 7. Not happy? Wait there is more. If you want to use a Customized Array you can do that as well, it says so. Where you ask? If you guessed it is on page 7 you get a