Review of 4E on Aint It Cool News

Massawyrm said:
There ARE Traps and hazards. Just no rules for making them yourself anymore like there is for monsters. They were in an earlier playtest version.

Ahhh, ok, good. Thanks for clearning that up (for me...)
 

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kitoy said:
I agree that the main characters in the Jhereg books are completely twinked out.

I was thinking more along the lines of actually making a Vlad Taltos-like character. A rogue on the Assassin paragon path with Ritual Casting as a feat. The magic that Vlad uses in the books is all ritual magic! Especially the scene on the Paths of the Dead where it takes him an entire novel to cast one spell. I forget which book that's in.

No, it isn't. Vlad comes off (at least initially) as almost ignorant of other types of magic because of the comparison with Morrolan and Aliera, but he's actually decent at "normal" sorcery, is able to dabble in "elder" sorcery (which he can do only because he's one of the founders of the Dragearan empire reincarnated) cooperates with Daymar on things involving psionics, and is an epic-level user of "eastern witchcraft".
 

Mort_Q said:
Much of the negative was about sacred cows.
Now, I'm pretty much a 4on, but I think that complaints about sacred cows have a certain legitimacy. A big part of RPGs is the culture of individual gaming groups (idioculture in GA Fine's terms) and the sacred cows of D&D play into this for many people.

Of course, the complaints the reviewer brings up are obviously not damning the overall review.
 


That is disappointing to find about trap creation, but I'm hoping they'll be created much the same way as monsters. The statblocks look awfully similar. There's even an XP value.

It's a shame because I was hoping to make more use of traps this edition, especially when I heard the Rogue will not be necessary to bypass them.
 

mmu1 said:
Not really. The main characters of the Jhereg series are exceptionally ill-suited to being portrayed as 4E characters. Though to be fair, D&D in general is just not a good match for the kind of fantasy Brust writes.


Um...the series was based on a D&D campaign, so... ;)
 


Monsters missing from MM:

I couldn't care in the slightest. If anything, I'd rather play with some new things. From the sounds of it it will be simplicity itself to ubild any monster you feel is missing.


Trap creation rules missing from the DMG:

Somewhat irritating, as tools are the DMs best friends. How hard can it be to invent your own traps though, really?


Recycled art:

Whatever. As long as there's plenty of fresh stuff in there as well.


All in all, sounds a lot better than 3rd ed, which I got sick of rather quickly. Mmmm.
 

Not much of a review but then I didn't really expect one given the source. This seemed to be just more of the love fest that I expected. I find it really really hard to believe that the ONLY problem with the game is that it didn't include a few monsters. I'm not saying that he doesn't really like the game but I expect a more critical review (in the sense that it is looked at objectively, not necessarily harshly) before I am willing to take it seriously.
 

Brown Jenkin said:
Not much of a review but then I didn't really expect one given the source. This seemed to be just more of the love fest that I expected. I find it really really hard to believe that the ONLY problem with the game is that it didn't include a few monsters. I'm not saying that he doesn't really like the game but I expect a more critical review (in the sense that it is looked at objectively, not necessarily harshly) before I am willing to take it seriously.

I'd like to seem some 3E reviews from the beginning.

The most interesting thing is to figure out how many reviews contain critic that doesn't hold up (typical early fan complaint was "Monks are overpowered") in the long run, and which reviews contain stuff that was only accepted as truth a lot later?

That said, most reviews so far seem to have a certain... bias. Grognards typically don't like it, fanbois find little to complain. There are few people that really come off as objective. (And if they are objective, they sometimes seem to have preferences that don't match my own...)
 

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