So... what has changed?

wayne62682

First Post
After about a year (or more? I forget) of a D&D hiatus I might be playing again with some friends. Now, the last thing I recall was a few months before Dark Sun was released; I think PHB3 had just come out.

What, if anything, has changed majorly in the D&D world? I saw these little paperback books, Heroes of Forgotten something-or-other and Heroes of Fallen Lands; are these new rules or stripped down versions? I still have, somewhere, my 4e books - are they still relevant or has there been so much errata that I may as well buy something new?

How's the DDI front coming? I guess the VTT never materialized (not that we thought it would); was it finally admitted it was never coming or is it still "coming soon"? My DDI subscription is long since expired and I'm not sure if I'll resub (I went to the Dark Side and became an avid WoW player during my hiatus so that gets the money I would pay to DDI) but might consider it if it was worth it.

In short I'm looking for a summary of any major changes to D&D since I haven't looked at nor touched anything about it. I see this new "D&D Encounters" thing but it requires a game store and I don't have one in my area at all (why on earth they keep putting these things out and requiring you to do it at a game store is beyond me; I'd love to be able to do that kind of thing for home games and get prebuilt adventures and such).
 

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How's the DDI front coming? I guess the VTT never materialized (not that we thought it would); was it finally admitted it was never coming or is it still "coming soon"?

There's a limited beta VTT they appear to have licensed out from a third party, though it's not "the" VTT as originally attempted. The original one was 3d, the new one is 2d only, and it doesn't appear to be connected in any way to the original one. From what I've seen, it's around the same or less than the currently free tools out there. But I haven't done much with it.
 


How's the DDI front coming?
Poorly, they released a monster builder incapable of building monsters and moved the Character Builder to an Online version. The Online CB either works very well or poorly - depending on who you ask (for me it doesn't work at all) and only has a limit of 20 characters. Dragon is posting less and less actual content every month and the compiled issues are no longer there (so if you want to catch up, you'll need to download every individual article yourself). Dungeon is steadying the ship though, largely thanks to Robert J. Schwalb.

The VTT is due for wider release soon though as far as I know. I don't know anything about this because the two online games I do run are using maptools and I am perfectly satisfied with maptools. I don't have a lot of interest in the VTT as a result.
In short I'm looking for a summary of any major changes to D&D since I haven't looked at nor touched anything about it.
A short series of stuff called "Essentials" replaced the main line of PHB/DMG/MM as the basic set of DnD to get started with. Many of these design decisions are quite contrary to what happened in 4E before: Like martial classes having no real choices of encounter power (just 1 they get multiple times) and dailies were stripped off them.

They are publishing a lot of wizard builds. A lot of them. So if you REALLY like wizards then you sure are in luck at the moment! The latest book, Heroes of Shadow adds in a monster class called the Vampire. It is really whacky design wise and is the most on rails class in 4E - even the martial classes can't match it for linearity. They have also gone back to adding racial penalties into the game - arguably unnecessarily at that. Two races from Heroes of Shadow shade have such penalties. The Shade has a -1 penalty to surges and the Vryloka gets -2 to their surge value when bloodied.

Books like Primal Power and such no longer exist. Instead PC books are going to be framed around elements where they come from, like Heroes of Shadow and the next book is Heroes of the Feywild. Monster Books are now boxed sets that come with an adventure themed around the boxed set and tokens (this I really love btw). Other "sourcebooks" look to be going the same way, like the Shadowfell boxed set. It also has a deck of cards for representing the shadowfell getting to you. Speaking of cards, they also released a deck of collectable "buffing" cards called Fortune Cards into the game.

Movie and game tie-in products seem to be the case in future, with them publishing in future a Book of Vile Darkness (to tie into the cheap made for TV movie on the Science Fiction channel) and the Neverwinter Campaign Guide (to tie into the equally cheap Xbox live arcade DnD action game).

Gamma World was released, which is a science fiction variant of 4E that uses some pretty whacky character creation rules. It's fantastic fun and I recommend it if you buy anything from the post-essentials era. I just love this to pieces and sincerely hope there is more to come (but it is looking doubtful :().

And Dark Sun was released and it was the last truly great thing that Wizards released. I cannot recommend you get anything else more than Dark Sun if you do not have it. Also pick up the Creature Catalog as well (I do wish that was a boxed set with tokens and an adventure ala Monster Vault. I would buy that so hard). The adventure isn't great though and you can ignore that, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice by not getting Dark Sun I can assure you.

All your previous stuff is still compatible with the new stuff (and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise). You will not probably get many new options for older stuff anymore I would guess, but they are re-releasing most of the old PHB1 classes online (and for free it appears). So you can get updates easily this way for stuff that has been changed. This also reintroduces many "AEDU" classes like the original fighter into essentials proper.

So that's about it that I can think of off the top of my head.
 

Wow... looks like a ton. What's this nonsense about martial classes having no dailies and one encounter power they can use multiple times?

So basically, the added back racial penalties (okay, I never had a real problem with this - it made sense although it sucks when you gimp yourself on a class choice because you have a penalty to it), gutted the XXX Power books with the options and now you're forced to be related to some kind of power source, nerfed martial characters into the ground (?), buffed Wizards (hey this sounds like WoW - Warriors get nerfed, Mages get buffed! Hooray World of Castercraft, I mean Dweomers and Dragons!) and went back on their promise (or was it a "maybe"?) to redo the old campaign settings.
 

It wasn't so much a nerfing of the martial classes, it was offering new builds designed in a different manner.

The two new subclasses of Fighter, the Knight and the Slayer, offer people the choice of playing a less complex version that can do the same thing all day long. But its not really a nerfing, because even without daily powers, they're just as effective at their role as the classes they supplement. Some people don't care about picking powers, and just want to swing their swords and axes, but with these classes they can do it without being gimped.

There's a lot of debate about whether the essentials books are a new edition or just new options, and I am firmly on the side of just new options. I run a game that has classes from both the PHB series and the Heroes series, and they're perfectly compatible in play. The only thing we're missing is the feats to allow multiclassing into these new subclasses, or ways to hybrid them.
 

Wow... looks like a ton. What's this nonsense about martial classes having no dailies and one encounter power they can use multiple times?
They made simple to play Martial classes, the Slayer/Knight/Scout/Thief so that people who wanted a reasonably "simple" class would have one. They are not remarkable in any manner, but are amazingly consistent damage wise and actually perform pretty well. Their lack of options can sometimes really hurt, but in general it doesn't feel like a nerf as a change in priorities. Your party with a slayer isn't going to regret his presence!
buffed Wizards (hey this sounds like WoW - Warriors get nerfed, Mages get buffed! Hooray World of Castercraft, I mean Dweomers and Dragons!)
Haha. It's not quite that bad, but Wizards are getting an amazing amount of love at the moment comparatively to everything else. I am wondering what Heroes of the Feywild is going to look like at the moment.
and went back on their promise (or was it a "maybe"?) to redo the old campaign settings.
I don't recall this one, could you cite a source?
 

It might just be fuzzy memory but I could have sworn they said they would basically redo the old settings; maybe it was just wishful thinking when they redid Eberron and then Dark Sun after FR. I know a lot of people were clamoring and hoping for a 4e Dragonlance.

Good to know it's not a pure "nerfing" then, being away from the game for so long I never know what to expect (but hey, at least it's not 4.5E right? ;)); it doesn't sound too bad then.

So I should get both of those paperback books then to replace the old PHB? And did it invalidate the PHB2 and the existing X Power books? Depending on what type of campaign we start I was thinking of being an Invoker; does that still exist?
 

Martial classes didn't get nerfed. The martial classes you know and live are pretty much unchanged (no class has been removed). The Essentials books added some knew martial subclasses that are different than the previous martial classes. The new martial subclasses aren't weaker but they don't have as many build options.
 

If you like the martial classes in essentials will be determined by how open and flexible you like classes. If you don't mind doing the same thing for 30 levels, there is nothing wrong balance wise with those classes. They do run into trouble when they get tested on the options they don't have (Especially the knight) but their core reliable functionality is undeniable by anyone. They do keep up and are simpler viable alternatives for those who want them.

Everything pre-essentials still exists. Nothing is invalidated and you can still use all of it. So play your invoker alongside a PHB Fighter with the essentials thief, warpriest and mage really not noticing anything terribly different anyway.
 

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