arcady said:
Open your 1E book and look up the name of the guy with spells per day and a familiar.
Trick question - not all "magic-users" ever got a familiar. Only if the DM was generous enough to bless you with that spell.
I really don't call 4E wizards "Vancian", for sure, but the daily spells mean that traces of it are still there.
Gnome? Not in my PHB. It's a monster in the MM, sure, but it's not in the PHB as a PC race.
I'm getting really curious, now. What's so unusable, mechanically, about the Gnome entry from the 4E MM? I keep hearing people say, "It's unusable" but yet people like Mearls and Noonan say, "yes, you can." Is it the lack of feats? Is it that conditional invisibility thing? What else is unusable about it, other than, "it's not in the PHB"?
Back to the point made by Wisdom Penalty.
Ari Marmell first codified this for me, and in my playtests I'd seen it myself but didn't put a solid finger to it before then; however, there are a number of things that are very "retro" or "retro reminiscent" about 4e for me. People are missing the forest because of the trees, figuratively.
- classes play as strong of a role in 4e as they do in pre-3e editions. This was lost in 3e, and reclaimed in 4e, through the changes to multiclassing and through the paragon paths.
- AD&D had a unit of measurement called "the turn", which was a 10 minute unit of time in which searches, binding wounds, cleaning up, etc. took place. All combat took a turn, and a turn was a good way to slkow down the pace of the adventuring day. This was lost in 3e, and more in 3.5, as spell durations listed in rounds and minutes encouraged (almost pushed) parties to rush dungeons at breakneck paces. 4e practically mandates the "short rest", as your encounter powers don't come back without them. It may not be the 10 minute turn, but it's a good attempt at curtailing the 15 minute adventuring day.
- XP is assigned per monster, as it was in earlier D&Ds, rather than by a nebulous encounter level and challenge rating system.
- Monsters have returned to their roots with the new stat blocks, listing the most important info, and concatenating the amount of info a DM must know about a complex monster. No longer is an advanced Dragon's stat block over a page in length; as in the old days, monsters are back to AC, attacks, to hit, damage, and one or two special abilities (or four or five for those really advanced beasties.)
- Just as importantly, exception-based monster abilities have returned. A monster might have five times the hit points of a normal member of its species because it needs them, not because it had a high con bonus which bumps its fort save, skill checks, poison save DC, and number of rages per day. A monster might be able to breathe its breath weapon immediately upon losing half its hit points, because that would be fun to see, not watching gamers hem and haw until the DM came up with a feat to let it do that, just so the half-dragon players could argue about taking it, too.
- Treasure tables are back, in a manner of speaking. only this time they're broken down into much more understandable units, for the DM to track.
Add to these (and these are just ones I've been thinking about from the forums; more to come once I get to peruse the books in detail) the mystique of magic iterms returning; admittedly, this renaissance of magic was started with the Magic Item Compendium in 3.5, a book I heavily recommend to any 3e fan, but it's been continued. The stage is set for any number of specially powered, unique items that don't depend on its numebr of plusses to note its importance. Add in the changes to weapons (according to Ari) that are reminiscent of the old Basic/Expert/Masters D&D.
There's a lot that hearkens back to older D&D, while replacing it with what the designers think are good solid changes to the parts of older D&D that didn't work (such as the dependency on clerics, the lack of unique and interesting powers for non-spellcasters, random hit points leading to parties too disparate to adventure together, Base attack Bonuses and save DCs that led to the same thing, etc.) Are those changes for the better? Only play will show the truth of the matter.
