Shimmin consolidates his geekery with pontification on 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons.
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The glory of earlier editions of D&D was that they provided a "big tent" which could accommodate all sorts of things - it didn't cater to one particular model of play fantastically well, but it supported a wide variety of approaches in an erratic but just about serviceable manner. 4th Edition, on the other hand, seems to have devoted itself to handling combat and dungeon crawling especially well and glossing over everything else. I think this has good and bad points: on the one hand, if you're going into a 4th Edition game, you can reliably expect that it will be about miniatures skirmish combats and high adventure. Sure, someone could run a game all about character development and politics, but they'd be ignoring the best parts of the system to do so; it'd be like that XKCD strip about the "worst capture the flag server ever". On the other hand, I liked having D&D there as the "big tent", the common ground which everyone liked but few people unabashedly loved. Oh well.
There's a slightly nasty sense in which D&D has become the rather tragic victim of the snobbishness of the late 90s.
Early D&D only had rules for combat, because that was the only thing that the designers thought needed rules. It didn't mean that you couldn't run games with little or no combat, just that you didn't need a system for it because hey, you know how to talk to people, right?
Unfortunately it then became established doctrine (through White Wolf and later - ironically - the Forge) that only things you had rules for were important. So D&D tried to introduce rules for things that *weren't* combat (in the shape of the 3.X skill system) but it always felt clunky and awkward. This people took as evidence that D&D was "only good for dungeon crawling" and that dungeons were what the game "did best" and so we get 4th edition, a game now designed to focus on the system's percieved "strengths" by making it All About the Combat.
It's a rather sad spiral. You start with a game that's actually very open ended and freeform, with very few rules for anything outside combat. Then people tell you that because you have to have rules for other things, so you add more layers of complication until you end up with a system that isn't very open ended or freeform, and still has most of its rules focusing on combat. Then you realise that the non-combat parts of the rules aren't working, because there isn't the framework to support them, so you go *back* to only having rules for combat, only now you've lost sight of the idea that you can do the other stuff as *well* so you get the worst of all possible worlds, something that is both restrictive and codified *and* totally combat focused.
And the White Wolf players say "we told you so".
Sorry, epic reply is epic.
It's technically restricted in terms of actions, which fits the computer model - there's a defined list of things you can do. On the other hand, you don't HAVE to pick a power to use as your action; you can do other things if you want, as long as the DM decides how to deal with them. To some extent fighters actually suffer from this - they have powers instead of "just attacking", but lose the ability to combine various weapons with various types of attack (trips, grapples, disarms, sunders and the like).
It's very much combat-focused, and so skills, feats and spells are all tailored almost exclusively to combat. The last, especially, I find a bit unconvincing and out of keeping with wizardly fantasy... Some people might find the simplification a problem; for example, there are fewer skills now, and a closed set of Knowledge skills. Skills also basically scale with class. So it's harder to invent new skills for PCs to acquire to deal with a new situation ("Craft:Pianoforte" or "Knowledge:Aliens" or whatever you had in mind), and you might find the set limited. For example, there's no more Architecture & Engineering, which means you'll need to use either Arcana or Dungeoneering to deal with machinery. On the other hand, physical skills have been rolled together into Athletics or Acrobatics, which is probably a sensible simplification, and similarly there's only one sensory skill, Perception.
As I said, the Monster Manual concentrates on combat not background, so there are suggested "encounter groups" for creatures (some of them unconvincing) but little to suggest why you'd encounter or fight them in the first place. You won't find ordinary animals or vermin in there either, only fey or elemental or demonic variants, so a "realistic" campaign might be trickier, if you want wild animals to ward off with campfires, and the like.
The other thing is that one reason combat plays such a big part is that it takes a long time. Minions are a good idea (weak, 1 hp cut-outs to give that "cutting down hordes of enemies" feel without too much book-keeping), but most critters now have a load of hit points - even kobolds and goblins can absorb a lot of hits before they go down, which is consisted with high PC hit points, but makes the battles quite drawn-out. Hence the 7-hour kobold-fest I mentioned.
I'm not sure where the players want to take this, but they seem interested in roleplaying not just fighting. Depending how it works out, I'll either make things up, or possibly cobble some house-ruled content on for the more RP aspects if 4th Ed won't do what we need.
There's also the issue of Magic. I think that's going to be another article...
Yes, I think the powers in 4th edition are the make-or-break point: either you accept that they work the way they work and don't get too stressed trying to figure out how it works in practice during the game (how do you shove a gelatinous cube back two squares, when surely if you give it a push you'd just sink into it?), or you can't, and if you can't accept that you can't get on with 4th edition. (People who've had prior exposure to other RPGs seem to have the most problems with this, actually.)
Another point: I remember being struck, when I was glancing at the 4th Edition powers list, at how often you'd find powers for different classes which actually had precisely the same effect, with the only difference being the stat the person in question rolls on. It seems that in 4th edition the classes tend to have the same core competencies, and then have some areas they are especially good at, rather than being entirely distinct.
On the other hand, you don't HAVE to pick a power to use as your action; you can do other things if you want, as long as the DM decides how to deal with them.
That's the thing, though: you're relying on GM fiat, and if I remember correctly from the DM guide the likelihood is that you're normally going to be a little worse off trying to think outside the box than you would be using your powers. If you're using your powers, then you know upfront what your chances of succeeding the roll are, and often you at least get some benefit even if you don't make the roll, whereas if you're thinking outside the box the success roll might end up being quite tough, and you might not even get anything out of a failed roll. I found when playing 4E that I never tried anything original in combat, because it never quite seemed worth it - there was always a power appropriate to the situation.
Perhaps this is why I like Dark Heresy so much - you're normally hip-deep in the sort of trouble you're not really qualified to deal with, and most of your skills are low enough that if you just say "I shoot him" you're going to fail, so it pressures you into thinking outside the box and coming up with interesting plans to tip the scales in your favour.
If I remember correctly, Arcane Archers had a similar ability. At about 10th level. The thing is, the whole point about Arcane Archers was they enhanced and augmented their abilities through magic, whereas rangers are now expressly non-magical.
I can see why people would add rules for non-combat interaction. For people with no RP experience (like me and my gang), if someone suddenly decided to, say, try to persuade the king’s garrison to revolt, earn their keep as a baker, or build themselves an iron golem – I would have had no idea what to do, or where to even start. But because 3.5th edition has rules for crafting and employment and persuading, I could at least have a stab at it in that version (I don’t know about the earlier ones). I might not be happy using the rules as written for the particular situation I’m in, but there’s a somewhat consistent framework to work off. So writers could see that as a benefit for newer players. I assume that what really happened was that they’d come up against all kinds of situations in their own games, worked out ways to handle them, and then decided to write these into the rules. Perhaps it would’ve been better to have these in a separate section, an appendix even, with “suggested ways to handle situations”.
You could also argue that you start needing some kind of rules for conversation as soon as you introduce personality stats. Otherwise you can get surly, taciturn, barely-coherent barbarians merrily convincing everyone with cunning arguments because there’s nothing to stop them, or because you’re basing it on players’ ability to roleplay a situation (problems I only know second-hand) and the barbarian’s player is more articulate than the bard’s.
This bothers me a lot, not because of my very limited prior experience, but because I visualise things as they’re going on and some of them end up being more Men In Tights or cartoony than heroic. I can actually hear the “boing!” as Corwen Copperpot knocks back the (strawberry-flavoured) gelatinous cube with his axe on Saturday morning. There are also a couple of weird interactions: if you push someone off a ledge, they get a saving throw, which is always a 50% chance, rather than the old Reflex-based system. So a zombie is just as likely to catch itself as an elven acrobat.
The similarity of powers aspect is another thing that makes me think you could actually have far fewer powers. Does anyone remember Necromunda? There you had a load of “skill charts”, and each ‘class’ could use a certain subset of these charts to gain abilities. Something similar might work. Then again, they wouldn’t have the different explanations (holy smiting vs. burst of raw magic vs. big club over the head) so they might lose something that way. On the other hand, the power-list idea might make for less duplication and more interesting powers. I’m all interested now... There’re definite advantages to having class overlap, because it does mean you don’t always need a party of one wizard, one fighter, one rogue and one cleric; but it means they’re less distinct, as you said.
I do agree with what you’re saying about DM fiat, and how the more cut-and-dried your basic options are, the less likely it’ll be you’ll do something different. This might depend on the DM, so if you have someone who actively encourages creative thinking and makes it worthwhile, you’d be okay. For DMs, it’s actually quite difficult though; I’m still reading through the new DM’s guide, but because abilities like stunning, dazing, tripping, pushing and pulling are all now done through specific powers, if a cleric wants to try and just trip someone, it’s not clear how you’d resolve this if they don’t have a trip power. On the other hand, pushing people over or tripping them up is a really obvious combat move that even kids use, so it seems ridiculous to say you can’t do it without a power. But is knocking people over the equivalent of a 1st-level attack? A 5th-level? A 20th-level? I don’t know. Maybe it’ll all become clear.
Q: Which is easier to push off a ledge: a) a 10-foot cube of flesh-absorbing acidic jelly, or b) a 4-foot halfling thief?
A: Both are equally difficult to push off a ledge.
Q: When pushed off a ledge, which is more likely to catch itself at the last minute: a) a 10-foot cube of flesh-absorbing acidic jelly, or b) a 4-foot halfling thief?
A: Both are equally likely to catch themselves.
Q: When a creature is pushed off a cliff and saves itself at the last minute, will it a) fall over before it reaches the cliff, or b) catch itself on the way down?
A: a)
Q: You know the archetypal cliff-hanger scene, where the hero dangles by one hand from a precipice trying desperately to climb back up, while the villain looms ever closer? How does that work in 4th Edition?
A: Nobody ever dangles from precipices. Save or fall, baby.
Q: Which is more agile: a slow-moving, 10-foot cube of semi-sentient jelly, or a typical orcish warrior?
A: The jelly. Obviously.
Q: Which is easier to trip up: a) a 10-foot cube of jelly, or b) a tall, thin skeleton?
A: The jelly. You fool.
I just wanted to say I really liked this article - not being especially with the savvy with roleplaying my'self, it's nice to read a review/analysis for a roleplaying game from an outsider's perspective.
I did once play a game of 4th ed D&D (I know! shock!) and the combat took *forever* - partially, of course, it was that we didn't know what we were doing but actually the hitpoint inflation meant that it was taking six warriors wailing on him to kill one kobold. Also although I got a sense that combat had been streamlined (less of that what the fuck is my THACO business) I didn't get a sense it was any more interesting-per-se.
Maybe I'd have seen it better if we hadn't retired in exhaustion, six hours later, having killed five kobolds.
The thing about early D&D is that, despite its insanities and its quirks, it's quite fluid - you can usually find a way to do whatever you want with it - dungeon crawling, politics, arty farty character development.
With 4th ed, I felt quite constricted...
Some links:
Swords and Wizardry emulates the ancient, original D&D rules, only they are arranged far more sensibly and are far easier to follow than the somewhat erratically-arranged original books. The standard version includes the most widely accepted rules from the supplements (which includes a heck of a lot of stuff which is now considered to be vital to D&D), the "White Box" version emulates the original core rules only.
Labyrinth Lord contains the rules from the old Basic and Expert sets from the early 1980s in one convenient package.
OSRIC is a clone of 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. (Whilst no clone yet exists for 2nd edition, the two are sufficiently close that I reckon you could run pretty much any 2nd edition product using OSRIC).
And of course, if you want to play 3rd Edition it's free forever without any retro-clone jiggery-pokery.
On the notion of 4th ed speeding up play. It's true that it's much easier to work out what your specific powers do now than in 3rd where you had hosts of different rules to work out.
On the other hand, everything in 4th edition has roughly five times as many hit points as it would have had in earlier editions, which makes everything take five times longer to kill. Worse, because PCs are more powerful and more durable, monsters are less threatening, so you *also* need more of them.
A fight against five kobolds would have been a difficult challenge for a 2nd or 3rd edition party, and would be over one way or another in about fifteen minutes. The same fight in 4th edition is a comparatively trivial challenge but takes *hours*.
And of course your final battle will usually be against a "Solo" monster, which will have, like, ten bajillion hit points to make up for the fact that there's only one of it.
Very true. We did the third and fourth fights of Keep on the Shadowfell at Halloween (the second, which is almost identical to the first, I skipped on the grounds it would be boring). It was a fair bit faster than the first battle, but those two plus a bit of discussion took NINE HOURS. That's without a meal break. We were actually commenting on this in the game - we kept track of turns (an old wargaming habit of mine) and it was really noticeable that, say, the first three hours represented about twenty seconds of action.
True that. But then again - and here I'm relying on my hazy memories of that 4th Edition campaign you ran a while back - although the concept of having minion-monsters who only take one hit to kill is a decent way to speed up the combat, I seem to recall that actually successfully hitting the buggers could sometimes be more difficult than you'd expect. And since a "missed" attack can never cause damage to a minion, if you want to get rid of 'em, you need to hit.
Flipping through my copy of Keep On the Shadowfell (bought during a brief spurt of being excited about 4th edition), I'm finding that most encounters involve either:
- A bunch of minions and a number of normal monsters on top of that.
- One really powerful normal monster attended by insane numbers of minions.
- Encounters with groups of normal monsters, with no minions present, so each monster present has to be ground down hit point by hit point.
- Ridiculously powerful solo monsters.
Ignoring the solos, the encounters involving exclusively normal monsters involve 3-5 of 'em. The encounters that include normal monsters and minions involve 7 to 17 monsters. Even if you aren't using proper miniatures, the spatial location and current status of every single one of these monsters, plus the player characters, needs to be kept track of, because there really isn't any scope to run combat in an abstract manner. And even the lowliest minion has a stat block which is vastly more complicated than pretty much anything seen in pre-3rd edition days.
Conclusion: I am a boring old man who cannot keep up with the cool kids these days.
None of the established gaming groups I know have switched over, and thanks to a WOTC lawsuit we know that their sales figures for 4E are deeply uninspiring. The 3.5 fan community is still pretty strong, at least on the interwebs, although its market dominance is being eroded by Exalted and some other stuff.
Shimmin, I actually have to disagree with a couple of your points: That Wizards and Sorcerers have different spells is, in my opinion, one of the better things about the new edition. 3.5 Sorcerers added little or nothing to the game, being essentially just wizards who were inferior in every way. 4e sorcerers have a lot of spells which radiate from their bodies, give them auras, and so on, while wizard spells tend to conjure objects at some distance, something that really captures in my mind the feel of someone whose very body is magical.
On the flipside, I don't feel that the simplification of the mechanics succeeded at all. The basic "rules" are very simple, yes, but as the levels pile on the sheer number of conditional modifiers becomes boggling. During the one, play-test encounter I ran before giving up on the game, my players couldn't keep track of the SCORES of small conditional modifiers: 1 to Perception for standing near the Elf, 2 to to hit an enemy that was tagged with Lance of Faith, 2 to hit with Opportunity attacks if you're a Fighter, 1 from the Warlord when you spend an action point, etc.
It really actually slowed down play far beyond anything I've seen in my 3.5 games.
Which lawsuit would that be? I'm only aware of Hasbro's suit against Atari over the D&D computer game licence (which I sort of hope they win, Atari have done barely anything with the licence except lazily crank out NWN2 expansions for the past few years), and of the cease and desist they sent out against that "print your own power cards" site. None of which seems to offer conclusive proof with regards to sales figures.
I'm not sure we're quite talking about the same thing. I don't disagree that it's good to have the two classes (three, including warlocks) having different spells. You may well be right about the effects of those powers, too (I haven't actually checked, and I've just been playing D&D for eight hours so I really don't want to see the rulebooks right now). What I find sticks a bit is the lack of a solid reason for them to be separate classes with separate powers.
So it's clear to me, for example, why fighters are different from barbarians are different from rogues. They each have a theme and the powers they have support that theme pretty clearly. Barbies attack ferociously and unstoppably, fighters are all-round capable and hold the line, rogues are tricky and exploit every advantage. For me, only warlocks have a well-defined basis like that: they're somehow gifted by external powers and use them in a variety of weird and sinister ways. Wizards and sorcerers have an alleged theme (study and technique vs. raw innate power) but I just don't find the powers support it well enough. There seems no particular reason why a wizard could learn to cast an orb of acid, say, whereas I can accept that he won't learn the abilities granted to warlocks because their source is sufficiently different. So even if your suggestion is true (sorcerers have a lot of spells which radiate from their bodies, give them auras, and so on, while wizard spells tend to conjure objects at some distance, something that really captures in my mind the feel of someone whose very body is magical), to me that doesn't obviously tie in with innate power vs. careful study.
On the other hand, if they'd made sorcerer powers very "raw" (which they partly have) and wizard powers very technical (which they haven't really), that would make sense to me. I'm not even saying it would need a major change in the effects, only new descriptions and a bit of tweaking, most likely.