Changing the Games We Play
Guess the folks at Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast must just be into changing things this year.
Starting their next "big" expansion in October, Magic gets few alterations they've announced:
- "Intro packs" instead of theme decks. Seems like a fine idea to introducing new players, but I probably would have hit the existing fat packs for this instead of the theme decks.
- Fewer new cards per year. Yay. Even when I was buying a booster box for each expansion, I felt there were an awful lot of cards I never saw myself.
- One common in each booster pack will be replaced with a land. Eh. I can understand the desire to give new players more access to lands (being a fundamental part of the game), but I don't like this way to do it. To people who have tons of land, it's a waste of a card slot. To those who are new, it doesn't give them enough land to do anything with.
- One in eight booster packs will have a new "mythic rare" rarity card instead of a regular rare. Guh. Huge turn-off there for me, as someone who's been scaling back his purchasing by a lot. I can't justify purchasing boxes these days and on the singles market, these are almost guaranteed to be beyond my budget.
Overall... less appeal for me. We rarely play anymore. I can't afford to be in it for the collecting, which seems to be the way they want to push things. Ah well.
I've also had the chance to sit down and look at some of the changes in the soon-to-be-released 4th Edition D&D.
- Alignment shift. No Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil? Huh. Consolidation, of course. It looks like they're further defining "Good" and "Evil" to include "freedom" (a key element of chaos) and "tyranny" (an extreme of order) into those base alignments respectively. I wasn't expecting that, though I don't see any particular problem with it.
- Dragonborn and tieflings, but no gnomes. Again, these seem like odd choices to me out of all the races they could have picked, but that's fine. Eladrin? Meh, they're not a new race to me, just a new name for high elves.
- The focus on "encounters" seems much heavier than previous to me. Pacing of the game, rewards, use of powers - all revolve around the concept.
- It appears the PHB is more of a self-contained rules book than 3E, while the DMG has more advice for the DM. Pleasant change from all signs.
- Discussion of and attention to "roles" in the group. Not a bad thing, but probably the biggest sign from what I see of bleed-over from MMORPGs. The fighter class, for example, is described as a "defender" and gets abilities to encourage enemies to attack it while hindering them if they try to avoid the fighter and go for a softer target. While I remember a long tradition of fighers being in the front line to protect mages, there's now more talk about it and mechnical abilities to back up this tanking to a degree.
- Rituals. I find this idea to be quite neat - things like raising the dead, scrying, notable summons, enchanting items and such being files apart from class abilities and more generally accessible. They have their own limitations and costs, but seem to require a feat (or scroll) rather than being a specific class.
- Multiclassing/Paragon/Epic... I'm a little big fuzzy on these points. At level 11 and 21, you can take on... paths. Sounds like templates to me, in that you get a few extra things as you progress. Multiclassing seems to be taking a feat and swapping some abilities of yours class for those of another. Sounds like it should be simpler in play than previous, but I haven't been able to fully wrap my mind around it yet.
- Giving the players what they want. Strange, maybe, but I find myself having the most reservations about what I perceive as a shift toward further empowering/catering to the PCs. DMs are encouraged to give out magic items along the way based on what the players want rather than what makes sense or what's randomly rolled, and if they don't find it they can potentially make it.
I seem to have a lot of trouble explaining how I feel on this point. D&D has seemed to me a more "neutral/unbiased" game system. Even in 3E with the disparity between PC classes and NPC classes, you could slap whatever class you like on the party's opposition. The game was what I might call "as fair as it needed to be." If a gaming group wanted to play a game where the PCs were superheroic, it wasn't hard. If they wanted to play things more gritty, that could be done too.
Now there's more push toward the PCs being the heroes who are plainly better than anyone else. That's not a bad thing... unless you want to play a game where that's not the case. I think some settings and games are perfect that way, but it feels like there will be an uncomfortable level of desconstruction necessary to make a D&D game where things are more balanced. I prefered D&D as a generic system that could be tweaked to fit a setting - instead of a more genre-specific game that has to be untweaked out of its current bias, then retweaked to fit a setting with a different tone.
Personal bias, I suppose.
Closely tied to that, I think the number of powers associated with each class will make it more unpleasant to try to fit them mechanically into a setting with a different slant. It used to just be magic (which was much of the book) that had to be altered in most cases, but now I'm afraid it might take more effort to personalize a setting and use D&D.
The feeling I get is that is has become more setting-specific.
Well, enough on that for now. I won't be jumping at the books when they hit shelves in a few days, but I probably will buy them eventually. Alas, I expect they'll gather dust for the most part as my current co-gamers seem more inclined toward other games these days.
Starting their next "big" expansion in October, Magic gets few alterations they've announced:
- "Intro packs" instead of theme decks. Seems like a fine idea to introducing new players, but I probably would have hit the existing fat packs for this instead of the theme decks.
- Fewer new cards per year. Yay. Even when I was buying a booster box for each expansion, I felt there were an awful lot of cards I never saw myself.
- One common in each booster pack will be replaced with a land. Eh. I can understand the desire to give new players more access to lands (being a fundamental part of the game), but I don't like this way to do it. To people who have tons of land, it's a waste of a card slot. To those who are new, it doesn't give them enough land to do anything with.
- One in eight booster packs will have a new "mythic rare" rarity card instead of a regular rare. Guh. Huge turn-off there for me, as someone who's been scaling back his purchasing by a lot. I can't justify purchasing boxes these days and on the singles market, these are almost guaranteed to be beyond my budget.
Overall... less appeal for me. We rarely play anymore. I can't afford to be in it for the collecting, which seems to be the way they want to push things. Ah well.
I've also had the chance to sit down and look at some of the changes in the soon-to-be-released 4th Edition D&D.
- Alignment shift. No Chaotic Good or Lawful Evil? Huh. Consolidation, of course. It looks like they're further defining "Good" and "Evil" to include "freedom" (a key element of chaos) and "tyranny" (an extreme of order) into those base alignments respectively. I wasn't expecting that, though I don't see any particular problem with it.
- Dragonborn and tieflings, but no gnomes. Again, these seem like odd choices to me out of all the races they could have picked, but that's fine. Eladrin? Meh, they're not a new race to me, just a new name for high elves.
- The focus on "encounters" seems much heavier than previous to me. Pacing of the game, rewards, use of powers - all revolve around the concept.
- It appears the PHB is more of a self-contained rules book than 3E, while the DMG has more advice for the DM. Pleasant change from all signs.
- Discussion of and attention to "roles" in the group. Not a bad thing, but probably the biggest sign from what I see of bleed-over from MMORPGs. The fighter class, for example, is described as a "defender" and gets abilities to encourage enemies to attack it while hindering them if they try to avoid the fighter and go for a softer target. While I remember a long tradition of fighers being in the front line to protect mages, there's now more talk about it and mechnical abilities to back up this tanking to a degree.
- Rituals. I find this idea to be quite neat - things like raising the dead, scrying, notable summons, enchanting items and such being files apart from class abilities and more generally accessible. They have their own limitations and costs, but seem to require a feat (or scroll) rather than being a specific class.
- Multiclassing/Paragon/Epic... I'm a little big fuzzy on these points. At level 11 and 21, you can take on... paths. Sounds like templates to me, in that you get a few extra things as you progress. Multiclassing seems to be taking a feat and swapping some abilities of yours class for those of another. Sounds like it should be simpler in play than previous, but I haven't been able to fully wrap my mind around it yet.
- Giving the players what they want. Strange, maybe, but I find myself having the most reservations about what I perceive as a shift toward further empowering/catering to the PCs. DMs are encouraged to give out magic items along the way based on what the players want rather than what makes sense or what's randomly rolled, and if they don't find it they can potentially make it.
I seem to have a lot of trouble explaining how I feel on this point. D&D has seemed to me a more "neutral/unbiased" game system. Even in 3E with the disparity between PC classes and NPC classes, you could slap whatever class you like on the party's opposition. The game was what I might call "as fair as it needed to be." If a gaming group wanted to play a game where the PCs were superheroic, it wasn't hard. If they wanted to play things more gritty, that could be done too.
Now there's more push toward the PCs being the heroes who are plainly better than anyone else. That's not a bad thing... unless you want to play a game where that's not the case. I think some settings and games are perfect that way, but it feels like there will be an uncomfortable level of desconstruction necessary to make a D&D game where things are more balanced. I prefered D&D as a generic system that could be tweaked to fit a setting - instead of a more genre-specific game that has to be untweaked out of its current bias, then retweaked to fit a setting with a different tone.
Personal bias, I suppose.
Closely tied to that, I think the number of powers associated with each class will make it more unpleasant to try to fit them mechanically into a setting with a different slant. It used to just be magic (which was much of the book) that had to be altered in most cases, but now I'm afraid it might take more effort to personalize a setting and use D&D.
The feeling I get is that is has become more setting-specific.
Well, enough on that for now. I won't be jumping at the books when they hit shelves in a few days, but I probably will buy them eventually. Alas, I expect they'll gather dust for the most part as my current co-gamers seem more inclined toward other games these days.