4th edition
So, I downloaded the 4th edition core rulebooks off of the net to get an idea of what I think of the game before purchasing it. It’s an interesting deviation from 3rd edition, but at it’s core probably less of a deviation than I was led to believe. The most significant change I can see other than general tweaks to the rules is in character creation. First off the race and class choices have been completely upheaved. Gnomes are gone, as are half-orcs, replaced by “dragonborn” which are essentially klingons with breath weapons; and eladrin which are fey touched elves, since apparently just having elves and half-elves didn’t cover enough elf ground. I’d be gratified not to see drow placed in the playable races, but sadly, in their place the tiefling is now an official core race. This could all be fine of course, the balance issues are presumably addressed, and any experienced DM could simply ban the races they don’t want from their campaign, but I can’t help but notice that Gnomes and Half-orcs recieve a vastly less verbose section than other races in the monster manual, no playable stats are given other than pregenerated characters (this is annoyingly the case with all monster entries. I like that there are some basic pregenerated leveled monsters and such but I’d like the base stats of a race in case I want to build my own say, orc , and official mentions of PHB2 are already about. Clearly old playable races will be added, for only an additional $40 investment. Cute.
The classes have also had some significant restructuring. the druid, sorcerer, bard, barbarian and monk are all gone. The druid an monk are certain to make appearances in PHB2, and probably the barbarian. The new classes replacing them are the warlock, and the warlord, both of which are concepts I actually really like. The warlock seems to be a replacement for the sorcerer (until PHB3 or 4 maybe) and basically describes an arcane magic user that draws power from pacts with powerful beings, giving an excuse for their spellcasting ability other than innate ability. The warlord as best I can figure is a paladin bard, with powers designed to bolster the party and make them overall more effective in combat, I’ll miss the bard, but I’m really interested to try this class out.
As for character creation, it’s scale is head-spinning. I shit you not that the classes section (remember there are only eight classes) is a hundred and ten pages long. Fuck me, that’s a lot of info. It gives me a headache to even look at it for very long but it looks like basically your character every level chooses between 3 or 4 powers that shape the style of combat that the character does the rest of the game. I’m willing to give this the benefit of the doubt in terms of versatility and efficiency, in fact it looks really handy for character progression, especially once the group gets comfortable enough with the system to start developing powers of their own to really develop and customize their characters, but first, I don’t see where they get off calling this system dungeons and dragons at this point, and second it stinks of “buy these eight books to have access to more powers for your fighter that any good DM will simply tell you to get bent when you try to use, only $200 for the lot!”
The core system beyond that seems largely unchanged, rolls work the same, combat is basically similar with minor tweaks to make miniature use more efficient. I haven’t even started in on the DMG, but the monster manual frustrates me in the way I mentioned earlier of all the monsters being pregenerated with no base stats to build with. Take orcs for example: the MM has listed and built for you the orc drudge, orc warrior, orc raider, orc berserker, orc eye-of-gruumsh, orc bloodranger, and orc chieftan. There is not an orc nothing, no base orc, so if I want to build an orc, say rogue for use in my campaign I’m going to have to extrapolate the stats from these classes and reverse engineer the race from them, or wait until orcs are added as a playable race in PHB2 or so. I like the pregenerated stuff it will be handy, it even has basic tactics for them, module style which would be great for quick prep and on the fly and generally lazy encounter building, but seriously do they have to assume that all DM’s will no longer prep in 4th edition?
Ultimately I think a playtest is in order. All of the likes and dislikes of this are on paper, and there’s really no way to know how it will come out until you break out some dice, so anyone interested in a test run in the near future give me a ring.
Originally published at my web site. You can comment here or there.