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[joedizzy]

Man, D&D 4 is a bunch of fun, but trying to get a handle on all those spelled out options and abilities is like trying to move from making yellow blots with green backgrounds in Paint to dealing with colour saturation, hue and pixel bleed in Photoshop.

The end result promises to be incredible, but I cannot tell if the workload is worth the

Comments

[chris_goodwin]

The end result promises to be incredible, but I cannot tell if the workload is worth the trouble.

From everything I heard prior to release, to all of the actual play reports I've read since release, the end result is that it plays like an MMO with miniatures and paper character sheets.

[joedizzy]

I wouldn't know the difference. What does an MMO play like?

[chris_goodwin]

More or less like you might expect a D&D computer game to play. You move your playing pieces around, and make tactical choices with your resources in order to best be able to beat the opponent.

I understand that it's superb at what it does. The question is whether you like what it does.

[joedizzy]

Coming from WFRP2, I've approached 4E more from an old-school perspective: here's your character, there's the world... go out and have adventures and stuff.

Which is basically how we came up with running an ale-transport from a local village to the next town, before being attacked by a horde of skeletons & zombies Night of the Living Dead-style.

So far it's been holding up pretty well, it's just that during combat I always have this feeling of only using a fraction of what you can do in D&D combat and that's kind of annoying. Because it seems quite interesting to try to come up with ways of mucking about during combat. If you have a GM that's willing to roll with the punches, of course. So far our GM seems to more or less fall asleep during combat, judging by his monotone voice and plain descriptions.

[spacelem]

And the wizard plays exactly like the fighter, who plays exactly like the cleric, who plays exactly like the thief.

There's absolutely no variety in D&D4. It sums down to the following game strategy:

I pick a power to do HP damage to one or more bad guys. Possibly a status effect. Some of my powers are better than others at doing this.

That's it. There is nothing more to D&D4.

[joedizzy]

You seem to have played a different type of 4E game than I have, then. The differences in our game were borne out of what the players did and described and had less to do with mechanics