4th Ed D&D

[LadyTevar]

Ok, even for those without spoilers over the last few months, the books are out now, so we can discuss what we like of them so far.

I personally like the changes to the Wizards. The "At Will" and "Encounter" spells mean that a first level wizard no longer vents their spells on the first three encounters and has nothing left to use for the rest of the evening.

[Covenant]

I don't have a book, I've just seen the online published clips and heard the Penny Arcade podcast of them playing it with the WotC guy. It sounds good from what I can hear but I am concerned about how pidgeonholed classes will be into specific roles. I always like more flexibility when I can get it, and there doesn't seem to be much of that. Can you give us some information about how far you can push a general type of class, like a Fighter or a Rogue, outside of a specific role like Tank? The 'brute rogue' I saw WOTC post sounded awesome, but I've heard very confusing statements about what will be possible and what wouldn't.

[Uraniun235]

There are people who wanted to stay "spoiler free" for 4E? How does that even work?


I know that my friends are totally hot on it, love everything they've heard about it, and can't wait for their preordered books to arrive so that they can rub their penises all over it.

Some of it has sounded good enough, but I honestly don't care so much what system we use... just so long as there's room for hijinks and BSing, I'm good.

[Nephtys]

Ok, even for those without spoilers over the last few months, the books are out now, so we can discuss what we like of them so far.

I personally like the changes to the Wizards. The "At Will" and "Encounter" spells mean that a first level wizard no longer vents their spells on the first three enemies in the first encounter and stands around with a dagger-wielding liability for the rest of the evening.

Fixed it for ya, Tev.

[SirNitram]

Can you give us some information about how far you can push a general type of class, like a Fighter or a Rogue, outside of a specific role like Tank? The 'brute rogue' I saw WOTC post sounded awesome, but I've heard very confusing statements about what will be possible and what wouldn't.

There's always ways to 'tweak' it in various directions. Brutal rogues and artful rogues are examples: Artfuls are insanely manueverable, or maneuver their enemies better, while brutals just pile on damage. To give an example from the early powers: Artful rogues can grab Positioning Strike as a 1/Encounter power, dealing normal damage and moving their target a number of squares(Or five foot increments) equal to their Charisma bonus. The brute option is double weapon damage with the bonuses from dex and strength both. Yea, the 'roles' are a bit strong, but I'd say not as strong as they used to be. A Paladin and a Fighter are both more than just meatshields standing there, with their own powers now to buff themselves, sometimes others, lay down ranged energy attacks(Paladin), or the quintessential 'Stand there and laugh'(Fighter).

Multiclassing is also less penalizing(Feat based, and you get more feats), though toned down. Gishing will take some thought, and not be the traditional Gish(Buff self up, brute force) but more a swordsman who bzats folks from afar.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

I personally like the changes to the Wizards. The "At Will" and "Encounter" spells mean that a first level wizard no longer vents their spells on the first three enemies in the first encounter and stands around with a dagger-wielding liability for the rest of the evening.

Fixed it for ya, Tev.

Isn't that what Sleep and Colour Spray are for?

I haven't read the books yet, but from what I've read of the previews, the classes don't seem any more pidgeon-holed than they were in 3.5 (with the exception of classes like 3.5 Wizard which could do anything, thus making the other classes obsolete). They have multiple paths, too, so not all Rogues have the same Sneak Attack progression and are only differentiated by their Skills.

[loomer]

The books were leaked a few days before the release date, so with 4th Ed is probably going to lose a few more sales than they normally would. I've got the feeling the whole thing may turn out to be a failure in the long term.

[Hotfoot]

The books were leaked a few days before the release date, so with 4th Ed is probably going to lose a few more sales than they normally would. I've got the feeling the whole thing may turn out to be a failure in the long term.

I doubt it would fail based on entirely on piracy. Piracy has been a fact of life for RPG books since the advent of PDFs, but people still want hard copies of the books for easy reference, and printing up hundreds of pages from a commercial printer isn't exactly cheap, even if you do it in just in black and white.

Meanwhile, the entire online subscription model for online searchable copies of the main rule books, plus character sheet storage, character portrait designer, a "Magazine" subscription, and an online virtual tabletop will ensure at least a fair amount of ongoing payments, which of course would greatly offset any costs of piracy.

I detailed a list of reasons that the RPG market was in trouble a few months ago, but frankly, piracy hurts smaller companies much more than bigger companies. D&D has the benefit of being not just in gaming stores, but virtually every bookstore as well. This translates to a much higher resistance to the damage of piracy when you can pick up the books while shopping for something else on an impulse, compared to having to order them special from the gaming stores or hoping that it's carried by Amazon.

The biggest hurdle facing 4th Ed, really, is die-hard 3.5 fans who spent hundreds or thousands of dollars on books four years ago without realizing that a new edition was bound to be along pretty soon. They have a financial stake in the old system and unless they are blown away by the new one, they're not going to budge, and many of them are looking for just about any excuse not to get the new books.

They're going to find it, too, in the overall jump in the general feel of the mechanics. This time around, things are different, and there is just no hiding that. 3.0 to 3.5 was a series of tweaks, it was gentle in comparison, whereas this feels more like the jump from AD&D to 3rd Ed. Everything feels easier, cleaner, and more modern. It does feel more like an MMO, which is the primary complaint I've been hearing, and there's a major shift in making combat smoother. Somehow, some people have taken this to mean that there's more focus on combat, which frankly isn't true, but far be it from the average commentator to do more than the basic research.

[loomer]

Heh, we seem to be coming into conflict and alignment a lot the last few days, Hotfoot. I don't think the piracy'll do it either, rather, the die hard fans who decide to keep trucking with 3.5 (like myself, in fact, but that's just because I've looked over 4th Ed and still prefer 3.5... With some of the rules from 4th ed pinched to make it 3.75.)

[Hotfoot]

Well it helps that you're always wrong, and that I'm always awesome.

But in reality, at the end of the day both the small companies and WotC are recovering from the glut of 3.x, and having to deal with competition from MMOs.

At the end of the day, I like pretty much every change 4th ed has brought to the table. It actually allows for more organic characters than previous editions, as well as addressing serious balance issues.

Consider, for a moment, the fact that you do not need a Cleric to cast a Raise Dead ritual, a Mage can do the same thing. In fact, you don't need either of them, as any class can easily pick up ritual magic with two simple feats: Skill Training (Arcana or Religion) and Ritual Caster.

Boom, a Fighter, Rogue, Ranger, Warlock, Warlord, or even commoner who can cast Raise Dead, or any other ritual, so long as they can learn the ritual itself somehow.

[lPeregrine]

I doubt it would fail based on entirely on piracy. Piracy has been a fact of life for RPG books since the advent of PDFs, but people still want hard copies of the books for easy reference, and printing up hundreds of pages from a commercial printer isn't exactly cheap, even if you do it in just in black and white.

Exactly. I've downloaded books to see if they're useful enough to buy, but paper copies are FAR more useful, so I end up buying all of the good ones. Pretty much everyone I know who plays RPGs has a set of all of the books they actually use.

So I guess piracy hurts you if you produce over-hyped junk that nobody wants to pay for once they see how bad it really is. Whether 4th edition falls into this category, we'll see.


As for the new rules, I think there's some good and some bad. I'll give it a try, but I'm not too optimistic about the good balancing out all of the bad.

1) Some of the rules mess seems to be simplified. I'd have to play it to see how it works out in reality, but it looks promising. For example, saves are now 1-10 fail, 11-20 succeed, instead of having to memorize dozens of DCs and bonuses and stuff. When fighting against equal-level opponents, it very often ended up being something like 1-12 fail, 13-20 pass, now you just have that as an explicit rule with all of the extra work removed.

2) They've gone for consistency over randomness. For example, instead of doing say 10d6 damage with a spell, you now do 4d6 and a fixed amount based on your intelligence bonus. So fewer memorable wins (such as my character going *crit, 19, crit, crit, crit* and killing the traitor in the party in one round), but also much less of the "oops, you die" factor.

3) More flexibility within your class. Instead of fixed abilities that advance as you level, you pick from a list of class features every few levels.

4) Annoying spell memorization system changed. Now, most stuff is either at-will, or limited to once per encounter. No more "well, you had more than two encounters today, sucks to be a wizard" or "wouldn't it be really nice if you'd prepared your 'open lock' spell instead of that silly fireball?" problems.

5) Less downtime between encounters. Even without a healer, you get limited self-healing abilities, most of your abilites are per-encounter, etc. No more fighting once a day, and then spending a whole day resting for the next fight.

6) Skills are simplified greatly. No more digging through lists and trying to calculate skills. Not so much of a change when starting from 1st level, but for starting at higher levels this removes a huge pain.

7) Somewhat less of a problem with missing party roles. Now everyone has "healing surges" to allow self-healing, so having no cleric isn't as much of a problem. Now you have ritual magic, so it's much less of a problem if you don't have a wizard for all those locked doors/dead characters/bottomless pits to levitate over/etc.

8) You now get to exchange one feat or class feature per level gained. It doesn't change all that much, since the DM could always let you edit a character you weren't happy with, but it's nice to make it official.

The bad:

1) Multiclassing is completely destroyed. You have to give up so much to get limited features of a second class that it's just not worth it. Sure, the customization items are nice within a class, but forget about stuff like a wizard with a sword in one hand and wand in the other, a fighter who can sneak ahead and pick the lock instead of just kicking the door down, etc.

To multiclass, you first need to spend a feat to get a single class feature. Then, a few levels later, you can take two feats that each let you exchange one of your existing class features with one from the second class (yes, you spend a feat AND you lose a class feature). Then finally, once you do all that, after 11th level, you can start taking levels in the second class instead of the "epic" progression in your first class. And a third class? Forget it, it's specifically banned.

This is probably my biggest complaint, it REALLY takes a lot of the depth out of the game. The best games I've had in the past have been the ones where everyone played interesting non-traditional characters, and you just can't do that anymore. Whether I actually play the new edition is probably dependent on whether I can find a good solution to this incredibly stupid
decision.


2) Some options have been removed, for no apparent reason. For example, sneak attacks now only work with specific weapons, no more of the rogue/wizard who goes invisible, and then smashes your head in with a giant hammer. Fortunately these are easy to house-rule away, the system will still function just fine if you make sneak attacks with a two-handed axe.

3) Some spells have been changed, in ways I don't like. Teleporting is severely limited now, invisibility only works for one round, etc.

4) Your adventures/opponents seem to be forced into a pre-defined system, with much more specific guidelines on what to use. But again, easy to ignore and/or house-rule away, it won't break the system to have level 1 characters saving the kingdom instead of killing low-level goblins, or high-level characters killing goblins instead of gods.

[Civil War Man]

It actually allows for more organic characters than previous editions, as well as addressing serious balance issues.

Does this mean they retooled the power curve to fix the problem of some classes (fighter, bard, etc) becoming obsolete after a certain level because wizards or clerics can do their job better?

[Hotfoot]

It actually allows for more organic characters than previous editions, as well as addressing serious balance issues.

Does this mean they retooled the power curve to fix the problem of some classes (fighter, bard, etc) becoming obsolete after a certain level because wizards or clerics can do their job better?

Yes. From what I've seen, no more is it the case that wizards or clerics utterly dominate the game past a certain point. However, it is a little hard to tell just how far it goes, because there were simply a massive amount of abilities per class, and reading through them all was not an option for the limited amount of time I held the book.

Basically, they've normalized the power curve for all classes, so that progression of powers is the same for everyone, and they roughly have similar powered abilities for any given level. Wizards aren't useless at 1st level once they used up their "big" spells, and fighters don't suck at higher levels.

Now this next section is to address some of the points Peregrine brought up.

Now, on the subject of multiclassing: It doesn't suck as hard as it may seem. In fact, it's actually far more generous than most previous forms of multiclassing from what I saw, but what you have to remember is that multiclassing in 3.x without ridiculously powerful and broken prestige classes SUCKED. There was no way to get the higher level abilities if you had ten levels in fighter and ten levels in wizard, you were doomed to a Rogue's BAB, nowhere near the number of feats, and only 5th level magic. Not so here, where a fighter who multiclasses can pick up a wizard's paragon path, higher level abilities, and so on. Yes, you have to give up some of your fighter power abilities, but that is the price you pay for having a wider selection of abilities to choose from in the first place.

And come on, three-plus class characters were almost entirely uber-cheese crap that was done specifically for retarded first and second level bonuses, like a Paladin Barbarian Fighter Rogue who dabbled in Wizard for some random PRC that gave stupid retarded bonuses. Look, bottom line, when someone says to me that multiclassing allows for "Non-traditional" characters, I have a healthy dose of skepticism, because it seems like code for "retardedly powerful bullshit". Non-traditional characters, in my mind, are defined by the characters themselves, like the Rogue who is lawful good, or the Paladin who beats confessions out of his enemies, or the Fighter who hates killing people, not by "The Fighter who can throw a fireball" or "The Rogue who can use Cleric powers", or "The Paladin with Barbarian Abilities".

On top of that, the variation allowed within a class is pretty significant, so even within the most narrow class (Warlocks), a lot of variation is possible.

As for sneak attacks, it makes sense to limit the initial damage allowed because frankly it's a little ridiculous to cause that much damage on something that's supposed to be representative of a rogue slipping a blade through a target's defenses to hit a weak spot. It's simply not that easy to do that sort of thing with a big two-handed hammer. Besides which, there's a feat that increases sneak attack damage to d8's, and sneak attack now works on just about everything, instead of maybe only half the monsters you might usually face.

As for the changes to teleport, well, let's face it, Teleport was one of those broken spells that needed a desperate change. Invisibility I'm not overly happy about myself, but it wasn't exactly an underpowered spell in the last edition, what with being able to murderize people with virtual impunity (especially with a rogue who could get Improved Invisibility cast on himself).

[SirNitram]

Indeed. The rules on multiclassing that I saw suggest it's actually better in the long run. Four feats net you an equal number of abilities from one other class. Those can be raised in level as you go up. Yes, that means a high level Paladin or Cleric who took the Warlock multiclass could get the terrifyingly named Hurl Through Hell, which is perfect for interrogation. *BLAM, BAMF, Sizzle* 'And that's where you go if you don't start confessing.'

[Anguirus]

As far as piracy or 3.5 holdouts damaging sales...they ordered their largest print run yet for the core books, and they've already gotten so many pre-orders that they have ordered a whole new run.

[Oskuro]

What are this "epic" paths you mention? (something about a Wizard's paragon path?).

I was fond of Prestige classes, not because of the ridiculous überness, but because most of them had an specific theme and added a lot of flavor to the character.

From what you're saying it sounds like you can specialise your class after certain level.... if that is so, then Prestige classes could be added as new paths for the base class, right? Thus we keep the susbtance and the flavor, and get rid of most of the ridiculous multiclassing needs.

I really should get to reading the books.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Is there an SRD available yet, or would one need to get a copy of the books to see the new rules at this point?

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Non-traditional characters, in my mind, are defined by the characters themselves, like the Rogue who is lawful good, or the Paladin who beats confessions out of his enemies, or the Fighter who hates killing people, not by "The Fighter who can throw a fireball" or "The Rogue who can use Cleric powers", or "The Paladin with Barbarian Abilities".

I actually do like things like that, but if anyone thinks 3.5 did that sort of thing particularly well, they have fairly low standards.

[Hotfoot]

What are this "epic" paths you mention? (something about a Wizard's paragon path?).

Short version, paragon paths are specializations of your class that resemble prestige classes, but aren't stupidly overpowered or things that actually get in the way of your normal class progression. Epic destinies are like paragon paths, but even more powerful.

From what you're saying it sounds like you can specialise your class after certain level.... if that is so, then Prestige classes could be added as new paths for the base class, right? Thus we keep the susbtance and the flavor, and get rid of most of the ridiculous multiclassing needs.

Paragon paths add to your class, they don't make it blended with another class like some of the prestige classes from 3.x

The SRD comes with DDI subscription, which I am reasonably sure is not available yet, at least in full.

[Sharp-kun]

1) Multiclassing is completely destroyed. You have to give up so much to get limited features of a second class that it's just not worth it. Sure, the customization items are nice within a class, but forget about stuff like a wizard with a sword in one hand and wand in the other, a fighter who can sneak ahead and pick the lock instead of just kicking the door down, etc.

Alter the system for your games then. That's what we'll probably do. The game isn't set in stone.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Wow. The ink on the books hasn't even dried and someone's already defending the game's perceived flaws with that line.

Here's the problem with that reasoning: Good system crafting takes a lot of work, a lot of practice, and a special kind of creativity. Anyone can slap together a patchwork of house rules to address a system's problems, but they'll never be as good as a quality, well-thought out system. They won't even come close.

Anyway, I'm not ready to start hurling stones at 4th Ed. prematurely just because it has the D&D logo plastered on it, but I really do hate seeing that argument repeated so often.

[Oskuro]

Good system crafting takes a lot of work, a lot of practice, and a special kind of creativity. Anyone can slap together a patchwork of house rules to address a system's problems, but they'll never be as good as a quality, well-thought out system. They won't even come close.

Huh, that's why I've always been wary of third-party books. More often than not, classes and feats are used out of context and terribly unbalance the game. Of course, powerplayers see that as a personal attack on them, because they played fair and found the rule in "a book".

The GM can always decide about house-rules, but an awful lot of players think that if it is written in a book, the can "beat" the GM.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Good system crafting takes a lot of work, a lot of practice, and a special kind of creativity. Anyone can slap together a patchwork of house rules to address a system's problems, but they'll never be as good as a quality, well-thought out system. They won't even come close.

Huh, that's why I've always been wary of third-party books. More often than not, classes and feats are used out of context and terribly unbalance the game. Of course, powerplayers see that as a personal attack on them, because they played fair and found the rule in "a book".

The GM can always decide about house-rules, but an awful lot of players think that if it is written in a book, the can "beat" the GM.

That's why I said "good", and not "official". The two are unfortunately not always synonymous.

[loomer]

It's probably why one of the most popular house rules is "The DM is fucking right all the fucking time, sit the fuck down." I know my group uses it every game in basically every system and setting (with limits. If it comes to a spell or whatever, if the DM doesn't have a reason, or is just confused, we'll vote to roll with the actual conditions. Having 3 players who are also DMs helps with that.)

[Oskuro]

I once tried to explain to a former player the concept of "we play the game to have fun, not to appease your ego". He had a lot of trouble understanding that other players had the right to have fun too, or that the GM wasn't an opponent he had to defeat, but rather a referee who had to make sure everyone had a great time..... no wonder he is now a former player.