"I got to play 4th edition D&D....just not D&D" Topic

I had the chance to play the new 4th D&D edition rules. Having started with the tan D&D box in the 90's and then getting into 2nd I have been playing for a while so I know abit about D&D….THAC0 anyone?
We played a set of pregen characters with a pregen adventure. The rules where sparse and while our GW was very confident he admitted the rules did not cover everything.

What struck me was that at 1st level our lowest HP was 23…23! It seems that when you start at 1st you are already a hero. In addition to high HP you also have Bloodied and Surges. It seems that when your HP drops to a certain point you get "bloodied" which depending on your race, class, or the oppoent gives penalties or bonuses. For example we fought a bezerker and when it got Bloodied it made an attack and out wizard got bonuses against bloodied oppoenents. Surges are new, it seems all the PCs get surges which heal a certain amount of HP. They can be used as a normal action (more about that later)and heal the player of a certain HP. So while a cleric or paladin does augment healing, a party might not need one anymore.

Characters get 3 actions…move, minor, normal action. So in a turn I was able to move (move), make a charge attack (normal action) and lay on hands (minor).

Also characters have tons of abilities. They get once per day abilitites, once per encounter abilities, and constant abilites. For example our mage could cast a sleep like spell once per day (which she had to sorta memorize) but was able to lay down a constant barrage of magic missles.

Enimies seem to be in different categories they fall under minion, brute, artillery! and other titles which describe their function on the field.

Role Playing seems to have been dumbed down a great deal. We had to get out of a city. Instead of rolyplaying it out we where told to describe how we would do it based on our skills then make a check if we got a certain amount of checks we got out of the city. Kinda takes the imagination out of it.

Combat just seems so Diabloesqu in that you have all these abilities that are titles "level 1 paladin attack" that do all these nifty abilities. The notion of just hitting someone with a normal sword attack is out the window.

The system is all about making a god like character and laying out combat damage. While it is not the D&D I grew up on it is still an OK system. The rules make sense.

I miss the days where your experieces defined a character not what they can do, but not everyone likes playing that way.

enworld.org

>Role Playing seems to have been dumbed down a great deal. We had to get out of a city. Instead of rolyplaying it out we where told to describe how we would do it based on our skills then make a check if we got a certain amount of checks we got out of the city. Kinda takes the imagination out of it.<

That has little to nothing to do with the system itself – that's just how the person running the game chose to run it.

'Tis okay. Paizo is going to save us:

paizo.com/pathfinderRPG

Hmm… Sounds like I'll stick with 3.X and be happy. I rather like nursing a first-level, mom's dirty look can kill you character up to near-epic. Thanks for the review.

Some of the mechanics sound like video games. Like hitting some button when your combo meter gets high and there is a "surge", if an opponent gets a bonus when you get bloodied that sounds like a fighting game where one of the players gets dizzy when you hit them with some combos. Characters in a video game usually start with a decent sized bar of health, maybe the new edition (wich has to compete with other media more than the first couple editions) has to emulate some of that to keep new players interested? What did 1st edition have to compete with? Simon Says and the electric football table…

Geez, that DOES sound stupid. *sigh*

I don't know HOW you think 23Hp is "god-like", I never started at 1st level in any D&D game. Too easy to fumble with a sword, stick yourself in the foot, and die.

While tedious to generate, Hero System Fantasy is a fun game. Sure, the characters are quite a bit tougher, but your GM can throw equally tough monsters at you. One game, we fought like a dozen giant skeletons for a hour, with characters getting knocked out, or winded, and the others having to protecting them while they tried to get back into the fight.

Man, it was AWESOME, never been a game since where the desperation and struggle was that palpable. First round, my archer hit the lead skeleton carrying the amulet we wanted, and we managed to grab it! It only took the rest of the hour though, to get away with it!

I suggest you try out hero system fantasy.

Err damn, I mean "Champions Fantasy" by "Hero Games"

Thanks for the review. I miss THAC0…think I might rake out my AD&D books…

From the enworld site:

The Dragonborn breath type is chosen at character creation. Also, Dragonborn Females do have boobs, at least in the picture.

I am glad they cleared that up. That would have been a deal breaker for me <grin>

Ehn. It's a taste test.

Hero System is tremendously complex. It's got a learning curve. Newbies have trouble with it, WAY beyond what they would have with the first three editions of D&D. It takes a while to get into, and some people just don't have that kind of patience (or that ability to rapidly crunch numbers in the head, even simple ones). D&D's always been more "user friendly."

This does not mean Hero System's a bad game system. I like it. It is, in many ways, more realistic than any D&D system every made. But it is far more complicated…

Well, from what you describe, I say (mostly) "Yuck."

I like the idea that some spells can be used more than once for low level wizards, and maybe the normal/minor/major action thing is a nice touch, but the rest? Blech. I'll stick with original Basic or AD&D 1st Ed., thanks.

I never had a problem with low hit point scores at low levels; you just planned the challenges accordingly (i.e. don't send 1st level parties against huge ancient dragons…).

The real problems come in when the characters reach high level and even the wizards are walking meat shields. I liked the Traveller approach, where hit points were simply the total of three skills and the "full health" status of a character remained essentially unchanged throughout their career. But I digress…

I'm not much impressed with the "progress" of D&D under WotC's control. But I haven't kept up with the fluff or all the system details, so my impression could be flawed (or just the result of slowly becoming an ).

"THAC0? In my day we used charts on the back of the Dungeon Master's Screen and we looked up every hit. And we liked it!"

From what I've read to date, both 4.0 and Paizo's OGL 3.X are trying to address a lot of the same perceived problems with current 3.5 gameplay. 4.0 is a much more…traumatic series of changes, though, in part because they're blatantly chasing after the online WoW player base, and altering D&D extensively to make it more familiar to players of MMORPGs. 3.X is more of a series of evolutionary changes, and to me feels more like a "real" tabletop RPG.

Still, I'll give both a try. Neither one's getting a penny of my money until I've had some experience with the systems, though. For what D&D does, 3.5 isn't so badly flawed to make me desperate to change over anyway.

The easy fix for HP in D&D (too low at low levels, too high at high levels) is to switch to VP/WP. Problem solved.

What I *really* need to do is just convince my local play group to go with Savage Worlds instead.

Thanks for the review, Beowulf… even though the sound of 4th Ed. makes me want to rub my face off with a cheese-grater then stick my head in a bucket of lemon juice.

To think…. I was considering pre-ordering!

The thing to remember, gents, is that this is the shape of things to come.
By which, I DON'T mean 4th ed's mechanics or computer-game conventions…. I mean rapid changes with increasing frequency.

AD&D: 1977 – 1989.

2nd Ed: 1989 – 2000.

BUT….

3rd ed: 2000 – 2003.

3.5: 2003 – 2007*.

4th Ed: 2008 – ?

*Although, of course, it's still available; all in-house developement and new WOTC support material for 3.5 stopped in 2007 in preparation for the 4th ed. launch.

And don't kid yourself that these changes are, in any way, motivated by the desire to support the system per se, and it's existing customers…

… they will be made to wring every cent of market value from the brand… to bring the system into line with emergent entertainment market trends (hence, 4th ed's MMORPG, WoW similarities)… and to appeal to a demographic of early teens.

Why? Because, though we might fondly imagine that years of purchases makes us 'core customers' or some-such, what it actually means is that they've HAD our cash.
In the cycle of repeat purchasing, the newest customer, yet to be thoroughly plucked, is the most profitable.

Eventually, the kids who start off on 4th ed will be saying: "You know what? I'm happy enough with 12th ed… I don't think I'll be starting over with 13th."

Ironically, the demographic they now aim at is not buying the products. They are downloading them as illegal pdf's via bit torrent or megaupload. Everyone from middle school on up does it. Honestly, I am starting to see nothing wrong with it because the junk being published isn't even worth the electrons it takes to store it on a server.

BTW if TMP users were *really* honest without fear of reprisal, I bet many many people here would admit to doing the same thing or at least get their pdfs from a buddy who downloaded them.

I will stick with my basic Labyrinth Lord.
link

Honesty's got nothing to do with it in my case, CP!

You see this post, right here?

You are looking at the most advanced thing I can do on a computer.

The only illegal act I could hope to acheive with a PC would be to chuck it at somebody.

Printing and binding a pdf can be a pain depending on the size of the book. A professional binding that is distribute in the thousands is a lot nicer to look at and generally a sturdier book for about the same price.

I have the new version on preorder and will give it a few trials on my own before I judge it. Then my group will tweak it like we do most any game rules we play until we like it or go back to V3.5.

The only illegal act I could hope to acheive with a PC would be to chuck it at somebody.

Funny, the FBI agent at our "Citizen's Academy" cyber-crimes lecture didn't mention that one…

I'm done with D&D. Tried it for a few years. didn't like it and gave all my D&D stuff to friends who do play.

I have discovered the old RPG, The Fanatsy Trip and a quite active group supporting it. There is even a publisher of solo adventures name Dark City Games.

I have also discovered the old RPG, Tunnels & Trolls which is now in its 7th edition. A publisher by the name of Outlaw Press is producing new material and selling what old stuff they can unearth or re-publish.

Of course there is Savage Worlds and all its incarnations.

But D&D 4.0…I think not. From the review it would seem that it is just a pen and paper version of an FPS. If I'm going to play an FPS--well that's one of the reasons I spent so much on my computer. If that's the market D&D is after, then it might just be the beginning of the end.

4.0? Heck no! Not since mrwigglesworth has posted that wonderful link to Labyrinth Lord! Thank you, sir!

Al | rivetsandsteam.com

Someone is pulling out old Tunnels & Trolls to republish? Have they considered that Flying Buffalo is still around and might be a bit annoyed?

Fiery Dragon did T&T 7th edition with full cooperation of FBI (Flying Buffalo Incorporated). Outlaw press, who is republishing some of the FBI and Blade adventures, also has the cooperation of the FBI.

You can find an article on my blog about "Wolves on the Rhine" an historically (as oppsed to fantasy) based adventure for The Fantasy Trip or Dark City Games' TFT compatible rules here: link

And an article on the Tunnels & Trolls derivative, "Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes" here: link

Furthermore, if you're interested in Savage Worlds, you might want to read the article on the Pirates of the Spanish Main here: link

Weired as it may seem, our group plays D&D, COC, Savage Worlds fairly regularly with other random rpg's thrown in from time to time (WH40K and Tractics are the non RPG games of choice at the moment).

The gaming system being used really is a choice of the dm willing to run the campaign and buy the books. The rest of the group buys into the system if it shows its value in the playing. I'll have to look into the T&T link some more.

I actually found CHAMPIONS to be easier than D&D because all the rules are self consistent. Why does Strength in D&D go up to 18/00, what does that mean? Took me a long time to understand how Thac0 applied to non-0 armor class!

With champions, I found the play to be very fast, generating not so much. But then you can make any character you want.

Also, D&D, keeping challenges 'sane' for first level characters is like, well, having them fight house cats or something. When you have 8hp, a sword fumble can kill you.

4e D&D in a word, stinks from all that I've seen so far. Munchkinized powergaming tripe served up for the shallow end of the gaming gene pool.

One really pleasant discovery was Castles & Crusades which has been around a couple years. I've switched from 3.5 to that…all the niceness of the d20 system with the back to basics aroma of what D&D started out as. FUN! It's also easy to convert 3e and 3.5e stuff over to use…I'm back to two or three books to run a game instead of two large storage tubs.

It's a common misconception that Champions (aka Hero System) is more complex than D&D. Character generation is a bit more math intensive in Hero, and the options available are near endless (for supers, anyway), but play has always been more straightforward. Since the Crunch Explosion in 3.x, claims that D&D is simpler really start to look silly.

The promise of "all effects relate in known ways" in 3.x didn't last long once the supplements started to roll out, but has been a reality (with an occasional rough spot) in Hero since Day One.

The only time a Hero character sheet exceeds one page (of stats, I make no promises once you start taking campaign notes…) is for Batman-style supers (always a new gadget) and fantasy magic users and collectors of enchanted items, gadgets, rides, and/or followers. It *might* grow to an additional page with experience as well.

Unified mechanics? Hero was doing that almost 20 years before D&D. Real skills? Ditto.

The math in play is fairly similar in complexity between the two games, except that Hero tends to keep the numbers handy, whereas a special case will send a 3.x player diving into page 4 and the books it was filled out from…

Yes, the current Hero book is hundreds of pages, but have you added up your "necessary" supplement page count for 3.x recently? For one class?

By comparison, the now huge pile of additional books for Hero 5th legitimately add nothing but examples and advice to the game; its *all* in the main book.

That said, Hero 5th is a bloated disaster, written by a lawyer with editorial immunity and published by an incarnation of Hero Games that prides itself on published word count. Go find a 4th edition Champions book (blue hardcover) or the related version of the Hero Core Rules. You won't be sorry.

The problem I have with it is it's called "D&D"
It's like diet-caffine free-cherry vanilla-Dr. Pepper. It's not Dr. Pepper!!!! It's some other animal completely!!

All I've heard about 4.0 sounds like a tabletop World Of Warcraft emulator… and brings in most of the elements that I really dislike about World Of Warcraft.
Not that World Of Warcraft isn't itself heavily derivative of a lot of the lame concepts started by D&D… like levels and classes and factions (alignment).

Makes me all the happier that Chaosium's Deluxe Basic Roleplaying is due out next month!
One game to rule them all!!!

In economics, Hotelling's Law tells us that in certain markets "its rational for producers to make their products as similar as possible" (quoting wikipedia). Usually this is when the products are undifferentiated commodities, like gasoline, rice, or inexpensive hotel rooms. This usually does not apply to products and services where customers like to believe they're making a personal statement, like high fashion, cars, etc.

Minotaur player characters, high HP and self-healing, endless magic missiles, online play, I think the pattern is clear. All our players are playing WoW, so we should be more like WoW.

So does Hasbro think RPGs are a commodity?

I would have thought RPGs were the ultimate personal statement, and that you would always win through a product differentiation strategy instead of a Hotelling strategy. But that's just me, and I'm not a D&D player.

Actually, I may run a D&D game for my son and his friends this Summer, but we're going to use 3.0 because we have the books.

Some of the changes are interesting enough to make me want to read the book, but rather than pre-ordering I may just wait and pick up a bargain copy second hand in a year or so.

As ever, I hope D&D 4.0 is a *huge* success and brings hundreds of thousands of people into gaming, because that would be good for the stores, other players, other manufacturers, and even for society. But I'm not real confident.

Andrew

I am going to buy two copies of "Labyrinth Lord"…

They had me at "free" when it came to the Labyrinth Lord PDF. How old school can it be when your PDF comes with an errata sheet.
I almost hate getting these free games, they always end up with me spending money.

Thanks for the link.

LLC aka Ron

I've thrown my support behind the Basic Fantasy RPG. They are also based on 3.5 but are free as well.

basicfantasy.org/main.html

beowulfdahunter, thanks for the report.

clonecommander: Some of the mechanics sound like video games.

You're correct, and it's no secret. That's been a stated design goal since development work started on D&D 4e. As you can tell by other posts above, some people like that, some don't. I'm in the like camp -- anything that makes a complex RPG simpler to pick up and play is a good thing, and I loathe arbitrary mechanics that make characters tactically useless, like using up a wizard's spells early in an encounter or keeping a low hit point roll for the life of a character.

Will it be a great design? We'll see.

Norman D Landings: … rapid changes with increasing frequency.

Your timeline looks a little off to me; you're assuming the date the authors stopped development is important. I think that's irrelevant; what's relevant is when a new game system is available to players. I got this timeline from Wikipedia (here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%26D ) and it matches my memory:

1974 (D&D Original)
1977–79 (AD&D 1st Edition)
1989 (AD&D 2nd Edition)
2000 (D&D 3rd Edition)
2003 (D&D v.3.5)
2008 (D&D 4th Edition)

Even that needs some interpretation. Like them I won't count Basic D&D which was originally concurrent with AD&D 1st edition. However AD&D 1st edition did take 3 years to come out, so I would count 1977-79 as belonging to both Original and AD&D1 editions. And it's misleading to call 3.5 a new edition; it's the same mechanics as 3.0 and the 3.0 books are forwards compatible with it. 3.5 is really a better edited version of 3.0, not a version that invalidated the earlier books. Proof: I played with my 3.5 group last weekend and my DM had misplaced his 3.5 books and used my 3.0 ones.

So that gives us 6 years for D&D original (74-79 inclusive), overlapping 13 years of AD&D1 (77-89 inclusive). Then AD&D2 for 12 years (89-2000 inclusive). And 3.x for 9 years (00-08 inclusive).

I'll grant you 9 years for D&D 3.x is a shorter lifetime than the 12-13 years for the two prior versions.

Parzival: I never had a problem with low hit point scores at low levels; you just planned the challenges accordingly (i.e. don't send 1st level parties against huge ancient dragons…).

This is true, although only to a point. Under AD&D2, I had a new player argue with me that he should start at 1st level. He was joining a 5-7th level party for an appropriately leveled module; I made him 3rd level. During the game he fell off a runaway wagon, took a D6 and rolled a 6, then fell off somethinge else and took another D6. I told him "see, if we'd done what you wanted you'd be out of the game now".

jbenton: That has little to nothing to do with the system itself – that's just how the person running the game chose to run it.

Exactly.

Crusoe the Painter: Why does Strength in D&D go up to 18/00, what does that mean? Took me a long time to understand how Thac0 applied to non-0 armor class! … When you have 8hp, a sword fumble can kill you.

Yes, those were dumb mechanics. 18-percentile Strengths were a silly add-on to the original 3D6 characteristic generation. THAC0 was a workaround for an armor system which tied to the 2D6 resolution chart in the original Chainmail miniatures game. Both were done away with in D&D 3.x. And fumbles were never part of D&D but many groups favored them as house rules.

[quote=jbenton]>Role Playing seems to have been dumbed down a great deal. We had to get out of a city. Instead of rolyplaying it out we where told to describe how we would do it based on our skills then make a check if we got a certain amount of checks we got out of the city. Kinda takes the imagination out of it.<

That has little to nothing to do with the system itself – that's just how the person running the game chose to run it.

I think D&D 4e would disagree with you…

[quote=D&D 4e]Even small villages give characters ready access to the gear they need to pursue their adventures. Provisions, tents and backpacks, and simple weapons are commonly available. Traveling merchants carry armor, military weapons, and more specialized gear. Most villages have inns that cater to travelers, where adventurers can get a hot meal and a bed, even if the quality leaves much to be desired. When characters stop in at a settlement to rest and restock their supplies, give them a bit of local flavor, such as the name of the inn where they spend the night, and move on with the adventure.

Emphasis on "move on with the adventure"… like all you need to know from social encounters in the village is what weapons you are buying and maybe an inn name. Everything I've read from the new rulebook seems to emphasize getting your character into combat, which makes sense, since every mechanical articulation of your character is now combat oriented. No longer will Barbarians refuse to associate with Clerics, will Paladins refuse to associate with Evil characters etc.

I guess quote html doesn't work fully on this board… bah, you get my point!

Gotta jump in here.

Ref the commets about it being like a video game. – I strongly dislike this direction. But my dislike has little to do with complexity, it's the 'feel' of the game. Video games are NOT roleplaying games. If all of the action and interaction boils down to tactic and a dice roll, then the game is simply a skirmish wargame with few bits of limited interaction thrown in.

Ref the commets about the quality of the game being down to the GM rather than the rules. – I couldn't agree more. BUT, the rules do have an impact, especially on new players. If a ruleset favours monster bashing, tactics & wealth/XP accumulation over roleplaying and interraction, then the rules WILL affect the game. (Although I suspect most GM's that favour roleplay over tactics orientated games will simply switch to other systems rather than struggle on continually ignoring rules).

Ref the comment about system compatibility – especially the comment about being able to use V3.0 rules in a V3.5 game. That's just a ludicrous statement which actually gives even more ammo to the anti D&D gamers. This shouldn't even be an issue for any good GM. Our group has run V3.5 games with AD&D rules, Runequest scenarios with Traveller rules, Traveller adventures with Cthulhu rules. Hell, we even regularly run games without rules.

Zardoz.

Harnmaster -- great system, still in print and supported. It's a d100-based system with graphic wound combat system. No lost hit points, but crushed bones, cuts, slashes and gashes. Puts the hurt into combat and makes ya think, hmmm, rather than bull my way through the front door perhaps a little planning is required.

I recall a game in which a player used to D&D picked a fight with the city gaurd and as they pummeled him into unconciousness wailed, "But they're just zero levelers!!!"

Oops…no levels! Just improvements to your skills.

The system makes for great roleplaying and great combats, has a flexible fatigue/mana-point magic system and an abstract religious-magic system. Want to throw flashy spells? You'll burn yourself out, go right ahead, or perhaps pace yourself. Want the gods to help you out? Don't forget to build up Piety Points to boost your intervention chance through prayer, good works and deeds to your diety. Great system.

link

Then there's Minimus

PDF link

Complete RPG. Two pages. Definitely NOT a pen-and-paper video game.

I recall a game in which a player used to D&D picked a fight with the city gaurd and as they pummeled him into unconciousness wailed, "But they're just zero levelers!!!"

Gotta love mistaken assumptions. Do you think the city would pay them to be guards if they were really that harmless?

If I want to play Dungeons & Dragons, I'll play Labrynth Lord or BFRPG.

Now where 4th Edition D&D has potential is as a skirmish wargame. It sounds like there are all sorts of cool things you could do with it in that capacity. 3/3.5 was already a step towards wargame-ifying D&D and 4th edition looks like the next logical step.

I'm going to sign up for a local running of it on the D&D day next Saturday and see how I like it.

I'm having too much fun with Savage Worlds right now to buy the new 4.0 books, but if an electronic copy comes floatin' through my transom, I'll at least give it a read.

Game systems come & go, but the Heroic Fantasy stays with us.

I remember how we rolled our eyes when TSR first tacked the "A" onto D&D. By then we were on to playing Chivalry and Sorcery or Traveller, and dabbling in the arcane intricacies of Rolemaster, ICE and MERP. Soon Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer and Ars Magica were tempting us away to other things, other worlds.

But the one constant factor with us all through that was imagination, imagination and adventure. Er… the two factors… and the nice red uniforms. Oh, s.

I left roleplaying gaming for many years, then got lured back to D&D – oddly enough – by a computer version, Neverwinter Nights. We learnt with NWN that you can actually do *roleplaying* on the computer… as long as you have an online DM, 3-6 online players, and a cool set of tools provided by NWN. Now I've been back playing D&D, DD3.5 in fact, for about a year, and you know what? I'm really not all that attached to the game system. The important thing is getting into the adventure with a group of friends.

This said, all early reports of DD4 look very, very bad. The terminology alone is enough to make me gag. If anything, the book-keeping seems even worse than with DD3.5, and the slant towards constant combat just rubs me the wrong way. Guess I'm just old-school.

If any of you wander up near Châteauroux (France), gimme a holler. We can get some old-school games together.

Cheers, --- Wheldrake

The initial demo of D&D4 is really poorly put together. Oddly enough, I've heard that Paizo are the guys who put it together (seems kinda odd, but…)

I spent 6 months playing weekly trying to make a character based off of Joscelin from the Kushiel's books work in 3.5. I could RP the personality fine, I just couldn't make him effective in combat (I had to sacrifice my entire attack bonus to get my AC high enough to survive, but then I couldn't hit anything). I can make him work in 4e as a multiclass ranger/fighter. (basically, a Ranger with a fighter ability or two).

The issue with 3.5 is that some characters are COMPLETELY useless in combat (rogues, anyone?). Too much stuff was immune to core abilities of a class. We had a rogue that could find every trap, but would just go to the back of the room and light a smoke when combat started, because everything in the area was IMMUNE to sneak attack. It's incredibly frustrating. Also, there used to be a lot of duplication of capabilities between several classes, like rogue, ranger, and scout. Scouts are not useful in a dungeon, because their basic ability Skirmish depends on movement.

4th has largely fixed those issues. Granted, there aren't Barbarians and Driuds in the first player's handbook (they're going to be in Players II), but I do understand that it takes more work to redefine the core concept and then develop the 'powers' of those classes than it does to just develop the powers of a class where you already know what it's role is supposed to be.

While the biggest change between 3.5 and 4e is the combat, the skills mechanics have been tweaked a bit. Most skills have been broadened out. Need to figure out how that spell works? 3.5, roll Spellcraft; 4e, roll Arcana. Need to remember some detail about someone famous and magical? 3.5, roll Knowledge: Arcana; 4e, roll Arcana. The skill list that used to take up an entire page-column now is under 20 items. Also, if you sank max points into just a few skills, you could keep up with the increasing target numbers for success, but if you put a few points everywhere, you just couldn't keep up. You couldn't really build a well-rounded, skilled character in 3.5 unless you were a rogue, but then you couldn't actually damage more than half the things in the monster manual (ignores the first 5-10 points of damage, and is immune to the only capability for high damage a rogue has? I'll be in back, smoking, thanks. Have fun storming the castle!)

Because you NEVER had enough skillpoints to build your character up to what a real person would know, WoTC compressed the skills and changed the Trained/untrained mechanics, too.

I'm not completely sold on the new rules yet, either, but everyone has been rebalanced in combat *and out of combat*. There should never be a time when everyone but the rogue sits around doing nothing while the rogue clears all the traps. Everyone has some capability to do things out of combat just as much as they do in combat. It's a nice improvement.

As far as I can tell, the classes do not exist outside of combat. The only difference classes would have out of combat are their skills and their abilities to cast rituals, all of which are entirely open to all classes thanks to feats.

Actually, that's what I find really disappointing about 4e after reading the PHB thoroughly and playing in four game sessions. I was hoping for a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, that game where the "roles" characters played in the party had more to do with adventuring and discovering than combat*. What we got instead is "Fight Game 4.0". It IS a game, and that's the nicest thing I will say about it, but it isn't a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

*And people may disagree with me here, but they are flat out wrong. Take 1e AD&D; the fighter was the only class that was "safe" in a fight. The thief was there to navigate the party safely through the dungeon, the magic-user there as a general utility box with a spell for every occasion, and the cleric played the first-aid medic to keep the party from dying from traps, monsters and other hazards.

I disagree with Lion In the Stars' assessment of rogues as useless. Just because many opponents are immune to sneak attack damage doesn't invalidate the entire class. And there are many, many things you can do beyond simply hitting your foes for damage.

Achtung Minen hit the nail on the head when he talked about character specialization as a keystone to D&D. Different characters have different roles and they all help towards the synergy that is a party of adventurers in D&D. In the original edition, this specialization was almost entirely dependent on character class. In DD3.5 there are many, many forms of specialization, from class to feats to skills to spell lists (etc) but the bottom line is the same: your character will be very good at a limited number of things, and not so good at others, and it will be up to your fellow party members to fill in the roles your character can't cover. That's the beauty of cooperative team games.

In DD4 it appears that everybody will be good at everything. AM's suggestion that "the classes do not exist outside of combat" seems to correspond to the feeling I've been getting from reading posts to many message boards. "Fight Game 4.0" sounds like the best (polite) name for it.

This said, I'm sure that with a few houserules, and a lot of DM love & goodness, a DD4 game can be every bit as good as a DD3.5 or DD1 game. The bottom line is what you *do* with the rules.

Cheers, --- Wheldrake

Even a cursory look at 4e will show that character roles are more prominent than ever in the game. They even named them instead of assuming everyone already knows this is the case as in past editions.

Defenders-Fighter, Paladin
Strikers-Rogues, Rangers, Warlocks
Leaders-Warlord, Cleric
Controller-Wizard

You still want a fighter-type to wade in and smash stuff, you still want a sneaky person to get in cheap shots, you still need someone to heal the party, and you still need someone to chuck the AOE spells.

You can get some overlap with character building of course, but a rogue or wiz is still not going to go toe-to-toe with the big-bad alone, your fighter is still going to get mind-frakked by the evil wizard, etc.

My son needed a fifth at a convention to play the intro module, I agreed to help them out and fill the slot. I was prepared to hate it (I thought 3.5 was barely playable) but I came away loving it. The way our party kept playing off of each other's powers gave it a a feel of teamwork that was just way to much fun.

When the Kobolds kept shifting after my Ranger so that he couldn't use his way cool powers until I teleported away from them was too much fun. When I read a first level character could teleport 5 squares I thought this is crazy. Once I started playing it was just crazy fun.

Went in wanting to hate it, now I am ready to play some more.

LLC aka Ron

D&D ceased to be after AD&D 2nd ed. Later games called D&D may be OK (although I don't find them to my taste – if I want to play video-games I'll play video games) but they simply aren't D&D in any meaningful way.

Up to AD&D 2nd ed you could take any product from any D&D or AD&D version and use it with any other version with little or no amendment – no more than an experienced DM could do on-the-fly during play.

All versions after that lose that level of compatibility – both with earlier versions and in some cases with each other. At best you can use them after lengthy and complex conversions, but in most cases the details, rules and power levels are so different as to make it impossible to convert in any way that results in satisfying play.

The practical impact of that (and my cynical opinion suggests the reason they did it this way) is that if you had, say, a collection of OD&D sourcebooks & modules for a certain setting you could continue to use that as you moved to different versions – you might gradually replace some but didn't have to, and certainly not all at once just to play in your preferred setting with the new version, whereas now you have to buy all the sourcebooks again in the new version. Very lucrative for publisher, very expensive for the player.

I'm just glad I was obsessive enough to build up a huge collection before all this happened (and after I saw what was happening, and realised that real D&D was in serious danger of becoming extinct) – with that and what I can design myself I have enough to keep playing REAL D&D with my group for the rest of our lives.

When we want to try a different game, as we do from time to time, we try one that's honest enough to admit its different, not one that tries to ride on the coat-tails of D&D and pretends to be something its not.