There was a knock at the door, and player A answered it. The figure asked if he could come in, and the player said "sure". As one, all the other players turned and looked dumbstruck at player A who was like "What?

Hah! When we played the combined we had the exact same thing happen. except when Player Asshat said, "Sure!" the rest of us yelled "WHAT?!?!?"

cold pizza:

P-C, how really very cool! I've been doing a little bit with ARGs for work, and she is the bomb diggity.

And that was them on Cute Overload?!?!

Wow the world gets small sometimes.

P-C, how really very cool! I've been doing a little bit with ARGs for work, and she is the bomb diggity.

Nice!

And that was them on Cute Overload?!?!

Hee, yep!

So, my 4E PHB came today. I haven't had time to do anything but crack the cover, but even just a cursory glance through the book left a bad taste in my mouth.

The interior layout is, for reasons I cannot put my finger on, off putting. And while the game and book layout may not be the best for new gamers (according to the blog post I linked to above), the writing style isn't helping, either. Several bits, primarily the bullet points on why you should play a given race if you want character type BLAH, read as if they were written to condescend to brain damaged children.

Okay, okay, this really should be about the rules of the game... It's gonna take a few days for me to read the book and give my impressions of the game (unplayed as yet).

Okay, I'm not ten pages into the character creation chapter and I'm already ready to club my own brains out with the book three or four times over.

First, I'm really loathing the idea of roles. I find it limiting as a player and as a DM, and while I agree that groups should be well rounded, formalizing it in the rules like this is anathema to me.

There's a sentence near the beginning of chapter two about imagining any kind of hero you might want to play, that comes just before the rules start laying out some very narrowly defined kinds of characters to play.

There's the crappy ability score generation section that leads off with the "everybody gets the same set of generic numbers" section, follows with a point system and attending chart that is needlessly complicated in a silly way.

And then there was the multiple plugs for the RPGA on a single page.

Oh, and the sidebar in the first chapter about the history of D&D, that ended with a paragraph on the new edition (you know, the one you're reading) that called (itself) "new, exciting, bright and shiny." That made me want to choke a bitch.

The interior layout is, for reasons I cannot put my finger on, off putting.

I agree. The DH and I actually had a long discussion about this. He's happy the lines and weird fonts of 3e are gone; I miss the parchment and the sketch art. And the layout is just bad feng shui.

I skipped all the patronizing shit at the front because I always do.

Alex, my Gay Stunt Husband, gave me the 2-book slipcase for Vampire: the Masquerade. The one that has the original core rule books for V:tM and the Sabbat. I foresee gothy gaming nostalgia in my future, and much whining about why will NO ONE run a Vampire game for me. Consider yourselves warned.

Added today to the list of things I am really NOT liking about 4E -- the binding is for shit. I've had my book for ONE DAY, and the shit glue they used to bind the book is shedding pages in chunks.

What. The. Fuck.

Ok, finally found some time for a proper response. So going way back, Sean, thanks for the extra stuff from Manny, it was pretty interesting. I haz comments:

I think it was less that all the classes feel exactly alike (i.e. that a fighter feels a cleric) but more that every fighter is going to feel like every other fighter, and every cleric is going to feel like every other cleric.

There are a couple of builds for each class, but yes, not so much variation within a lot of the classes. (Side note: one of the things that really impressed me when first I read through 3E was the Domain system for clerics. I skipped 2E completely, and compared to AD&D, where the non-casting classes really did have almost no variation, 3E was quite the revelation.)

Nonetheless, there were classes in 3E that had even fewer than two real options, like the barbarian, paladin and monk. (And later the samurai, swashbuckler, warmage etc.) 3E's variation was considerable for some classes, but it wasn't evenly shared. I think 4E has pretty much the same or better degree of customisation available for non-casters.

But the philosophy's changed, which masks things. Previously you could use the fighter class to build a melee grunt, an archer, or a high-dex swashbuckly type. (The last option pretty much sucked under core rules, but still.) You can still do that in 4E, but not through the one class. Now those builds would be fighter, ranger and rogue.

As more supplements are released, I expect to see more viable builds come available for the classes, and also other classes, to fill different niches. I understand the barbarian, bard, druid and sorcerer are all planned for future release, there's already a heroic tier illusionist build on the website, and they've also announced shadow, psionic and ki power sources are coming. But this gives rise to a gripe of my own, namely, they've changed the basic structure of the product line to be more modular (IMO). For instance, in 3E you had all the planar info in the DMG; now it'll be in a supplement out later this year.

Ditto campaign settings, ditto a lot of player options. The core books contain the universal rules and the principles of role-play, and enough player options and antagonists for the GM to make the whole thing viable. But it does feel to me like they've shifted things around to sell more supplements. I was going to buy them anyway, but it makes it tougher for people with less disposable income. They're a business, they have every right to try to move product, and they were never going to give away as much as they did with 3E, but it still means they're offering less up-front in 4E.

The one thing he mentioned (though he seemed to indicate there were others) was the rogue push ability. He said it was probably the single most useful (and most absurd and un-D&D-like) ability displayed in the games he'd run.

Funnily enough, this feels more realistic to me than the 3E rogue experience. The lens through which I look at it: D&D's turn-based, which of course creates a level of abstraction that leads to some pretty foolish results. For instance, you can just run around defenders to get at your target, and they can't even bounce 5' to the right to intercept you, because it's not their turn. Fights too often devolve into combatants standing toe-to-toe and trading blows, where they should (realistically) be dodging, seeking position, pulling hit-and-runs etc, and I would especially expect a key defining feature of a rogue in combat to be their mobility. They should be hard to pin down, wrong-footing and overbalancing their opponent with feints and dodges. (Shifting themselves too, of course.) An at-will power I'd regard as harder to justify, but as an encounter or daily power, I think it's a more sensible realisation of a sneaky fighting type in a turn-based game than the way they played in 3E.

I can't speak to its usefulness, as I haven't played the game yet, but it would assuredly be my first choice for a rogue. Not just because I can see uses for it, but it just sounds like fun. (continued...)

( continues...) Like I said, I haven't heard any claims that it's unbalancing - it's only once per encounter and just a single target, right? So, nice against one oppponent, but I have trouble seeing it winning a combat single-handed (unlike, for instance, colour spray in 3E).

One caveat: there is an element to the rogue's slide ability that IMO isn't realistic, namely it still works on immobilised opponents. If you're using the opponent's momentum against them, there needs to be some momentum to use.

But that actually leads into another advantage I think 4E has over 3E, and for me it's a big one: the rules are so much less ambiguous now. They've been a lot more stringent with using well defined key words, stricter definitions, and avoiding open-ended options that area just begging to be cheesed (e.g. 3E polymorph). Makes it easier for a newbie to learn, and makes it much easier to avoid rules-lawyering and the associated metagaming.

He said the game is very well balanced for the most part across the board. However, he's now reversed his position on game balance, and has decided that, at least as far as the form it took in 4e, game balance is actually a crappy way to make an RPG. Everything comes across as SAME. The amount of variation and flavor between characters (or lack thereof) he found to be very off putting.

From my experience, I disagree. LARP, sure. RPG, not so much, for three reasons.

1. Gaming with players who play to exploit overpowered options just isn't as much fun. Whether you prefer more RP or G, D&D is still best as a cooperative game. Balance encourages that.

2. It's easier on novices. It also sucks to build a character that you expect to be competent, and then find that the options you chose just aren't up to snuff. (These two reasons I sum up as, if the system encourages excessive benefit from system mastery, it also encourages metagaming, which detracts from simply being able to make a character that fits your concept and playing them.)

3. A character who has trouble meaningfully contributing in a fight (or conversely, a combat-only build that has troublew finding something to do outside of a fight) encourages its player to be disengaged from the game at these times. It also hurts the party, and thus the cooperative feel of the game, because it puts the other characters at risk.

I don't think of myself as a great role-player. My first LG character was really just me in a pointy hat, my second I retired for a couple of years because he just wasn't real to me, my third had a couple of traits but ultimately was more because I wanted to try a spiked chain fighter. I had a bit of a breakthrough with my first Eberron character, a warforged with a Kryten-like personality and an insanely literalist bent in conversation. He was an utter blast to play, and for maybe the first time I really found myself getting into a role. (Since then I've had some other fun characters, like a dwarven Montana-type survivalist and conspiracy theorist, and a halfling marshal called Napoleon, Lord of the Undergrowth.) So I feel I've made progress, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

The reason why I mention this is that I still don't see 4E's more restrictive options as in any way damaging my opportunity to roleplay. In some ways it's better, because some characters I'd find that I was trying to express their persona through mechanical choices, and it just became trapped on the page. I get that others are going to relate differently, and I really don't see myself as in any position to judge others, but for me I'm doing fine building characters in 4E.

FTR: I'm currently working on three different possible characters. Ok, I'm working on sixteen, but most of them are still just numbers on a page, not a personality. But the three that are starting to become real for me:

1. A tiefling wizard. I'm too old to do Emo; so, I figure, my tiefling will also be old, and rather than doing the "Life is pain" route, he's a crotchety old bastard a la Victor Meldrew. (continued...)