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...)

( continues...) 2. A dragonborn fighter (multiclass paladin). After meditating on the dragonborn's teeth, I decided this guy has the soul of a birdwatcher; but rather than looking for every bird in the world, his Life List is that he wants to try to eat every non-unique creature in the Monster Manual. Except the plants, because "do these choppers look like they were deigned for rabbit food?" He'll become a Champion of Order, or in other words, "A place for everything and everything in its place - namely, my axe in your belly, and your flesh in mine."

3. A half-elf, or more precisely, "Half-elf, and all man, baby!" (There may be gestures.) I haven't got any further on this one yet.

So anyway, like I said, I have no more trouble coming up with characters in the new set than in the old. So if I can have a system that is at worst neutral on RP, but is also a better G, I'm in for it.

The DMG has about 6 pages in it that are worth owning, and that really pisses me off (it's basically full of shit telling you how you can do whatever you want and how to have imagination).

Aww. The poor DMG, it gets no love. I largely agree, though I found more than 6 pages I'll use. It has the crunch stuff for prepping both combat and non-combat encounters (skill challenges!), setting rewards, and of course customising things. So that's five chapters, more or less. As for the rest of it, great if you're either new to role-playing (which, after all, is probably the segment most in need of a DMG), not so necessary for experienced players. (I think necessary for another reason, namely the amount of flak I've seen WotC taking for the notion that 4E doensn't support role-playing. But that doesn't make this stuff useful, it just makes it a signal of priorities.)

I mentioned before, this edition seems to be structured in a more modular fashion. That's hit the DMG hardest. Prestige classes and magic items have been moved to the PHB. Planar info is in a later supplement. There's no longer the need to provide table after table of NPC builds (I think there wasn't before, admittedly) because the antagonist-building philosophy no longer needs the same detail. What's left is role-playing 101. I'm curious to see what they put in to justify the DMG II (and especially III, IV and so on), but it's not an automatic buy.

Aw, BT.... You seem to like so much about the new edition.

Everything about it is just making me want to rant and scream about it, but I don't want to make you feel bad, or like I'm attacking you or something you like.

Should I come here to rant about 4E? I don't want to drive you away from our shiny gaming thread! (Yes, I think you a strong enough human that someone else ranting about the terribleness of something you like, I just thought I'd make the offer)

Oh, the roguezilla stuff is also from computer games I think. They're going for special moves, some wuxia supermove stuff. If you don't want dwarves doing spinning jumping headkicks of doom, you're kind of out of luck with 4E. But if you want snazzy fun combat options, then there you are.

I'm sure you didn't intend it this way, but as someone who likes 4E, and who doesn't have any interest in "dwarves doing spinning jumping headkicks of doom", I found this kind of insulting. It's one thing to decide it doesn't suit your style of role-play. It's quite another to deride what other people get out of it.

Oh, and I disagree with ditching LE as an alignment. What were the Nazis if not LE? But I like Unaligned.

They didn't ditch the underlying outlook, they just rolled it in with the rest of "Evil". That I don't mind, but I think they should've removed CE and LG while they were at it. I tend to think the alignment system proved to be more a source of always-edifying arguments in moral philosophy, and doesn't really seem to have added much to defining a character.

I kept trying to use the DMgenie and WotC's computerized tool, but every program got the rules wrong somehow. Still, I thought it was faster to just do that and then scan the results for errors.

Have you ever used HeroForge to do characters? They have a similar monster builder called MonsterForge. Not sure of its accuracy, and I don't know that it covers everything, but it might help.

It sounds like 4E is geared towards action gamers more than role players.

Not really. I think it'll suit action gamers nicely, but the role of combat within a D&D game hasn't changed - it's still whatever the DM makes it. The position of roleplaying hasn't changed - it's still whatever the DM and players make it. The reviews I've read aren't short on role-playing experience, both outside of and within combat.

The last time I played D&D it was a World of Greyhawk thing where all the effort seemed geared towards the combats. Every time I tried to roleplay something, the DM said, "Oh, that part is assumed, we need to move on to the encounter, we have a time limit." I didn't go back for a second session. Darn it, I like dickering with an innkeeper about the price of dinner and whether I get a bed to myself.

I enjoyed Living Greyhawk a lot, but the mods usually structured the story to include three or so combats, and if you were at a convention or for any other reason had a time limit on the session, then the role-play was probably going to suffer. Running a campaign on that kind of scale is going to feel somewhat different from the flexibility a home game offers.

Combat has always played a major part in D&D. However, the level of roleplaying is entirely dependent on the group & the DM. The new skill challenges can make social encounters a dynamic event involving many of the group.

Oh, that reminds me! I tried out a skill challenge framework in my last Eberron campaign session. I think it worked out nicely. It got the players more engaged, kept me engaged too, ensured that things didn't just grind to a halt or devolve into a "Diplomacy check!" "I made my Aid Another roll." I like it, it gives me a framework that encourages a good session without me having to do ridiculous amounts of prep.

. . . then there was the D&D campaign where the DM thought he was the next Weis and/or Hickman, and we were working out his plot points and themes. He had us spend an entire session working out fully fleshed characters with backgrounds and all, then threw us through a dimensional warp where those backgrounds and relationships didn't matter and we didn't know anyone in the party. Plus he finally admitted that the monsters were designed to kill as many characters as possible and that "it will all make sense in a few weeks, when we get to the next stage."

Just assure me that Stage 3 was profit.