billytea, thank you for a well-written critical look at 4E. My opinions pretty much match yours, but you did a far better job than I could in getting it all down in a clear fashion.

Oh, Sean, I'm sorry about the binding - there are a number of reports of this happening unfortunately - but try not to take the rest of the game so personally. And remember where you see patronizing, the writers were probably just ensuring that things were clear for a newbie.

As for alignment, yeah, it's not the cleanest option they could have come up with, but I find what is there to be manageable.

Also, for all their efforts to revamp alignment, it seems to me that, by leaving Lawful Good as an alignment choice, they've changed so much but done nothing at all to solve the "paladin-asshole straightjacket" problem that seems so rampant among paladin players.

You're getting bent out of shape about an assumption. Alignment is no longer a requirement for any class, or any spell/power for that matter. The only alignment restriction for a Paladin is that he be the same alignment as his diety. In the game we're about to play I'm going to be an unaligned Paladin. He will be actually quite a mellow character.

If you can play an unaligned paladin, the 4E alignment rant is withdrawn.

if the gods exist definitively, and good and evil is defined by the clear, bright teams of the gods, the concepts of good and evil become utterly meaningless and arbitrary.

So you're saying that if both sides agree on what is good and evil, the terms "good" and "evil" are meaningless?

Or is it more that the LG Paladin destroying a village in the name of his god is just as evil as the LE Anti-Paladin torching another village?

Both. Plus, definitive proof of the gods renders the need for faith null and void. And for me, when you take away the need for faith, everything interesting about morals and ethics goes away.

Power is back. Yay. Now I can print some 4E character sheets and build out some characters. I'll have to take a short break for work this evening, but I really do want to work up some characters.

And there are things I like about the new edition. They are vastly outnumbered by the things I am not liking, and I think all of them can easily be grafted onto any other system, but there are things I like.

Example: the new rules for small characters. Much simpler and nicer.

Plus, definitive proof of the gods renders the need for faith null and void. And for me, when you take away the need for faith, everything interesting about morals and ethics goes away.

You and my DH share a brain on this.

Something else I like about 4E: The character sheet.

I've never found a single version of the 3.x character sheet that didn't wind up having large swaths of unused or poorly used space. Even on the sheets I like.

The 4E character sheet is seems to be a thing of beauty, and because of the mechanics of the game, offers very little wasted space. And more importantly, most of the things that seem to need to be grouped or sided together together are. That's a claim made without having actually seen the sheet in action, but just at a glance, it appears to be very well laid out.

A question to all who possess 4E (I have not read it enough to have a well formed thought on it yet): Do we think it might be possible to run a 4E game play-by-email?

If so, I would propose a Buffista PbEm game of 4E. I think that the very nature of such a game would force us into heavier roleplaying territory, and thus put that very aspect of the system to the test.

I would offer to run such a game, but I do not have possession of the DMG or MM, and am not really planning to, so I think I actually lack the proper tools to make such an offer.

Funnily enough, the character sheet has generated a number of player-created versions. Enworld has a number up, and this site has a link to a few sheets as well as Power Card sets (which are very handy) - [link]

The most common criticism I've seen cast at the official sheet is that the section for powers is laughably insufficient for all the details required.

BTW, our merry group of seven players rolled up their characters this week. By a mix of happenstance and cajoling we ended up with quite the strange mix of PCs:-
4 Tieflings! A fighter, a rogue, a wizard & a paladin. All but the wizard are related.
2 Humans, both of whom are clerics. One of them is 12 years old.
1 Half Elf warlock. He's actually more sinister than all the Tieflings.

This is going to be curiously fun.

I thought the character sheet was better than 3e but still not fully made of win. I await Mad Irishman's version.

I'm a total fan of using cards for inventory and powers, so we'll either buy or make those.

I have a question (because I'm too lazy to go get the book): are Powers based on class only, or are some based on race? I.e., can a tiefling have a Tail Slap?

The Mad Irishman version (and that must sound odd to some people) is already up, though it is a 'beta'. [link]

There are powers based on race but they are minimal and found on each race's two page spread.

Raq, follow my link above to some of the best Power cards out there. there's also another site that's working on a variety of looks, though it's early days for most of them, it is fascinating to see the different approaches people are taking to the cards. [link]

Good! Because I want us both to be able to discuss it with each other! And pretty much everywhere else on the interwebs, this would involve dirty fighting and blood oaths, so it's nice to be able to have the 3E/4E conversation without it turning into personal attacks and jihads.

Not wrong. There's no way I'd try this sort of conversation on the WotC boards, for instance.

4E seems to have tried to solve the problems by combining alignment with no-alignment to get the best of both worlds, but I find it to do exactly the opposite. The 4E alignment system is just a big mess that makes so much less sense than alignment as it existed before.

Yeah, I have to agree. In the words of Richard Cheese, "Look, either close 'em or spread 'em. But not this halfway crap."

Basically, you needed to be an outsider, undead, dragon, aberration, or other explicitly evil (or good) kind of creature to be EVIL (or GOOD, or whatever) enough to register for detection spells. Thus, at least as far as alignment related spells worked, they still served their main function, but don't affect day to day life at all.

I like that rule. I may introduce it into my Eberron game.

This is one of my main problems with any form of D&D and the way the cleric class functions. Just by nature of their existence, the game intrinsically, mechanically, defines gods as existing and taking sides.

This is one of the reasons I like the Eberron setting. The gods may or may not actually exist, and clerics can be any alignment. My Eberron party is about to hunt down an evil cleric of the Silver Flame. He was a Thrane war hero with a seething hatred of Karrnath and its undead, and regards the peace treaty as a capitulation. He wants to rekindle war in a crusade against Karrnath, and to that end, he is willing to use captured Karrnathi undead to commit atrocities in Sharn, Breland's largest city, then destroying the undead. (The sadistic delight he finds himself taking in the deaths of the unworthy Brelish seals his alignment change.) Anyway, if the PCs do badly at solving the whodunnit, they may face his pet wraith in a temple of the Silver Flame, which he has Desecrated through the power of the Flame.

Anyway, the guy is utterly convinced of the rightness and necessity of his actions to destroy the greater evil, and believes the Flame smiles on him. In a Greyhawk campaign (for instance), I'd have to force an unnoticed conversion to an evil deity to make this work.

Which I think is where my fundamental philosophical dislike of alignment comes in -- if the gods exist definitively, and good and evil is defined by the clear, bright teams of the gods, the concepts of good and evil become utterly meaningless and arbitrary.

Is this per Bertrand Russell's arguments against God? I really struggled with the relation between God and good when I left the FAC. (A uni course on the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch and Rai Gaita helped me sort out my position.) I love these kinds of questions. (And the Ontological Argument for God, and questions of theodicy, and a bunch of other stuff.)

A question to all who possess 4E (I have not read it enough to have a well formed thought on it yet): Do we think it might be possible to run a 4E game play-by-email?

I don't know, but I'm willing to try.

BT, you want to run the game, I'm in, especially if it's Eberron.

It would be amusing to have a DM half the world away.

Well, okay, probably. I probably shouldn't assume I have the time without knowing more.