OK, so, we spent the weekend playing 4e. Back-of-the-book adventure. We made 4 first-level characters...for posterity, they are:

Controller: Morgan, a human wizard of unknown gender (OotS, yo!)
Striker: Ellantry Mistymorn, female elf ranger (archer-flavored)
Defender: Unapologetic "Pol" Schadenfreude, male dragonborn fighter
Leader: Haldric Horsehung, male half-elf warlord.

Note we didn't make a rogue-zilla, and only tried one new race. Because the "striker" role was filled by the ranger, and the rogue seems to have limited purpose outside of combat, we opted against. And I may be the only player of 4e ever to actually draw character portraits on the character sheets.

About 4 hours into the game, one player said, "Maybe it's just that even-numbered D&D versions suck."

I'll spare you the play-by-play and give my general assessment.

1. Ease of play: NSM. May be an issue of familiarity, but we were looking up rules every action; in fact, sometimes as many as 5 rules to determine how they interacted. Character creation took a long time. That's mostly familiarity, but also, first-level characters are about the equivalent of third-level 3.5e characters.

2. Rulebooks: The DMG is a total waste of trees. The two pages of useful info could've been included in the PHB. The PHB didn't seem well organized to me - at one point I needed to look up movement ("If Pol's Speed is 5, how many hours will it take for him to walk 15 miles?") and the Table of Contents sent me to chapter 5. Which said, "Movement is how far you can move in a round. See Chapter 3 for movement rates."

Also, I don't think they did a good job of clarifying some terms. It wasn't until the third character that we figured out "Powers" is the generic term, but Powers are Spells for a Wizard and Exploits for a Ranger. It was confusing.

3. The Business of Gaming: The only thing that differentiates one character from another (inside a class) is the Powers. Of which the PHB gives about four. It seems clear that WotC views the PHB as sort of a freeview, and plans to issue splatbooks with more Powers. Also, I suspect classes that aren't in 4e like Druid, Barbarian, and Monk will get splatbooks.

4. Gameplay: Key point, we all had fun.

However, the most fun parts were things the DM created. The adventure as written is just five fights. The DM added some interpersonal stuff to try out skill challenges and skill checks, and that was the only time we could really roleplay. (I like the skill challenge concept, btw, and will be incorporating it into other rulesets).

4e was quite good as a tactical fighting game. We were punished if we used poor tactics and rewarded for using smart ones. Individual character builds are balanced to a fare-thee-well (which I hate), so what's important is your party build. The only "role" in 4e's claim to be a role-playing game is that of Leader, Striker, Defender, or Controller. I.e., what you do in combat. The main result of the party-build concept seems to be that you either all survive or it's a TPK. In essence, the party is a corporate entity, and it lives or dies.

(In some ways I'm okay with this, as it forces player cooperation...but it also forces the DM to be the foe of the players, which I've always thought was stupid.)

The move action/standard action stuff is a little different, but easy to grok. At least at early levels, it seems that they have done away with your reliance on magic items to be strong, instead making your Powers the key point.

Final word: It's a superhero tactical fighting game (Champions) in a high fantasy wrapper. It's fun, but I don't see where it adds any value over playing Descent or World of Warcraft.

Haldric Horsehung

OMG!!

thanks for the summary, Raq.

The Business of Gaming: The only thing that differentiates one character from another (inside a class) is the Powers. Of which the PHB gives about four. It seems clear that WotC views the PHB as sort of a freeview, and plans to issue splatbooks with more Powers. Also, I suspect classes that aren't in 4e like Druid, Barbarian, and Monk will get splatbooks.

The other classes are going to be featured in the yearly new volumes of the PHB. Yes, this time next year there'll be a PHB 2, DMG 2 & MM 2. I wonder if the DMG 2 is fail miserably in sales.

Of a similar vein to some of Raq's critique, Chris Pramas, head of Green Ronin publishing, wrote a blog post about 4E's suitability to introducing new players to gaming. He finds it lacking.

Also of note in the 4E discussion, WotC continues to dick around in releasing the GSL (the new version of the license) and the SRD. They've guaranteed that no third party publishers will be able to release any competing products until at least this time next year.

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

Cthulhu Now, but we once spent an entire session where our characters sat in a Denny's.

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.

The skill challenge was totally cool. At first I thought it sounded kind of dry ("you have to get 4 successes before you get 2 failures") but the ability to have various characters use various skills that all applied was excellent. And fun!

You know, really 4e reminds me of first edition.

However, the level of roleplaying is entirely dependent on the group & the DM.

I was wondering about that -- I like an RPG where the RP involves more than just hacky-smashy as much as anyone, but disallowing haggling with the innkeeper sounds like a DM issue more than the ruleset. Unless I'm missing something.

You know, really 4e reminds me of first edition.

Huh. And also, huh. Expand?