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A Veteran GM's First Impressions of D&D 4th Edition
Martin Ralya writes "I spent several hours with the three core D&D 4th Edition books on launch day, and wrote a detailed look at all of them based on my first impressions. Two big takeaways: Yes, the World of Warcraft comparisons are fair (and a good thing), and the way character powers work now will make the game more fun for everyone."
It seems a bit funny to me that they are making it WoW-like in the "everybody can play easily" quality. I never liked that about WoW, because it just meant that a bunch of idiots could sign on and play, but in a tabletop game it will just make it easier for friends who thought it was too complicated before to get into it. Hearing this about it makes me happy.
The 4e books have about 1/4 the content of previous edition books. They have large type, a lot of whitespace, and hell of a lot of repetition and iteration through trivial variants.
Every new power or creature has an embarassingly bad "Magic: The Gathering" style name, which often has only a slight connection to the game mechanic it represents. Many of the powers have rules that only make sense in combat, and the ones that are designed to be done outside of combat are slapdash.
It's all designed around "game balance" (i.e. balance as a competitive tactics boardgame, not as a cooperative role-playing game) to the point of continual absurdity.
I could go on and on, but there is a lot to hate in 4e, and anyone who gives it an entirely uncritical review is either taking money or ignorant of previous editions.
Two things I find funny about D&D 4E in comparison to GURPS 4e (my generally-preferred system). Remember when GURPS 4e came out? Everyone whined it was too expensive. Now D&D 4E is over $100 for the PHB/DMG/MM basic set (no pun intended), though of course you can find it online for cheaper. Yet no one seems to be complaining.
On the upside, many of the things that GURPS 4e did right D&D 4E is also doing right. Much improved rules layout and general unification/simplification of "stupid things". I was very much not a fan of d20 3.x for this exact reason; the entire ruleset was vomited into the book with what seemed like little attention to organization. (Remember GURPS 3e sidebars?)
That said, D&D 4E is very much still the quick hack'n'slash ruleset. Of course, it doesn't have to be, but it certainly doesn't have the attention to character personality advantages/disadvantages and all the non-combat skills that GURPS does. But then not much else does, and that's why we all love GURPS, isn't it. ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage