A Veteran GM's Preview of the D&D Player's Handbook 2

Martin Ralya writes "I've had the Player's Handbook 2 for two weeks (it releases on the 17th), and I've written an in-depth preview of the book from a GM's perspective for Gnome Stew. It's billed as 'the most significant expansion' of D&D 4th Edition yet, and that's accurate. The short version: No power creep, no balance problems, and all of the new classes are excellent — even the bard. They'll become part of D&D's lore in nothing flat."

Comments

Re:1st Ed.

[gizmoiscariot]

This is like saying "First Person Shooters are cheap elsewhere. Why do people keep buying exorbitant amounts of money for, what is in principle, the same game released over 30 years ago (Wolfenstein 3d)"

Theres a large difference between old school D&D and 4th edition.

Re:1st Ed.

[bonch]

I have a solution for you if you're not interested in the latest book. Don't buy the book.

You're welcome,
Your friendly neighborhood Spider-man

RP vs. G

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I read TFA, and I saw no discussion of how this book (or any of 4e, really) fosters the RP of the G. Pretty much the whole review was about how these different characters will function differently in combat. It reads like we're back to miniature gaming with some background character information for color--and much less focus on the fostering of interesting characters with subtle motivations, backgrounds, and non-strategic interactions with the party or NPCs.

One could argue, I think, that any class-based system constrains the ability of even experienced players to come up with unique character ideas. You might play a character with an interesting motivation and background, but at the end of the day you're the "striker, divine" (or whatever).

Maybe DnD isn't the place for that, and if you want to play characters one should play Amber (or arguably WoD). And I'm sure that I'll hear from folks that say any good gamer can wedge a character into whatever they're given to play, and that's true to an extent.

But certainly the system can foster the sense of character and RP, mostly by how much emphasis they put on combat rules and differentiation between characters. A class-based system limits that differentiation, by design, so you more or less have a pre-determined function in a squad of people that you need to fill or you're leaving a gap during melee.

It seems like 4e has borrowed from WoW to the extent that playing characters is mostly an afterthought, just as it is in WoW. (Yeah, I tried to play on some "RP" WoW servers too, and barely ever ran into others that would also RP. Most of the other folks didn't even know it was an RP server, and frankly, again, the system was all about combat effects, and had very very few character driven effects or story, so it's extremely hard to differentiate yourself outside of combat.) I don't fault WotC for that--it's hard to not want to replicate the success of WoW.

But really, if I want to play combat miniatures, I'll do something else (like Warhammer). If I want to RP, it doesn't sound like 4e is the system to do it.

Am I wrong?

Re:1st Ed.

[hey!]

I ran a number of AD&D 1st Edition campaigns, but never bothered to pick up the 2nd Edition.

I was very aware of consideral systemic problems wth AD&D, but by in large every DM I knew tweaked the rules to his liking. AD&D is not a game you play like chess or bridge, that really needs tournament rules. As DM, you control the mythos of the universe in which your players play, therefore you control the implicit rules of the campaign. It's a short step from there from making up your own explicit rules. Virtually no DM I knew followed the AD&D rules exactly, and many of us replaced sections of the rules entirely to suit our preferences.As DM you set the rules in order to maximize the enjoyment of your players; if they don't like them, you change them but if one player objects to what other players like, he can find a different game. My philosophy was the a campaign was group storytelling, and I tweaked the rules appropriately. This attracted like minded players.

Recently, my kids were interested in learning about D&D, so I picked up the latest edition. My impression of it is that it is far better by many measures, but worse in others. It'd be a much better system if you wanted to play D&D as a tournament game, if you registered your characters the way bridge players are registered and took them around to different campaigns.

On the other hand, it was much worse from other standpoints. For example the Gygax mythos, which was fine as a starter mythos but rubbish from a literary standpoint, seems wired more deeply than ever into the structure of the game.

The improvements of the recent rules move the game more down the road of simulation. Under the old rules the cure to balance problem was a judicious application of Deus ex Machina; done cleverly enough it becomes part of the story and is not even noticed by the players. You take the player with an unbeatable character and you cut him down a notch, which motivates the player to respond. So from a DM perspective the rule improvements reduced the need to play dirty tricks on the players, but this is not an improvement in fun.

What the rules do do is make playing more complicated. The AD&D 1st edition rules,with all their faults, could be explained to a new player in about fifteen minutes and learned by a new DM in a few hours. This, combined with the ready made but hackneyed Gygax mythose, bootstrapped many a fine campaign.

So, I'm in the market for a simpler system. It doesn't have to be perfect, because perfection isn't really that important. Perhaps I'll go to Ebay, as you suggest, but ideally it'd be something that is designed from the outset to be simpler to play and extend.