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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."
I've been playing in a 4E campaign for about 7 months now, but I managed to get most of my group to try out alternating with Savage Worlds' system, playing Deadlands (Reloaded). Now our DM is switching out the 4E game for a Crimson Skies game running on Savage Worlds.
If you want something that offers a lot of room for character creation without bogging down (make a PC in 5 minutes with more flavor than any D&D character), has rules that don't get in the way of roleplaying (and has mechanisms to reward it), and offers tactical or non tactical combat that is FAST even with many combatants, then check out Savage Worlds. There area a bunch of published systems with more on the way (next Cthulhu game will be SW based) and a huge amount of fan conversions (it really doesn't take a lot of work to convert a setting). Best of all, the core rulebook is only $10 - Savage Worlds Explorers Edition - and includes all the rules you need for nearly any type of gaming situation (I had a gunfight split off into a chase situation on the side, which we then ran simultaneously using the chase rules; the chase ended in a crowd and the next session, will probably be resolved with a persuasion contest).
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The problem is that depending how they get the books, they might not know how much they're going to hate it until they get the books, sit down with them, and find out just how limited this edition really is.
If you're lucky enough to live near a game store that has a back room or upstairs dedicated to playing games (a dying breed, those, but that's a rant for another time), then odds are good that either someone there plays 4th or the store itself runs demos. That's the best opportunity to play the game without needing the books yourself, because someone else likely already has them.
If you're just browsing in a bookstore, there's less opportunity to see the thing in action. You can read snippets and passages, but unless your bookstore is progressive and offers places where you can sit down and peruse what you want to buy, you're likely not going to capture the spirit of what makes a game good or bad.
As for why there's no love for 4th, I think it's limitation shock: 3.5 had become a hairy, unkempt, unruly man-child with many stress fractures where the added-on feats and features were causing bloat. The attempt to streamline it, give it a nice haircut, and maybe even get back to old-fashioned values (i.e. its wargaming roots) was overdone and overdone hard, to the point where I now refer to it as "the bastard child of role-playing and slot-car racing."
Counterpoint: At the risk of the "troll" moderation, those people who insist that roleplaying is impossible with 4th edition rules is doing it wrong. Roleplaying is a matter of characterization, independent of whatever structure of rules is at the table. It has more to do with imagination than the list of moves that your character can execute in combat, though they serve well as a reference for definition.
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You're absolutely right, and it sounds like 4e continued the downward spiral of the RP element in D&D.
I also agree that class based systems will tend to make people RP less because the character's not different enough. I thought the Firefly system did a decent of helping RP, and I think Palladium does a decent job as well simply because there's just so much detail to the world that it makes players want to incorporate their character into it.
However, IMHO, the best system for RP is GURPS. I've never seen a mechanic encourage RP more than the disadvantage system. Most players who do strong characterization in the other systems do it by giving their characters disadvantages anyway, it's just not incorporated into the system. It's easy to make a characters that's good at things, it's what every player does naturally. But when you incorporate the other aspects of the character into the game, character will gain more dimensions naturally and be a lot more fun to play.
However, many of my friends disagree with me on that (sometimes violently), so YMMV.
If you don't like it, don't play it.
Well, but those of us who played older versions of these games and realized that they were broken in certain ways are disappointed to see that they won't be getting any more "patches," so to speak, to their favorite edition of the game.
It's like being a huge Battlefield:Vietnam fan, and then Battlefield 2 and Battlefield 2142 come out. You like BF:V, and don't like BF2142, and so you don't buy or play BF2142--but it does mean that you're stuck with the BF:V gameplay that you have, rather than getting fixes or updates that the game might sorely need. And it still means that you're disappointed that they took the games in a direction that you don't like. Not playing the new game doesn't really remove the disappointment, and it does make it tough to find new people to play the old game with. Naturally, this makes a person want to complain--it's perfectly natural, and it's just as natural to dislike complainers, which is why this "don't like don't play" attitude is to some extent understandable.
"No power creep"?
Sorry, I have to take exception to this.
One of the major problems with 4th edition is how hard it is to hit things. When I sat in on a Gencon panel with the 4ed designers last summer, they said they balanced the game around a 50%-60% hit rate. While this may have made their math easy, it doesn't make the game fun. Seriously - when you use your awesome encounter ability and it misses half the time, it kills a lot of the fun in the game.
Worse, over the course of the 30 levels 4th Edition is designed for, PCs pick up a net -5 to hit along the way (Monster AC goes up linearly with level, PC's attack bonus goes up proportional to half your level (a -15 to hit change), but +6 for using a magic weapon, +4 for stat bumps), meaning that PCs end up missing 75% of the time or so without using anything special. This means that PCs that needed 11s or better to hit Irontooth (a +2 level monster) need 17s or better to hit Orcus (a +3 level solo). Sure, there's powers like Lead the Charge that give a large bonus to hit, but in order to apply the bonus, you have to hit with it.
4th edition has been very cautious at assigning bonuses to hit - almost all feats in the game (like Weapon Focus) were rewritten to add bonuses to damage instead of bonuses to hit. There's only very limited ways of gaining bonuses to hit (Tieflings using fire attacks have a feat available, as do Warforged with another ally adjacent to the target).
So where does PHB II's power creep come in? The major, obscene jump in power is a pair of feats called Weapon Expertise and Implement Expertise, that add +1/+2/+3 to hit at the heroic/paragon/epic tiers. It's approximately 10 trillion times better than any feat released before (the Warforged feat mentioned above - which is a racial feat - only gives a +1 bonus, and only when you have another ally touching the monster), and obsoletes immediately those feats that have tried to give a bonus to hit.
This is combined with melee mastery, which lets you swap out strength for your highest stat when making basic melee attacks. So a 10 Str, 20 Cha Paladin - who'd flail weakly at any enemy provoking an Opportunity Attack before - picks up the equivalent of +5 to hit and damage.
Sorry for the math, but the nutshell idea is: with just two feats, it works out to a +8 bonus to hit, which is insanely out of whack with everything they've done before.
The current theory is that WOTC realized they screwed up the math in their to-hit rolls and/or realized that PCs missing 75% of the time is simply not a very enjoyable way to spend an evening (my group is ready to go back to 3rd Edition, they're so pissed off at missing all the time), that they released this "patch" to correct the problems in their math. Which sounds fine at first, until you realize that they probably should have just patched the system to give a +1 bonus to hit at 5th/15th/25th levels. Creating a feat to do the work for them is bad, since it just set the new standard in feat design, and because the feat is now mandatory for all characters, and feats are supposed to be minor options that people can use to tailor their specific characters. No feats should be mandatory.
The rest of the PHBII seems to follow this theme. Bards have a paragon path that lets people automatically hit. Avengers get to roll twice every time they attack, and take the better roll, etc.
While this is all welcome news for those of us that play the game:
1) It reveals how badly made 4th Edition was and is.
2) It is a tremendous power creep, which is rather the opposite of what the reviewer for Slashdot said.
4th Edition is the snack food of the role playing world.
Books are cheap on eBay. Why does anyone feel the need to pay exorbitant amounts of money for, what is in principle, the same game released over 30 years ago.
Boy, do I feel old and cranky.
You sound it too. You're essentially judging "youth culture" without making any effort to investigate it; like old people griping about rap music or the internet. If you'd actually open up and read a 4e book, you'd see how radically different it is from 1e.
You probably wouldn't like it 'cause your tastes have fossilized, but at least you'd be able to voice a semi-intelligent complaint about it at that point.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
However, IMHO, the best system for RP is GURPS.
Whatever works for you; nowhere is YMMV is as true as it is in game design.
However, I have followed the development of GURPS for years and years. While I love the system for individual character design, everytime I have tried to develop a party around it, the characters are too individual. The party often just won't have a single cohesive focus because none of the players work together. Most GURPS campaigns that I have been in have fallen apart after a few sessions as a result--everyone is off doing their own thing.
Again, this can be corrected with good DMing--it's really their job to find the motivator that unites the party. And, they can help during character creation by giving each character a "god" part that will serve as a unifier later. But that put a lot more work on the DM.
The best system I have developed a character in, personally, is WoD. I think the new version is even better--instead of 7 classes, there are now 5. Each major class has a multitude of minor classes, including rules for creating your own variation. So every character is broadly slotted into a major class, with a lot of opportunity for the refinement and differentiation of that concept with a minor class. Also what helps WoD, imo, is that many of the powers have pretty subjective interpretation--so if you haven't designed the character, and played the character, to back up your application of that power in combat (or otherwise) it's not going to work. Therefore, good RP lends itself to what you are able to accomplish in combat, not vice versa.
btw, GURPs "borrowed" the concept of disadvantages from the original Hero Superpower games. But I think you're right, it's a key element to creating different characters.
Another thing that I really like about GURPs is the ability to RP during combat. By this I mean the mechanic that lets you choose between actively defending, aggressively attacking, or blending them. While it serves a strategic purpose, it also allows some RP--a fearless barbarian would also aggressively attack without consideration of defense, while a spineless wizard might always maximize their defense until just the right moment for an attack.
Finally, I'm having a debate about game mechanics on slashdot. Thank Gygax I'm already married with kids--I think I just lost my "check vs. social skills" saving throw. ;)
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