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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."
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.
Gizmo
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
Agreed. Not sure what all the hate for 4ed comes from. If you don't like it, don't play it. Its not like the previous edition's books exploded at a certain date and were not usable.
Gizmo
Exploding books are awesome! Thanks for giving me another way to kill my players!
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Agreed. Not sure what all the hate for 4ed comes from.
4th edition? Hell, until they bring back THAC0, screw 'em.
Now get off my lawn.
Internet scofflaw
Shouldn't it be veteran DM? Silly noobs... =P
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?
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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.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
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").
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.
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Ahh, yes, Dungeons and Dragons. A game that that combines the breathless excitement of Parcheesi with all the thrills of double-entry bookkeeping.
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Back then, the game world looked recognizably like the Middle Ages, and character classes were defined by social roles, not by combat system mechanics.
4th edition is a game, and it feels like one. To complain about its realism would be akin to complaining that actual knights and bishops act nothing like their corresponding chess pieces. They can make them do whatever they want.
What Gary Gygax did for D&D is what Tolkien also did in his fiction: He made the world seem recognizably like history. He had an appendix on polearm heads. Among the rules were straight up history lessons. His D&D was history with a tweak. In addition to actual history there was this extra element - the gods, the primal elements, the outer planes... things that ordinary people in that world have superstitions about but almost never encounter openly. Even those things match the actual superstitions of history in their most important elements.
I guess I insist on playing campaigns that capture this spirit, and for this, 1st ed is perfect. As far as the mechanics go: they're maybe not optimal, but nothing is, and with wise house rules and good roleplaying, you can make any system work at the complexity level you need. What's most important is to have the system pull you into the right spirit of the setting, and to get out of your way when you want to role play a character. I don't see any reason to abandon the "cannonical" D&D - 1st ed - for the flavor of the week. It's not like the previous game somehow vanishes when the new flavor comes out, and I support people playing and hosting whatever rule system makes the most sense to them. I recently ran a 1st ed game in a rather small con, and I thought it worked just fine. I'd love to see more of that.