Alright, I realize that a great majority of "gamers" look down on tabletop gaming. This is less true in recent years than the strange and mysterious times of AD&D and the fabled "First Edition" itself, but it holds true often enough that someone owning a console will still look sideways at somebody who owns a library of rulebooks and sources for playing with dry-erase maps and plastic minis.
Still, I know there have to be a few people here who have looked at, played, or been in the same apartment complex as D&D at some point, and with the 4th Edition banners that have until recently populated the Escapist I thought it might be nice to write up a brief review of my experiences with Dungeons and Dragons.
To give a little history, I was a D&D 3.0 player. I was too young to get into AD&D and didn't even know what Dungeons and Dragons was until I was about 15. I started playing with some friends in junior high school and immediately fell in love with the system. I had never known anything different before it, and I wasn't the type of person to criticize or fault a numeric system for attempting to realize abstract character concepts on a sheet of paper. To me Dungeons and Dragons was a mechanical framework that could give you a kind of satisfaction to seeing the outcome of a roll of a d20, whereas the meat and potatoes of the game was the epic adventure, being the heroes and saving the day. Finding out who your character is and what destiny may unfold before his feet. At the base of it, D&D was a roleplaying outlet and a way to create cohesive concepts with other people.
As I played D&D with different groups and more people in addition to joining forums and browsing the Wizards of the Coast message boards, I discovered more and more things about tabletop gaming in general. I discovered the munchkins, the min-maxers, the hardcore roleplayers, the houserulers, the homebrewers, and tons of other playstyles. It was at this point that I realized that some people, when presented with a mechanical system, would do strange and unusual things that typically only students graduating with degrees in chaos theory would try to rationalize, simply because the rules could say they could. Still, it never really got in the way of my enjoyment of the game and I never questioned the foundation on which the entire thing rested precariously upon.
Then, 4th Edition came along. Maybe I was enjoying my slight mastery of the mechanical system so that I could, once a concept was born, create the pen-and-paper version of practically anything I desired, drawing on an extensive pool of knowledge about feats, skills, and assorted prestige classes. Maybe I was scared of change. Maybe the raving fanboys who'd purchase anything Wizards puts between two hard covers and calls "official" made me pee a little. Whatever the reason, 4th Edition hit like a gigantic rock in the middle of my otherwise quiet if undecorated midsummer-day swimming hole.
A lot of the changes in 4th Edition are presented mechanically, which has a good deal to do with why I thought it was unnecessary from the first day it was announced. See, Wizards had previously revised their "3.0" system into "3.5," which fixed a lot of mechanical errors in the game and helped stay abuse. This was OK, it was more like a "patch" than releasing a brand new game. Then they released "Star Wars Saga Edition," which utilized their 3.5 ruleset and combined various elements from other sources (such as d20 Modern, another 3.0-based supplement) to make a hybrid system that was flexible, adaptable, and worked well. Again, this wasn't so much of a brand new game as it was a game patch, and at the very onset of 4E's planning period a lot of my friends were excited. We were hoping that 4E would be a refinement of the hybridization shown to us in bare glimpses of the Star Wars player's manual, a perfected system that would allow us to realize even more creative character concepts and forge ahead into a shiny new library of books.
We were wrong.
4th Edition introduced many new concepts while keeping the fundamentals of the d20 system the same; that is, you basically roll a twenty-sided die to do anything you ever wanted. Everything else changed in various degrees, ranging from being edited into a more sensible or workable mechanic, all the way to being completely arbitrary and different. The main focus of 4th Edition appeared to be empowering the players. While this isn't a terrible thing, and 3rd Edition was probably greatly in need of more ways for DMs not to cripple their adventuring group, I feel that it went just a little bit too far and said "SPAAAAAARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" as it leapt right off the deep end into the realm of Cliche Badassery. It really and truly feels like the developers were spending a lot of downtime playing WoW during 3.5's success, and when they were suddenly slapped with a deadline and a requirement to completely rewrite core concepts, from player races to the way the game plays, they could only go "Urk!" and CTRL+C/CTRL+V.
Let me give you an example. In D&D 3.X, players often complained about how the Wizard could, at level 20 (the previous maximum level before "epic" rules took over), destroy a Fighter without much effort. While it was true that Wizards got a huge repertoire of spells, they were limited in their uses per day, never mind the fact that the Wizard was always portrayed in a beneficial light. Saying a Wizard could beat a Fighter, when the fight starts 400 feet away from each other and the Wizard has 9,000,000 gold worth of magic items while the Fighter is armed with a loincloth and rusty spoon, is a little biased. Never mind the fact that in the whole of Dungeons and Dragons, the party was supposed to work together to overcome trials, not run around loldueling'ing with each other. I won't say that the class balance was perfect, but it was balanced more toward something other than scoring HUEG CRITICALZ.
In 4th Edition, they revamped most of the classes and broke them down into standardized rules. Every class gets a selection of a limited number of abilities they can use per day, per encounter, and "at-will." These are chosen from a list individual to each class, and are an attempt at giving them more flexibility in choosing what each can do. While this is respectable, as in previous editions you simply "got what you got at X level," this makes everything feel a little too video-gamey. The list for each class is rather limited, and there are obvious logic flaws; the Fighter, for example, can choose "Cleave" as one of his at-will abilities. This means that every turn, the fighter can hit 2 enemies instead of 1. This Fighter can also choose a "once per encounter" power, called "Spinning Sweep." This ability allows a Fighter to attack an enemy and, if successful, knocks the enemy down. Now, my question is, why is it that a Fighter can swing his weapon in wide, accurate arcs (as Cleave suffers no penalty to attack rolls made to-hit) all day, every day, every second of every encounter, while he can only swing at someone's feet once every 10 or so minutes? Even putting logic aside, many class abilities feel like strict copies of others. Wizards get an at-will called magic missile, a ranged attack they can use any time of the day to deal damage to one foe. Warlocks get Eldritch Blast, an at-will ranged attack that they can...use to deal damage to one foe? Warlords have Inspiring Word, which can heal allies. Clerics have Healing Word, which can...heal allies too?
The supposed "creativity" of the system and "new concepts" feel a lot like they're being dumbed down for quicker character generation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how Dungeons and Dragons 3.X could take new or inexperienced players literally hours to scour rulebooks to find carrying capacity and pick spells. To anyone more used to the system of 3rd Edition and previous, 4th Edition may seem like a hand-holding, crooning mother figure compared to a frame in which to build a new and interesting character. It basically comes down to choosing between about 8 races (guest starring the Draenei, from World of WarCraft) and about 8 classes. Then they must make the arduous choice of where to place their talent point--er, I mean, what special abilities to choose to make them "unique." Since many abilities are strictly thematic, ie, "Two-handed DPS Fighter" or "Sword-and-board Tank Fighter," this isn't very difficult either.
Once you get past the character generation, you can really appreciate the roleplaying opportunities 4th Edition provides. It expands the "playable" levels up to 30, and makes leveling less of a concern, allowing you to focus on the development and expansion of your character's personality, goals, and feelings towards eating other party members. This may seem ideal, because roleplaying is a major factor in tabletop roleplaying games, but the feeling may be a little bit dulled when you discover there are rules clearly listed for everything. Your character can literally choose a destiny as he approaches level 30, and this "destiny" gives you obvious mechanical perks. For instance, if you pick "Demigod" for your character's destiny, you gain superpowers as you near level 30. At level 30, your character immediately poofs and becomes some entity to be worshiped on the Plane of Gods. I wish I were making this up, but the rulebook literally says that as soon as you hit level 30 and complete your "destiny quest," you hand over your character sheet and the game is over. That's it. The adventure ends, time to roll up level 1 characters and go on another one. Pardon me for feeling a bit railroaded, but isn't this what happens in the end of every Final Fantasy game? You save the world, become the world's most badass swordfighter, and learn to summon monsters that can eradicate the solar system, then you retire to serving tea in a quaint shop somewhere in BFE. That's what this is, and it's literally written into the rules.
In the end, I suppose I will always draw the conclusion that 4th Edition feels like a "moneymaker." It's only natural for a company to want to make more money, but the timing and execution for it are bad business. 3rd Edition revamped itself halfway through its career, and afterwards released literally hundreds of supplements from both WotC and third-party publishers. Gamers sank thousands into the franchise, from collectible miniatures to use on their Wizards-approved game mats, to rulebooks that would allow them to play fighter/wizard/cleric/halfling/dragon/anthropomorphic cheesecakes. They release campaign settings with unique and adventurous stories, such as Eberron and the Forgotten Realms. Even such classics as Greyhawk were popular, to the point it became the "mainstream generic D&D setting." As soon as 4th Edition came onto the shelves, Wizards of the Coast dropped development for further 3.X content and no longer provides support for 3.X-related materials on their official website! If that wasn't enough, the company Paizo Publishing has the rights to release a new D&D rulebook called Pathfinder, which takes 3.5 Edition and modifies it with beneficial updates and rules that many classic 3.X gamers, like myself, thought the game could have used from square one. Essentially, it comes down to Wizards scrapping everything and telling their fanbase that every product bought before 4E was invalid, and that should fans want to stay "official" they should upgrade to 4th Edition. I honestly believe this was not because D&D gamers were crying for a completely different game system, it was simply because the company felt it was time to cash the check and write a new one.
Despite all of this, I can't say that 4th Edition is unworthy of attention. It has its merits, and like all games it breaks down into aesthetics. Trying to compare 3.X and 4E alongside one another is like trying to compare a Sega Genesis with a Super Nintendo. They both play video games, it comes down to whether you prefer Mario over Sonic. If you are looking for something new to try in your tabletop gaming sessions and like more action-oriented adventure a la World of WarCraft, pick up 4th Edition and follow along. If you still prefer the flexible character creation, varied races, multiclassing, and huge amount of resources available, stick with 3.5 until Paizo Publishing releases the final version of Pathfinder.
Still, I know there have to be a few people here who have looked at, played, or been in the same apartment complex as D&D at some point, and with the 4th Edition banners that have until recently populated the Escapist I thought it might be nice to write up a brief review of my experiences with Dungeons and Dragons.
To give a little history, I was a D&D 3.0 player. I was too young to get into AD&D and didn't even know what Dungeons and Dragons was until I was about 15. I started playing with some friends in junior high school and immediately fell in love with the system. I had never known anything different before it, and I wasn't the type of person to criticize or fault a numeric system for attempting to realize abstract character concepts on a sheet of paper. To me Dungeons and Dragons was a mechanical framework that could give you a kind of satisfaction to seeing the outcome of a roll of a d20, whereas the meat and potatoes of the game was the epic adventure, being the heroes and saving the day. Finding out who your character is and what destiny may unfold before his feet. At the base of it, D&D was a roleplaying outlet and a way to create cohesive concepts with other people.
As I played D&D with different groups and more people in addition to joining forums and browsing the Wizards of the Coast message boards, I discovered more and more things about tabletop gaming in general. I discovered the munchkins, the min-maxers, the hardcore roleplayers, the houserulers, the homebrewers, and tons of other playstyles. It was at this point that I realized that some people, when presented with a mechanical system, would do strange and unusual things that typically only students graduating with degrees in chaos theory would try to rationalize, simply because the rules could say they could. Still, it never really got in the way of my enjoyment of the game and I never questioned the foundation on which the entire thing rested precariously upon.
Then, 4th Edition came along. Maybe I was enjoying my slight mastery of the mechanical system so that I could, once a concept was born, create the pen-and-paper version of practically anything I desired, drawing on an extensive pool of knowledge about feats, skills, and assorted prestige classes. Maybe I was scared of change. Maybe the raving fanboys who'd purchase anything Wizards puts between two hard covers and calls "official" made me pee a little. Whatever the reason, 4th Edition hit like a gigantic rock in the middle of my otherwise quiet if undecorated midsummer-day swimming hole.
A lot of the changes in 4th Edition are presented mechanically, which has a good deal to do with why I thought it was unnecessary from the first day it was announced. See, Wizards had previously revised their "3.0" system into "3.5," which fixed a lot of mechanical errors in the game and helped stay abuse. This was OK, it was more like a "patch" than releasing a brand new game. Then they released "Star Wars Saga Edition," which utilized their 3.5 ruleset and combined various elements from other sources (such as d20 Modern, another 3.0-based supplement) to make a hybrid system that was flexible, adaptable, and worked well. Again, this wasn't so much of a brand new game as it was a game patch, and at the very onset of 4E's planning period a lot of my friends were excited. We were hoping that 4E would be a refinement of the hybridization shown to us in bare glimpses of the Star Wars player's manual, a perfected system that would allow us to realize even more creative character concepts and forge ahead into a shiny new library of books.
We were wrong.
4th Edition introduced many new concepts while keeping the fundamentals of the d20 system the same; that is, you basically roll a twenty-sided die to do anything you ever wanted. Everything else changed in various degrees, ranging from being edited into a more sensible or workable mechanic, all the way to being completely arbitrary and different. The main focus of 4th Edition appeared to be empowering the players. While this isn't a terrible thing, and 3rd Edition was probably greatly in need of more ways for DMs not to cripple their adventuring group, I feel that it went just a little bit too far and said "SPAAAAAARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" as it leapt right off the deep end into the realm of Cliche Badassery. It really and truly feels like the developers were spending a lot of downtime playing WoW during 3.5's success, and when they were suddenly slapped with a deadline and a requirement to completely rewrite core concepts, from player races to the way the game plays, they could only go "Urk!" and CTRL+C/CTRL+V.
Let me give you an example. In D&D 3.X, players often complained about how the Wizard could, at level 20 (the previous maximum level before "epic" rules took over), destroy a Fighter without much effort. While it was true that Wizards got a huge repertoire of spells, they were limited in their uses per day, never mind the fact that the Wizard was always portrayed in a beneficial light. Saying a Wizard could beat a Fighter, when the fight starts 400 feet away from each other and the Wizard has 9,000,000 gold worth of magic items while the Fighter is armed with a loincloth and rusty spoon, is a little biased. Never mind the fact that in the whole of Dungeons and Dragons, the party was supposed to work together to overcome trials, not run around loldueling'ing with each other. I won't say that the class balance was perfect, but it was balanced more toward something other than scoring HUEG CRITICALZ.
In 4th Edition, they revamped most of the classes and broke them down into standardized rules. Every class gets a selection of a limited number of abilities they can use per day, per encounter, and "at-will." These are chosen from a list individual to each class, and are an attempt at giving them more flexibility in choosing what each can do. While this is respectable, as in previous editions you simply "got what you got at X level," this makes everything feel a little too video-gamey. The list for each class is rather limited, and there are obvious logic flaws; the Fighter, for example, can choose "Cleave" as one of his at-will abilities. This means that every turn, the fighter can hit 2 enemies instead of 1. This Fighter can also choose a "once per encounter" power, called "Spinning Sweep." This ability allows a Fighter to attack an enemy and, if successful, knocks the enemy down. Now, my question is, why is it that a Fighter can swing his weapon in wide, accurate arcs (as Cleave suffers no penalty to attack rolls made to-hit) all day, every day, every second of every encounter, while he can only swing at someone's feet once every 10 or so minutes? Even putting logic aside, many class abilities feel like strict copies of others. Wizards get an at-will called magic missile, a ranged attack they can use any time of the day to deal damage to one foe. Warlocks get Eldritch Blast, an at-will ranged attack that they can...use to deal damage to one foe? Warlords have Inspiring Word, which can heal allies. Clerics have Healing Word, which can...heal allies too?
The supposed "creativity" of the system and "new concepts" feel a lot like they're being dumbed down for quicker character generation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, seeing as how Dungeons and Dragons 3.X could take new or inexperienced players literally hours to scour rulebooks to find carrying capacity and pick spells. To anyone more used to the system of 3rd Edition and previous, 4th Edition may seem like a hand-holding, crooning mother figure compared to a frame in which to build a new and interesting character. It basically comes down to choosing between about 8 races (guest starring the Draenei, from World of WarCraft) and about 8 classes. Then they must make the arduous choice of where to place their talent point--er, I mean, what special abilities to choose to make them "unique." Since many abilities are strictly thematic, ie, "Two-handed DPS Fighter" or "Sword-and-board Tank Fighter," this isn't very difficult either.
Once you get past the character generation, you can really appreciate the roleplaying opportunities 4th Edition provides. It expands the "playable" levels up to 30, and makes leveling less of a concern, allowing you to focus on the development and expansion of your character's personality, goals, and feelings towards eating other party members. This may seem ideal, because roleplaying is a major factor in tabletop roleplaying games, but the feeling may be a little bit dulled when you discover there are rules clearly listed for everything. Your character can literally choose a destiny as he approaches level 30, and this "destiny" gives you obvious mechanical perks. For instance, if you pick "Demigod" for your character's destiny, you gain superpowers as you near level 30. At level 30, your character immediately poofs and becomes some entity to be worshiped on the Plane of Gods. I wish I were making this up, but the rulebook literally says that as soon as you hit level 30 and complete your "destiny quest," you hand over your character sheet and the game is over. That's it. The adventure ends, time to roll up level 1 characters and go on another one. Pardon me for feeling a bit railroaded, but isn't this what happens in the end of every Final Fantasy game? You save the world, become the world's most badass swordfighter, and learn to summon monsters that can eradicate the solar system, then you retire to serving tea in a quaint shop somewhere in BFE. That's what this is, and it's literally written into the rules.
In the end, I suppose I will always draw the conclusion that 4th Edition feels like a "moneymaker." It's only natural for a company to want to make more money, but the timing and execution for it are bad business. 3rd Edition revamped itself halfway through its career, and afterwards released literally hundreds of supplements from both WotC and third-party publishers. Gamers sank thousands into the franchise, from collectible miniatures to use on their Wizards-approved game mats, to rulebooks that would allow them to play fighter/wizard/cleric/halfling/dragon/anthropomorphic cheesecakes. They release campaign settings with unique and adventurous stories, such as Eberron and the Forgotten Realms. Even such classics as Greyhawk were popular, to the point it became the "mainstream generic D&D setting." As soon as 4th Edition came onto the shelves, Wizards of the Coast dropped development for further 3.X content and no longer provides support for 3.X-related materials on their official website! If that wasn't enough, the company Paizo Publishing has the rights to release a new D&D rulebook called Pathfinder, which takes 3.5 Edition and modifies it with beneficial updates and rules that many classic 3.X gamers, like myself, thought the game could have used from square one. Essentially, it comes down to Wizards scrapping everything and telling their fanbase that every product bought before 4E was invalid, and that should fans want to stay "official" they should upgrade to 4th Edition. I honestly believe this was not because D&D gamers were crying for a completely different game system, it was simply because the company felt it was time to cash the check and write a new one.
Despite all of this, I can't say that 4th Edition is unworthy of attention. It has its merits, and like all games it breaks down into aesthetics. Trying to compare 3.X and 4E alongside one another is like trying to compare a Sega Genesis with a Super Nintendo. They both play video games, it comes down to whether you prefer Mario over Sonic. If you are looking for something new to try in your tabletop gaming sessions and like more action-oriented adventure a la World of WarCraft, pick up 4th Edition and follow along. If you still prefer the flexible character creation, varied races, multiclassing, and huge amount of resources available, stick with 3.5 until Paizo Publishing releases the final version of Pathfinder.
