A One-Third Impression

As most of you know (If you don't, welcome to the club), I've been a long time D&D nerd. At an age in my life where most of my friends have lost the time to play, my wife and I soldier on...adventuring on our nightly walks with Molly. Though our playstyle has evolved pretty far from the ruleset, I still get a kick out of new source books, and under such pretense, I picked up a copy of the new 4th edition rules. Since I finished plowing through the Player's Handbook yesterday, I'm going to offer up a 1/3 review of the new face of D&D.

Before I begin, let it be known that I'm somewhat old school. I came into D&D at the height of 2nd edition AD&D, and immediately hated and scoffed at all that was 3rd edition for its entire lifecycle (with the exception of the two Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance PS2 ports, to which, 3rd Edition rules worked wonders). In essence, I felt that 3rd edition was a dumbing down and a 180 about face to the 2nd edition rules: roleplaying opportunities decayed into infinite skill/power checks, and everyone wanted miniatures combat so they could use their silly feats. So, long story short, the few 3rd ed books I did buy, were mainly for the artwork, and ideas; I tossed all the rules and replaced with a bastardization of 2nd edition and my own house rules.

I was fully expecting to toss out 4th edition just as quickly, but I've seen several improvements upon 3rd edition, and what's more, an actual evolution that feels right for the D&D name. What do I mean by that? Well, originally, D&D 3rd edition was supposed to be a sort of simplification of 2nd Ed. AD&D rules (I guess the "Advanced" was causing WotC to lose customers or something). But, to all appearances, I think 3rd Ed. ended up being by far more complex than anything 2nd Ed. had done. 4th Ed. is a clear simplification of rules. It's also a very baseline release. WotC (that's Wizards of the Coast, the current owner of the D&D name), in its unending pull for massive amounts of money, drops several thousand hints to bigger and better things you can do for your PCs in upcoming books (that will probably also hit you at $35 per pop). I like that. 4th Ed. embraces the KISS principle in initial Racial/Class offerings. It also has a compact array of spells, powers, equipment, and feats so that anyone can sit down and whip up a pretty decent character on the fly. Content-wise, the new Edition is written clearly enough that a 10 year old initiate will be off the hook excited about it, and yet still with enough interesting stuff that old hats like myself can pull something out of the reading.

Instead of giant blocks of text, I'm going to break into list mode for things I like and dislike with the PHB:
What I like:

• The new powers working: At Will/Encounter/Daily <-- this is all very smart
• Wizards have become more versatile and less weak seeming--to some effect they can sling a lot more magic per day, and the At Will cantrips do a great job of making their minor magic abilities shine in ways I've always envisioned
• Finally, Rogues are not completely shat upon by the rules.
• Paragon and Epic tiers are well defined at the get go.
• Implements for spell casters (such as rods, staves, wands, holy items) are now integral and pretty slickly incorporated
• Overall magic Items have become somewhat more generic, but they serve as a good template for creating a lot of different items. Also, the inclusion of magic items in the PHB is smart.
• I'm so glad that they dropped the Threat rating garbage for monsters. Also, from briefly thumbing the Monstrous Manual, I see that they've added lots of flavor text, stuff for what you can learn based on monster lore, tactics, and finally, fixed HP counts for monsters. At a glance, all of this looks very accommodating for no-pre-planning DMs like myself.
• Healing Surges, though completely non-realistic are a kind of cool idea, and well implemented.
• The God-related Skills are a nice touch.
• Halflings have finally become something interesting (neither 2nd or 3rd edition could capture anything interesting for this short-statured race.) They're kinda Kender-like now, and I like that a lot.
• Dragonborn and Eladrin are pretty decent as far as new races go.
• Retraining is a great idea.
• Feats actually seem to fit into this edition in a non-clunky way.
  

What I don't like:

• Almost all the powers in the PHB are combat oriented. I want to see more full-figured powers. Alteration magic, for example, is almost completely non-existent currently.
• Some former spells have become rituals, and currently take too long to cast (seriously, ten minutes before your knock spell fires? come on.)
• miniature combat. Every time I've ever tried it, it destroys my mental image of the battle scene. I wish WotC would leave wargaming to the folks over at Games Workshop. D&D has never, in my mind at least, been known for its miniatures combat rules. I think 2nd Edition did the best at handling this--they kept it as a supplement. A lot of powers and feats now require squares and all that positioning garbage; I think it would have been easier to have some of that more vague, so that it could fall into the standard realm of DM describing the combat, and players reacting. We've never had trouble keeping all of it in our heads.
• Tieflings, though I love them, have really become very generic, losing all of their glorious chaos in appearance, function, and role. This makes me very sad.
• It looks like the beautiful 2nd Ed. view of the Multiverse, crystal spheres and the like has been shattered. D&D 4th ed. talks about a lot less in terms of primes, planes and the stuff in between. The Astral is super heavily built up, but the planes, seem, for all purposes non existent beyond the old Inner planes, now called Elemental Chaos. To supplant, they've added Fey worlds and I think the shadow realm, but I think overall, Planescape was one of TSR's greatest creations, and it saddens me that they're throwing out a lot of the beautiful madness of that campaign setting.
• The Open Gaming License is no more. WotC, you are a bunch of greedy dumbasses for dropping the OGL in 4th Ed. Shame on you for creating a beautiful 3rd party explosion with 3rd edition only to cut off that world with your new baby.
• Plate armor for only 50gp?! Madness I tell you.

I think really, that's about all I can say at this juncture. Overall, I think 4th edition is a big improvement over 3rd, and so far I like it enough to be willing to give up on the (now almost 20 year old!) 2nd ed rules.