I've been playing D&D since the old "blue box" version in the late 70s and have played every version up until now. I've read the 4e Players Guide, but it just doesn't feel like D&D any more. It might be a good game system, but it's just not D&D to me.
That is the driving force behind 4E, not a creative style, not a love of the game. Corporate greed. Let Hasbro squash what made 3E the golden Age of the game by opening it up to anyone. So now let's squash all the independent Publishers who drove us to excel into non-existance. Hasbro should be ashamed
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Smaugdragon"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong"
Personally, in terms of corporate greed (and outlay of my cash), I love 4e compared to 3.5.
Yes, WotC opened up most of 3.5 to other publishers but that just about ruined the RPG industry as almost every company was only producing d20 games and supplements (and, let's face it, d20 was never even remotely close to the best system out there - it was just what D&D used). Also, there is a (more limited) license to produce 4e products and there are multiple companies doing so.
With 3.5, I spent probably about $1000 to get a good selection of books with most of the rules.
With 4e, I spent less than $100 to get PHB, Forgeotten Realms Players Guide, and PHB3 (and I didn't really need PHB3) and occasionally spend $10 for one month to be able to update DDI Character Builder and Adventure Tools and I'm set on all of the rules I need to play the game. GMs will need to spend some more but still not even close to what was needed for 3.5.
I would say 3.5 was much more about corporate greed than 4e. With 4e, yes they are trying to make money but they are trying to make it as easy and inexpensive (not sure if this is intentional or accidental) as possible to play the game.
I find that 4th ed is far more balanced, but it seems really forced. The classes all seem to have been homoginized, with the Master wizard who spent his entire life learning how to shoot fire from his fingers being equal in power to some barely trained fighter using a sword that somehow gives him super powers.
Another problem I have (although this may become rectified with a future supliment) is the staticness of the monsters. There is no easy way to advance them. Meaning either entirely new sets of monsters are every level (or lots more of the same) or using NPC bandits or something.
I also dislike the way races are handled with bonuses to everything, rather than an advantage and a drawback.
In short although the system is useful for some of my more difficult ot balance base classes I won't be switching anytime soon.
Actually, advancing monsters is fully supported. I'm not sure which book has the rules but you can download the Adventure Tools if you have a DDI subscription and then adjust monsters to your hearts content.
I voted Maybe but it's not quite that straight-forward. I'm not currently in a 3.5 game. One of my groups just started a 4e game. 3.5 and 4e are really very different games. 3.5 is more role-playing with tactical options (and far too many scattered rules). 4e is a cross between a miniatures game and MMO (just not on the computer) - they are rapidly adding tons of rules but the majority of them only affect you if you play one of the classes dealt with (since most of the rules are now race/class-specific).
It still does not address the fact that 4th ed is aimed at WOW players and their combat rules are crap. The minion rules alone ruin the game. Where is the off chance that a 1st level kobold could get that 1-in -a-million shot and take out a 12th level fighter? Or the swarming hoardes of goblins overwhelm the same fighter? No instead you have ballon figures of 1 HP that die if breathed on wrong. In earlier editions we called that a Gorbel and at least they exploded. Add to that Hasbro is FORCING every distributor to stop any 3rd ed from ANY company and we come back to corporate greed
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Smaugdragon"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong"
Yep. 4e does seem to be aimed at MMO players. The combat rules (so far anyway) don't seem all that different from 3.5 and the MM does give options for tougher monsters (so far, we've encountered 4 different toughness of goblins ranging from 1hp up to 25-30hp). D&D has never had the best combat system (and never addressed unlikely hits).
4e (or 3.5) is definitely not my favorite fantasy rpg (probably Rolemaster or Chronicles of Ramlar) but I'm enjoying it for now.
I hadn't heard Hasbro was trying to force distributors to stop handling 3.x products. That seems like an obvious and easily won lawsuit. It doesn't surprise me though as Hasbro has always been about greed.
I haven't tried the new version of the game. I reluctantly switched to 3rd from 2nd AD&D ... in fact I still use aspects of AD&D2ed even when I play 3.5 with friends ... there are AD&D class-kits that never made the conversion to 3rd as prestiege classes and I make custom modifications for myself and players.
Some of my friends have tried 4ed and told me about it ... what was their discription?
"Blizzards of the Coast" ... it was described to me that WotC incorperated cool down times for Spells and Feats or whatever like World of Warcrack.
They don't have cooldowns but they did introduce at-will, encounter, and daily powers. Their usage is exactly what it sounds like (at-will can be used whenever, encounter is (usually) once per encounter, and daily is once per day).
They cleaned up a lot of the combat rules but did remove some options such as trip (which was often abused badly in 3.5).
I've taken a look at the 4.0 stuff in the last year or two, and I have to say that I wasn't really impressed. On the one hand, it does sort of go back to the roots of D&D, i.e., it's become more miniatures-combat-driven, which is where D&D started back in '78. On the other hand, a lot of the roleplay-driven options (feats that add a little crunch to what would otherwise be fluff, for example) are gone (from what I've observed anyway). Personally, I've made the transition from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder 3.75 -- which is what 3.0/3.5 SHOULD have been... no dead levels -- every class level gets a feature of some sort -- makes it more worthwhile to stick with one character class rather than multiclassing all over the place (not that I'm not going to multiclass).
In the game I'm getting ready to DM, the majority of the character classes are 3.75-style, but some 4.0-style classes were also submitted by community fans... and it doesn't look that difficult to reverse-engineer the 4.0 classes into 3.75. They may have streamlined the rules, but D&D 4e is still *basically* d20. D20-Lite, perhaps, but still d20.
I've DMed a few sessions of 4E just to get a first hand impression of it, and I really don't think I'd like running a long term campaign with it. For a quick one-shot game it's somewhat entertaining, but in many ways it seems more like a board game than a role-playing game.
One thing that reflects this "board game" feel is that it seems like they went overboard trying to make everything "balanced", but when doing so, the only aspect of balance they were really considering was combat balance. They've tried to make sure that all characters would always have some important role in combat, and some people may view this as an improvement. If you view the system as primarily a combat board game with some freeform (rules-lite) roleplaying between battles, this sort of obsessive balancing makes some sense, but it really kills one aspect of D&D 3.x (and d20 modern) that I really liked: The ability to create characters who were not combat-oriented.
I played in one D&D 3.5 game where the entire party was made up of 6th level bards at a prestigious bard/wizard school, and our combat abilities ranged from pathetic to weak. During the whole game (about 3 or 4 sessions) we got in only three fights, two of which were very minor, and the final one basically consisted of us trying to keep the character with the best use magic device skill (who also happened to be the squishiest character in the party) alive long enough to use the item we had that could banish/destroy the yugoloth we were fighting (which we would have no hope of actually defeating in a straight-up fight).
It was a very fun game, but I don't think it would have worked well at all in 4E. The four characters, despite all being human bards (though two of them had a bit of fey blood), were all very different from each other, and had a wide variety of different skills and talents, as well as very different spell selections.
Due to the reduced skill set, the limited choice of powers at each level, and the combat-oriented nature of most powers, I think it would be extremely hard to get that level of uniqueness out of four non-combat oriented 6th level human bards in 4E.
What I really don't like in 4E is:
1) Too much of character building is put in the initial race and class choice, rather than spread out across the character's career.
I really like the multiclassing system in 3.x (though I prefer to primarily multiclass among base classes, and only use prestige classes sparingly). In 4E it feels like you "choose" your character at the beginning (and somewhat with the paragon path later) and then make slight tweaks through feat choices. In 3.x, it's more like you "build" your character steadily throughout your adventures, through class choices, feat choices, skill choices, and spell choices. While some prestige classes have specific requirements that push you toward a specific optimal build, I tend to avoid those, and build with base classes.
Power choices at each level are pulled from a small pool, so it feels like you're following a pre-determined progression highway, and occasionally get to change lanes, but regardless of what lane you're in, you end up at the same place. You're always going to have a role in combat, and that role is primarily determined by your class. The various types of "multiclassing" in 4E basically amount to getting a few powers from a different class, but most of the powers from all classes are just do some damage and have some side effect.
Skills are chosen in the beginning, and other than spending a feat to get training in a new skill, or get skill focus, they don't really change. Also, the 1/2 level bonus that 4E adds to everything eventually swamps the difference between a trained and untrained character. This seems to reflect the attitude that a high level character is simply better at everything than a low level character, while I prefer the 3.x skill system where a low level bard with good charisma and maxed bluff might be able to reliably out-wit a high level fighter who just isn't good at sensing motives. 4E just doesn't give high level chatacters the ability to be bad at anything, just slightly less good at it.
2) Skill list is too consolidated in 4E
In 3.x, we don't have a formal "skill challenges" like 4E has, but we use a lot of skill checks and spells in non-combat situations to determine the success of our non-combat challenges, whether it's hide/move silently/spot/listen checks to follow and spy on a rival, or sleight of hand to plant a listening coin in his pocket, or charm spells and bluff/diplomacy checks to question his friends or allies, or knowledge politics and forgery checks to lure him away with a false royal summons while we break into his home.
While most things that you could do with skills in 3.x can still be done in 4 (with some exceptions, like the craft skills), the skill list has been much more consolidated, which in my experience greatly reduces the uniqueness of characters of a given class. I also like the Int bonus applying to skill points in 3.x because it provided a good reason for non-wizards to have high Intelligence.
3) A huge number of pages in the 4E players handbook are devoted to class-specific powers, which means that they are mostly irrelevant to any character who is not of that class. As a relatively inexperienced 4E player, I find this very frustrating because it's really hard to quickly get an idea of how a class will play without reading through all the powers up to 30th level. This is even worse because the class you choose at 1st level is what you're stuck with for your whole career, with barely any room for detours.
With 3E, I can very quickly get a good idea of what a class can do because the whole class description is a few pages at most. In many cases, several spellcasting classes will even share a spell list but with different casting mechanics (wizard/sorcerer, cleric/favored soul, druid/spirit shaman) which allows me to reuse my knowledge of the spell list across multiple classes, rather than learning a completely different power list for every single class.
3E gives you a smaller number of building blocks (though if you count prestige classes, it's actually even more building blocks), but more flexibility in how you combine them. Most of 3E's rules expansions, such as new base classes, prestige classes, and feats, could be fully incorporated into existing characters, while most of 4E's rules expansions (primarily new classes and races) can only be fully used with a new character (since multiclassing is much more limited in 4E).
As more 4E books are released, there are more class options for new characters, but each of these classes follows the same basic progression of powers, and has roughly the same level of customizability as the previous classes.
Personally, I like a small number of classes that can be combined in unique ways, rather than a large number of relatively pre-defined classes to select from. In fact, I personally think that paladin and ranger were redundant classes that should have been removed from 3.x (or possibly turned into prestige classes associated with specific militant religious orders). A paladin type character could be created as a fighter/cleric, and abilities like lay on hands could be recreated as feats that expend a turn undead use (which could have been simply called channel positive/negative energy, with turn undead being merely one possible use of it). A ranger type character could likewise be built as a fighter/druid or barbarian/druid.
I would have been very happy with 4E if they had taken this approach of cutting out redundant classes and providing additional flexibility through feats to recreate the archetypes by multiclassing existing classes. Instead, they went in the exact opposite direction and made a specific class for each character archetype, while reducing the ability to combine classes. As I said above, in 4E it seems more like "choosing" a character rather than "building" a character.
I tend to like classless RPG systems, and of all the editions of D&D, 3.x seemed to come the closest to a classless system because you weren't "locked in" to a class once you chose it, you pick and choose classes at each level. Rather than saying my character "is a fighter (with some rogue and barbarian powers)", I would say my character "has levels of fighter, rogue, and barbarian". If I started out primarily a fighter but later decided that I needed to be more rogue than fighter, 3.x would let me build toward that. In 4E, whatever class you choose at 1st level will always be your primary class, and everything else will be just a minor hobby.
I'm just not thrilled by it
I'm just not thrilled by it the way others are!
That's the second biggest dragon I've ever seen!
It doesn't seem like D&D anymore
I've been playing D&D since the old "blue box" version in the late 70s and have played every version up until now. I've read the 4e Players Guide, but it just doesn't feel like D&D any more. It might be a good game system, but it's just not D&D to me.
Try mentioning how you feel
Try mentioning how you feel on the WOTC message boards, I can tell you from personal experience you won't be popular.
That's the second biggest dragon I've ever seen!
Corporate Greed
That is the driving force behind 4E, not a creative style, not a love of the game. Corporate greed. Let Hasbro squash what made 3E the golden Age of the game by opening it up to anyone. So now let's squash all the independent Publishers who drove us to excel into non-existance. Hasbro should be ashamed
Smaugdragon"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong"
corporate greed was worse under 3.5
Personally, in terms of corporate greed (and outlay of my cash), I love 4e compared to 3.5.
Yes, WotC opened up most of 3.5 to other publishers but that just about ruined the RPG industry as almost every company was only producing d20 games and supplements (and, let's face it, d20 was never even remotely close to the best system out there - it was just what D&D used). Also, there is a (more limited) license to produce 4e products and there are multiple companies doing so.
With 3.5, I spent probably about $1000 to get a good selection of books with most of the rules.
With 4e, I spent less than $100 to get PHB, Forgeotten Realms Players Guide, and PHB3 (and I didn't really need PHB3) and occasionally spend $10 for one month to be able to update DDI Character Builder and Adventure Tools and I'm set on all of the rules I need to play the game. GMs will need to spend some more but still not even close to what was needed for 3.5.
I would say 3.5 was much more about corporate greed than 4e. With 4e, yes they are trying to make money but they are trying to make it as easy and inexpensive (not sure if this is intentional or accidental) as possible to play the game.
I find that 4th ed is far
I find that 4th ed is far more balanced, but it seems really forced. The classes all seem to have been homoginized, with the Master wizard who spent his entire life learning how to shoot fire from his fingers being equal in power to some barely trained fighter using a sword that somehow gives him super powers.
Another problem I have (although this may become rectified with a future supliment) is the staticness of the monsters. There is no easy way to advance them. Meaning either entirely new sets of monsters are every level (or lots more of the same) or using NPC bandits or something.
I also dislike the way races are handled with bonuses to everything, rather than an advantage and a drawback.
In short although the system is useful for some of my more difficult ot balance base classes I won't be switching anytime soon.
advancing monsters
Actually, advancing monsters is fully supported. I'm not sure which book has the rules but you can download the Adventure Tools if you have a DDI subscription and then adjust monsters to your hearts content.
I voted Maybe but it's not
I voted Maybe but it's not quite that straight-forward. I'm not currently in a 3.5 game. One of my groups just started a 4e game. 3.5 and 4e are really very different games. 3.5 is more role-playing with tactical options (and far too many scattered rules). 4e is a cross between a miniatures game and MMO (just not on the computer) - they are rapidly adding tons of rules but the majority of them only affect you if you play one of the classes dealt with (since most of the rules are now race/class-specific).
It still does not address the
It still does not address the fact that 4th ed is aimed at WOW players and their combat rules are crap. The minion rules alone ruin the game. Where is the off chance that a 1st level kobold could get that 1-in -a-million shot and take out a 12th level fighter? Or the swarming hoardes of goblins overwhelm the same fighter? No instead you have ballon figures of 1 HP that die if breathed on wrong. In earlier editions we called that a Gorbel and at least they exploded. Add to that Hasbro is FORCING every distributor to stop any 3rd ed from ANY company and we come back to corporate greed
Smaugdragon"But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong"
Yep. 4e does seemed to be
Yep. 4e does seem to be aimed at MMO players. The combat rules (so far anyway) don't seem all that different from 3.5 and the MM does give options for tougher monsters (so far, we've encountered 4 different toughness of goblins ranging from 1hp up to 25-30hp). D&D has never had the best combat system (and never addressed unlikely hits).
4e (or 3.5) is definitely not my favorite fantasy rpg (probably Rolemaster or Chronicles of Ramlar) but I'm enjoying it for now.
I hadn't heard Hasbro was trying to force distributors to stop handling 3.x products. That seems like an obvious and easily won lawsuit. It doesn't surprise me though as Hasbro has always been about greed.
4ed D&D
I haven't tried the new version of the game. I reluctantly switched to 3rd from 2nd AD&D ... in fact I still use aspects of AD&D2ed even when I play 3.5 with friends ... there are AD&D class-kits that never made the conversion to 3rd as prestiege classes and I make custom modifications for myself and players.
Some of my friends have tried 4ed and told me about it ... what was their discription?
"Blizzards of the Coast" ... it was described to me that WotC incorperated cool down times for Spells and Feats or whatever like World of Warcrack.
They don't have cooldowns but
They don't have cooldowns but they did introduce at-will, encounter, and daily powers. Their usage is exactly what it sounds like (at-will can be used whenever, encounter is (usually) once per encounter, and daily is once per day).
They cleaned up a lot of the combat rules but did remove some options such as trip (which was often abused badly in 3.5).
3.5 vs. 4.0
I've taken a look at the 4.0 stuff in the last year or two, and I have to say that I wasn't really impressed. On the one hand, it does sort of go back to the roots of D&D, i.e., it's become more miniatures-combat-driven, which is where D&D started back in '78. On the other hand, a lot of the roleplay-driven options (feats that add a little crunch to what would otherwise be fluff, for example) are gone (from what I've observed anyway). Personally, I've made the transition from D&D 3.5 to Pathfinder 3.75 -- which is what 3.0/3.5 SHOULD have been... no dead levels -- every class level gets a feature of some sort -- makes it more worthwhile to stick with one character class rather than multiclassing all over the place (not that I'm not going to multiclass).
In the game I'm getting ready to DM, the majority of the character classes are 3.75-style, but some 4.0-style classes were also submitted by community fans... and it doesn't look that difficult to reverse-engineer the 4.0 classes into 3.75. They may have streamlined the rules, but D&D 4e is still *basically* d20. D20-Lite, perhaps, but still d20.
3.xE vs 4E
I've DMed a few sessions of 4E just to get a first hand impression of it, and I really don't think I'd like running a long term campaign with it. For a quick one-shot game it's somewhat entertaining, but in many ways it seems more like a board game than a role-playing game.
One thing that reflects this "board game" feel is that it seems like they went overboard trying to make everything "balanced", but when doing so, the only aspect of balance they were really considering was combat balance. They've tried to make sure that all characters would always have some important role in combat, and some people may view this as an improvement. If you view the system as primarily a combat board game with some freeform (rules-lite) roleplaying between battles, this sort of obsessive balancing makes some sense, but it really kills one aspect of D&D 3.x (and d20 modern) that I really liked: The ability to create characters who were not combat-oriented.
I played in one D&D 3.5 game where the entire party was made up of 6th level bards at a prestigious bard/wizard school, and our combat abilities ranged from pathetic to weak. During the whole game (about 3 or 4 sessions) we got in only three fights, two of which were very minor, and the final one basically consisted of us trying to keep the character with the best use magic device skill (who also happened to be the squishiest character in the party) alive long enough to use the item we had that could banish/destroy the yugoloth we were fighting (which we would have no hope of actually defeating in a straight-up fight).
It was a very fun game, but I don't think it would have worked well at all in 4E. The four characters, despite all being human bards (though two of them had a bit of fey blood), were all very different from each other, and had a wide variety of different skills and talents, as well as very different spell selections.
Due to the reduced skill set, the limited choice of powers at each level, and the combat-oriented nature of most powers, I think it would be extremely hard to get that level of uniqueness out of four non-combat oriented 6th level human bards in 4E.
What I really don't like in 4E is:
1) Too much of character building is put in the initial race and class choice, rather than spread out across the character's career.
I really like the multiclassing system in 3.x (though I prefer to primarily multiclass among base classes, and only use prestige classes sparingly). In 4E it feels like you "choose" your character at the beginning (and somewhat with the paragon path later) and then make slight tweaks through feat choices. In 3.x, it's more like you "build" your character steadily throughout your adventures, through class choices, feat choices, skill choices, and spell choices. While some prestige classes have specific requirements that push you toward a specific optimal build, I tend to avoid those, and build with base classes.
Power choices at each level are pulled from a small pool, so it feels like you're following a pre-determined progression highway, and occasionally get to change lanes, but regardless of what lane you're in, you end up at the same place. You're always going to have a role in combat, and that role is primarily determined by your class. The various types of "multiclassing" in 4E basically amount to getting a few powers from a different class, but most of the powers from all classes are just do some damage and have some side effect.
Skills are chosen in the beginning, and other than spending a feat to get training in a new skill, or get skill focus, they don't really change. Also, the 1/2 level bonus that 4E adds to everything eventually swamps the difference between a trained and untrained character. This seems to reflect the attitude that a high level character is simply better at everything than a low level character, while I prefer the 3.x skill system where a low level bard with good charisma and maxed bluff might be able to reliably out-wit a high level fighter who just isn't good at sensing motives. 4E just doesn't give high level chatacters the ability to be bad at anything, just slightly less good at it.
2) Skill list is too consolidated in 4E
In 3.x, we don't have a formal "skill challenges" like 4E has, but we use a lot of skill checks and spells in non-combat situations to determine the success of our non-combat challenges, whether it's hide/move silently/spot/listen checks to follow and spy on a rival, or sleight of hand to plant a listening coin in his pocket, or charm spells and bluff/diplomacy checks to question his friends or allies, or knowledge politics and forgery checks to lure him away with a false royal summons while we break into his home.
While most things that you could do with skills in 3.x can still be done in 4 (with some exceptions, like the craft skills), the skill list has been much more consolidated, which in my experience greatly reduces the uniqueness of characters of a given class. I also like the Int bonus applying to skill points in 3.x because it provided a good reason for non-wizards to have high Intelligence.
3) A huge number of pages in the 4E players handbook are devoted to class-specific powers, which means that they are mostly irrelevant to any character who is not of that class. As a relatively inexperienced 4E player, I find this very frustrating because it's really hard to quickly get an idea of how a class will play without reading through all the powers up to 30th level. This is even worse because the class you choose at 1st level is what you're stuck with for your whole career, with barely any room for detours.
With 3E, I can very quickly get a good idea of what a class can do because the whole class description is a few pages at most. In many cases, several spellcasting classes will even share a spell list but with different casting mechanics (wizard/sorcerer, cleric/favored soul, druid/spirit shaman) which allows me to reuse my knowledge of the spell list across multiple classes, rather than learning a completely different power list for every single class.
3E gives you a smaller number of building blocks (though if you count prestige classes, it's actually even more building blocks), but more flexibility in how you combine them. Most of 3E's rules expansions, such as new base classes, prestige classes, and feats, could be fully incorporated into existing characters, while most of 4E's rules expansions (primarily new classes and races) can only be fully used with a new character (since multiclassing is much more limited in 4E).
As more 4E books are released, there are more class options for new characters, but each of these classes follows the same basic progression of powers, and has roughly the same level of customizability as the previous classes.
Personally, I like a small number of classes that can be combined in unique ways, rather than a large number of relatively pre-defined classes to select from. In fact, I personally think that paladin and ranger were redundant classes that should have been removed from 3.x (or possibly turned into prestige classes associated with specific militant religious orders). A paladin type character could be created as a fighter/cleric, and abilities like lay on hands could be recreated as feats that expend a turn undead use (which could have been simply called channel positive/negative energy, with turn undead being merely one possible use of it). A ranger type character could likewise be built as a fighter/druid or barbarian/druid.
I would have been very happy with 4E if they had taken this approach of cutting out redundant classes and providing additional flexibility through feats to recreate the archetypes by multiclassing existing classes. Instead, they went in the exact opposite direction and made a specific class for each character archetype, while reducing the ability to combine classes. As I said above, in 4E it seems more like "choosing" a character rather than "building" a character.
I tend to like classless RPG systems, and of all the editions of D&D, 3.x seemed to come the closest to a classless system because you weren't "locked in" to a class once you chose it, you pick and choose classes at each level. Rather than saying my character "is a fighter (with some rogue and barbarian powers)", I would say my character "has levels of fighter, rogue, and barbarian". If I started out primarily a fighter but later decided that I needed to be more rogue than fighter, 3.x would let me build toward that. In 4E, whatever class you choose at 1st level will always be your primary class, and everything else will be just a minor hobby.
-Kasoroth