{"id":1748,"date":"2008-07-07T11:00:22","date_gmt":"2008-07-07T16:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1748"},"modified":"2008-07-07T13:02:58","modified_gmt":"2008-07-07T18:02:58","slug":"dd-4th-editionfirst-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1748","title":{"rendered":"D&D 4th Edition:First Impressions"},"content":{"rendered":"

The two most notable things I’ve seen said about 4e are:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The system is more streamlined, leading to more roleplaying.\n<\/li>\n
  2. The system is more rigid, leading to less roleplaying.\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I’m not done reading, much less absorbing, the fourth edition books, but it looks to me like both of these statements are true. <\/p>\n

    The system is certainly more rigid. There are “roles” in every party. (Combat roles, that is.) Someone to absorb damage, someone to deal damage, someone to manage crowds, someone to heal. The 4e manual calls them defenders, strikers, controllers, and leaders. These roles have existed in MMO games for years. The four-person team with one person for each of these jobs is so common that even the jokes about how cliché it is are old and stale. The classic D&D adventuring party is a fighter, a rogue, a wizard, and a cleric. Note that this is the ideal setup for both an adventuring party and<\/em> a sitcom.<\/p>\n

    How it looks to me so far is that the system is less open to roleplaying because it wants to railroad you into a narrow idea of what an adventuring party is and what they do. But if you already<\/em> play that way, then the rules are less cumbersome (because they’re not trying to accommodate all those other<\/em> sorts of parties) and so you can get in a fight and get back to the plot with less time fussing around with numbers and charts.<\/p>\n

    So what it looks like to me is that 4e D&D is just specializing<\/em> more than it has in the past. This is a trend that’s been going on since before I got into gaming. We’ve been moving away from monolithic systems that try to be all things to all groups, to more focused systems that are easier to learn and use but are a lot less flexible. Pirate games. Space games. Superhero games. Mob games. Etcetera games. <\/p>\n

    I haven’t tried to run a 4e battle, and that experience probably won’t come for some time. My group is in the early, faltering stages of trying to get a game going during the season of cookouts and nice weather. And when that game does<\/em> get going, it will be our long-awaited Star Wars game<\/a>. So I’m not going to be qualified to really comment on the thing in detail any time in the foreseeable future. So, I’ll hold off on the criticism until then. <\/p>\n

    I’m just messing with you. Let’s do this:<\/p>\n

    Justin Alexander comments on the dissociated mechanics<\/a> in 4e, and I agree that the once-a-day powers do a good job of making the world make a little less sense. Moreover, it’s another thing you’ve got to track<\/em>. Oh great, they got rid of the need for Wizards to renew their spells each day, and replaced it with a system where everyone<\/em> has to renew all their little feats and tricks each day. This does not seem like progress to me. <\/p>\n

    “Okay guys, let’s rush these Orcs.”<\/p>\n

    “Hang on. Let’s wait a few more minutes until after midnight, so I’ll be able to use Greater Surprise Bitchslap on their leader.”<\/p>\n

    To be fair, there were several “once a day” powers and feats in 3.5e, but the problem seems to have spread. I never liked them either, not just because of the hassle of tracking them (tracking one is easy, but once you have several players with a few daily abilities each it’s much less so) but because it forces these characters into meta-game thinking and requires they suddenly be aware of the clock at a resolution that just isn’t available to them at the purported technology level. To wit: These guys aren’t wearing wristwatches. They shouldn’t know when midnight passes. But they do, because they can suddenly use their abilities again. (You could put the powers on a 24 hour cooldown instead of having them renew at midnight. But then you’d have to track what time of day<\/em> everyone last used their powers, making the whole thing even more work.) <\/p>\n

    These powers are interesting when you’re moving minis around a grid. That is, it makes the tactical portion of the game better at the expense of making the world a little more arbitrary and mechanical. Hence the “less roleplaying” charge.<\/p>\n

    But if rumors are true and combat is quicker, then combat is over sooner and we can get back to the core of the game for me, which is stories and characters. Is combat faster? I don’t know. You can run a mock battle with pre-rolled characters if you like, but you don’t really know how a system holds up until you blunder into some contradiction in the rules when running an eight-man battle on a slippery hillside in the dark using improvised weapons against disguised attackers while one party member is blinded and their foes are under the influence of too much ale. <\/p>\n

    Fighting on a sterile grid is easy. Fighting in a world where some kind of dynamic story is going on is always going to be a challenge, and most rule systems can be judged on how well they don’t make things worse when things get complicated. I’m interested to hear how other people think it does at making fights both faster and more seamless.<\/p>\n

    EDIT:<\/strong> A Couple of people have pointed out that the powers don’t reset at midnight, but are tied to the new rest system, which actually sounds pretty good. I’m still not crazy about an ordinary power that can’t be re-used for purely mechanical reasons, but it’s not quite as bad as it sounded at first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    The two most notable things I’ve seen said about 4e are: The system is more streamlined, leading to more roleplaying. The system is more rigid, leading to less roleplaying. I’m not done reading, much less absorbing, the fourth edition books, but it looks to me like both of these statements are true. The system is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1748\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}