I have not idea what blog this was from, but this motherfucker was 7 pages, double spaced. Someone clearly doesn't like change...
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I figure any game blog is going to require a discussion about what's happened to our tried and true dungeon delver since Wizards of the Coast got it from TSR, and what they've since done to it. So I'm going to have it out right here.
No, I do not like Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition.
I don't hate it. I might play it, but to me it's like playing Candyland after playing Diplomacy for so long. I don't invest enough emotion in any game to "hate" it, as the erstwhile defenders who wasted good money on it say. And yes, the real haters are the ones who vehemently will not accept any criticism of this game.
I've been playing AD&D since 1st Edition. I had very few problems with 2nd Edition; they were annoying, but mostly they were nothing that a good and savvy DM couldn't handle with a bit of tweaking. I had quite a lot more problems with 3rd Edition, particularly with what they did to the mighty Paladin, who was reduced but to a shadow of his former glory. Again, that was nothing that a good and savvy DM couldn't handle with a bit of home rules.
My big problem with 3E, and with d20 in general, was the Attack of Opportunity, which necessitated the need for the battlemat. It's not that I don't like maps; I love maps. I mind being forced to rely on a battlemat. Because you now had to draw out a map to a more exact detail in terms of distance and reference than you were required to before because of the AoO. I'm a GM that likes combat to go fast, smooth, and generally easy to follow without having a ton of modifiers to track, which is another nit I pick off of d20 games.
4th Edition is not Dungeons and Dragons. It is in name only. It barely resembles Dungeons and Dragons of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd Edition. Don't believe me? I can't take a character from those editions and faithfully convert him to 4E.
I have a 27th Level High Elf Archmage named Myrow the Magnificent (and yes, he actually did earn that title). Actually, in 3.5E terms he's a Wizard 14, Artificier 4, Mage of the Arcane Order 2, Archmage 5, and Loremaster 2. Getting away from the Prestige Classes, to convert Myrow from 3.5 to 4E would to castrate him. This is a guy who can level entire cities, smash castles into dust with meteors, and cast Wish at will. Wish doesn't exist in 4E. All of his spells would be reduced to jokes; doing the math, his Meteor Swarm converted to 4E could not even kill an entire squad of CR 3 Hobgoblins!
Maybe that's an extreme example, but a Fighter from 2E or 3E is not a Fighter in 4E. In fact, a Fighter in 4E is a Defender. He has a specific role; he's a tanker, a term derived primarily from MMOs.
In previous editions, you could make a fighter into anything you wanted. True, even back in my beloved 1st Edition, there might've been pigeonholing going on, as players adapted to the play-environment which they were given by necessitating a good balance of abilities within a party. But if you wanted to make a light fighter, one who relied more on mobility and stealth than brute force, you could do that.
Can you do that in 4E? Not really. For one, the abilities you get limit you to what you can do. You may want to have a fighter who's concerned enough about stealth to want to wear leather armor, but then you'd be hampering your abilities as a "defender," and that's the problem.
Your fellow players expect you to be a defender. So, hold that thought.
In 1st and 2nd Edition, the rules were, in black and white, that you rolled for your stats. Sure, there were optional rules that allowed you to make stronger characters if you wanted, but I preferred rolling 3d6 for your stats and keeping what you got.
Why?
Because of the challenge. It's called Role-Playing!
Sure, your character may not be as strong as you'd like or smart as you'd like, but the idea was to play him. The idea back then was that heroism wasn't defined by how strong or smart or quick you were. Heroism is defined by what you do, by using what you have and overcoming the odds. And you built your character up from there. There was more to Dungeons and Dragons than simply leveling and gaining magic items. There was buying new weapons and armor, looking for special material components, looking for new jobs and adventure.
If you look at the 4E PHB, they've totally done away with any notion of you even daring to roll your stats. They would rather you took the pre-determined values and place them in the ability scores best suited to the class you were playing.
Now, of course nothing's stopping you from actually rolling your stats. But if nobody else at the table is, you better be prepared for their anger if you don't roll up something that is acceptable to them.
Because 4E is designed with a particular party arrangement in mind. Look at the 4E DMG. This game starts with the premise that there will be about 4-5 players at the table, that there will be a defender, a striker, a controller, and a leader, with someone else taking a role to boost a particular part of the party (everyone likes two defenders up front, right?). It then goes on to spell out what you'd have to do as DM to your own bad guys if your players don't measure up to that paradigm in anyway.
It already presumes that everyone is expertly competent, at least according to their stats, in their assigned (note, not chosen) role.
I've argued with a lot of people on that point. They don't see a problem with that. Why roll up and play an incompetent, or less than competent character? They simply don't understand. They think there is freedom and variety in being able to make a fighter with a higher Constitution or Dexterity than one with the high 16 stat in Strength, but they would be wrong. Play the game long enough, you'll learn what works, and you'll have to eventually bow to the conforming nature of 4E and play a fighter with the 16 Strength and the Scale-Mail Armor.
And then every fighter, in fact every character, begins to look the same. If you give me a 4E Wizard or Cleric or whatever, I can generally predict just what he'll look like on the numbers. From there on it's little variation. You needn't have bothered to name the playing piece you've handed me; because you've just handed me a wargame piece.
That's a stark contrast to a freshly rolled character from the 1E and 2E days. There was more individuality, more character in that character than there is in the cookie-cutter design of the 4E paradigm.
And then there are the patronizings.
4E is a game that caters to those who don't ever want to lose.
If you read the DMG, it is filled with platitudes and emasculating nonsense that could only come from a liberal city like Seattle. There are no instantly deadly traps. It tells you not to have combat encounters next to an 80' cliff for low level characters; because, you know, if they fall, they might...oh no...they might die!
I'm sorry; I thought D&D was about high adventure! How can you have high adventure if there is no high risk of failure or death?
Of course, as I mentioned, most 4E people have never actually read the DMG. I know; I quiz them from time to time. Oh, they may have consulted the charts, they may have flipped through it, but they never just sat there and read this.
Those that have read it tell me the same casual defense of it. "I don't run my game like that anyway. I put instantly lethal traps (or, I have my monsters pound on fallen PCs)." That's not the point. The point is that the whole premise of 4E is fully expressed in the DMG, and that premise is this:
The PCs are already heroes, but they're heroes utterly interdependent upon one another to survive, but they are never going to face anything that, statistically, they shouldn't be able to handle when they're all together.
Heaven forbid that the PCs should ever encounter anything dangerous enough that they'd have no choice but to run for their lives. If you run your game as per the 4E DMG, that option would be the last thing in your mind.
There are other mechanical flaws that I find annoying, all of which is easy to see that WotC was looking to curry favor with the MMORPG crowd; World of Warcraft (WoW) in particular.
Encounter Powers, for instance. Why do they only work once per encounter, especially martial powers? Why do I have to wait five minutes in order to do this special attack again? You may not have a problem with that, but in RPGs that can be a nasty problem. That's what I call a "Man Behind the Curtain" problem, where you are no longer role-playing in a fantasy world, but now you are playing a game because the game mechanics have interfered with the role-playing aspect.
And take monsters. I've DMed 4E, and I can tell you from personal experience that it is an exasperating thing when you have monster abilities that recharge on a result of a d6 roll.
What's wrong with that, you say? Plenty.
Consider what they've done to everyone's favorite monster, the dragon. Dragons, in the 4E Monster Manual, get to use their breath weapon once at any time during a combat encounter, and it recharges on a d6 roll of a 5 or a 6. You're thinking that's a 33% chance that it'll come back each round. That would not be the correct way of looking at it. The correct way to look at it is that the breath weapon is 66% unreliable.
That means that once the dragon has used his breath weapon, there is no reasonable expectation that it'll come back in the next round for him to use. What's wrong with that? The problem is that now I, as DM, can't role-play this intelligent dragon properly. How do I properly use his abilities to their fullest expression? In the past editions, there was a guaranteed rate of return for such a weapon, within 1-4, or more, rounds. But the 4E dragon has no such expectation. There's a really good chance it may never, ever, come back for the rest of the combat encounter. The 4E dragon doesn't know when it will come back; he has no way of knowing! So now, he has to use tactics and attacks that do not factor in his breath weapon at all because he can't rely on it.
And even so....the breath weapon is weak compared to what it was before. In previous editions, an adult dragon was something to be feared. He could raze armies in one gout of his breath weapon. Not in 4E. But since every other class has been just as castrated, it's hard to tell from that perspective.
Every creature that has such mechanics suffers the same dilemma.
Conclusion
There are other deal-breakers with 4E, but one is enough for me. At best, 4E is a mediocre wargame. It is not an RPG. If this game were called anything else but D&D, I don't think so many people would play it. In the deepest part of their hearts, even the most stalwart 4E defender knows this to be true; he has trouble admitting that he was duped, and admitting he was fooled. I don't begrudge anyone for being fooled. We've all been taken by charlatans and crooks passing bad products. They appeal to our emotions.
4E is a bad game overall. I give it a 2 out of 5. I don't begrudge people who play it; I just hold the fort, waiting for the day when they're ready to play something a bit more exciting and a lot better.
Like Shadowrun, or Savage Worlds.
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Savage worlds is still a pretty awesome system though.
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