Chatty's Review: The D&D 4e Player's Handbook

Last week, I reviewed the DMG and found it to be the best version of this long-lived book. It wasn’t without flaws, chiefly among those was how the writing of Skill Challenges was doing the mechanic near-criminal injustice.

This week, I’ll tackle the 4th Edition Players Handbook, from the standpoint of its content and then its organization.

I’ll also apply something I learned from making scientific presentations, I’ll give you my conclusions up front and you can read on to see how I got there.

Chatty’s flash review of the Player’s Handbook:

The new 4e rule set deliver what the designers promised and actually achieves much more than I would have expected from an exception-based designed Core product when compared to similar designs (Collectible Card/Miniature games).

The book presents the new rules in a clear, concise and well organized manner, making it a great reference book.

While the book shines as a great set of rules and ease of reference at the gaming table, it seriously lacks in terms of walking a new player through the game and making a character. Char Gen requires constant, somewhat confusing page flipping throughout the book. That should not be seen in such a State of the Art game design.

The Player’s rules

In the book, you’ll find everything that players need to know to play D&D, including predictably Character Generation (taking most of the book), equipment, Magic Items (which is a first) and combat.

As some have noticed it’s the about Martial, Arcane and Divine Heroes. I know it’s no surprise that WotC will print more source books but this time the book actually comes out and mentions things like “in future volumes of the Player’s Handbook”.

At least they are being brutally honest about it, and let’s face it, that’s what a lot of fans want, more crunch . For instance, I have over 45 D&D 3.5 books!

The Players Handbook is the core of the crunch of D&D 4e. About 80% of the games’ rules are in there. Like D&D 3.X, giving out the combat engine and task resolution mechanics to the players makes it a shared responsibility game. I’m all right with that and after nearly a decade of D&D 3.X, I think most players are comfortable with that.

It’s been said in countless other venues, but D&D 4e is about action scenes, well defined class roles and equal opportunities for all characters to have a significant impact both inside and outside combat.

The rules are built around a few key concepts such as:

• Roll high with a d20 against target number
• A set number of actions per round
• Death and healing mechanics and so on

All these concepts can be explained in about 15 minutes and don’t need to be re-explained.

However, as simple as the game core mechanics are, the strength of D&D 4e comes out in the way each power, feat, magic Item and other sub-component interact in a synergistic way and allow players to break the core rules.

Having played Magic: The Gathering casually and competitively since it’s release, I’m very comfortable with this approach and this gave me an advantage in learning the new ruleset.

Such an approach actually makes rules argument easier to resolve and allows easier adjudication of out of the ordinary events (you just find a simple way to break the rules that maintain suspension of disbelief in your players).

For this, the Player’s Handbook, as the embodiment of the D&D 4e rules, shines like a bright star in my book. I’m actually impressed that so many things can be done with this Core game. When you buy a Core set of other exception based design games, you don’t get as much stuff… (but then again, with an average 80$ entry price, it’s to be expected).

In fact, I will go against the current opinion on the subject and say that D&D 4e was probably not designed to get the Video game/MMORPG crowd to adopt Tabletop RPGs. I actually believe that Wizards of the Coast are trying to eat market shares of the very large and lucrative collectible/non-collectible card/miniatures gamer pool.

Business analysis comments aside, the PHB is a very dense read, with the tons of powers, feats, magic items and rituals. I often found myself skimming ahead to the next chapter.

So dense is the book in fact that after a certain time, all powers and Magic Items start to feel like they are one and the same. I’ve since found out that they are boring to read but fun to play, so stage a few fake fights with your new characters.

The Players Handbook Organization.

From a DM’s perspective, I like how the PHB is organized. Having read it only once, I was able to find whatever combat rule or piece of equipment in mere seconds when I played my first few trial games.

The combat section is well laid out and the various special actions (like Bull Rush and so on) are found alphabetically. The same goes for skills, feats magic Items and so on.

A limited but useful Index is found at the end of the book and I found it to complement the table of content admirably.

I found the book to be on par to with the 3.5 D&D Compendium in terms of at-the-table usability. (Note that the 3.5 Compendium was among my favorite D&D books).

Actually, maybe that’s where the book’s greatest problems lie. In making the book more useful at the game table than on your desk it might have partly defeated it’s purpose of being a helpful reference to new players and to create characters.

I did two characters so far with it and I must say that the organization of the book does not lend itself to a seamless, linear process.

I don’t know if it’s because I haven’t mastered the book’s layout yet but creating a character leads to a series of page hunting exercises where you dive in all over the book, front and back, to get to whatever choice you have to make.

I’m sure it was sensibly the same in D&D 3.5 but it’s was bad enough that I got annoyed by it.

I mean, Gurps was published 15 years ago and had from the 1st edition, a linear approach to character generation.

What it needs to be fixed (and please don’t tell me about D&D insider, this book needs to be a stand-alone product) is at the very least a series of tables with page-referenced Powers arranged by class and by level. Like in the Monster Manual, those tables need to followed by an alphabetical Powers index.

These two additions would make it a bit easier on players making PCs and would speed up in game reference more.

I’m starting to think that D&D would have been better served (regardless of the outcry it would have generated) with a Character Generation/Equipment/Magic Item Players Handbook and a Combat/Task resolution Adventuring Handbook.

The designers said they weren’t afraid to change what needed to be changed, maybe a 4th Core Book would not have been that far fetched.

So there you have it. Great fun rules, great for referencing during a game book, somewhat hostile to new players, especially during character generation.

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Chatty's Debates: The Relative Merits of Action-Oriented RolePlaying

I know that this here site has been somewhat content-lighter lately.  Summer has arrived and I start to feel the pull for other evening activities than blogging.

Also, since I don’t have a game going anymore, gone are the periodic DM logs or Game Prep posts.  There’s nothing to be worried about, just a more infrequent stream of RSS feeds from your neighborhood Chatty DM.

While I’m at it, why don’t you have a look at my latest guest post over at Geek’s Dream Girl.

All right, time for another little debate!

The 4th edition of the World’s Most Popular Roleplaying game has embraced Action Roleplaying as its most basic philosophy.  It’s all about the encounter (mostly combat) and their resolution in the most entertaining way possible.

This double focus on Action and the ‘fun’ that must be derived from it is apparent in all parts of the game’s design.  From the ton of powers available to players during Character Generation/Leveling up, in rules that try to foster speedier resolutions, in the actual DMing tips that support this playstyle to the somewhat minimalist designs of monsters in the Monster Manual.

Let’s be honest here, D&D has always had the potential to be all about action, but in editions prior to the third one, it was just one of the playstyles the game could easily embrace, especially in the 2nd edition.  In fact the A D&D 2e Planescape campaign Setting repeatedly mentioned that Killing and Looting was not the ‘best way to play the game’ anymore.

My debate questions are thus:

• Is Action-Oriented Roleplaying game more likely to entice new Role players in the hobby?
• Can one have an immersive story-intense roleplaying expercience in a such a system?
• Do the rules that foster such action (Combat, skill challenges) act as a barrier preventing immersion to a certain degree? (or: Can you Roll-Play and Role play at the same time?)
• Do other action oriented system (like Savage Worlds and maybe Burning Wheel) have the same features and barriers?

My take on it:

Action oriented Roleplaying games are the best entry-level systems for new players.  The designers of D&D 4e were going after a new market  nd time will tell how succesful they’ll be. I predict that we’ll see significantly more new players with the release of the ‘Starter Game’ in large-chain bookstores later this year.

As one learns the many specific rules around an action-based (tactical) Roleplaying game, the mechanics take center stage and pretty much occludes  Story-driven method acting.  As the rules get mastered, action scene accelerate and players who enjoy this type of gaming immerse themselves in this action.  Battle moves and stunts may start getting described outside of mere mechanical constructs and players may start quipping NPCs and each others.

However, as any modern action film can attest, an action scene is all about the action and the special effects.  The story more or less grinds to a halt for that Chase in the markets of Marrakesh or that fisticuff with the Ogre-Sized Nazi underneath a parked bomber plane.

To that effect I believe that D&D’s approach to Core Game action rules will tend to squelch role-playing in favour of Roll-playing in most player types.  As anything else about RPGs, I find it a perfectly valid way of playing a game.

I believe that this is a conscious design/business decision. The Core Game is mostly only about action and conflicts and straight up go-beat-the-bad-guys heroics. Later products will likely explore wider possibilities and playstyles.

That’s why I hope that later campaign settings will, like A D&D 2e, explore the game’s potential outside of relentless action and mayhem.

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