A little more than a year ago, as excitement (and hype) was building around the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, I wrote a series a posts based on what I thought D&D 4e would be about.
- Nostalgia vs Fun
- Retro Stupid vs Retro-Stupid
- I Hearth Grapple
- Schooled by the Old Combat School
- Exploration vs Competence, Fun vs Satisfaction
It’s interesting for me to look back at them and see my own excitement and wariness about the new edition. I think I got a lot of things about D&D 4e right and this has helped me accept the new game, warts and all.
When the game came out, I published a few more posts about my initial experience reading/playing 4e
I even reviewed the Dungeon Master Guide and the Players’ Handbook.
While my initial reaction to the new version of the game was mostly positive, a few things struck me as odd or even wrong. It took me a while to accept that Magic Items and Feats were less powerful. I had trouble with the whole concept of Treasure Parcel, feeling it robbed me of the time honored tradition of generating treasures randomly.
Oh and the Class and power books were a chore to read. After 2 or 3 classes, I had a feeling that all classes had the exact same powers!
Thus, like many bloggers who play 4e have said, I don’t believe that the game is without flaws. In fact, once the sense of novelty died down, I found myself on the fence about some key elements of game for quite a while (including Parcels, length of fights and feeling of apparent uniformity of classes).
But as I started playing it, first at the D&D game Day, then at Gen Con and finally with my friends, I slowly found that the little things that bugged me didn’t bug me so much. As my players and I explored what the game could do, I discovered the strengths of the 4th edition that played to my own play preference.
My players, as a gaming group, prefer heroic character that are competent from the onset of play. They also prefer that all classes are balanced within their respective roles. My players love having powers that can be managed like resources. They also love how many elements of the game can come together to create rich and challenging encounters to play through. They appreciate that the game lost many elements that they found aggravating like level drains, equipment destruction and, mostly, no more “Save or miss the whole fight” effects.
As a DM, I remain amazed at how easy running encounters was. Card sized monster stat blocks, dungeon tiles, combat was easy to run, not fast, but easy to run.
However, what really sold me completely to the game was when I started writing my own adventures. I was constantly using the tools of the Dungeon Master Guide and those of D&D Insider. Making encounters were really easy, changing monsters on the fly also. This was such a nice break from 3.5!
All the time I saved in prepping went into two things: writing more compelling stories around my game (as my Primal/Within campaign can attest) and making my encounters more exciting with the help of interactive elements (traps, terrain, stunts and Skill Challenges). In fact, after fiddling with Skill Challenges, I finally found how to implement them in fun and creative ways, thus making my encounters even cooler to play.
Anyway, all this to say that my conversion to 4e is complete and I foresee quite a few more seasons of playing it with my friends. Our ongoing campaign is slowing down for summer and I hope to get my players to the 10th level by the time we retire for our annual summer vacations.
So what do I expect from 4e for the next year? Well, I actually was invited to participate in Jeff Greiner’s The Tome Show a few days ago and I got the privilege of asking that very question to James Wyatt and Chris Perkins of Wizards of the Coast. So why don’t you check it out?
The Tome Show: D&D 4e, One Year Later
Also, other bloggers participated in this show, check them out also!
(Hint: The Players Handbook 3 and Dungeon master Guide 2 will push the game’s enveloppe quite a ways, I’m really curious to see it).
Many of my friends still doesnt want to try it. I bought the player handbook and I think it’s interresting, but I can’t give a definitive opinion it until I try it for real…
Rolemaster was awesome when I was reading it… until I tried it.
Maybe one day…
😉
The game has had a big barrier to entry for many people, for many reason.
I’ve no issues with those who decided to give the game a pass. I consider myself luck to have seen the game target most of my specific needs and preferences in a RPG.
Maybe your friends will reconsider at a later date.
@D_luck You take that back about Rolemaster or I’ll have to get my crit tables out and unleash some open-ended d100 style whoopass on you! 🙂
My main issues with 4e still come down to cost. I just don’t have that sort of cash to drop on the books I’d want/need and the all the other little things like minis etc. That won’t change unless my numbers come up on the lottery.
Bobs last blog post..Old Guy Being Taught An Old Trick?
I really like the treasure parcel system, since it lets me pick and choose items and keep the gold and item balance quite constant. When I rolled treasure, players got a lot of redundant equipment or items they couldn’t use, which created a culture of carting rubbish back for resale, and simply buying your own items instead of questing for them.
I’m also impressed with how much easier it is to stat up monsters – after picking up 4E I went back to stat up a third edition monster, and found it very clunky by comparison. This edition is a great time-saver for DMs.
Jonathan Drains last blog post..Mediaeval Wrestling Recreation Video
@Bob: You won’t see me argue economics. 4e is kinda pricey when you want to play with all the options.
@Jonathan: I’m slowly getting used to parcels, especially since I discovered that converting an Item into gold finally gives Players the feeling of scoring big.
As for stat, no contest. I love how fast it is to create combat encounters in 4e.
Totally agree about the reduced prep time, especially when using the Encounter Builder and Compendium on D&D Insider. Never occurred to me to convert treasure parcel magic items to cash – doh!
RichGreens last blog post..Today’s Tiny Ramblings
Chatty, how does 4E handle unusual PC actions, such as knocking weapons out of hands or aimed shots?
Johnns last blog post..11 Homebrew Dungeon Master Screens
@Johnn: It doesn’t, but you can work with the DM to implement it rather easily.
Disarm: Atk vs Reflex defense of target. Hit: Weapon is knocked away in square adjacent to attacker.
Aimed shots don’t exist (like they didn’t exist in 3e IIRC) since Hit Points are an abstraction. But then again, I’d allow an atk vs Reflex to daze or slow a target until End of Next turn as a way of demonstrating called shots to the head/legs.
Cool beans!
Johnns last blog post..11 Homebrew Dungeon Master Screens
@ChatyDM:
Re: Aimed shots.
In one of our games, the paladin was held by a tentacle monster and failed her check for breaking free.
The ranger decided to help out by shooting arrows at the tentacles.
She hit the monster with one of the arrows – exceeding the DC enough for me to rule that she hit her target.
(I like to interpret how close you came to doing it exactly how you describe by how close / above you are to the target roll)
It gave a +4 bonus to the Paladin on her next attempt (many tentacles).
With the proper fluff, this was a cool action that made the ranger proud.
Eric Maziades last blog post..Magical hunter boots: Sensi-Paws, by Firat
I’m currently DM’ing our first forays into 4thED territory, and we’re starting to get it right. Since we’ve been playing D&D since the 1st edition (and alas, got ourself an aha-experience when the miserable mess that was Thac0 arrived ^_^) we find various stuff we like, and vice versa. The thing is, on paper, 4th edition just sounds like so much muck’n’mud. It’s when you start playing it you realize that it’s actually quite fun.
The best part right now is that my players has actually stopped taking long rests as soon as their dailys are spent, and they realize that they can go on for a long time + the fact that they start to get a feel for the tactics + and i succeeded in making a skill challenge transparent enough so it did not feel forced, something i thought impossible.
i still think it’s a bit dull that all magic items are just instantly known what they do (we have a history of wearing rings and flapping arms, drinking unknown potions and hope for the best and stuff like that), but it’s no biggie.
all in all, it’s fun, and we’ll probably go about it with me as the 4thEd DM, and the other guy as the old 3.5th ed DM.
Along with the ease of writing your own adventures comes one of the biggest perks of 4e, in my opinion. The fast turn around time from being a player to a DM. I had a player who had never played a tabletop RPG before and within 4 months she was already adeptly running her own games.
Nicholass last blog post..A Blood-Soaked Review of the MM2: With Haiku!
I was just pointed here and I’m curious how you’ve made skill challenges work, as I always find them incredibly clunky. Do you have any post where you spell it out, or should I just dig through your campaign write-ups and get a general idea?
@Bryce: Hi, welcome to the blog. I think you should look at the later campaign logs (http://chattydm.net/category/rpgs/campaign-logs/) to see how I tackled Skill Challenges. I haven’t written a post directly about Skill Challenges as I’m going to have one in Kobold Quarterly next fall.
(opinion incoming)
I played 4e for a while, and was really excited for it prior to release. After a while, though, it just felt too compartmentalized. Combat was like a computer RTS game sans the ability to speed things up, and the only thing defined for character classes (and the races) was combat role and ability. After a while, it just became stale and too focused on a single thing: Combat (which is basically whack-a-mole). Go through 10 encounters… yay… generic level up. I had a blast with the people I gamed with (great group), but not with the game.
Anyhoo… the purpose of gaming is to have fun. To those playing 4e and loving it, carry on! To those hating it, there are hundreds of other RPGs out there. I found the one for me. 🙂
.-= Rafe´s last blog ..Burning Shepherd =-.
Been awhile since I’ve had the time to visit. 4e is something my boys are expressing an interest in playing. We loved the initial taste at World D&D day but found gameplay to be a big time factor.
We’d probably have started playing at home if it didn’t take so long to game out combat.
.-= Vulcan Stev´s last blog ..Dungeons & Dragons Edition Wars: D&D 3.5 =-.