Orryn Emrys
Explorer
I would venture a guess that I'm hardly unique in my quest to determine the future of gaming in my own house given the release of 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. I've spent the past several months anxiously awaiting this newest iteration of my favorite game, soaking up every bit of trivia about its development that I could and enthusiasticly sharing it with my colleagues at every opportunity. It was, if nothing else, fun to extrapolate what I could about the upcoming system.
So now it's here. And I like it. There are, however, some concerns.
The central focus of D&D, mechanically speaking, has always been combat. The game's roots are firmly entrenched in strategic war games and miniature-based skirmishes loaded with vast sequences of extremely tactile rule systems. In its simplest form, D&D enjoys a very straight-forward system of combat resolution that doesn't require any kind of degree to properly employ, laced with a collection of essential statistics that give the characters and creatures in the game a sort of general form and function which allows them to interact with the combat rules.
During the later years of 1st Edition AD&D, subsystems appeared to support non-combat elements of character development, particularly the nonweapon proficiencies introduced in the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides. Additionally, the elements of the game have always supported other archetypical features of a fantasy tale: magic and miracles, wondrous and dangerous environments, treasures and artifacts, thievery and skullduggery, etcetera, etcetera. The idea of the game gradually moved from a simple invade-the-dungeon, kill-the-monsters and take-their-stuff formula to a much broader sort of simulationist game in which you could easily enjoy any approach to characterization that was feasible in a fantasy world. The 2nd Edition AD&D game capitalized on this idea with a bevy of products intended to provide players with the tools to expand the simple concepts presented in the core books in as many directions as they could come up with.
3rd Edition D&D took this concept to a new level, implementing a "build" system for character design that allowed players the most dynamic construction tools they'd ever had the opportunity to play with, at least in the realm of Dungeons & Dragons. By this time, the RPG market had enjoyed a significant boom, offering players a plethora of options for roleplay in a variety of genres and systems. We flirted with some other games during the 90s, particularly ICE's Hero System and White Wolf's Storyteller games, even Palladium's Rifts... but nothing was ever as lasting as our weekly D&D games. And with the turn of the century, and the release of 3E, it Just. Got. Better.
When 2nd Edition was released back in '88, I avoided it. I'd been running 1E for years, and I had every book... I just didn't see a reason to trade up. When I eventually clicked with a group that played 2E, I gave it a chance. And I realized that my stubbornness had cost me a couple years of enjoyment. So when 3E was announced, I pounced on it, watching the internet for rumors and tidbits and reading the "Countdown..." articles every month in Dragon Magazine.
It had issues. When 4th Edition was announced, they started fingering 3.5's issues unapologetically. And they were right. A number of my current problems with system are items that they elected to address in the construction of 4E. Encounter building, monster customization, tedious combats, and the loss of earlier editions' ability to throw larger clusters of creatures at your heroes and still present a comparable challenge... these and other factors had long since become unsatisfactory for me, though I had more trouble pinpointing them before they were called out to account for themselves. Which isn't to say that they weren't problems before I knew what they looked like... I just worked around them. Just like everyone else, if they found them trying in the least.
So now what? I've only had a single session of 4th Edition. I've read the books... I consider myself a relatively experienced judge of system mechanics, and I can easily recognize the grace and elegance of the new game system, the clever manner in which it sets out to do precisely what it intends to. Characters are balanced, powers are cool and interesting, encounter-building and monster customization is simple and powerfully flexible... I love the skill system, I like the tier-based advancement philosophy, and the half-your-level scaling of attacks, defenses and skills. It's good, and it's gonna be a lot of fun.
But it's a one-trick pony.
It makes everything fun, but it doesn't make everything possible. And I can more clearly see how important that is now for my players and our gaming style. For example, character optimization is key in 4E, so you absolutely cannot construct a sub-optimal character, or a character who lacks prowess in battle. The character roles defined by the new system are a powerful tool, but they're also a straightjacket. Blurring the lines between them too effectively would damage the ability of the system to deliver what it promises, but many players want precisely that kind of blurring in their characters. It isn't to make them more powerful... we all know that only a very few approaches to 3E multiclassing are anywhere near effective enough to significantly increase a character's capabilities, rather than watering them down... just to make them who and what they want them to be. Roleplaying such characters can be a rewarding challenge in a D&D game, and 3.5 continues to make it viable. 4E does not.
And that's really the point. What's possible. My D&D game has always made it possible. We've enjoyed long, rich, memorable campaigns that hinged on characters who have had to forge their own paths to success, not that handed to them by the optimization of the system. We're gonna do some 4E for a while - I think our current campaign is perfect for it, as the group pretty much made combat-capable 3.5 characters that translated fairly easily to the new system - and I know we're gonna enjoy it. But I think that it will wear out its welcome before long. There's only so many games that we're going to want to play to enjoy the challenge of employing our combat-capable PCs as a tactically-effective unit, in games focused primarily on individual combat encounters. For my convoluted political campaigns or games that focus on the social implications of the characters' experiences, I could do it 4E. Sure I could. But I could it better with 3.5.
Now I've got to figure out what I would do to my 3.5 game to take advantage of some of the powerful tools they've implemented. It's tough... they've really intrically tied their new mechanics to the their core design philosphies, so it may only be so possible to do.
So now it's here. And I like it. There are, however, some concerns.
The central focus of D&D, mechanically speaking, has always been combat. The game's roots are firmly entrenched in strategic war games and miniature-based skirmishes loaded with vast sequences of extremely tactile rule systems. In its simplest form, D&D enjoys a very straight-forward system of combat resolution that doesn't require any kind of degree to properly employ, laced with a collection of essential statistics that give the characters and creatures in the game a sort of general form and function which allows them to interact with the combat rules.
During the later years of 1st Edition AD&D, subsystems appeared to support non-combat elements of character development, particularly the nonweapon proficiencies introduced in the Dungeoneer's and Wilderness Survival Guides. Additionally, the elements of the game have always supported other archetypical features of a fantasy tale: magic and miracles, wondrous and dangerous environments, treasures and artifacts, thievery and skullduggery, etcetera, etcetera. The idea of the game gradually moved from a simple invade-the-dungeon, kill-the-monsters and take-their-stuff formula to a much broader sort of simulationist game in which you could easily enjoy any approach to characterization that was feasible in a fantasy world. The 2nd Edition AD&D game capitalized on this idea with a bevy of products intended to provide players with the tools to expand the simple concepts presented in the core books in as many directions as they could come up with.
3rd Edition D&D took this concept to a new level, implementing a "build" system for character design that allowed players the most dynamic construction tools they'd ever had the opportunity to play with, at least in the realm of Dungeons & Dragons. By this time, the RPG market had enjoyed a significant boom, offering players a plethora of options for roleplay in a variety of genres and systems. We flirted with some other games during the 90s, particularly ICE's Hero System and White Wolf's Storyteller games, even Palladium's Rifts... but nothing was ever as lasting as our weekly D&D games. And with the turn of the century, and the release of 3E, it Just. Got. Better.
When 2nd Edition was released back in '88, I avoided it. I'd been running 1E for years, and I had every book... I just didn't see a reason to trade up. When I eventually clicked with a group that played 2E, I gave it a chance. And I realized that my stubbornness had cost me a couple years of enjoyment. So when 3E was announced, I pounced on it, watching the internet for rumors and tidbits and reading the "Countdown..." articles every month in Dragon Magazine.
It had issues. When 4th Edition was announced, they started fingering 3.5's issues unapologetically. And they were right. A number of my current problems with system are items that they elected to address in the construction of 4E. Encounter building, monster customization, tedious combats, and the loss of earlier editions' ability to throw larger clusters of creatures at your heroes and still present a comparable challenge... these and other factors had long since become unsatisfactory for me, though I had more trouble pinpointing them before they were called out to account for themselves. Which isn't to say that they weren't problems before I knew what they looked like... I just worked around them. Just like everyone else, if they found them trying in the least.
So now what? I've only had a single session of 4th Edition. I've read the books... I consider myself a relatively experienced judge of system mechanics, and I can easily recognize the grace and elegance of the new game system, the clever manner in which it sets out to do precisely what it intends to. Characters are balanced, powers are cool and interesting, encounter-building and monster customization is simple and powerfully flexible... I love the skill system, I like the tier-based advancement philosophy, and the half-your-level scaling of attacks, defenses and skills. It's good, and it's gonna be a lot of fun.
But it's a one-trick pony.
It makes everything fun, but it doesn't make everything possible. And I can more clearly see how important that is now for my players and our gaming style. For example, character optimization is key in 4E, so you absolutely cannot construct a sub-optimal character, or a character who lacks prowess in battle. The character roles defined by the new system are a powerful tool, but they're also a straightjacket. Blurring the lines between them too effectively would damage the ability of the system to deliver what it promises, but many players want precisely that kind of blurring in their characters. It isn't to make them more powerful... we all know that only a very few approaches to 3E multiclassing are anywhere near effective enough to significantly increase a character's capabilities, rather than watering them down... just to make them who and what they want them to be. Roleplaying such characters can be a rewarding challenge in a D&D game, and 3.5 continues to make it viable. 4E does not.
And that's really the point. What's possible. My D&D game has always made it possible. We've enjoyed long, rich, memorable campaigns that hinged on characters who have had to forge their own paths to success, not that handed to them by the optimization of the system. We're gonna do some 4E for a while - I think our current campaign is perfect for it, as the group pretty much made combat-capable 3.5 characters that translated fairly easily to the new system - and I know we're gonna enjoy it. But I think that it will wear out its welcome before long. There's only so many games that we're going to want to play to enjoy the challenge of employing our combat-capable PCs as a tactically-effective unit, in games focused primarily on individual combat encounters. For my convoluted political campaigns or games that focus on the social implications of the characters' experiences, I could do it 4E. Sure I could. But I could it better with 3.5.
Now I've got to figure out what I would do to my 3.5 game to take advantage of some of the powerful tools they've implemented. It's tough... they've really intrically tied their new mechanics to the their core design philosphies, so it may only be so possible to do.
Good read. 
