D&D 4th Edition Details Released

Wired is reporting that some juicy details of Wizards of the Coast's new 4th edition for Dungeons and Dragons are being leaked on to the web from the D&D Experience in Arlington, VA this week. "Wizards of the Coast, the current custodians of the D&D universe, have been talking about the upcoming fourth edition of the game for months, but they've been fairly cagey about hard details, preferring to tell us more about how elves love footraces than how much damage a fireball does. They're running actual 4e games at D&D Experience, though, and thanks to people with scanners, you can too!"

Classes

[TitusC3v5]

Even though AD&D was my first PnP experience, I've liked each release less after 2nd Ed. It seems at though every time they try to further the pigeon-holing of classes into certain roles, not unlike MMOs. This edition is no different, even going so far as to actually define these roles - controller, defender, leader, striker (CoH deja vu). As it is, it looks likes D&D is going to remain the system of choice of those who are more interested in flexing the system to make ungodly powerful characters, rather than interesting ones.

Re:Classes

[Unoriginal_Nickname]

Apart from, you know, 2nd Edition was a brutal hack-job created as an interim measure only to deprive Gary Gygax of royalties. 2E was riddled with terrible rules (THAC0 being one of the more benign terrible rules). I don't know if you're only looking back on 2E nostalgically or if you've just never run a 3/3.5E campaign before, but the newer rulesets are much much much better. The supplements, however, are not. They don't even try to balance things like Psionics, and creating a character using the book Savage Species is a pretty quick way to create an overpowered character. My suggestion to you is to avoid both of these things, and also to get a better DM because 3E, properly run, should be quite a bit harder (or at least more tactical).

Re:Classes

[XorA]

If the promises in the preview books made it into the Players Handbook, this is the least pigeon holed DnD edition ever. As characters can take class features from other classes. So you can have the fighter who can pick locks, or the cleric who can specialise in Katana. I always liked WFRP for its flexibility, and I really hope when DnD 4E is released the promises are kept up and it gets more flexibility.

D&D sucks

[paulatz]

Maybe the subject is a bit rude, but I cannot like D&D any more. It is getting more and more cumbersome and unrealistic, it more of a math problem than a simple canvas on which to build with your fantasy.

It have been a few years now, since I last did some role playing with my friend, in the last period we had much more fun using a simple set of rules we had developed ourselves than any boxed set

D&D is especially bad as it started as a simple set of rules, with some original points and, and than evolved to gigantic, while keeping it's original inconsistencies and awkward mechanics.

Anyway I don't I will have much time to play it again until I retire, and it will take, well.. about 40 years

Re:Classes

[owlman17]

The way I see it, a very rough analogy would be like this: AD&D was like the Win9x series, based on top of OD&D. 2E was like WinME. 3E was like WinXP, and 3.5E was like WinXP SP2. And 4E is Vista. The other superior RPGs, (this is subjective, and can't pinpoint a particular game at the moment) like Linux/Mac/BSD. OSRIC, [knights-n-knaves.com] an open-source, AD&D clone is probably like ReactOS/Wine. I'm still into AD&D 1st Ed. (And yup, still dual-booting into Win98.)

Re:D&D sucks

[vertinox]

Maybe the subject is a bit rude, but I cannot like D&D any more. It is getting more and more cumbersome and unrealistic, it more of a math problem than a simple canvas on which to build with your fantasy.

I was thinking the same thing about the new rules. I remember at times as a kid in which we would just throw out the rules for simplicity and have a six sided die scale with 1 being you failed horribly at the task and 6 mean you succeeded brilliantly with varying modifiers for success or failure on occasion. It wasn't about playing a game as it was story telling and role playing. Now it seems they just want to take WoW's success and bring it to PnP which is not that great of an idea.

I was hoping that someday we would see PnP actually go online, but I'm having my doubts.

Re:I hate WotC

[Planesdragon]

They simply destroyed DnD. And no, I don't mean 3rd edition or 3.5. I mean dismantling the settings that had no profitable audience and then pushing harder and harder to make it clear that it's always been a purely minature game.

There, fixed that for you.

(There's a reason why AD&D 1st edition had measurements in inches, and everything was described as "rounds" and "turns")

Re:Classes

[pokerdad]

Apart from, you know, 2nd Edition was a brutal hack-job created as an interim measure only to deprive Gary Gygax of royalties. 2E was riddled with terrible rules (THAC0 being one of the more benign terrible rules). I don't know if you're only looking back on 2E nostalgically or if you've just never run a 3/3.5E campaign before, but the newer rulesets are much much much better. The supplements, however, are not. They don't even try to balance things like Psionics, and creating a character using the book Savage Species is a pretty quick way to create an overpowered character. My suggestion to you is to avoid both of these things, and also to get a better DM because 3E, properly run, should be quite a bit harder (or at least more tactical).

THAC0 could have been done better than it was (see 3E), but in 1989 it was a god send. Suddenly there was no need to always have the DMG open to the two page spread that was that the to-hit tables. No more were the unpredictable and illogical entries the riddled the extreme ends of the to-hit table; now a change in AC by 1 always meant the number you needed to roll changed by 1. I honestly doubt that the to-hit system could have been optimized any more than it was, in light of how many people were outraged at the small change ditching the table envoked.

As for the supplements creating over powered characters - that has always been the way of D&D. Every new edition starts out with a (mostly) fair and balanced ruleset, then the add-ons spin out of control. Eventually they decided to trash everything and release a new edition; rinse repeat.

I know I'm a bit of a rarity, but I honestly believe that every new edition has been an improvement of the previous. I have many fond memories of every one of them, but I don't equate fond memories to eliquent rules.

Re:I hate WotC

[noxavior]

While I won't go as far as hating a company which is trying to make more money, I see where you are right. WoTC has changed the D&D way. It used to be about one off adventures, a minimal rulebook environement and a large amount of leeway for the DM.

Things have changed of course. D&D has grown into the largest system, encompassing many settings with a user base so large they feel they can milk it for profit indefinitely. At the same time, WoW is the hot new thing, a competitor to D&D like none before. Sales of the core books are probably slipping at this point and the 3.5 is unstable, so it's the perfect time to make a new edition.

However, it seems to me that this edition is likely the Vista of D&D as another ./er pointed out. The features will be there, but it looks to me that a great deal of its design is around "how to make more money from our player base", rather then "how do we make a better game?"

Oh, and a blind friend of mine discounted the whole 4Th edition when I told him about the visual, computer based enhancements. I just don't see WoTC going out of their way to make a blind friendly online system.