Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, First Impressions
The last Wednesday I had the chance to start playing the preview module, Keep on the Shadowfell, ran by one of the players of my regular campaign (where I am also a player I don’t GM). I also managed to get a peek in a player’s handbook and monster manual, and here is what I think of this edition so far.
First and foremost, this is a wholly different game. DnD 3rd edition was very different from the ADnD 2nd edition, but felt similar, since the mechanics have the same core principles. This does not happen with 4th edition though.
One of the main design objectives was to put everyone on balance and to make sure every character had interesting things to do in battle. Any one that played DnD knows, spellcasters at early levels, quickly depleted their spells and spent most of the time not doing anything relevant. At later levels this could still happen but most likely is that they would be the most efficient killing machines in any party, and not only that, but by then they would now totally outshine the meelee classes, that can do little more besides rolling dice to strike with their weapon, while the clerics and mages unleash lots of pretty lights (Mage:”I invisibly fly through the battlefield raining fire on our foes, burning their skin and melting their bones”; Warrior:”I hit one guys with my pointy stick”).
From the module and from what I saw in the PHB, this was most likely achieved, but at what cost? Spellcasters now have a healthy amount of options at first level but they will loose flexibility later on, and it’s not the rituals that will make up for that. The many specialized spells that a wizard could memorize on specific occasions are mostly gone, and they now have a much smaller number of known spells. The classes without spells now have lots of fancy abilities, so you will most likely never use a standard attack, which is good and bad.
There are a good number of abilities that feel like only a small upgrade to some older one, and could have been condensed into just one, but my major grips with meelee abilities are it’s forced movements. It’s not hard to envision a rogue using its weapons to threaten an opponent into moving, but only if it’s an opponent that can recognize the threat and doesn’t have an incredibly though hide that would allow him to disregard it, but after checking the PHB and MM for exceptions I found none. Sure there are monsters that are immune or resistant to forced movement (the dwarfs for example), but mostly they are not, so we can now have a halfling rogue forcing a 30th level elite Tarrasque (gargantuan size and very very mean and stupid and brutal) to move. This confuses me.
It’s true that I couldn’t read the books on detail, so maybe I missed something but I doubt it, specially because forced movement is now a huge part of the combat options, and if most of the monsters are immune to it then it’s kinda pointless.
Combat is also not simpler. At first level there are allot of things to track, sure you won’t feel huge changes level from level, since you don’t gain that many abilities, but there is definitely allot of things going on. We will see in time if it’s easier to manage than 3.5. It does feel more fluid, but this is only based on a couple of encounters of a introductory module so it’s too early for a verdict.
My other big issue with 4th is the new level of abstraction where they took the game. One must now completely stop thinking of HP as describing physical health. The only way you can visualize combat in 4th edition, is not as an exchange of hits, but as weathering down ones defenses/stamina/morale, so when you see a warlord telling you “Don’t let that bastard play with you, hang in there ! ” *you recover x HP*, you must not think that his words cured your wounds but that he made you recover some moral (kinda like cheering a football player on). Of course it’s not at all hard to see where this breaks since the system was not made to be 100% coherent. Their focus was totally on making the combat feel fun, and more like a miniature game.
So is all this good or bad ? Honestly I don’t know. The combat is fun, no doubt, but I have serious difficulty visualizing some of the new paradigms, specially all the forced movement and teleportation, and I also haven’t read the books in detail, which still leaves allot of questions in the air.
Tags: 4th, 4th Edition, DnD, Roleplay, RPG
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