A Look at D&D 4th Edition

Alright, I’ve been putting this post off too long, so lets get to it… Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition was released not too long ago, and although it is not actually an online game, has anything to do with community management, nor is it a spiffy web-thing, I’m still going to talk about it regardless. Why? Because, much of modern gamingdescends from it – and this time, it has been affected highly by online games. Not to mention that Wizards of the Coast is releasing an online service for it (which does make it relevant to this site, but I won’t get into that much).

So, I’ve had a chance to sit down and pour through the material so that I can give some basic thoughts on it. Now, before I begin, I need to cover a few things. I started DnD with 3rd Edition, so I’m not some veteran DnD player, nor am I that familiar with 2nd Edition, save old CRPGs. I also did not start tabletop gaming with DnD either. My first one was West End Game’s Star Wars RPG. So, I started with D6, and to this day I still love D6. I also love games such as Fudge (which no one has ever heard about) and other extremely rules-lite systems. I also officially dislike DnD. Well, that isn’t really fair, but I do find the system to be chunky, clunky, convoluted, and far, far too rules heavy. That said, I’ve still had fun in plenty of DnD games.

So with that out of the way, what about 4th Edition?

Well, its still too chunky, clunky, convoluted, and rules heavy for my tastes (big surprise, eh?). However, there are several important things in this system that certainly helps with that problemover prior editions and creates what appears to be a surprisingly fun game.

To begin with, there has been an awful lot of streamlining that has removed some of the strange oddities of the last system. For example, all rolls pretty much work off of the same formula: you roll a 20 sided die, then add half your level, then any applicable modifiers (1d20 + 1/2 level + modifiers). This is nice, because every time you roll that d20, there’s little question as to what you need to actually add to the roll. Rolling an attack, a skill, or just about anything else works exactly the same way.

Skills were changed heavily too. You don’t spend points in them as you level up, but instead you get a bonus for being trained in them or not. This simplifies things quite a bit and allows the system to work well with the new d20 + 1/2 level method. I still honestly don’t know how I feel about the change. Skills always seemed to be rather secondary before – not that they weren’t useful, but the skills you picked were fairly limited and didn’t seem to differentiate you a whole lot from anyone else your class. That still will effectively be the case, but at least its easy.

However, instead of seeming entirely secondary in 4th Edition, the developers went to some length to make skill checks a bit more interesting. You are able to use multiple skills in different situations and multiple party members are able toparticipate in each challenge. This makes the skill checks function somewhat more like a combat round, giving them more focus, more cooperative gameplay potential, and a greater fun-factor.

While these changes are not entirely unwelcome (and the new skill checking system is quite welcome), it does seem a bit silly, from a roleplaying perspective, that no one really has any weaknesses as far as skills go. You always have at least the ability to add half your level when rolling for that check.

Speaking of rules affecting roleplay… Well, actually, none of the 4th Edition rules seem to affect any roleplaying situations outside of bluffing, diplomacy, and some knowledge skills. In fact, they all seem almost entirely tied to combat and skill checks. 4th Edition is very much focused on being a Role-Playing Game. The rules very much focus on the game aspects, and there are essentially no roles that involve things like riding a horse, or any other roleplaying-oriented or mundane task. In a way, this might seem like the system is focusing itself on a very hack-and-slash gameplay style (which you could easily argue that it is), but this isn’t actually all that bad. Coming from my rules-lite-loving additude, this is actually very nice. It means that the game system only ever gets in the way when you actually need the random chance, because of a challenging situation. It, however, doesn’t affect mundane things and actions that happen outside of such challenges. That means that your roleplaying is up entirely to your imagination. That, I think, is a great boon.

Since this is a game focused heavily on combat, I might as well take a look at that. To begin with, I will start with the biggest change to the system: powers. This is where you truly can see the MMO-influence, because I can totally imagine my DnD character being controlled with a hotbar full of crazy abilities that let me do extra damage and other effects. The reason for this is pretty simple: because that’s exactly what powers do. Every character is able to pick from a (giant) list of powers and choose a handful of them to use in combat. Everyone does this and everyone works effectively the same: Fighters, Wizards, Rogues, Clerics, everyone. With every attack, you can choose to use a power to fill your sword with holy radiance and strike for extra damage, or to cast magic missile, or to cleave through your opponent into another, or… Well, you can get the idea.

Each power can either be used every action, if you so wish, or once every encounter, or once every day, depending on the power and how strong it is. Wizards and Clerics are not presented with their normal spell list. Instead, they choose spells off of their own power lists, just like how Fighters chooses their powers. It means that they have much less variety in the number of spells that they can cast at any particular time (although there is still a large variety of spells over all), but they also will always have spellsavailable and don’t have to worry that they expended all of their magical might before a big fight. Melee fighters work in the same way, allowing them a much greater array of actions to do in combat than merely hitting the giant with a large sword, or disarming, tripping, etc… Now they can do any of those actions, plus a number of special melee-centric moves.

It genuinely seems to make combat more enjoyable too. Sure, they basically lifted it from online gaming, but it wasn’t a bad idea. It gives you plenty of things to do in combat, plenty of choices, and makes you think about which action is the best. For the people worried about the strategy of saving your powers as opposed to expending them without care – that still exists. Your daily power is actually going to be pretty strong and you really are only going to be able to use it once a day. Even spending encounter powers is a bit risky, as you might want to use it at another point in the same encounter.

Now, I can’t mention combat without mentioning the biggest weakness I think this system has, at least for me. It is extremely reliant onminiatures and having an actual grid. I generally prefer to avoid things like that, but with the way powers work, its pretty difficult to do so. Movement plays a major role, and so does multiple-target attacks, which vary greatly in their effectiveness depending on where you are positioned in relation to your enemies. However, if you like playing withminiatures all the time anyway, then this shouldn’t be that big of an issue.

So, yes, DnD is still rules heavy and I still prefer D6 and Fudge over it, but I find myself actually wanting to give 4th Edition more of a chance than I normally would. Then again, maybe I just really want a tabletop game to partake in, in general.

Really, this is just the briefest of looks at the system and I’ve only covered a few aspects of it. Its a DnD game, so obviuosly its going to be giant.  There is plenty more to the system and plenty more that I could talk about, including some rather controversial changes (like Healing Surges) – but really, I think the above sums up my thoughts over all.