Mike Shea, 8 March 2008
The chain wielder swung his chain and grinned at us. The mage behind him drew her hands out from her robes. With the three axe wielding berserkers in front of us, we were clearly outmatched. Battle began. Our ranger drew back and fired two arrows, striking against both the mage and the chain wielder. Our fighter and paladin engaged the barbarians. Our mage cast sleep and a round later, the chain wielder fell asleep where he stood. The cleric ran over and, before the chain wielder's head cleared, poured every ounce of his holy energy into the downed chain wielder, and down he went. I scored a 38 point Cascade of Light critical hit. At level 1. With a cleric.
This isn't your father's Dungeons and Dragons.
Over the past six months, ever since Wizards officially announced the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons at Gencon in Indianapolis in 2007, we fanboys have been digesting every single piece of information we could get and reverse engineering every cryptic blog post, podcast, and article we could find. We built our own house rules with diagonals counting as 1 and tossing away critical threats for direct critical hits. For six months we drank every single drop of information that came out of Wizards. This weekend the floodgates broke and we nearly drowned in the piles of new information we received.
The waiting is over. We've played 4th edition. And it's good. Very good.
When I first began playing D&D 3.5, I remember how clearly impressed I was with feats. I never cared much for the skill point system of 2nd edition. They seemed generally weak. Feats on the other hand had a clear combat advantage. They truly altered your character. 4th edition takes this a step further with "powers". These powers take feats a step further. They are the main effects your characters have in battle. For spell casters these powers clearly resemble spells but for melee classes they're something new. If you've played any of the classes in Book of Nine Swords (perhaps the best evolution in D&D 3.5) you know exactly how they work. Now our dwarven fighters are shield-bashing hobgoblins off of cliffs while our ranger fires a pair of devastating arrows into two different enemies simultanously. These powers are the core strength of 4th Edition. They may also be its biggest drawback.
Speed of play was a core tenant of the design of 4th Edition. No longer would players have to comb through the Player's Handbook seeking grapple rules. Now troll heads would roll, one right after the other.
After sitting down and playing about two-dozen 4th Edition battles over the past four days, I can state the following with first hand knowledge. At lower levels, it doesn't play that much faster. In two five-hour games and a half dozen 30 minute Dungeon Delves, I found the battles to take as long and perhaps longer than previous Delves at Gencon and previous low level adventures. Much of this can be attributed to how new the whole system is. It took all of the players time to grasp all the new rules and understand all the capabilities of each level 1 character.
That's not the only reason games ran slow, however. The variety and the strength of each character's powers require some thinking. There's a lot more strategy in each move now. Sure, iterative attacks are gone, as is wizard and cleric spell memorization (thank the gods), but it's been replaced with tactics and strategy. Maybe that's where it deserves to be. It's a lot better to spend your time discussing the best way to set up a bunch of skeletons so you can knock them into a gorge than it is to spend your time looking up turn undead charts. But if you expected 4th edition to speed up the game, it won't - at least at first level. I fully expect higher level battles to go much faster with the new rules and new mechanics than they did in 3.5 but that still remains to be seen.
While powers may seem to complicate standard character actions, most of the other game mechanics are greatly simplified. The consolidation of skills, the removal of the full-round action, the simplified movement rules, and the consolidation of status effects all speed up the game quite a bit. Within two battles the rules feel natural. This is how D&D should be. People shouldn't have to struggle to have a good time at the table.
There's still a lot we don't yet know about 4th Edition. How will character power scale over time? How will the rules make your character seem to continue to grow in power without becoming too difficult to play in higher levels? We know that the Wizards team wants to speed up the process to build and run the games but how exactly will this work?
I had an opportunity to discuss adventure building with Rob Heinsoo and James Wyatt on the last day of D&D Experience. They gave me some interesting information. First, when a dungeon master builds a non playing character (NPC), they do so by building them up as one would build a monster. NPCs don't need every single bit of information that a player character needs. They just need enough to build a character for the purpose of the story. As a test, James Wyatt loaded up his galley copy of the monster manual and built an 8th level fighter in under two minutes. Likewise, monster progression won't occur just by adding hit dice onto a monster. Instead the DM will create an "elite" version of that monster that actually acts and counts as two monsters of the same type. These elite monsters might gain action points or extra moves or situational attacks on top of hitpoint, armor, and attack boosts.
We often miss the primary purpose of game systems like this. These rules exist so we can build a story. It's a story split throughout the heads of the players at the table and within the random chance of a die roll. It's a story created spontaneously by those who sit at the table and turning, literally, with the roll of the dice. It is easy to get caught in the strategy of the rules and forget this core purpose. These rules exist to build a common framework for this shared story. It is clear, however, as we listen to the designers talk about their work and watch them run the games at the table that they haven't forgotten the importance of the story. The monster statistics are built to represent that monster. The powers of the player are meant to build in the dynamic action of those characters. It will be wonderful to have a system where I can use the rules to define the characters in my world rather than worry about whether I am handling their skill points correctly.
Our party had just defeated a band of corrupt guards and the rogue guild lackey who had hired them when we heard the onrush of the rest of the town militia. How would we escape? That was up to us. The dwarf overturned a cart, sending it and its contents crashing onto the street. Our ranger danced up the wall of a building, tripping at first but finally making it over. The dwarf grabbed a barrel and tossed it at the guards, sending them all sprawling. The warlock, always the most charismatic of the party, was so deft of mind as to not only convince the guards that he was but a bystander, but actually began ordering them himself. Soon, our party rushed out of the city with the chaos of the town square long behind us.
4th Edition isn't just an easier way to play our favorite game. It is a better, faster, cleaner way for us to build stories that would otherwise never be told.
This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. Please send comments or questions to mike@mikeshea.net.