Whilst I've touched on on a few points here and there I've never really taken the time to concentrate properly on the subject, confining myself mostly to whinging about 3.5 without really digging into 4th ed much.
So I guess it's time to do that.
The funny thing about 4th ed is that I actually get it. I can clearly see what it was they were going for. With standard 2nd ed - 3.5 D&D part of the problem is that I just find the whole setup utterly baffling. With the seemingly infinite array of flawed design elements which unfold at every turn I really can't get a grip on what sort of game it is that the system is even trying to do (other than an annoying one anyway), let alone why anyone would think it's a good idea. 4th edition however comes with a remarkable clarity to it. A quick leafing through the books will quickly show what it is they were going for.
WOW players. Plain and simple.
Everyone with a PC basically looks like this, right?
The game is structured at more or less every level towards recreating an MMO style play experience at the table. And, to be fair, it does actually succeed in this remarkably well. However the first obvious problem with this is so remarkably straightfoward I'm almost suprised that nobody in the games design department actually thought of it:
If I wanted to play WOW that badly, I'd just go and play WOW.
Actually, if wanted play WOW that badly I'd go jump off a building. But that's another story.
The game is tight and focussed on it's goals, but ultimately it's just not the sort of game that I'm interested in, at least when playing a tabletop RPG. Which is a shame, because there are some decent elements to the game. Although, being D&D, there's also a fair bit of utter shite.
Taking it's cues from a computer game has, unfortunately, meant that the game has also taken a lot of the limitations as well. The class system is, if anything, even more utterly restrictive than in 3rd ed. You're depressingly restricted by your class still, sure. But in turn your class is depressingly restricted by being shoehorned into the standard (I.E. dull as fuck) MMO paradigm of tank/damage/healer. Your not building your character to do whatever it is you might think would be cool for that character. Your building it exactly to the books specification for it says someone in a party should be doing. Not YOUR party necessarily. The given ideal, as laid down in the holy tome of "shut up and do your job".
"Okay, I'll be the Cleric...."
The powers are a nice idea, but in practice don't work as well as they could. Don't get me wrong, I think the idea of giving all the different classes special moves was a really good one. After all, why should it only be the spellcasters who get to do all the flashy fun stuff whilst everyone else just gets to stand there and hit things? However in practice I found it less a case of picking out some cool stuff that sounds fun or in character and more a case of take the predetermined package given in the book or suck. You couldn't really mix and match anything to suit yourself because you HAD to be tightly focussed on one particular given role.
That and the summoning magic SUCKED BALLS.
Seriously. You get to summon a thing, which is cool, right? Only you can only do it once per day. And it only lasts for one encounter. And it takes all your characters actions to control it. And it's not, when it come down to it, even moderately effective in combat. It's like they took every possible restriction you could think of to limit summoning, slapped them all together and called it a power set whilst forgetting to put anything other than the limitations in. You know, like some actual powers or something to make it all worthwhile.
as you can probably tell, I tried to play a wizard and didn't find it very satisfying. Mainly this is because the idea of a wizard simply doesn't fit into this system at all. The whole point of a wizard is to go around learning spells. It's what they do. But in 4th ed you only get whatever power cards drop out of your arse when you level up Sure, there were a few rituals you could pick up for out of combat effects. But you couldn't actually go out and learn fireball from wizard school. You literally had to just drink murder out of kobold skulls until you suddenly learned it in a flash of light.
I suppose they felt that crippling the wizard like this was fair enough in light of the way it improved basically every other class, and maybe the wizard players wouldn't whine so much now that they actually got to cast Magic Missile more than 4 times before they needed to lay down. But it still bugs me. Sure, it's the sort of thing that you'd just accept in a computer game. But this ISN'T a computer game, and it really shouldn't be trying to emulate them quite so closely.
It's like books and movies. You can make one out of the other, sure. But each is a different medium with it's own ways of doing things, strengths and limitations. one is not necessarily superior to the other, just different. And that's not a bad thing.
The way the powers themselves were laid out was also a little off. You had At Will, Per Encounter and Per Day abilities. Which is all well and good when you're trying to emulate the skill bar of an MMO (short, medium and long cooldowns) but doesn't work so well in an actual roleplay. I can only do this thing once per day? WHY? How does that work? Does that mean I have to wait exactly 24 hours until I feel up to punching someone in that particular way again, or does it reset at midnight or something? The ways things are rationalised in a computer game are not the same as the way things are rationalised in real life. Which, you may remember, is kinda what roleplaying games are trying to model. Albeit in a far more dramatic and interesting fashion. With Owlbears.
Everything's better with Owlbears.
Of course one thing with everyone having daily powers was that the weird pacing issues D&D suffers from were actually magnified, as now the whole party needed to go and lay down to become useful again, rather than just the spellcasters. Seriously, I just can't fathom the concept of camping out in dungeons full of hostile monsters being part of the everyday routine.
As I've mentioned previously the combat is very miniatures focussed. Personally I don't have a problem with this as I like minis and have actually begun to learn that proxies are not a bad thing. Many people of course disliked this on the basis that it was simply a ploy by the manufacturers to sell more minis. Now, the fact that D&D minis were sold blind boxed does give a certain validity to what they say. It's definitely not the most cost effective way of getting minis. Even if you simply want a basic pool of proxies you still want a reasonable mix of things, which may require a substantial investment to achieve. Seems kinda odd that they never did army builder packs of staple creatures for the roleplaying crowd themselves but rather left it up to the singles dealers on ebay, but do I know about marketing? Similarly I gather that some people didn't like the packs of powers cards that were available to buy for the different classes. However at the end of the day is it really reasonable to get upset at a company for trying to make a profit on their product? Even a bunch of game cancelling bastards like WotC?
Just sayin'
In the end, maybe that's why D&D sucks so much. Maybe by continually producing a substandard product there's always room for a new edition? Really, the problem with 4th ed D&D isn't that's worse than than 3.5. It's simply that bad in an entirely different way from what people were expecting.
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