Minireview: Dungeons & Dragons, 4th edition
Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition is probably the most-hyped and also the most controversial new tabletop rpg product in recent times. Is it any good? Well… yeah. Kinda sorta.
I stopped playing/running D&D ages ago, when AD&D 1st edition was the current one. It was a fun first tabletop rpg game, but the limitations of the (frankly crappy) ruleset had started to grate at that point. I moved on to Rolemaster, and then on to other games. I mostly skipped the 3.x phase, and don’t really know much about that ruleset; or let’s say: I know enough about it to know I don’t much care for it.
Honestly, I doubt that I would have picked up this new version had not Amazon had an amazingly low (preorder) price for it; I got it for under half price as compared to local game stores, and that’s including shipping. At that price, I went “hell, why not” and ordered the thing. I have to feel a bit sorry for game store owners, there is no way they can compete with that kind of price competition.
Complaints about this version abound on the net. It’s gone very far in the WoW direction. It’s dumbed down. It has nothing except combat.
You know what? The complaints are mostly correct. It has taken a lot of cues from WoW. It is pretty dumbed-down (or “simplified”, if you prefer). And it is pretty much only about combat.
Thing is, I’m not seeing those as being totally negative things. Trying to appeal to the WoW crowd does make a lot of sense. Tabletop rpgs still offer a lot of things that you simply cannot get from WoW (or such), and lowering the barrier of entry makes all kinds of sense. The dumbing down is a mixed bag. One one hand, at times the text reads like it’s aimed at 8-yr olds, which is extremely annoying. One the other, the mechanics seem pretty smooth, and I have no love for 3.x’s complexity (which to me gives very little in return). The rules feel pretty slick, in fact, in spite of the steals from computer games (aura effects, group roles, easy healing, etc). The game wants to emphasize fun, it seems, and that’s good in my book.
About the combat… well, hmph. I’ve never really seen D&D as anything but a fantasy combat simulator, to me it’s never even tried to much support the roleplaying aspects. So the fact that 4e is pretty much a fantasy combat simulator and in some respects more tactical board game than roleplaying game doesn’t surprise me much or seem all that odd. On the other hand, I can well understand people who have gotten used to running more “serious” games with the 3.x ruleset being turned off by this new incarnation. In addition, this edition is even more geared towards using miniatures than any previous one.
To sum: to me, 4e looks pretty sleek, and it seems designed to do the lightweight dungeon romp thing pretty well. On the other hand, it seems very lightweight and at times I get the feeling it’s aimed at younger kids. I can understand the criticisms it’s receiving, but I can also understand the praises. What you think of this game depends a lot on what you’re expecting and what your background is.
The core rules here seem very fun and sleek, like I said, and I might even try to run a purely-for-fun dungeon romp with this at some point. I get the feeling that the game succeeds in doing what it sets out to do, provide a easily approachable tactical dungeon monster mash game, with some light roleplaying elements included on the side. It’s just that what it set out to do doesn’t match what some people would like. C’est la vie.
The books are the classic three. First off, a Player’s Guide which details the character options, the main rules, and most of what you really need in order to play. Second, the Dungeon Master’s Guide which contains detail on running the game and some additional rules, and finally the Monster Manual, with lots of stuff to kill. Production values are high, as expected, and the organization is mostly good. Small negative points for the lack of a good index, spells are organized by level and if you want to quickly find a given spell you have to resort to leaving through the book – which sucks. The Monster Manual is nice in that it gives lots of variations of each beastie, no longer do we have the uniform “all instances of a given monster are the same” thing. Points for that.
Trying to look at this game objectively: it seems to be a professionally designed game of dungeon looting, with heavy emphasis on tactical combat. The rules give the impression of being quite heavily tested, and play balance has won out over realism in all cases (not that D&D was ever realistic in any degree whatsoever). It seems like a fairly solid game, and perhaps later supplements may even widen the focus a bit, so one might actually call it a “roleplaying” game without putting tons of conditionals and disclaimers all over the place.
If you’re heavily invested in the 3.x ruleset and like it, you probably won’t like this new version too much.
So: purely as a game, I’ve give WotC pretty high marks for this. It’s still D&D, but it has been heavily tweaked to do at least one thing (dungeon crawls) very well and it contains some nice new innovations from computer games and some indie games. The price of that is some amount of “dumb-down” and the near-lack of meaningful non-combat options.
In the “black marks” department, we have the whole heavily bungled launch, the whole poison-pill GSL license drama (which shows the weasel lawyer side of WotC/Hasbro pretty clearly), the bungled and buggy “D&D Insider / Gleemax” web support thing, etc etc. But all of that is topic for another discussion.