ok. i ran the adventure for dnd day (last saturday) and i must say i was not impressed for a number of reasons. it is here that i will voice my displeasure:
1) nowhere in the book does it state feet as a unit of measure, meaning that squares are the primary unit of measure and meaning that you must use a board and minis to play
2) the whole "lets sit down as a ground and rest for five minutes and get back hit points and encounter spells, while the DM can't stop us from doing so" rule. now i am a fan of giving power back to the player (qags is proof of that) but this is too much to bear. as a dm,gm,whatever, i like to react to whatever the pc's are doing to weave a story. to be powerless to stop something irritates me, because i can stop it, but than i'm an @$$hole for interrupting the rest.
3) UBERSKILLS! you tellin' me that dungeoneering skill is now completely comprehensive? thievery is now all the rogue stuff thrown together? come on!!!
4) passive insight and perception takes away surprise moments. I cant respect that.
5) the big one! it seems like every bit of actual thoughtful roleplaying is gone, for more of a hach-n-slash aspect of playing. from what i've seen, those who play dnd minis love it. those who are the faithful pen and paper loathe it.
my thoughts: if someone is in the street giving away copies of the books, i would beat that person silly and takes the books, run the books over with my car. set them ablaze, urinate on the book to extinguish it, then feed the ashes to a dog so that the animal could return the book to it's original state of matter. this dnd should be an option book of rules, not a complete new edition. persinally i think they reverse engineered d20, then rebuilt it from the mini rules. needless to say i'm not participating, because THEY TOOK DND AND MADE IT A VIDEO GAME!!! Rpgs are what i play to excercise the mind and get away from video game.
sorry for those i offend, i needed to get that out thanks
I think it is pretty obvious by now that D&D is trying to mimic the MMO-style of role-playing. Dumb it down and make it one combat after another. D&D is no longer a role-playing game. It is more of a wargame.
I'm afraid that you are sadly right. However, as a rper who likes the story aspects or roleplaying games, I find this latest incarnation of D&D simply awful as its been described so far. (I still haven't played D&D 4th Ed and after reading MK's post, I really have no desire too).
Look, if I wanted to play WoW or any other MMORPG, I'd play Wow or a MMORPG. I've never been a big fan of mini games, just my personal preference, I have nothing against them. If I take the time to sit down and roleplay with my friends/gaming group or with other players at a con I want an entertaining story. I do not want to play a computer game on a tabletop. They are different forms of entertainment. I want the storytelling aspect of my games, not a tactical battlemap. Heck, wasn't that what the Chainmail game was for?
Plus, if D&D is really trying to compete with MMORPG as a tabletop game, D&D is going to lose this competition. The one main advantage computer games have over tabletops are the graphics. No matter how descriptive a GM is, describing a fireball will not compare with seeing a fireball graphic on a MMORPG. If D&D truly belives that they will convert a generation of computer gamers used to the bells and whistles of MMORPG's into table top gamers with mini's, maps, and other elements borrowed from an MMORPG, they are in for a rude awakening I fear.
*sigh* Why not just emphasize running epic fantasy stories and using your own imagination? There is a niche for that. We don't need another incarnation of MMORPG's, even a tabletop version.
let me remind everyone though that this incantation of dnd 4 ed. was originally inteded to go online as some form of MMORPG, thus that is the reason it plays like a video game. now i do have friends that play pc games such as diablo as well as mmorpgs of various types, and of course they like 4th ed.
now i know that there are a lot of different types of gamers out there in mays forms. i don't want to step on anyones toes for being a specific type of gamer, i just want people to know that i don't like the newest installment of a LEGACY RPG with a time-honored tradition of excellence. although DND was not my first experience with roleplaying, it does have a specific spot in my heart(hell, i own just about everything Ravenloft). it just pains me that i won't be endorsing this form of dnd.
Deadstop ran a 4E test run a couple months ago. Here's what I said about it on another forum:
Since combat rules are about all that's come out so far (and since we were doing an Xcrawl scenario), the game was mostly combat, so I can't really comment on much else.
The combat rules, for those who haven't been keeping up, are a weird combination of miniatures game, MMORPG, D&D, and CCGs (they even use terms like "interrupt" and "first strike").Basically, you don't just whack things with your weapon anymore. Instead everyone has special types of attacks (kind of like feats) that they can use either at will, once per encounter, or once per day.
The Good: There's some actual strategy and tactics involved in combat now. Also, even with the two encounters we went through, we started getting more effective as we learned what each person could do and how to use each character's specials in combination. This might actually be kind of cool, since parties will get better at fighting as a group as they learn one another's strengths.
The Bad: Using the CCG analogy, you've basically got "cards" (special attacks). Every class and monster has its own selection of these. I suspect the sheer number of combinations will mean that some of them will be horribly broken, just like some of the early Magic cards. Also, some of them don't make sense--for example, when the cleric used a certain attack, he got to give one of the other characters a +2 bonus (or heal them) for no apparent reason.
Assorted other notes: *Everybody's useful in combat now, even low level wizard types. *The new healing rules (very MMORPGy) get rid of some problems, but are so abstract I'm still not sure how you'd explain what's going on from a story point of view. *Mages can now basically cast unlimited magic missiles. This is good for making them useful (and gets rid of the stupid spell memorization stuff), but not good if you want to do low fantasy. Apparently there will be "ritual" rules for non-combat magic (and possibly similar rules for other things, since all "non-adventuring" skills have been cut out of the new rules). Depending on how these work, you may be able to go low fantasy by just cutting out the wizardly classes, but we'll have to buy the books to be sure, since they're not going to give us those rules until the books come out. * Ditto with clerics and heal spells, but everyone has a limit to the number of "Healing Surges" they can use per day (cure spells use up a surge). * Most characters are now "Unaligned." Alignment still exists, but it doesn't really have any mechanical effects anymore. * Since each class will presumably have several specials to choose from (plus skills and feats), characters of a particular class should be less cookie cutter. * They say you don't need miniatures to play. They're lying about that. But assuming minis does make a lot of the tricky timing and movement stuff much simpler.
In general, from what I can tell they've done a good job on the "game" end of things. If you want to do a [insert MMORPG] style dungeon crawl, the rules I've seen so far are very nice. Just not sure if they make any sense when you try to take the characters out of the dungeon and do character/story stuff.
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