D&D 4E: Of Wizards, Coastal And Otherwise
May. 14th, 2009 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinThere was a passing mention on a MU story discussion thread of how much more appealing the Wizards class is in 4th edition D&D than in previous ones, which reminded me of my own thoughts on the subject.
My first experience with D&D was in the late 1980s, with the versions of Basic that were available at the turn of that decade... and while I loved the idea from the start, there were a few "culture shocks" I had in going from fantasy literature to the tropes of fantasy roleplaying as they existed then. In particular was this strange creature that back then was called "magic-user". I didn't recognize it at all. This was a fragile being with enough HP to die reliably in one hit, who could cast a single spell once per day.
Does such a creature exist in the annals of fantasy fiction? Of legend? Is there any historical forebear or precedent we can find for this strange lifeform?
Of course not.
The "memorized magic" model is drawn from the works of Jack Vance, but there's nothing archetypal or iconic about it. It doesn't match some cultural understanding of what magic is or how magic works. The rulebooks would assert that you've spent xty years training under a master learning how to cast a single spell and now you're ready to go out and see the world and adventure and your further magical education is your own lookout.
Except by "ready to go out and see the world and adventure" meant "ready to die the first time something hits you." By selecting magic-user as your class, you were saying "I choose to roleplay as the idiot who left/flunked out of magic school after learning one spell and decided to become an adventurer, despite having no ability to defend myself." It was possible to write a convincing and compelling fantasy story about a fighter or thief at the start of their career, or even a cleric (since the classic cleric class was presented as a "fighter cleric" with healing spells as a bonus), but if a magic-user showed up in a D&D spin-off novel or comic you can bet they'd be higher than level one*.
Was there some code of conduct or professional rule that required master spell-casters to kick their apprentices out as soon as they managed to learn any magic at all? If not, why wasn't it possible to roleplay a mage who spent a few more years at the master's feet? A weak argument could be made that book learning was no substitute for experience... but "experience" means "killing orcs", and for a low-level magic-user, that actually means "not dying while your teammates kill orcs." That's a better way to learn magic than... studying magic?
The only possible defense of the old magic-user model is that truly wizardly wizards should be rare, that they can't be cranked out factory style and the game thus requires you to grow into the role of one by first having an exceptional intelligence roll that gives you more spells per day from the get-go and then surviving to the higher levels.
And that's valid, from one point of view... but it's not a point of view I cherish. The PCs are already exceptional by virtue of being adventurers... they aren't just farmers who decided to pick up a sword. If it were otherwise, there would be no villages menaced by goblins because the villagers would pick up swords (or just use their farm implements, since polearms have such favorable stats) and clean out the goblins themselves. The fighter isn't somebody who got up in the morning and strapped on a sword, the thief isn't somebody who just the moment before play started decided it might be fun to try to open a lock without a key, the cleric didn't just wake up with an idea to praise Crystal Dragon Jesus and see if any undead were turned by it. They're heroes.
Newly-minted heroes, aspiring heroes, whatever you want to call them... but just as the narration of a book wouldn't be following a band of schmucks who set out to the moldering Mines of Moulderainia just because they're the eighth in a series of nineteen bands of schmucks who will try to remove the curse of the moldering mummy, you wouldn't be sitting around a table pretending to be these people if they weren't the heroes. Yes, failure should be a possibility and death should be a legitimate threat, but remember: fourteen heroes (fifteen, counting Gandalf) set out from the Shire in The Hobbit and onlyone three of them died. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser didn't always get the gold or the girl (and they rarely managed to keep either), but they were still larger than life from their first adventures onward and they still overcame terrific odds and terrible foes time and time again.
So bring it back to Wizards. In 4E, when you play a Wizard, there is no doubt that you're a Wizard. The new implement system means you're going to have a wand or staff or orb or tome in your hands at all times... and these items are not a ray-blaster-thingy that lets you cast a single spell (or a small selection of them) x extra times, making you marginally less useless until finally it becomes useless itself, as they were in original Basic D&D... they're part of your schtick, part of your character, an extension of your magical abilities and a tool for extending them. That's a Wizard. That's Wizardly.
Yeah... when I got my first taste of D&D, the wands were a big "WTF?" moment to me. The whole charge system was familiar to me in a video gamey kind of way. It was a limiting factor. I got that. I just couldn't wrap my head around its inclusion in an imagination game that didn't have a set ending like a console game and where nobody benefited from you plunking in quarters like an arcade game.
I mean, imagine a story where the hero is told, "Beware the witch's wand! The wand is the source of her power. With it she can shoot a line of frost maybe, I don't know, three or five times, and then it's dead." or "The evil wizard is invincible as long as he has that staff, and as long as he doesn't use it too often. Unfortunately, we only have 49 men in the royal army and we're pretty sure he's got at least fifty charges in the thing."
Later editions of D&D made it increasingly routine to recharge a wand or similar magical implement, but it still struck me as being a lot of artifice. In many other games, notably GURPS and even D&D's poor step-cousin Tunnels and Trolls, wands and staves served first and foremost as as wizardly tools for channeling magical power and that rang a lot truer to me.
In 4E, wands, etc., give you a prop that adds flavor. The Wizard's "implement mastery" feature gives them a reason to favor certain spells, or changes the use of the spells they pick, making a staff-wizard different from a wand-wizard, which is an interesting twist. Different specific wands and staves often give persistent bonuses to types of magic or they give you an extra spell you can throw in once per day, which is enough for it to become a particular Wizard's signature, thus making "beware the wand" warnings a little more plausible in-universe.
All in all, it's something I can get behind. It's something I can point at and go "That's a Wizard."
Then there's the At-Will Power system. All Wizards have at least two spells that can be cast, as the name implies, At-Will. No dithering over whether or not the minor menace you face is worth expending one of your precious starting spell slots. You're a freaking Wizard. If there's a rat, you can slay it with a bolt of eldritch energy as casually as you like because there's more where that came from. It's not that these spells are uberpowerful, but they're yours to call on at-will... because you're a Wizard.
Then there's the cantrips. Cantrips have been a part of D&D for a while, and they were a good effort at making up the gap between fantasy conceptions of what it meant to be a wizard and the game mechanical facsimile we were given. "You can tell I'm a wizard because I can make twinkly lights appear. I can clear these cobwebs away without getting my hands dirty. I can light or snuff out candles for dramatic effect." Things that say, in effect, "I am a wizard". Except in previous editions they were tied into the spells/day system, so it's "I was a wizard but now I am le tired and must take a nap." With 4E giving so much more rule focus to combat than everything else, they could have skipped on these, but instead they made them broad enough to cover an awful lot of low-level utility effects and made them at-will.
More dramatic mystic attacks and effects are covered by encounter, daily, and utility powers which the Wizard accumulates with levels, or with rituals if they involve more of a persistent effect. It's a workable system and it makes for good story-reality. You can have a Wizard at level one who can throw off a couple of simple spells as easy as nothin', make a light at the tip of a staff or floating in air at will, every once in a while put a batch of monsters to sleep or throw a ball of fire, and... with great ceremony, enough time and the right reagents, restore a broken crown or sword or lock or whatever from a piece of its mangled remains.
So, yeah. A lot of attention has been given to the fact that Wizards have at-will spells at all and how this changes the paradigm of playing one at lower levels, but equally important for me is the fact that they seem like more than Wizards in name now.
One thing I will say... and this ties into WotC's marketing model... is that they're better the more books you have: Adventurer's Vault gives you the alchemy option and many more choices of implements, Arcane Power gives you more spells to choose from, including illusions and summoning magic, an additional option for orb-wielders, and the option of using magic tomes as an implement (and the image of a Wizard holding a book of eldritch lore while casting a spell is terribly appealing to me), familiars, etc., and just about every book includes some more rituals. The options in Player's Handbook are a nice start, but they can only be combined so many ways.
But that's the closest thing I can offer to a criticism for it, really... they've got to make their money somehow, though, and they can realistically only fit so much in one book, so it's not a huge one.
*Edited to add: I just thought of a D&D spinoff story that's all about a wizard at the start of his career: "Elminster: The Making of a Mage". Now, Elminster is one of *D&D's canonical archwizards, the archetypal sage of the Forgotten Realms setting. He is not an NPC, he is a deus ex towera. When he shows up in your fantasy adventure, it means the same thing as when Uatu shows up in your X-Men adventure: things are fucking heavy.
His origin story, "The making of a mage", is actually all about him being a mercenary fighter and a thief and a cleric... the three original standard classes that are distinctly not mages. Why? Because he's the smartest freaking man in the world and he knows better, that's why. Because not even Ed Greenwood could have written a convincing and compelling story about a D&D pre-4E canonical magic-user/mage/wizard who hits the road at level one and lives to become an archmage.
My first experience with D&D was in the late 1980s, with the versions of Basic that were available at the turn of that decade... and while I loved the idea from the start, there were a few "culture shocks" I had in going from fantasy literature to the tropes of fantasy roleplaying as they existed then. In particular was this strange creature that back then was called "magic-user". I didn't recognize it at all. This was a fragile being with enough HP to die reliably in one hit, who could cast a single spell once per day.
Does such a creature exist in the annals of fantasy fiction? Of legend? Is there any historical forebear or precedent we can find for this strange lifeform?
Of course not.
The "memorized magic" model is drawn from the works of Jack Vance, but there's nothing archetypal or iconic about it. It doesn't match some cultural understanding of what magic is or how magic works. The rulebooks would assert that you've spent xty years training under a master learning how to cast a single spell and now you're ready to go out and see the world and adventure and your further magical education is your own lookout.
Except by "ready to go out and see the world and adventure" meant "ready to die the first time something hits you." By selecting magic-user as your class, you were saying "I choose to roleplay as the idiot who left/flunked out of magic school after learning one spell and decided to become an adventurer, despite having no ability to defend myself." It was possible to write a convincing and compelling fantasy story about a fighter or thief at the start of their career, or even a cleric (since the classic cleric class was presented as a "fighter cleric" with healing spells as a bonus), but if a magic-user showed up in a D&D spin-off novel or comic you can bet they'd be higher than level one*.
Was there some code of conduct or professional rule that required master spell-casters to kick their apprentices out as soon as they managed to learn any magic at all? If not, why wasn't it possible to roleplay a mage who spent a few more years at the master's feet? A weak argument could be made that book learning was no substitute for experience... but "experience" means "killing orcs", and for a low-level magic-user, that actually means "not dying while your teammates kill orcs." That's a better way to learn magic than... studying magic?
The only possible defense of the old magic-user model is that truly wizardly wizards should be rare, that they can't be cranked out factory style and the game thus requires you to grow into the role of one by first having an exceptional intelligence roll that gives you more spells per day from the get-go and then surviving to the higher levels.
And that's valid, from one point of view... but it's not a point of view I cherish. The PCs are already exceptional by virtue of being adventurers... they aren't just farmers who decided to pick up a sword. If it were otherwise, there would be no villages menaced by goblins because the villagers would pick up swords (or just use their farm implements, since polearms have such favorable stats) and clean out the goblins themselves. The fighter isn't somebody who got up in the morning and strapped on a sword, the thief isn't somebody who just the moment before play started decided it might be fun to try to open a lock without a key, the cleric didn't just wake up with an idea to praise Crystal Dragon Jesus and see if any undead were turned by it. They're heroes.
Newly-minted heroes, aspiring heroes, whatever you want to call them... but just as the narration of a book wouldn't be following a band of schmucks who set out to the moldering Mines of Moulderainia just because they're the eighth in a series of nineteen bands of schmucks who will try to remove the curse of the moldering mummy, you wouldn't be sitting around a table pretending to be these people if they weren't the heroes. Yes, failure should be a possibility and death should be a legitimate threat, but remember: fourteen heroes (fifteen, counting Gandalf) set out from the Shire in The Hobbit and only
So bring it back to Wizards. In 4E, when you play a Wizard, there is no doubt that you're a Wizard. The new implement system means you're going to have a wand or staff or orb or tome in your hands at all times... and these items are not a ray-blaster-thingy that lets you cast a single spell (or a small selection of them) x extra times, making you marginally less useless until finally it becomes useless itself, as they were in original Basic D&D... they're part of your schtick, part of your character, an extension of your magical abilities and a tool for extending them. That's a Wizard. That's Wizardly.
Yeah... when I got my first taste of D&D, the wands were a big "WTF?" moment to me. The whole charge system was familiar to me in a video gamey kind of way. It was a limiting factor. I got that. I just couldn't wrap my head around its inclusion in an imagination game that didn't have a set ending like a console game and where nobody benefited from you plunking in quarters like an arcade game.
I mean, imagine a story where the hero is told, "Beware the witch's wand! The wand is the source of her power. With it she can shoot a line of frost maybe, I don't know, three or five times, and then it's dead." or "The evil wizard is invincible as long as he has that staff, and as long as he doesn't use it too often. Unfortunately, we only have 49 men in the royal army and we're pretty sure he's got at least fifty charges in the thing."
Later editions of D&D made it increasingly routine to recharge a wand or similar magical implement, but it still struck me as being a lot of artifice. In many other games, notably GURPS and even D&D's poor step-cousin Tunnels and Trolls, wands and staves served first and foremost as as wizardly tools for channeling magical power and that rang a lot truer to me.
In 4E, wands, etc., give you a prop that adds flavor. The Wizard's "implement mastery" feature gives them a reason to favor certain spells, or changes the use of the spells they pick, making a staff-wizard different from a wand-wizard, which is an interesting twist. Different specific wands and staves often give persistent bonuses to types of magic or they give you an extra spell you can throw in once per day, which is enough for it to become a particular Wizard's signature, thus making "beware the wand" warnings a little more plausible in-universe.
All in all, it's something I can get behind. It's something I can point at and go "That's a Wizard."
Then there's the At-Will Power system. All Wizards have at least two spells that can be cast, as the name implies, At-Will. No dithering over whether or not the minor menace you face is worth expending one of your precious starting spell slots. You're a freaking Wizard. If there's a rat, you can slay it with a bolt of eldritch energy as casually as you like because there's more where that came from. It's not that these spells are uberpowerful, but they're yours to call on at-will... because you're a Wizard.
Then there's the cantrips. Cantrips have been a part of D&D for a while, and they were a good effort at making up the gap between fantasy conceptions of what it meant to be a wizard and the game mechanical facsimile we were given. "You can tell I'm a wizard because I can make twinkly lights appear. I can clear these cobwebs away without getting my hands dirty. I can light or snuff out candles for dramatic effect." Things that say, in effect, "I am a wizard". Except in previous editions they were tied into the spells/day system, so it's "I was a wizard but now I am le tired and must take a nap." With 4E giving so much more rule focus to combat than everything else, they could have skipped on these, but instead they made them broad enough to cover an awful lot of low-level utility effects and made them at-will.
More dramatic mystic attacks and effects are covered by encounter, daily, and utility powers which the Wizard accumulates with levels, or with rituals if they involve more of a persistent effect. It's a workable system and it makes for good story-reality. You can have a Wizard at level one who can throw off a couple of simple spells as easy as nothin', make a light at the tip of a staff or floating in air at will, every once in a while put a batch of monsters to sleep or throw a ball of fire, and... with great ceremony, enough time and the right reagents, restore a broken crown or sword or lock or whatever from a piece of its mangled remains.
So, yeah. A lot of attention has been given to the fact that Wizards have at-will spells at all and how this changes the paradigm of playing one at lower levels, but equally important for me is the fact that they seem like more than Wizards in name now.
One thing I will say... and this ties into WotC's marketing model... is that they're better the more books you have: Adventurer's Vault gives you the alchemy option and many more choices of implements, Arcane Power gives you more spells to choose from, including illusions and summoning magic, an additional option for orb-wielders, and the option of using magic tomes as an implement (and the image of a Wizard holding a book of eldritch lore while casting a spell is terribly appealing to me), familiars, etc., and just about every book includes some more rituals. The options in Player's Handbook are a nice start, but they can only be combined so many ways.
But that's the closest thing I can offer to a criticism for it, really... they've got to make their money somehow, though, and they can realistically only fit so much in one book, so it's not a huge one.
*Edited to add: I just thought of a D&D spinoff story that's all about a wizard at the start of his career: "Elminster: The Making of a Mage". Now, Elminster is one of *D&D's canonical archwizards, the archetypal sage of the Forgotten Realms setting. He is not an NPC, he is a deus ex towera. When he shows up in your fantasy adventure, it means the same thing as when Uatu shows up in your X-Men adventure: things are fucking heavy.
His origin story, "The making of a mage", is actually all about him being a mercenary fighter and a thief and a cleric... the three original standard classes that are distinctly not mages. Why? Because he's the smartest freaking man in the world and he knows better, that's why. Because not even Ed Greenwood could have written a convincing and compelling story about a D&D pre-4E canonical magic-user/mage/wizard who hits the road at level one and lives to become an archmage.
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no subject
on 2009-05-14 03:53 pm (UTC)I'm a little disappointed in the way they did sorcerers, just because they don't seem to have overcome an issue they mentioned pre-release: "Every time we came up with a way to do a sorcerer, it was basically just the Warlock again." But with that known and accepted (and a storm theme in Arcane Power making me giddily happy) I can live with it.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 04:19 pm (UTC)I mean, in 3.X, there was throwaway fluff text about sorcerers maybe having innate magical powers because of some dragonish leanings in their blood or soul... the sorcerer was The Other Wizard Who Is Slightly Less Hamstrung By Vance with dragonblood as a handwave for why they were slightly less hamstrung. But in PHB2 they took that and ran with it for the dragonsoul sorcerer and came up with something that is distinct and cool and distinctly cool. And then they took the competing explanation, that some people just have a natural innate affinity for wild magic, and they ran with that, and they came up with something that fits that, and that is also distinct and cool and distinctly cool.
Looking at them, I wondered where they would go from there... the two initial examples of power sources both managed to encompass the entire elemental spectrum and I wondered how many examples they could come up with that would do the same for Arcane Power and further supplements, but as you obviously know they were cleverer than that. Storm magic and cosmic magic.
Warlock and Sorcerer are really two of my favorite things about 4E, because between them you get a sense that magic is big, it's bigger than one person or one school or one system and there are many different ways of approaching it. From AD&D onward there was the idea of "Specialists", but you wouldn't necessarily know a necromancer from a mage who had necromancy spells. 4E gives different magic characters distinctive flavors and flairs in a way that I've never seen outside of GURPS, only they're all laid out before you which makes it easier to put a group together and just get a game going.
Edit To Add:
And while "Illusionist" fit into the Wizard class, I've got a feeling that certain specialties of magic... like Necromancer... will show up as their own classes when we get to other power sources... like Dark. If so, that will really highlight the ability of 4E to make different types of characters distinct from one another. In my 2nd edition AD&D PHB, it explains that Clerics are meant to be battle priests in the model of the hospitalers and Druids are merely included as an example of "priests of another mythos", with the idea that DMs and players can come up with other ones, when from the beginning they are very clearly an entirely separate class of characters and adding another one like them would take considerable mechanical adjustment. Illusionists are similarly included as the canonical example of a specialist mage, but they follow a simple set of rules that are laid out for each of the "schools" of magic and are in no way to mages as druids are to clerics. A true necromancer class should be as distinct from a common mage as a druid is from a cleric, and the fact that in 4E druids and clerics have been severed completely gives me hope that we'll get a kick-ass necromancer.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 04:46 pm (UTC)As for necromancers, I'm concerned about how that will be done. The summoners suggest that they might go for a summon-and-dismiss format for undead, but particularly in the numbers I don't know if that quite works. It feels like necromancy that involves undead should be ritualized magic, rather than something that will crumble back into a pile of bones and dust as soon as the fight's over. But how do you handle that? You don't want players taking 'looting corpses' to a whole new level, but you also want to make it feasible for an NPC to summon lots of undead minions without having to be Orcus' right hand man.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 05:12 pm (UTC)I'd expect a Necromancer to function along those lines. Perhaps the basic builds could be a spirit summoner and a corpse animator, with each one having a different form of servant that is a generic-in-stats personal-in-nature undead servitor that they can command in combat and channel powers through, with the Big Gun powers split between enhancing the main servitor or summoning others (which, to build on the examples of the Invoker, Shaman, or Wizard, could involve a conjuration, a zone, an actual summon, or even a fleeting effect: a laughing skull, dead hands reach up from the ground and claw at ankles, a wraith spirit, or a bunch of ooky spirits swarm through the target).
In keeping with the Necromantic flavor and the "everybody can attack every turn" model, the Big Gun powers would probably be phrased as "drain energy from your foe and give it to your servant".
That's just one way they could go with it, obviously... and in any event, there would have to be a number of necromantic rituals to fill in the gaps, just as there are for Wizards.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 07:29 pm (UTC)One of the things about 4E is that they've completely abandoned the idea, not present in early editions but on full display in 3rd, that the archvillains are essentially evil PCs and so anything statted out for one is accessible for the other.
It's an interesting and entrancing idea, and having rules for things like creating endless numbers of undead servants and magic items and mystic traps and all answers the question "Where do the bad guys get all this stuff?", but 4E's a great testimony to the possibilities that are revealed when you move away from that kind of a system.
So, the villainous zombie master has an army of skeletons and zombies because the villain has these things (cf., Open Grave makes the note that the easiest way to simulate a vampire lord's traditional thralls/familiars is to just pair them up with appropriate creatures, no mechanic needed), but a heroic PC Necromancer would instead be able to channel death magic into discrete (and quickly and easily gamed) localized effects. Maybe a dedicate servant, a few persistent summons, and several abilities that involve "drive-by" manifestations: shrieking shades, grabbing arms, etc.
If I wanted to play the more mastermind-type necromancer, I'd look for a system that's not so action oriented, like GURPS... which conveniently has a flexible "animate dead" spell with loads of options.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 07:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 07:57 pm (UTC)(Open Grave actually has a whole section on different ways to game out a zombie horde. Sadly, one of the few glaring mistakes in that book was they forgot to include the stats for a zombie plague, though they put the errata on the website pretty quickly.)
no subject
on 2009-05-16 06:37 am (UTC)And I to am more fond of abstract over miniatures in tabletop RPGs.
no subject
on 2009-05-16 05:15 pm (UTC)The rules point out that if you know a spell at a sufficient skill level that you can cast it without motion or speech, you have a few seconds to retaliate if a necromancer removes your brain.
There's also a necromantic enchantment spell for creating wraith items (typically but not necessarily a ring, for tradition reasons... and the ring can have other powers enchanted into it). The power cost of that spell, along with the animate corpse spell and the one for becoming a lich, are based on standard templates, but GURPS being an entirely point-buy system, the cost can be easily scaled up or down for weaker or more powerful variations.
no subject
on 2009-05-16 06:07 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-16 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-16 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 04:33 pm (UTC)And the Rituals in 4e... Ugh. I'm not saying they should be cheaper than doing it by hand, but they should at least be cheaper or faster; in many cases they're neither.
...And it'd be nice if they actually, I dunno, edited the books before they printed them. They've gotten so bad of late with reprint errors and contrary rules and just plain old spelling and reference mistakes.
no subject
on 2009-05-14 05:00 pm (UTC)A magic wand in the hands of a wand of accuracy wizard means enhancement bonus to hit and damage plus the wand's daily power plus the wand's critical effect or property if any plus the accuracy power. That's far from being a useless prop. And how much you want to focus your power on your implement is a question left to the player... you can choose to pump up the attribute associated with its bonus, you can take feats like Implement Mastery that function as a proficiency bonus, you can choose powers or even a paragon path that benefit from associating with a particular implement... you can tie up your character's identity in an implement, or you can treat it as a prop and pretty much only seek out magic implements for the enhancement bonus, or anything in between.
As for rituals... they were the part of the new paradigm I took the most time to warm up to. They hardly seem worth it at low levels, especially compared to alchemy which basically lets you get useful expendable items at a cheaper price. But they seem necessary at high levels to preserve the "hey, this wizard is a wizard" feel by giving ways of doing earth-shaking, world-changing feats of magic in a way that stops the from being mid-combat game breakers or things you can do too casually or too often. Anything that's not an attack or a five minute utility effect becomes a ritual.
The errata? I'd like to know what edition wasn't plagued with spelling and typesetting errors... this edition's been better than the previous ones about not having blatantly self-contradictory or just plain poorly explained rules, and in the age of the internet, getting corrections out when they do make a mistake is fast and easy. Actually, I'm hoping that they keep following the trends they've been setting in seeking online revenue and going with regular published updates and move to options for digital distribution. It would be cheaper and more eco-friendly, and I use my laptop as a DM's screen anyway.
no subject
on 2009-05-18 12:15 am (UTC)And... I have the first print of 3e. It hasn't as many errors as the first print of 3.5, let alone 4e.
Come on, at least the things you print should have number that work. It's the easiest thing to test, you just add some number together. And they didn't do it.
no subject
on 2009-05-18 01:42 am (UTC)But most of the corrections dealing with numbers that I've seen have been balance tweaks or tweaks to damage dice or hit bonus for a particular attack that proved to be not as useful in play as it should have been.
So Blade Ward now does 2W damage instead of 1 and Shadow Wasp Strike targets Reflex instead of AC, and some attacks now have a different hit bonus, and now there's a net bonus for trained skill use instead of a net penalty for untrained (because they've removed the "Add 5 for skill checks" guideline from the DC setting table). I'm sorry, I don't see that kind of ongoing adjustment indicative of sloppy editing.
And yeah, there have been actual errors... like no stats for a zombie plague disease that was referenced in Open Grave, and a reference to "Infernal" when they meant "Supernal" in Arcane Power, but they released corrections for those just as they adjusted the balance of a few attacks post-release.
And it really shouldn't be a surprise that 4E's pages and pages of special attacks require more post-release tweaks than 3E's pages and pages of... oh, that's right. They didn't have anything comparable. The closest thing would be the spell system, which I'm pretty sure received numerous nerfings, adjustments, tweaks, and clarifications during the years it was being supported, and were still left with several spells that required an informal "just don't abuse it" rule.
I have to say that a lot of the complaining about 4E reminds me of the Onion news video "Trekkies bash new Star Trek film as fun, watchable" (http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film). The system is eminently playable, supports any combination of class and race, allows for more complex (but quick and dirty) combat and focuses more on freeform roleplaying than Munchkinned numbers outside of combat.
They've made D&D into a game that lets anyone jump in and play. They've lessened the impact of knowing the arcane intricacies of the metagame inside and out. Yes, you can still min-max the hell out of a character, but if you pick a race and class combination because you like them you're not going to be rendered superfluous by the person who built for stats, and that's a huge step up from 3rd edition.
It's not 3E Version 2, so I'm not surprised that people who enjoy 3rd Edition aren't changing to it... the 4E Forgotten Realms setting shows the folly of trying to convert between the two... but it's a snazzy enough game in its own right.
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on 2009-05-14 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 05:31 pm (UTC)Yeah, I know what you mean by the loss of flexibility. I still look at the great big long grimoires that came with older editions and salivate on the possibilities.
But one element of the previous spellbook system was that a wizard's power/flexibility/usefulness in part depended on the DM's willingness to play Santa Claus and put spells into their hands. Again, this is something that got better with each passing edition having more codified rules for players just buying/gaining spells, and it's something that's still somewhat present in the ritual system.
Anyway, the wizard's thus far fairly unique "spellbook" class feature (Swordmages can choose to gain a similar but lesser ability through a feat) lets them have more daily and utility powers than they can use in a day, thus retaining some of the flexiblity. The expanded spellbook feat gives them even more choices. Like members of any class, they can choose to "retrain" at any level, swapping a power they've previously chosen for another one. The idea of mystical research or study accompanying this can be incorporated into roleplaying or handwaved away.
Really, what's lacking in my mind... and this is a side-effect of every class in the book having thirty levels' worth of "spells"... is breadth of selection. The Arcane Power book helps there.
On that note, one thing I'd like to see, if they do another round of * Power books, would be the introduction of generic Spells, Exploits, and Prayers. As much as I've been praising them for making each class distinctly flavored, they've done quite a good job at that, and I think it would be interesting if there was a volume of arcane spells, martial exploits, divine prayers, and primal invocations that could be chosen by any appropriate character, because that would give them a way to increase the number of possibilities across the board, and with the Wizard's unique ability to hoard more powers than they can use, they'd benefit the most from the added selection and really be able to show their versatility.
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on 2009-05-15 09:20 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 05:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 05:33 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'll make the correction.
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on 2009-05-14 05:37 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 06:03 pm (UTC)Tangentially, I love your description of Elminster's class choices. It's funny because it's true.
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on 2009-05-14 06:37 pm (UTC)GURPS is really my gold standard, especially as it can be flexed to get all the same flavors that D&D4E presents as ready-made options.
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on 2009-05-14 06:43 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 08:26 pm (UTC)Oh, how we are laughing. Doctorate of "Sweet Fanny Adams" indeed!
... now I wanna play, and have none to play with.
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on 2009-05-14 08:42 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 08:49 pm (UTC)of course I have umpty-billions of ways I could set up a space for long distance sitting in... all we'd need is a couple of webcams on your end and a couple on ours... and trust, of course.
Not too long ago I played 3 nights running via speakerphone form my desk at work when I was working 3rd shift.
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on 2009-05-14 09:00 pm (UTC)There are freeware based solutions that do a lot of the same things, but considering how much stuff I've got going on I'd rather have something that's already completely tailored for the rules I'm using, that uses tile-based map builders instead of "import your JPG map into the program and we'll put a grid on it!" (because I fail art), etc.
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on 2009-05-14 09:07 pm (UTC)Damn you WotC! you had another good idea!
When it comes out you Know Damn Well that
We are talking epic-10-hour-never-go-to-sleep-again-food-is-for-the-weak gaming sessions y/y?
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on 2009-05-14 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 09:12 pm (UTC)i'm too lazy to do it myself.
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on 2009-05-14 09:23 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 09:32 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-05-14 09:36 pm (UTC)I got mad at one of my previous DM's the session before I quit playing with him, I was discussing how i didn't like map "move six squared and attack" combat because it brought in too many rules and nitpicky BS into combat that just aren't necessary.. he defended it with "It's more realistic this way" ....
... but I thought this was a fantasy game....
.... and I rest my case.
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on 2009-05-14 10:08 pm (UTC)My excuse for arbitrary combat mechanics isn't that it's "realistic", but the opposite: it's arbitrary. If everybody knows the rules, you can figure out what you can do with them... you know if you're close enough to leap between your ally and the dragon, you know if you're close enough to charge down the enemy and smite them verily, you know if you're far enough away to scramble up the slope before you get run down.
The "realism" in all that... fantastic or not... has to be inferred by looking at everything that happens in everybody's turn, since logically "in reality" you're not all waiting for each person to go.
If you've got a DM who has a good grasp of the rules and is flexible and doesn't have an instinctive "no you can't do that" reaction to somebody presenting a question that seems to stretch them, D&D has mechanics that can be quite flexible. I mean, say the ogre is just a hair more than six squares away and you say, "Look, he's right there... who's to say I can't push myself a little harder and still hit him (instead of waiting for a whole cycle of turns to come around and then moving again?)"
The DM can say, "Look, it says 6 squares and so that's what you get."
Except:
The rules allow you to make a charge attack, which is a standard action (i.e., it uses up your attack for that turn) that lets you move your whole speed as part of the attack... meaning, you can move your six squares towards the foe, and if they're not in reach, you CHARGE. A DM who's not in the "no, no, no" mode would recogize that this is what you're saying your character is doing: digging deep down within themselves, pushing themselves as hard as they can, and bearing down on the enemy full-steam-ahead. The cost is that it's a basic attack, i.e., not one of your class-specific special attacks (unless you belong to a class that has moves that can be combined with a charge, like Barbarian), but it still lets you get your character into the fray.
Likewise if you're trying to get away from somebody... a good DM would remind you that you can use your standard action to take another move action, you can spend move actions running instead of walking (taking some substantial combat penalties, but if you're getting away from danger instead of going to it...) instead of just reiterating the basic rules.
None of that is to say that there's an extra movement rule covering every situation where the basic rules might become constraining, but that the rules do allow for some intricacy and a DM who's willing to be flexible and negotiate can often find that the rules don't even need to be "flexed" to accommodate what players are asking for.
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on 2009-05-14 11:03 pm (UTC)Actually I'll offer it even if it doesn't fail.
few thoughts...
on 2009-05-14 08:38 pm (UTC)2. Actually, I've got a few ideas on how to play a level 1 wizard.
Step 1: Add a dollop (generous) of Cowardice
Step 2: Give him a spell interesting enough to get him kicked out of his mentor's grasp (I'm thinking wildmagic here)
Step 3: He's got the highest intelligence in the room. USE IT. He's the blipin' strategist, not built for being in the middle of fights! Have him be the planner, erecting defenses, and the thinker -- the one who notices likely ambush places. He'll still be no good in a fight, mind, but at least he'll be the "interesting" character.
Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-14 08:52 pm (UTC)I had a seeing eye dwarf, who kept me alive for awhile.. and didn't even mourn my death at lvl 4... he just ganked my stuff before they burned me.
Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-14 08:54 pm (UTC)Crapsack World Survival is a valid form of game that some people enjoy, but it's never been what D&D promised or claimed to be, despite the early editions being pretty much that until you had some levels under your belt.
2. Steps one and three are essentially directives to roleplay "Try very hard not to die before you become a powerful wizard." It's a viable way of playing the game, and pretty much the way people got their wizards up to a useful level... but they're both options that remain even when the system makes wizards useful as wizards.
Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-15 02:30 am (UTC)Damn. Now I'm remembering my two favorite spellflingers of editions gone past. So very different in style and habit, and yet both with a rather disturbing tendency to faceplant.
Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-15 07:19 pm (UTC)I think one of the basic principles in D&D (at least 2nd ed) is that a level one hero is able to kick the crap out of MOST people in town. I don't think this necessarily needs to be the case to have a hero-based system. Then again, D&D always seems more willing to play "happy" worlds, worlds where coming back to a town doesn't mean counting the fresh dead in it.
Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-15 04:41 am (UTC)Saying that, you're assuming all properly designed systems assume a world where the baseline of what people do to live is 'kill stuff.' It doesn't have to be so, there can be worlds where not every bush and piece of road is full of Random Encounters looking to eat people.
Then again of course it all depends on how we define 'capable of fighting.' We could say it's doable by everyone except quadriplegics, or we could say it takes not only a bit of training but also the guts to not panic when the situation comes up, which is rarer than many think.
Re: few thoughts...
on 2009-05-15 07:24 pm (UTC)I think that D&D often has worlds that are too populated with monsters, and yet not populated enough. Actually, this is an easy thing to fix -- have magical monster repelling charms for towns, that wizards have erected, and that span the fields required for living in said towns.
This world we live in is a really soft world. Most women can't fight (least I can't fight). I think you can probably say that Japan makes for a baseline of "nonfighting world"... on the other side, you have a hunter/gatherer culture under constant assault from monsters. That's the endpoint for "fighting world"
If we make the assumption of a moderate amount of monsters, we also can make the assumption that most towns will fall under attack at some point, so militias will form (soldiers hired where affordable -- depending on their skill and average success rate, you'd see different amounts of training for commoners).
Panicking can help in certain situations, as well ;-)