#dnd 4e

[looceyloo]

Been meaning to do a proper portrait of Dana for a while!

Dana was my very first D&D character who became my first Tav as well! She was a 4e Fey pact warlock whose patron was Sehanine Moonbow, so it was an easy switch to Selune.

Her mother was an Elven warrior who was sworn to protect sacred forests of Sehanine/Selune, but she was raised by her father, a wizard, in Baldur's Gate. Despite having no memories of her mother, and her father discouraging her from getting mixed up with deities and magic, Dana was naturally drawn to the moon. After her father's death, she set out to find herself.

She was the perfect Tav for a Shadowheart redemption/romance campaign!

[talenlee]

4e: The Pinball Wizard

Back in the heydays of the 4th edition community being a community that all met on a single forum and shared a common lexicon and all that, there were phrases, truisms, slang and tropes we recognised and used to speed our way through conversations. This was true of 3rd edition too, since the community was actually, broadly speaking, the same thing, but that community kind of uprooted itself and moved on to other places, while the 4th edition remnant seems to have not really coalesced in a subsequent form. We don’t really have a 1d4chan or Brilliant Gameologists or deeply intimidating Pathfinder Subreddit as places to scare people off, and instead it’s stuff like…

Well, this blog post might get shared on the subreddit. Hi reddit! I like you even if we don’t agree about Blackguards!

Anyway, thing is, there are things that now have no meaning except their place in 4th edition conversations, and are functionally un-googleable because they’re very generic ways of just using words, or maybe, were named after something else. Back in City of Heroes there was a powerful supergroup known as the Green Machine, that was entirely team-buffing healers that refused to heal, and that’s not a term you can search for meaningfully. Another group that existed and that shares its title with today’s subject was a group of kinetics, where everyone could use powers to make everyone else fire off at super speed, showing you don’t need good powers if you can fire off your best powers every second.

They called themselves the Pinball Wizards, and now, if you go look for what that means in 4th edition D&D you kinda find nothing.

Here’s the story of one of the more distinct power level errata of D&D 4th edition, where in 2011, a single sweeping change to the way the rules worked destroyed a strategy and in the process brought something ridiculous down to merely really good.

This build was a combination of two basic parts, which were well and strictly defined under 4th edition rules. The first is zones. A zone is an effect, made by a power with the ‘zone’ keyword so you knew where to look for it, that looks at that area for some reason. Some zones are used for things like a healing aura, or a space that a character can move around in freely, but very commonly, a zone is used to represent an effect that’s bad that lasts. This can be a bunch of falling shards of glass, a cloud of toxic venom that hovers in a space, or a ground teeming with sharp, jagged vines on thorns.

Zones are extremely cool, make no mistake, and they tend to fall into the toolkit of the Controller. Controllers want to deprive enemies of actions, and zones are a great way to give enemies a bad choice: Stay in an area to do something they want to do, or spend actions getting out of it. Since zones do a good job of representing effects like rings of fire, or clouds of poison, or raining ice, it’s stuff that hits the wizardy feeling of editions past.

The other part of this is forced movement. 4th edition had a family of these effects known by their more specific names of push pull slide, but these are ways to change where enemies are positioned and everyone who complains about fighters in 4th edition is usually complaining about these and they are cowards. These effects show up everywhere, but undeniably, if you’re looking at the people who will do the most of them, you want controllers.

The build that worked out of this was known as the Pinball Wizard. You played a Wizard who used one of a number of long-lasting powers that created a zone that did something dangerous when someone entered it. Then you used your other powers to slide something in and out of that zone over and over again. Wizards got more than a few powers that did slides, and they got access to items and feats that improved their slides. You could use a slide effect to turn two squares of slide movement (and we’re talking like, 4-8 squares for builds that are trying) into like, 40 damage.

At level 2, when tanks are happy to have 40 hit points.

Anyway, you might be thinking the sensible solution is to make it so that these zone powers are limited in how often they can have their effect – and it kinda makes sense, narratively, in the context of the world, right? Like, an enemy or person isn’t going to breathe more if they run back and forth through a poison cloud.

In 2011, Wizards released an update to the compendium that added that rules information to every single damaging zone power in the game, with a note of the when, and an article explaining why they did it. It was a perfectly reasonable rules update made through a digital system they had and realistically speaking, the only thing to mourn is that there’s now no good reason to ever let a player get away with this use of these powers together, because it’s pretty silly.

The system that was left after this change was obviously a better system. It had a clear, specific template that it could use thereafter and while it did lose some edge cases, it was implemented thoroughly and comprehensively in a way 3rd edition almost never managed to execute. This was because of a central control system, the compendium, but it also spoke to a problem that a game normally about disconnecting and engaging with a very material play space was going to have to confront head-on.

Basically: This kind of errata existed in the rules, sure, and if you download a rules compendium, every power that can be changed mentions the 2011 change. But the books don’t. The books still have the rules change and to learn how the game works, you have to know it. Or you have to use a digital compendium, which presents a new problem for a game that is meant to work with paper and dice.

These were inevitable evolutions of technology and they interest me because they kinda present problems and solutions at scale. The actual problem of a wizard stacking a bunch of redundant effects together to kick an enemy through the boundary of their zones as a single incident was not a meaningful problem to a table. If it’s a problem, it’s a problem that has an administrative option to work with – the Dungeonmaster can look at it, and decide it’s too good and talk to the players about it. That problem is solvable almost instantly if everyone in the group and game has a good relationship and respects the DM.

But if you made the game, you don’t have a problem that can be solved on the spot. You have a problem of all the players, in a communal space, who bring it up and ask if it makes sense and consult with one another and now you have the problem that looks like at scale your product has a flaw and you need to address it to make that flaw not look like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Oh, what makes a good game is important here, it isn’t not important.

It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing.

It is a thing that few games get, not really, unless they’re very big, and trying to do a lot. It’s barely something that even the next tier down of games need to care about. Errata happens, people care about making the books better. But most people don’t have a comprehensive central database where they can update all the powers that use a particular wording.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

Yeah this isn't part of the tournament this is just for my sake. IMPROMPTU BATTLE FOR MOST SEXY ORC

5e Gray

5e PC

5e Claw of Luthic

4e

3e

2e

1e

[ultraflavour]

Why there won't be a repeat of the 4E/Pathfinder Era

It's the year 2011. The sentiment on 4th Edition has badly soured with a large portion of the D&D-playing audience, and there's not much else going on in the fantasy sphere.

Dungeon World and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire aren't coming until 2012, and 13th Age won't be for another year after that. But there is one product line at the FLGS that's been getting a lot of buzz, and if you were around at this time, you know exactly what I'm talking about: Pathfinder.

But here's the problem. You, the hypothetical person in this situation, were still kind of having fun with 4th Edition. It didn't seem so bad that the world needed to abandon it outright, but apparently it did.

Now, don't get me wrong. 4th Edition had PROBLEMS. It's not that weird that it collapsed in the way that it did. I'm not going to get into a substantive rules breakdown here, but suffice to say, it needed a refresh. And whatever "D&D Essentials" was, it wasn't enough.

But keep in mind, this is 2011. The online tools required for randoms to play games with each other safely are on the horizon, but they are not here yet. We're still using MapTool. God damn, raise your hand if you remember fucking MapTool. Your options for who to play games with are the same people you'd always been playing games with. So if the group wants to switch games, you're switching games.

"It Feels Too Much Like a Video Game"

But now a new problem arises: Those people need to either make the case for Pathfinder, or make the case against 4th Edition. In 2011, most D&D players do not have anything close to the language they need to articulate what they actually like in TTRPGs, nor form any sort of coherent critical analysis of either system.

Furthermore, you can have a substantive rules discussion about 4th Edition all you want, but how does anyone know that Pathfinder is going to be any better? Until you've actually switched to it and you know what it's all about, you only know that it's "3.75 edition." So there's no real way to know if Pathfinder actually addresses the problems that 4th Edition created until you play it.

So, unable to make the conversation about the rules, Team Pathfinder has to resort to using a Razor. You need a statement that is so undeniable, so impervious to any attempt at refutation that it completely shuts down the argument entirely. And thus you arrive at "It feels too much like a video game."

I have a lot of feelings about this phrase. At the time I was going to school for Computing Science, with the intention of entering the games industry. Video games were not evil to me. So the idea that D&D feeling like a video game did not really register. Surely, that just meant that video games had started to mimic D&D. The Paladin class in World of Warcraft has "Lay on Hands" for god's sake.

Nevertheless, this line of reasoning worked, and part of the reason why it worked was because there was no real way to argue against it. 4th Edition had introduced mechanics from World of Warcraft such as "Tanks" that could "Taunt," and what basically amounted to "Cooldowns" that would refresh conveniently just in time for the next encounter. So that part could not be refuted.

But at the same time, so what? That was just D&D harvesting back ideas from a game that had pretty much used 3rd Edition as the basis for its entire class design. If 4th Edition felt like WoW, that's because WoW felt like D&D.

But it stuck, and Pathfinder enjoyed the most success it would see until probably 2023. 4th Edition fans the world over grumbled, put their Player's Handbook 3s away, and bookmarked the Archives of Nethys. (Yeah, I agreed to play Pathfinder, but I wasn't paying a single red cent for those books. Sorry Paizo, but I did get you back later with Starfinder.)

The OGL is a Flat Circle

Something we were not really "online" to at the time was also the GSL situation. You had to be deep in the forums at that time to understand what was going on, and hahahahahaha absolutely not.

Long story short, the GSL was WotC's first attempt at clamping down on the OGL in preparation for a digital toolset. Sound familiar? Well it happened pretty much the exact same way, except for one crucial difference: They didn't revoke the original OGL. I guess they just kind of assumed that everyone would move over to 4th Edition of their own volition, once 4th had conquered the world. Oops.

The sad part is that there was a Digital Toolset that was apparently the whole reason for doing the GSL in the first place, and it never materialized (For a pretty crazy reason, look it up if you want but it's not for the faint of heart). But this is another way in which history rhymes, because as soon as Wizards thought it had a hit on their hands, they tried to push it into the digital realm, where they could control how players interacted with their product.

So because of this situation, Pathfinder was able to basically reprint the 3rd Edition rules with some touchups and release it as their own product. They simply kept authoring the game under the (still valid) OGL 1.0, and nobody ever moved over to the GSL because thanks to Pathfinder, they didn't have to accept the much more restrictive terms of the new agreement.

This also meant that the "new hotness" was a game built on the bones of a game we had already been playing for nearly a decade. We opened the door of the sleek new sports car only to reveal that it was last year's model with a spruced up dashboard and a new suspension. It was still very much that game, and it brought with it that game's problems, many of which 4th Edition had at least gone some of the way toward solving.

It wouldn't be so galling, but when Pathfinder was pitched to me, I was assured that it had addressed the problems of 3.5e, and it very much had not. It had made meaningful improvements, don't get me wrong, but those improvements were not enough to make up for the system that I had walked away from to get to that point.

The Compromise Choice

5th Edition rode over the hill like Gandalf and the Riders of Rohan. I had a preorder copy waiting for me at the local Chapters in the Metrotown Mall. I remember it well, because I was very excited to pick it up.

People who think of 5E as this dominant, conquering force who weren't around before the Critical Role era might not realize that not everybody was on the 5E train right from the get-go. It had made a lot of controversial removals that some of the more devout Pathfinder believers balked at: Gone flanking, gone skill points, gone (most) feats. Gone stacking +2 bonuses, all replaced with some nebulous thing called "Advantage."

But what was left was a much leaner machine. Combats in 5E were downright breezy compared to Pathfinder and even 4th Edition. The narrative-forward features that many had criticized 4th Edition for removing were back.

But also notably absent were a lot of the features that people liked in 4th Edition, like the "Bloodied" condition, skill challenges and Minions. WotC could not have another 4E on their hands with this one, so it had to look at feel the way people remembered it when they actually liked the game.

So, we compromised in the interest of finally bringing everyone to the table again. Eventually the 1-2 punch of Critical Role and Stranger Things led to the game ballooning into the giant that nobody knew it could be. By the release of Xanathar's Guide to Everything in 2017, the 5E era was well and fully underway, and it had gained such a lead that it would be almost impossible for any independent company to catch up.

Vomiting in Stanzas

But as ol' George Lucas would say, history is like poetry, it rhymes. And so, eyeing the digital landscape once again, Wizards of the Coast blasted its own dick and balls off with a shotgun in January 2023 with the OGL crisis, shattering a long-held truce with its third party creators.

And so once again, with Wizards of the Coast dangling its 3rd party creators over the ledge like John Matrix in Commando, it was up to Pathfinder to save the day. Months worth of stock flew off the shelves in a matter of weeks, as once again the D&D community was left to answer the question of "What are we to do if D&D fails us?"

Except this time, things were different for my table. Because we had been proactive. About a year prior, I had already been getting a bit tired of interminable D&D 5E, and my group was ready for something new. We made a surprising discovery that changed a lot about how I thought about the TTRPG industry as a whole.

Lancer was like a bolt of lightning from the heavens. Up until we played Lancer, we had attempted a lot of different systems but none of them had stuck. Dungeon World, Blades in the Dark, Warhammer 40k: Wrath and Glory, Star Wars Edge of the Empire, all thrown on the heap. None of those could replace D&D for us, for various reasons.

Lancer, on the other hand, was clearly made by people who were fans of the same parts of D&D that I was. The part where it forced you to play on a grid, drawing templates, glorious keywords. And perhaps most importantly, every mech had something approaching the concept of "Powers" that had been lost in the move from 4th to 5th.

And it was just fun. It had rules that enforced a 3-4 fight per level pacing that actually made the concept of attrition much more predictable than the loosey-goosey "let's just take a long rest now so we have all our spell slots" approach of 5E. And it forced us to actually finish adventures using a mission-like structure, tempering our worst DM impulses to just let things drag on and on in the interest of an "epic" story.

But what really struck me was that Lancer was written and maintained by such a small team. The majority of the combat mechanics were written and designed by Tom Parkinson-Morgan, who previously had been mostly known as the author of Kill Six Billion Demons.

This was not a case of some tenured TTRPG company dropping their masterpiece and shocking the world. This was a scrappy upstart conquering the Itch.io charts because, and I quote, "People are horny for mechs." Not only were they able to offer a digital toolset that rivals (and in some ways exceeds) the one that the billion-dollar company could put together, they also were able to get their product onto bookstore shelves this year thanks to a strategic partnership with Dark Horse.

It meant that brands other than the big, established players could do exactly what they did, and in some cases, better. It changed the game, literally.

Our Cup Runneth Over

So now, with the OGL 1.1 unpleasantness sending the brand of D&D firmly into the "uncool zone" once more, the D20 Fantasy community returns to Pathfinder with hat in hand.

But this is the part where things have changed.

Because this time we actually have options beyond just "Pathfinder, again." Want more of a "retro" Dungeon Crawler? There's Shadowdark, and the rest of the OSR that's been humming along in the background! Want something a bit more on the storytelling side of things? There's Fabula Ultima, or any number of PbtAs or Forged in the Dark games.

And if you, like me, are still mourning the death of 4th Edition, now there's Draw Steel from MCDM, which is taking up that banner and waving it for the sad dorks like me to rally under. And a cry rings out: "4th Edition was not perfect but it was actually pretty fun and Pathfinder wasn't really a suitable substitute!" It doesn't fit too well on a t-shirt, we can workshop it.

In a way, the 4E/Pathfinder scenario has flipped: This time, the incumbent in the election is the game that's built on "the old ways," and the incoming contenders are the ones who are making the bigger swings. It changes the conversation considerably when "the consensus choice" is also the one based on the oldest ideas. Its proponents don't really have an argument to make beyond "It's what we've always done, don't rock the boat."

Golarion's Strongest Soldiers

But perhaps more importantly, the group doesn't need to all agree on a game any more. It's never been more viable to find a pickup game on the internet than it is right now.

I've been giving Pathfinder a lot of shit this article, but I'm actually playing in a PF2E game on Sundays right now. I wanted to give 2nd Edition a shot to see if they had actually changed the parts of the game that I was most unhappy about and... Well, frankly they haven't, but that's not really a problem at this point.

Now that OGL mania has subsided and the incoming wave of PF2e players has somewhat crested, the people who have remained are the ones who didn't crawl back to 5E once it was deemed "safe" to do so. Those who have remained are the people who actually want to be there, rather than the ones who compromised for the sake of group harmony. Otherwise they'd just be playing 5E, again.

No More Compromise

That's the future that we should be moving towards, a future where nobody has to compromise for the sake of the group. 30,000 people backed the MCDM game on Backerkit, and the video where the Critical Role team makes Daggerheart characters currently has over 900,000 views on Youtube. The OGL didn't just fracture the D&D community, it created whole new ones.

Plus, there's a whole industry of indie creators who are begging for recognition. Review channels like Quinns Quest, Dave Thaumavore, and Questing Beast are increasing awareness about smaller titles, to the point where it's becoming less and less of an excuse to say that you don't know what's out there.

All that's required now is for those people to find each other, and Discord makes that really easy to do. Every publisher has its own Discord at this point because why wouldn't you, so everyone knows where to go to get a game going. Plus there's still Subreddits, and now services like Startplaying.games. And VTTs are more sophisticated than they've ever been.

Like I said: things have changed since 2011.

5E is just going to get weirder

So even if 5E probably isn't going away, the people who remain behind will increasingly be rubbing shoulders with the real cranks, the true freaks who only think in terms of words like "Action economy." And you know what? God bless. You've clearly found something you love, and I love that for you.

If you are sticking with D&D because you genuinely love it, then great. But if you're sticking to it because you're afraid to know what else is going on out in the scene, just know that you are increasingly going to be sharing the 5E community with people who have to make up the same justifications as you are. The FOMO will drive you mad.

I know, because I'm a pro-wrestling fan who doesn't watch WWE. I watch every day as people tear their hair out every time they see people online bragging about how much fun they're having with other companies. The cognitive dissonance of having made a hard choice about which product to spend your time and money on, only to see other people enjoying different products, gnaws at your soul.

It leads to stupid bullshit like Console Wars. It drives you mad, until eventually you're so deep in the tank that you're subscribing to podcasts whose only job is to talk shit about "the alternative" just so you feel better about the choice you've made.

So if you are sticking with 5E, you have to really know that it is the right choice for you. Because the people leaving it for other games have made similarly strong choices. It absolutely would be easier to just stick with 5E, but at the same time, that's going to be less and less of a good idea as the game gets more stale (and more "digital-first"), and the people who stay behind get weirder and more reactionary.

At this stage in the game's lifecycle, there would have been a 6th Edition, but now that we've seen the new Core Rulebook refresh for 2024, we can definitively say that that's not happening any time soon. Unless something really surprising happens and Wizards gets their clocks cleaned by the combined forces of the OGL, Daggerheart, Draw Steel and Core20, or the looming shadow of Brandon Sanderson actually manages to consume the entire industry as the prophecy foretold.

Even then, it seems unlikely that they'll ever totally kill the Golden Goose. But don't worry, 5E is evolving, except the thing it's evolving into is a morass of hacks and kludges thanks to the Creative Commons license. Then you'll get a new movement of "5E purists" who remember "The good old days" when healing potions WEREN'T a bonus action, back when you still had to house rule that in, as god intended!

It's do or die time

At this point, I hate to say it, but if in some bizarre freak occurrence all of the new alternatives like Daggerheart and Draw Steel utterly collapsed, I would probably just quit the TTRPG hobby entirely. If D&D went back to being the all-encompassing monster that it became during the 00's and mid-10's, then it would simply prove that this industry will never be mature enough to justify the emotional investment.

There likely won't be a better chance than right now. A failure here would be held up as precedent, to say "See? The last time you peasants rebelled against D&D, this happened." Hell, someone on Twitter used the RPG "Quest" as a snarky rejoinder to someone asking about how they felt about new fantasy TTRPGs!

I don't think that nightmare scenario is going to happen, I'm just making a rhetorical point that nothing that D&D could do at this point could get me to agree to going back to spell slots, death saving throws, and the fucking action economy, even if it somehow did manage to go back to being "The only game in town." I hear that "We're not going back" is a pretty popular slogan lately, I have to assume they're talking about not going back to 5E, right?

Editor's note: The audience is going to be doubled over in pain at that great US Politics joke, might as well just end the article here.

[whinnylikeahorse]

when im in a thought terminating cliche contest and my opponent says

**CHOOSE YOUR OWN PUNCHLINE**

[buttpants]

4e Party!

[redwizardofgay]

I spent all day snuggled up inside making dnd characters for my friends.

🙂

[beatx-mavie-archangelx]

do you ever homebrew a bit too much to the point that the game turns into basements and lizards?

[magicturtle]

I started listening to critical hit when I was pretty young (maybe 13 or 14? Don't recall exactly when, before 5e and during the second term of the Obama presidency if that helps), and it really got me into ttrpgs in a big way - I bought *so* many secondhand 4e books. After a few years, I kinda fell out of listening to it and carried on with my life, still maintaining ttrpgs as my primary hobby space. Recently I've revisited 4e (hoping to run it with my group after our lancer campaign wraps up) and the podcast as well, which led me to this blog. Something I've always said about 4e is that it's the only edition of dnd to be really honest and up front about mechanically centering combat - 3.5 and 5 both do as well, but seem a little embarrassed about it an unwilling to commit to the idea. Revisting 4 though, I think I may have been mistaken. Writing from the designers (ex, the example characters they present in "4th edition for dummies") and some elements of the PHB make me believe that they, on some level, still were trying to do the "three pillars" thing mechanically. For example, having utility powers that are either only usable in combat or only usable out of combat as well as utility powers that could theoretically be used in either case (see PHB Warlock level 12 utilities) seems like a kind of weird design choice, like having those parts of the game compete for the same character resources strike me kinda weirdly. Curious if you have any thoughts on this.

I think you’re right, but you’re looking at it at an angle. 4e was the first (and maybe last) time that WotC’s D&D was honest about its focus on combat, and that allowed them to create a tight, robust system that could then be extrapolated into hundreds of combinations. Part of that focus is seen in player options emphasizing choice and mechanical impact.

These twin ideas mean that on level up, when given a choice, the player can choose one of many options, and that option will be mechanically impactful. Now, 4e existed for a long time and, especially if you were picking up the digital magazines you could argue that these ideas were not always at the forefront, but as far as the printed material, choice and mechanical impact were always important, even if the execution wasn’t always successful.

The extension of these ideas out of the realm of combat is reflected in 4th edition’s skill challenges. Same idea, choice and mechanical impact, hence feats and powers that care about skill rolls. Now, folks around here know that RAW skill challenges were, pun intended, a little undercooked; which is why I wrote up the Lord Kensington rules. If you continue to listen to The Void Saga on Critical Hit you may notice that my skill challenges are both tough and impactful, adding this pressure motivates players to get better at skill challenges. By the end of the game most, if not all PCs had one (or more) flat skill bonus feats. Many had, as you point out, chosen to forego potential combat bonuses for something that kept them from crashing and burning on skill challenges.

Run son! It’s time for a skill challenge!

So yeah, tldr 4e’s crew tried to extend their design philosophy to the other two pillars in the form of skill challenges, but clearly it didn’t receive the same amount of time as combat. But also that’s ok, because I fixed it for them.

Thanks for listening and thanks for writing in!

[minis-and-magic]

My Review of All D&D Editions Part I: Original D&D (1974)

I played them all so you don't have to. In honor of THAC0, low scores are better.

Where it all started.

This is the primordial soup that the game we know and love crawled out of to take it's first shaky steps on dry land. The system itself is an eclectic mess delivered in classic Gygaxian prose (read: big fuckoff paragraphs with important game mechanics buried in the middle). It's less a complete game and more of a bolt-on modification for an existing game (Chainmail) which happens to be where you'll find most of the actual combat rules. Considering that the wilderness exploration section of booklet 3 boils down to "Use the rules and map from this 3rd party board game with our house rules", it has the feel of a very enthusiastic homebrew rather then a real product.

This game was made on a shoestring budget and a dream and it shows. The formatting is particularly challenging, even in my "White Box" version which has been revised and cleaned up from the first printings. It should go without saying, but very little love and care is put into the visual design or artwork. Important information is rarely visually emphasized, the tables are cluttered and the order and arrangement of information can cause a serious headache. Do not expect any helpful sidebars or neatly columned spell lists.

That said, the game itself can be pretty enjoyable. It does not feel like what I'd consider the expected D&D experience; it is at it's heart a tabletop wargame more than a roleplaying game. There are few mechanics or opportunities to develop your character outside of combat or sweet *sweet* looting. But even in this earliest iteration you can see the nascent ideas that really defined the game to come. You probably would find the spells, monsters, character races and classes very familiar outside of a few name oddities (Not Fighter... Fighting MAN)

Fuck the dragon entry, blow the art budget on a sultry amazon! -G. Gygax, probably.

Truthfully, its biggest sin is that it doesn't live up to its own direct descendants. All versions of the Basic rules (and their infinite OSR clones) are much simpler and cleaner, AD&D is a far more complete experience and all of them have a much better play experience at the actual table.

All in all I would say it's still playable in this day and age but definitely chore-adjacent. It will almost certainly feel clunky and unintuitive to anyone who grew up playing 3e onward and suffers heavily from a painful lack of streamlining. Later products like Greyhawk massively improve the flow of play, but it is pretty clear that this was an unfinished and unrealized version of the game.

FINAL REVIEW: Chart-a-liciousness: Moderately Chart Heavy Sleaziness: Someone lend her a shirt! Formatting: I had to get my glasses for this one Ease of Play: Hope you have two other out-of-print games FINAL SCORE: 9

[falco-lombardis-guyliner]

"I like dnd 5e but combat takes forever/martials are underpowered, so I've homebrewed a fix-" 4e. You want to play 4e. Do yourself a favor and try 4e.

The children yearn for Nentir Vale.

"But nobody wants to learn it." then you learn how to run it. The broad strokes aren't that different from 5e, there's just more addition.

[talenlee]

4e: I Like the Ardent

One of the elements of Dungeons and Dragons as a game system that I hold fast to as one of its greatest strengths is the nature of the class-species based system where a player is immediately invited to create a character the second they hear about the basics of the system. To this end, there is a design space in D&D where the classes in that class system regard the potential power carried in a name that meaningfully explicates what they do. Class systems, broadly, recognise the value of names for what a class is, because that conveys tone for what a class does. A Barbarian and a Fighter aren’t meaningfully useful classes but when positioned as game systems, one of them is immediately more technical than the other.

Even if, yes, I’m sure, Berserker is the more proper term.

Anyway, to this end, a D&D character class cares about what I think of as ‘name space’ – the kinds of things you can name classes in order to make those classes compelling, interesting and memorable, the handles that players can get a grip on. This means that some titles, like Wizard, Bard, Rogue, Sorcerer, the 90s idiot’s allure of The Ninja, have value and weight to them and you can almost always directly tie the quality of a class to the name it gets, as that’s a sign that someone had a real clear idea and wanted to do something. If the weird is generic (the Seeker) or completely obscure (the Factotum), then you were odds on dealing with something that was not designed with a strong class fantasy and were about to be in for A Bad Time that was maybe interestingly broken.

And then there’s the Ardent.

Ardents are a type of support character, a Leader in the context of D&D 4th edition. While by no means their first appearance in the game, 4th is the place where they got good. 3rd edition Ardents worked in a way that I will generously call weird, and were positioned as a psionic healer and therefore in direct competition with the Cleric, one of the best classes in the game that could always manage healing as an afterthought. Not a good look there at the best of times, especially with the strongest virtue of the psionic system of 3.5 being ‘guess what rules oversight I get to dance in.’

The simplest description for the Ardent is that they’re a melee psionic supporter that leads by example and expresses emotions hard. It’s a bit of a hard class fantasy to put into a single word, right? You’re a feeler. Wait no that’s bad. You’re an emotive? Nope, that won’t do it, either. You can tell Ardent is a rough word to use since it shows up in the flavour text of dozens of other things and the Paladin even gets a starting power called Ardent Vow.

Thing is once this idea is set aside, the actual mechanical package of the Ardent absolutely rules. For a start, it’s a melee weapon based Leader whose primary attacking stat is Charisma, and whose skills back that Charisma up. You can play a skulking streetwise Ardent or a sincere politician Ardent or even just a walking threat Ardent, they all have the compatibilities. They also rely on a big weapon, meaning you get some of that anime hero vibes of a character with a huge weapon leaping into combat to have a big impact.

Because their primary focus was how things feel they could put a lot of different emotional impacts on the kinds of moves they had. That could be something like leading your friends in a direct charge against an enemy or sometimes it could be about psychically dragging your enemy towards you so every friend you have gets to make an attack on them along the way like it’s an Assist Strikers spice reel from the attract mode on an arcade.

Ardents had a special ability that fired off when they got bloodied, which was rarely worth worrying about. They had another ability that change how you related to opportunity attacks, too – either you were better defended against them (prompting you to be more reckless about how you moved), you were better at dealing damage with them (and therefore became more mindful about forcing opponents into positions to deal with them) or you got to deal more damage when you got hit by them (in which case you were suddenly an immense idiot trying to get whacked on the snout all the time in combat just so you could retaliate with nova spikes).

They also grew well. See, they were a psionic class, which meant early on you picked some at-will powers and then instead of getting encounter attacks, you swapped those at-wills for other at-wills and got instead power points to choose how to fine-tune your powers for points in combat. This could lead to things like a slow burning opening turn setting up a late-combat nova, or vice versa, or maybe you’d find you had one power you loved to use all the time and focused on using it, with your other powers as niche, sometimes fooders. As an example, Demoralising Strike is a power you start with and, using no power points, just gives enemies a -2 to defenses when you hit with it. If you augmented it though, it would impose a penalty of -X, where X is 1+ your con mod, so in some cases, -5, or -6. This is a big swing and makes things very easy to hit and paints a very broad target.

On the note of painting a target, they also get the power Forward Thinking Cut, one of my favourite 4th edition powers ever. Used just on its own it’s a solid melee attack that gives everyone adjacent to you +1 to hit. That’s a perfectly reasonable power on its own. It can be augmented once to allow a higgledy-piggle side-step charge, but then it can be augmented a second time to instead allow two other characters to come with you on the charge. This kind of flexibility delights me, where it goes from a serviceable every-time power and then upgrades into a power for transporting people into the fray at the very start of combat.

It’s such a cool class about creating cool feeling moments.

Shame about the name.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talesofkiruu]

Working on a Gamma World One-Shot

Something about Gamma World changes how I describe things and brings out a different kind of writer

The opening text for my Gamma World one shot I plan on running:

Welcome to Gamma Terra, a backwater planet that Fate has played a cruel joke on the rest of universe. The site of the collapse of the barriers that separated all realities, the central point, the singularity, the "Big Mistake." You call it home.

The Chromatic Sea is sea of rolling fantastical colors with equally terrible fantastical things that lurk below the surface. An ancient vessel has suddenly emerge off the coast of the fishing village, Moray. Word spread quickly and wanderers, travelers, bandits, adventurers, researchers, and any looking to make a fortune descended upon Moray. Well to no ones surprised a whole lot of them ended up dead, by what, well it would take too long to list the various ways of gruesome death that was inflicted upon them. Just safe to say the vessel is know as the Devil's Yacht. The thing all that Ancient Tech is a ticket to the easy life and you are on your way to attempt to get a piece of that old-timey pie for yourself. Because you are the best and so much better than all those losers that came before you.

Or the lead up to the first encounter:

You're pickup trucks rattle and hop as you drive down Eel Road, the ruined remains of snaking highway system that is a little too close to the crumbling coastline of the Chromatic Sea for the average folks liking. But heck it is an easier drive, even with the possibility of crashing into the rocky water below, than driving through Horl Choo Choo Plains and ending up being dissolved by hangry shrubbery.

[mydnd]

As a 4th edition apologist, I'm glad to see it has its fans. I have a pocket rant about how people ragged on 4e, but love 5e for all of the stuff it does (that started in 4e).

4e holds a special place in my heart. I started playing D&D when 3e came out, and 4e addressed many of the complaints we had with 3e. So, it was surprising to see so many people bashing 4e when it gave us exactly what we wanted: streamlined and clear rules, martial classes that weren’t boring, defined roles for every class, easy encounter building, and genuinely helpful DM tips.

Imagine my disappointment when 5e reintroduced so many of the problems from 3e that I thought we had moved away from. In a way, though, I'm glad they are slowly reintroducing concepts from 4e into 5e, although I wish they had done that from the beginning.

[whereserpentswalk]

Wow so this new dnd edition already has:

-A terrible VTT with video game monetization.

-People switching to pathfinder.

-Rules changes meant to fix the old system that just make it worse.

-OGL drama.

Can't wait for dnd 4.5th edition.