By Ben Larsen
As many of you know, the newest edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the best-known tabletop roleplaying game in the world today, hits the shelves in two months. The internet is swimming with claims and predictions about the new edition, from the developers to doomsayers to diehard fans. If you want concrete previews of the new rules and content, you can find a webliography at the end of this article.
I had the privilege of attending the Dungeons & Dragons Experience convention in Arlington, Virginia, from February 28th to March 2nd. This was the first opportunity for the general public to play 4th edition, although it wasn’t a 100% finalized version. Again, there are plenty of reports and blogs out there (including my own) discussing the mechanical details of the new ruleset. Rather than rehashing those types of descriptions, what I’ll be focusing on here is a qualitative take on the new edition: how does it feel to play, compared to earlier incarnations of the game, and how is it liable to impact your fun at the table?
Getting Started
Although we were provided with pre-generated character sheets, I can tell you that creating characters is somewhat easier in 4th edition than it was in 3rd. The arduous aspects of creating a 3rd-edition character — allocating skill points, poring through dozens of feats and spells that have wildly different effects, and using multiple charts to base all the math on — are greatly reduced. Most progressions are unified, eliminating the need for all those charts; the plethora of skills have been condensed, and skills are either trained or untrained without counting all those points; feats have mainly minor effects and very few of them can be chosen at 1st level. Best of all, most choices can be retrained, within limits, as your character progresses in level, so if you make a bad decision, you won’t be stuck with it forever.
Many of the things new players often find confusing…are either simplified or eliminated.
General gameplay was also easier to get into. Many of the things new players often find confusing, such as moving on the diagonal, calculating areas of effect, and the dozens of subtle options for moving and attacking, are either simplified or eliminated. Even I, as an experienced player, found my turns going much faster. There were a couple of things that were unintuitive — for instance, certain abilities require you to choose the “closest opponent,” and while one opponent might by obviously closer by physical distance on the map, it might be considered equidistant or even further away by the new distance rules. However, these rules were quickly mastered by everyone I played with, including some who had never played D&D of any edition before.
There was one aspect of the new system that challenged everyone, beginners especially: strategic movement. Mobility in the game is both greatly increased and more important to determining the outcome of a fight. For instance, one of the types of opponent we fought was the kobold dragonshield, which had the special ability to take a step away from you whenever you ended your movement next to it. This led to a lot of confusion from the players, especially the melee attackers, because every time they moved up to hit it, it would just step away. In order to actually land an attack on it, you had to plan your movement very carefully, so that there was no way for it to retreat, or find an alternate solution, such as having one character grab onto it while others attacked. These elements certainly made combat more interesting, but they could easily become a frustrating experience for beginners to strategic games, or even experienced players not used to thinking outside the old-school D&D box.
Getting Into the Swing of Things
Once the players had the basics down, the dynamics of long-term play started to show themselves. Although I never got to play with a group for longer than one five-hour adventure, I could definitely start to see the emergence of a real sense of roles forming. “Roles” is one of the buzzwords for 4th edition. Each class has a designated primary job to fulfill in combat: Defenders (such as fighters and paladins) hold down the front lines and keep the other characters from getting pounded on, Strikers (rogues, rangers, and warlocks) deal substantial amounts of damage to key opponents, Leaders (clerics and warlords) are responsible for healing and otherwise supporting the team, and Controllers (just the wizard, so far) manipulate the battlefield and wipe out masses of weak foes. There’s some freedom to go against type, but not much, the logic being that the developers didn’t want to give the players enough rope to hang themselves. When a character is outshined by another at what they’re supposed to do best, or is unable to fill a critical role in the team, it’s less fun for everyone. The role categorization helps ensure that every character has a job to do, and to be a contributing part of the team in a meaningful way every round.
While there’s certainly room for a single player to do some awesome things, a team who can communicate and are familiar with each others’ strengths, weaknesses, and options can be impressive nearly every round.
I’ve heard anecdotes again and again to the effect that nothing is deadlier in an RPG than a team of women who know how to cooperate. This will clearly be truer than ever in 4th edition. I’ll give you an example, something that didn’t exactly happen in our game, but came close. The party is traveling along a mountain pass, when they are attacked by a group of shadar-kai, a sort of twisted, evil, goth fey. The ranger and warlock go first, severely injuring the lead monster. The fighter goes next, closing the distance and reducing the monster to less than half his hit points. Then the enemies go, concentrating their fire on the fighter and damaging her severely. The first shadar-kai now activates an ability he can use only when bloodied, and goes into a whirling dervish of death, knocking the fighter unconscious and moving on to attack the rest of the party. The paladin takes a swipe, misses, then draws an attack from the monster as she moves up to the fighter and uses lay on hands to restore her to consciousness. She also positions herself in such a way that any opponents coming from the front will have to go through her first before reaching the vulnerable fighter, which means that if the first shadar-kai retreats, he’ll reach the fighter first. Why would he retreat? Because it’s the cleric’s turn, and she casts cause fear. The injured monster attempts to flee past the fighter, who hits him and stops him in his tracks. The cleric finishes her turn by moving up a little and healing the fighter some more. Finally, when the fighter’s turn comes around again, she grins, takes a step to the side, and uses her tide of iron to attack the dangerous foe and push him off the side of the cliff.
This kind of play is commonplace in 4th edition. A party that works together can beat challenges far above their level. On the flip side, a Leeroy Jenkins-style player who dashes off without regard to the rest of the party will increase the difficulty significantly. While there’s certainly room for a single player to do some awesome things, a team who can communicate and are familiar with each others’ strengths, weaknesses, and options can be impressive nearly every round.
Getting Simple with the Math
No matter how much one likes math, too much of it creates mistakes and slows the game down. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve updated a character sheet and found a +1 that I’ve been failing to apply for the last five sessions. My wife is playing a swordsage in our current 3rd edition game, and her rounds take forever because of all the math. An example of a “normal” attack for her might be using shadow blade technique augmented with burning blade while in assassin’s stance. This involves rolling 2d20, adding her normal modifier, the bonus from the bard’s song, and her flanking bonus to each roll, then deciding which die to use; if she hits with the lower roll, she adds 1d6 (her sword’s basic damage) + 3 (her Strength and magic weapon) + 3 (the bard song) +2d6 (assassin’s stance) + 5 (her Dexterity modifier, which she can add while in a Shadow Hand stance) + 5 (her Wisdom modifier, which she can add when making a Shadow Hand attack) + 1d6 (the shadow blade’s bonus damage) + 1d6+7 (the burning blade’s bonus damage). None of those things apply all the time, so it all has to be added up every time. This is an extreme example for a level 7 character, but high-level characters can get even worse.
I can’t speak very much about 4th edition’s amount of math firsthand, but the promise is that this kind of thing gets much, much better. No more two-weapon-fighting rogues who force you to add up 7d6 four times a round. No more dozens of modifiers all applying at the same time. No more having to calculate on the fly what armor class an opponent has against a brilliant energy weapon while flat-footed. The same is true for getting creative: the game no longer grinds to a halt when a player decides to grapple the troll. It’s a simple roll—your Strength against the troll’s Reflex defense—and the result is that the troll can’t move from its current location until it breaks free with an Athletics check against your Fortitude defense—or claws your face off. That’s it. (In contrast, the grapple rules in the 3rd edition Player’s Handbook occupy nearly a page and a half.) And if you get really creative (like swinging from a chandelier to kick an opponent off a balcony onto another opponent on the ground), it’s very easy to adjudicate that sort of thing, too, using only ability checks, skill checks, and static defenses.
Getting out of the Dungeon
Everything I’ve talked about so far has centered on combat. That’s only natural—D&D started off as a derivative of wargames, and combat is the most detailed aspect of the rules. That doesn’t mean that non-combat rules have been neglected, though. We’ve been promised a working set of “social encounter” rules better than the ones in 3rd edition (where a well-designed bard could turn a foe into a friend more or less automatically), but those weren’t demonstrated at the show. What was demonstrated, briefly, was the “skill encounter” system, which allows players to find creative solutions to a problem using the strengths that your character has. In our adventure, we had been involved in a street brawl and had to escape before being noticed by the guards. As the cleric, I used my Heal skill to pretend to be administering to the fallen, then used my Intuition to look for a moment when no one was watching and slip off into the crowd. Other options included sneaking off into the shadows (Stealth), climbing a roof (Athletics), hitching a ride on the side of a passing merchant cart (Acrobatics), influencing the crowd to act as a distraction (Streetwise), recalling where the entrance to the town’s sewer/dungeon system was and slipping into it (History), and so on. A little bit of creativity and anyone can find something to do in just about any situation. You can also choose how fancy you want to be — choose something simple and mess it up and you could get into big trouble, but choose something complicated and you could get an extra benefit out of it. Communication between players and DM is critical here — if the player tries something that they think is a moderately difficult Athletics check, and the DM decides it’s a difficult Acrobatics check, there could be some hurt feelings if it doesn’t get resolved before making the roll. Skill and Social encounters are worth just as much experience as a combat encounter, so a group who’s not as big on combat can avoid it much more easily, if they wish, than in previous editions.
Getting Promoted
The task of the DM is both easier and harder. The math side of it is a breeze: coming up with balanced and interesting groups of monsters to face, calculating experience rewards, putting together treasure troves, generating advanced or templated monsters or NPCs—all of these things take a fraction of the time that they did in 3rd edition. This kind of menial labor has been greatly reduced.
The hard part is the part where you really have to think. You can’t just plop down a room with some monsters in it — a narrow passageway, an ill-conceived trap, or a potent environmental hazard can all make things far more difficult for the PCs than the numbers would indicate. A well-designed map needs to be large enough to maneuver, with any hazards in places where they’re relevant but not crippling to either side, and that requires a lot of foresight (and a lot of space on your battle mat). A monster with an interesting ability that the PCs just don’t get can take down a whole party — and a monster with an interesting ability that you don’t get can either take down the party (if your interpretation makes it more powerful than it’s supposed to be) or make it an insignificant speedbump (if you don’t use it advantageously). A skill challenge or PC improvisation makes you think on your feet, and you have to be able to do so in a fair manner. If you come up with a “fun” trick for the hill giant that uses its through-the-roof Athletics check, the PCs may get crushed without a fair chance. DMs may find themselves “fudging” things for a few sessions to make up for their mistakes, until they get used to the demands of the new system.
Getting Digital
For some reason, the rumor has persisted that 4th edition will somehow require the use of a computer. It’s just not true. You need books, dice, paper and pencil, and something to use for a map and minis or tokens. That being said, there are some new digital tools that will be available for 4th edition, some free and some requiring the Dungeons & Dragons Insider subscription service (initially priced at $14.95/month, $38.85 for 3 months, or $119.40 for a year, per person). The subscription buys you access to the new electronic forms of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, a rules database (which contains info for all 4e supplements, whether you own the book or not), a character creator which includes both mechanical (a character sheet) and visual aspects (a customizable “virtual mini”), and the D&D Game Table, which allows you to use maps, minis, die rolls, etc. more or less just as you would at a physical table.
For some reason, the rumor has persisted that 4th edition will somehow require the use of a computer…
These are all take-it-or-leave-it kinds of materials, but the Game Table is worth special mention. Subscribers can connect with each other over the internet, “meet up” from their home computers, play (text and voice chat, though not video chat, are integrated), and save their session to continue later. For the casual player, that’s pretty convenient. If your group has half an hour to get a bit of gaming in, you can all load up the program from where you left off and suspend it when you have to. No setting up or forgetting where you left off — you don’t even have to haul out your rulebooks or character sheet, as it’s all stored (and indexed!) online. Each mini will stay right where you left it, even in the middle of combat, with the previous rounds’ actions recorded. If one player has an unstable connection, the session persists; there’s no “host” and no complications about logging out and logging back in again. If the DM allows it, play can continue without them even being connected. In theory, the Game Table can be used for games other than D&D, but you’d have to supply your own rules.
Of course, the “casual player” may not be willing to shell out $10/month/person, in which case you’re stuck playing the old-fashioned way. But passing on Insider won’t prevent you from playing the way you’ve been playing all along.
Getting Back to the Point
A lot of concern has been expressed on the internet about whether 4th edition still feels like D&D. Some are afraid it will feel more like an MMO, others that it’s dumbed down to the point of being more like a board game than an RPG. My feeling is that it feels like D&D. It’s undergone a lot of changes since 1st edition, when I started playing, but the basic feel of it is the same as ever. You’re still attacking monsters, casting spells, killing them and taking their stuff. You’re still adventuring in a pseudo-medieval society with elves, dwarves, and halflings. You’re still rolling d20’s to hit and d-something-elses for damage. There are some things missing that you might be used to — magic missiles that always hit, fireballs that involve dumping your whole collection of d6’s on the table, multiclassing that nets you the iconic abilities of multiple classes at once, and most of all classes and races (the druid, bard, and monk, among others, are being reserved for future releases, and gnomes and half-orcs can, at release, be found only in the Monster Manual, although they’re playable if your DM permits). But in the grand scheme of things, these changes are relatively minor.
So in my opinion, there’s no real paradigmatic change, either forward or backward. Combat is more streamlined and potentially more exciting; there are fewer boring moments while you wait for other players to make their decisions (in or out of combat) and you have nothing interesting to do; there’s less risk of feeling like a burden on the party, or feeling like you never get to have fun because you’re too busy taking care of other peoples’ problems. It’s all little things. These little things do seem to add up to a more fun experience (again, based mainly on my meager 11 ½ hours of trying it out), but it’s a quantitative change, not a qualitative one. If you never cared for D&D before, chances are 4th edition won’t change anything (unless your main complaint was that it was too slow, in which case you may want to try it out), and if you were a fan before, you’ll probably like 4th edition as much as or a little more than you liked previous ones.
Webliography
Article © April 2008 by Ben Larsen.
