Date: 2008-06-22 20:08 Subject: D&D Fourth Edition Thoughts Security: Public Mood: optimistic Music: Colbert Report theme

So, I’ve been playing Fourth Edition D&D for a month now, I suppose I ought to say something about it.

Short answer: I like it.

Long answer: It’s not perfect. They made a lot of things simpler, which is nice, but the result is that you get a combat system for minis. Non-combat abilities for PCs are greatly reduced, and monster abilities only concern what they can do for the thirty seconds they will be in existence. But I think it’s a worthwhile trade. Combat is a lot more fun than it was in third edition. I like that the first level PCs have a number of cool things to do every fight and can’t get taken out with a single hit. I like the strategy involved in figuring out how to best use everyone’s abilities together in order to win the fight. I like that every time I’ve played, I’ve wanted to tell people afterwards how cool this bit or that bit was. And that’s what I want from my combat system. The non-combat stuff I can largely handle on my own. My greatest worry is that I’ll become very annoying to play with, telling all the other players what they should do next.

Specific things I like:

Minions – These are monsters the same level as the other monsters in the fight, but they have only one hit point. If you hit one, it dies. They also lack special abilities, so they’re simpler to run. This lets you throw a lot of them at the PCs for them to mow through the way good action heroes should. They do not lack the ability to hit and damage PCs, however, so they are a credible threat. When I ran Feng Shui, players would just ignore the mooks and take out the main bad guys. Doing that in 4E will get you killed. 

Large Encounters – This is the first thing I heard about 4E that got me interested in it. Fights that spill through multiple rooms, doors bursting open and reinforcements pouring out… it’s not really anything you can’t do in 3E, but with encounters scaled to use large numbers of enemies, it makes it easier.

Page 42 of the DMG

Healing Surges – this is an extension of the Reserve Points concept Mike Mearls used in Iron Heroes, to give PCs a certain number of hit points to use during a fight, but you have more hit points to replace those with afterwards. So to take a pre-gen second level paladin from a module I just got for example, he's got 33 hit points to get through a fight, but in a day he can take 143 points of damage. Magical healing won’t add substantially to that number, but it will let him get damage back during a fight.