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Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition - play review
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Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition.
I was skeptical, to put it mildly, when I realized that D&D 4th Ed. was going to fully implement a miniatures game as it’s combat system. My players have heard me say, close on a bajillion times; “I love using miniatures. But, I hate having to use miniatures.”
For me, once the miniatures become a requirement of a system, they cease to be fun. Suddenly your Rifts game turns into a game of Necromunda or Warhammer 40K. Nothing at all wrong with those games. They’re both excellent products… but, they’re not RPGs. They’re wargames. When I sit down to play a role-playing game, I want to play a role, not a game-piece. When I sit down to play Dungeons and Dragons, I want to play the Dungeons and Dragons of my youth. I want to play that game that I was playing with my friends before any of us were old enough to vote or drive.
In those early games, (and here’s where the weird twisted-ness of my thinking reaches a record-breaking apex) we used minis. In fact, not only did we use minis, we loved using minis. They were awesome! But, here‘s my point;… we didn’t have to use them. The system was designed to allow you to picture the action in your head without necessarily needing visual aides. The visual aides helped, but they were strictly an option rather than a necessity. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my inherent resentment of authority, my propensity toward disobedience, or perhaps it’s just the fact that WotC is a phenomenon that I have come to equate with skin-rash, flat-tires and taxes. Whatever the reason, I was apprehensive about a role-playing system that built each and every ability, spell, prayer, exploit, etc. on the logic of grid-squares.
To me, it was an extension of the problem that I’ve always had with the “class-and-level” element of the game. By my estimation, class-and-level is just a flat-out inferior and outdated method for character advancement. It feels as if your character, as a living, vibrant entity, is placed on a set of rails that lead to an inevitable conclusion, rather than a completely open-ended journey whose final destination is something of which you haven’t the vaguest inkling and can therefore actually become curious and excited about.
"Required-minis" felt like that to me. Forget creativity on the battlefield. Your powers work this way and this way only. Your character is not a living, vibrant entity anymore. Your character is now a chess piece. He can move like this and do these particular things. No more of that pesky creative problem-solving and strategizing. Just stop having ideas of your own and play your character the way you’re supposed to... the way the almighty WotC says you should.
At least, that’s how I’ve felt until this past weekend.
Last Saturday, I sat down with one of my gaming crews to run a game of D&D set in Eberron. This was my first D&D campaign in nearly eighteen years. Three editions have been published since the last time I ran a long-term D&D game. My last real campaign was a Dragonlance game I ran with my old high-school gaming buddies. That game lasted a couple years, then we moved on to Palladium, White Wolf,… you get the idea. Anyway, since then, and for my entire adult life I’ve been running other games. I played in a couple of really good 2nd Ed. D&D games, but I didn’t run any. I missed the boat on 3rd Edition. When that one first hit store-shelves I was immersed in Aberrant and Rifts. A year later, I discovered and fell head-over-heels for Exalted 1st Edition, which consumed the bulk of my temporal and financial gaming-resources for the commencing six years.
By the time I finally got it into my head to check out 3rd Edition, they had released 3.5 and the game had long since swollen into a ponderous plethora of rules that, at higher levels became so complex that the game bordered on unplayable. Many players I knew were complaining of having to retire characters at level 15-16 because of the complexity of the game at that point. So, I was less than enthused about diving in. Ultimately, I learned 3.5, and bought a bunch of supplements. But, never ran it beyond a one-shot session here and there.
So, a couple years later we get edition number 4. WotC predictably starts things off by immediately promising the world. They start promising the “next big thing.” They say that the rules have been simplified, will leave more room for creative choices in designing and playing our characters and will redefine the D&D experience. They claim to have reinvented the wheel from the ground up. In other words, everything you’d expect a big company like WotC to say when they’ve got a new version of an old product coming out.
What I hadn’t, couldn’t and never would have suspected, was that they weren’t just blowing shinola. Don’t get me wrong, there was and still is plenty of shinola being blown from the WotC camp (that online gaming table that was a selling-point of 4th Edition since it was announced two years ago,... is it coming any time in our future, guys?) but, much of what they claimed about 4th Edition was actually true.
On my initial read of the rules, I was very impressed. When I read a new RPG, I read it from a very firmly rooted GM’s (or, in this case “DM’s”) perspective. I tend to evaluate, appraise and analyze rpg-rules from a very “How-well-will-this-help-me-run-the-game” -bias first and then appraise it’s player-character options second. For as long as I‘ve been gaming, I have GMed about 95% of the time, playing as a PC the remaining 5%. So, my bias, while perhaps lopsided, should be understandable.
From that standpoint, D&D seemed to be up to snuff. I was struck by how easy and bordering-on casual they’d made encounter design as well as by how much they had streamlined and simplified NPC stat blocks, while simultaneously making the NPCs seem more visceral. They not only made things simpler and easier, they also zeroed in on the things that made the game fun and amplified them, filling in the gaps left by what they’d removed from the system with more of the stuff that made the system fun to play.
Still, I’d never actually seen the game in play.
For my first session of this new campaign, I ran Keep on the Shadowfell (with the D&DI Eberron-Conversion notes, of course,) which is a module for first level characters. It’s designed to take the PCs from first to third level. It has a number of encounters, ranging from mild skirmishes to white-knuckled, desperate battles. But, even as I set up my DM’s screen, poured out my dice-bag and laid out my notes, I was filled with doubt about how a completely miniatures-based rules set was going to play.
My fears were completely misplaced.
The rules played awesome!
The system allowed for my players to develop characters that they wanted and could get excited to play. The skill-challenges system came into play a couple of times, both rewarding experiences. Skills feel like something more than just task-resolution checks now. It feels like your roleplay is important in the challenges.
At the table were...
~ Josh, playing a Gnome Bard named Julius,
~ Sean, playing a Changeling Swordmage named Kai,
~ Nate, playing a Human Wizard named Rogen,
~ Jake, playing a Dragonborn Paladin/Sorcerer Hybrid (Hybrids are currently in open-playtest for D&D-Insider subscribers) named Bastian, and...
~ Karen, who was playing a Bat-like Shifter Wulin Xia (a Monkish, Homebrewed Class from the D&D forums,) named Setara.
As we played, the game didn’t have just a couple of cool little moments. Rather, it was nothing but a continuous stream of cool little moments. No one took a backstage to anyone else. Everyone repeatedly got a chance to shine, both in and out of combat. Beyond being useful, each character was unquestionably crucial to each and every encounter. They moved about the field of battle, utilizing their various abilities to really fight, to really wage-war against the bad-guys, not just walk up to them and trade to-hit checks and damage rolls until they fell down.
There was certainly no shortage of creativity in the combat encounters. Our Wizard moved himself about the field like a pro, keeping his allies between himself and the enemy, laying down a deluge of Thunderwaves and Dagger Clouds. The Defenders, our Paladin, Wulin Xia and Swordmage, bashed, slashed and tossed opponents all over the place, while creating a never-ending, swirling tempest of “marks,” which would have kept even the hardiest force of foes dizzy with frustrated confusion as our Bard hurled devastatingly-damaging arcane-powered insults and rhetoric at the enemy and shifted his allies to and fro, simultaneously bolstering their resolve and driving them onward to victory. Honestly, I felt bad for those poor kobolds. We were initially worried about running with no true Strikers and three, count ‘em three Defenders. But, it played amazingly well.
And the role-play?
It was there in full-force, throughout the entire game. Now, the quality of the role-play is, of course due to the fact that I’ve got the greatest group of gamer-friends on the planet and they‘re excellent at what they do. But, it should not be overlooked (even though it often is) that role-play in combat is much more prevalent and possible when the system stays out of your way. The best rpg-systems are the ones that disappear in play. D&D 4E certainly did that for us. The Bard, you see was not the only one hurling scathing challenges and retorts at the kobolds as they stammered and sputtered uneducated replies, straining the three or four reptilian brain cells in their little heads. All of the PCs were making combat decisions based not only upon strategy, but also on what would have had the most dramatic impact. This did not come at the expense of strategy, nor did strategy detract from it in the least. Coincidence? Maybe. All I know is that we never had to sacrifice doing the cool thing, for doing the effective thing. The two overlapped every single time, in every single round. I harbor no illusions that this will always be the case, after all nothing's perfect. But, clearly this is an effect of system-design and as such, it will often be the case and that’s more than good enough for me.
All of this culminated in an encounter that was, I swear, the single greatest combat scene I have ever run in the damn-near twenty-five years that I’ve been GMing. For those familiar with Keep on the Shadowfell, it was encounter A3. The PCs were storming the kobolds’ lair in the caves behind a waterfall after dispatching their clan-mates outside.
This was a fourteen-round, level-freaking-one, fight with a bunch of housecat-sized lizard-men in a barn-sized cave… and it was more fun, epic, exciting and entertaining to me than the Battle of Helms Deep in “The Two Towers.”
The last five or six rounds of that combat-encounter consisted of each of us hanging onto the edge of our seats, watching fate’s pendulum swing back and forth over and over again, each of us honestly not having the slightest idea which side was going to emerge victorious, and cliff-hanging by our fingernails on each and every die roll,… both checks and damage. Several times, we thought the PCs were doomed, only to have the tables suddenly turned by a clever, creative idea,… only to have the tables turned back again by a couple critical hits or unlucky rolls,… only to have the tables rotated still one more time by another inventive idea,… and on and on.
(I swear those proverbial "tables" were spinning like equally proverbial airplane propellers.)
People were leaning in to see each die hit the table, standing up and cheering at a crit or a high damage roll, and cringing audibly at each miss or failed save.
We had gotten a late start, as so many first sessions often do, due to last minute character touch-ups, etc. and as such, this fight (the last of the session) began at 3am and went until after 4, yet no one was nodding-off or bleary-eyed. It was all just so engaging! The combat played fast and furious and people weren’t just saying “I swing with my sword” and rolling the dice. They were roaring taunts at their opponents, shouting encouragement to their allies and describing every fury-fueled lunge and parry. It was all marvelous.
Any reservations I had about 4th Edition were alleviated in that one encounter. This game is certainly up to snuff.
Yes, it’s still class-and-level. Yes, I still think that’s an antiquated way of doing things and yes, there are certainly better games out there for character-depth and development. D&D won’t win any awards for high-drama or deep inter-character relationship exploration. Nor will it turn your head with engaging plot mechanics. But, Dungeons and Dragons is definitely the best in the industry at the particular things it’s designed to do; namely exciting miniatures-based combat and good, old fashioned dungeon-adventuring. You know, that stuff that drew almost all of us to this whole role-playing thing in the first place?
And as far as all that loftier stuff is concerned (high-drama, character-exploration, PC soul-searching, etc.) D&D may not incorporate those things into its canon rules in any way, but… the rules are certainly designed to allow for all of those deeper things by keeping out of the way of such things. That’s more than a lot of games do to encourage story.
Each pre-published 4th Edition module that I’ve read has actually come out and said; “Don’t run this module exactly as it’s printed. The best thing you can do for your players and for your game is to make up more story, based around their characters and your campaign. Do not run this adventure right out of the book like a script. Make it your own.”
Now, coming up with more plot and personalizing the game is something that I’ve always done anyway… and not just to modules, but to entire settings and systems. I think that’s just good GMing. How else are you going to 1) keep your players from flipping through a couple of books and eliminating the element of surprise from the game, and 2) make the players feel like their characters actually matter and aren't just interchangeable game-pieces? But, I was both shocked and pleasantly surprised to hear/read the D&D designers and writers suggesting that DMs do it. That is quite possibly what impressed me the most about this new edition. For all their numbers, classes, levels and grids, they’re still putting character and story first above all.
Everything worked wonderfully.
I liked the game when I read it, but I loved it when I ran it. It feels like D&D again.
I can think of no praise that would glow more brightly than that statement.
I’m a believer now.
--
For more info: Email Christopher at Cosmic.ZenStorm@gmail.com.
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