It's Like Moving Into A New House, Complete With Hernia

After a hiatus of a month or so, we finally got to play D&D again last weekend. Well, technically. We decided to take the plunge and get into 4e so we aren't completely incompetent when we show up at Gen Con this year. It was time to roll up characters, and with the exception of Sirgeekelot, nobody had played 4e before. God, it hurts to change editions. I'm sure many of you can sympathize here. In 3.5e, I'd been playing and using that book long enough that I could find whatever I needed pretty fast. (And if I couldn't, Stupid Ranger usually knew the answer.) Now we're all screwed!

That being said, it did seem somewhat more straightforward to roll up one's character in 4e than in previous versions. I decided to try out the Wizard class, the lone "Controller" role in the book, to see how it stacked up against the 3.5e wizards I was used to seeing. Here's a few thoughts on the experience:

• After some mild arm-twisting, Dante talked us all into trying out the various methods of rolling up stats. Sirgeekelot did the point-buy system, I did the standard array method, and Stupid Ranger did the traditional rolling method. I've always hated methods other than rolling, I think it lends to mediocre stats and I usually use a crappy stat as a personality quirk for my character. Even so, I did wind up with a Wizard with a 16 INT and no stats so low that he would not to be able to open a door or wet himself in public or something. I think the standard array would be a good way to roll stats up if you wanted everybody to be exactly equal stats-wise or you were in a huge hurry. But I think I'll be rolling next time.


• The designers of 4e have been dutifully streamlining everything to make play go faster, more balanced and more smooth. This means they've combined and abstracted some features out from 3.5e - like Spot and Listen checks, which are now Perception. The list of skills is about one third of its former length, and choosing and training in these skills no longer requires a degree in calculus and a magical sherpa guide of leprechaun descent to guide you through the process -- changes which I welcome.
  
  Saving throws now use 2 ability scores, the higher of which determines one's bonus. This means that for the first time in recorded history, you can roll up a wizard with a good Reflex save. (Incidentally, our good buddy Sirgeekelot has designed a new t-shirt based on this discovery, which is now on sale in our shop.) I'm not entirely sure why INT would make one's Reflex save higher, as I've seen some very smart people walk into some very hard punches in my day, but I'm going to chalk this one up to "it makes the game more balanced".


• It seems like everybody has spells now. It's just that melee types tend to cast their spells with swords and maces and call them "exploits". Every class features a lot of picking of specifically named powers, which was always the part that took me forever when playing a spellcaster in 3.5e. Despite this, it did not take long for me to pick powers (probably because there weren't many to choose from at 1st level). This was nice too.


• I initially looked at the wizard and cleric powers and got upset because all I saw was combat spells. How the hell was I supposed to magically lock a door or grease up a staircase/elk/orc princess? I'm a roleplayer, dammit!
  
  It took me several minutes of kvetching and about 8hp damage from Dante's Clue Bat before I realized that rituals and spells were not, in fact, the same thing. A lot of the non-combat spells can be found in the Rituals section in the back, but not even close to all of them even the 3.5e PHB had. As previously stated, they have done some work to combine/generalize the usage of many game elements, so it may well be that I just haven't read over the list enough. One thing I didn't like, though, is that most of the rituals take a great deal of time longer than their 3.5e spell counterparts. Need to magically lock (or unlock, for that matter) a door before the bad guys catch up to you? I hope you have a 10 minute head start. I'm not sure why the designers felt the need to do this or what rationale is behind it, but this certainly puts a cramp in my "use spells for unusual roleplaying purposes" style.
  
  The other weird thing about rituals -- why in the hell are they at the very end of the book? They're literally the very last thing (besides a page of playtester credits) before the index. Did the people laying out the book forget that part until after the presses got started and just cram it in there at the end? Not that I really mind. It makes them much easier to find. My initial impulse was to say it would have been a little better to find it somewhere closer to the character classes, but I suppose the previous editions had the spells broken out into their own section as well. The fact that class-specific powers and everybody-gets-em rituals are separate was a little confusing to me, but it's something I can get past pretty easily.
  


• There were some conventions frequently used in the book that I found, for lack of a better term, obtuse. It was like they expected you to know what it was, but hid the definition somewhere really obscure. Dante and I both searched for quite awhile before we figured out that [W] was shorthand for one's weapon damage. A lot of the powers in the book say things like "and an ally makes a saving throw". A saving throw against what? Does that mean he gets to succeed the next time he has to roll one, or is this some beneficial effect you're giving him (and if so, why is he saving against it)?
  
  However, I have a feeling these are clearly defined somewhere I didn't read yet, and that their usage will flow freely like water for all of us at the table once we get to play for a few sessions. I'm sure I'm going to feel completely stupid once I find out what this new saving throw business means.


• I got a definite impression that they're approaching 4e as a work in progress, with errata being issued and the PHB2 slated for release next year. It sort of reminds me of how software patches work, except unfortunately adding and changing things to tabletop gaming means you either have to juggle 5 books to play with everything or you have to buy new books that have all the new stuff in it. My wallet, my back, and my all-consuming lust for convenience hate that part.

I think most of the pain of rolling up our first 4e characters had a lot more to do with the fact that we are playing with a whole new set of rules than any real problems with the rules themselves. That and we really didn't get to use these characters at all yet (that's next session).

I will have to reserve judgment until we actually get to play for a few sessions, but I'm hopeful about this new edition at long last. Overall, I still have some minor concerns with 4e but it's not the "OMG ITS NOW WORLD OF WARCRAFT TABLETOP RPG" that I had feared. I was confused by a lot of things, but I have a hunch that it will likely turn out that I, rather than the game, am obtuse. Only time will tell!