I don’t know, it actually reminds me a bit of NWN minus having the hassle of hitting the “rest” button after every battle (because of encounter reset powers). Sure there are shorter duration spells and effects, but that’s nothing that can’t be (and usually is) tweaked.
Well I’m psyched enough to see if I can start up a new local group. I’m a little concerned about the minis. It seems this version will really require you to play on a battle mat with minis or maybe tokens. What do you guys usually use to kepe track of the monsters and PC’s? Are minis more inexpensive now a days. We never used them before simply because they used to be so darn expensive 6-8 years ago.
My friend has tons of minis, I think they’re relatively inexpensive now (though the cost of paint, if you’re so inclined, could kill you). The new D&D minis figures could probably be used, I think those are pretty cheap, and pre-colored, but they don’t seem to have much variety.
We tend to use minis pertaining to the monsters, if that fails we use some old tokens from the starter sets or dragon magazine, or failing that pick a mini utterly unrelated to the enemy in question.
Correction, they’re intended to be used. They are cheap and they look it, being made of plastic, but they’re very handy. There have been about 14 sets with 60 characters each, along with some special minis, for 840+ different minis. Many are monstrous, but there is still an overwhelming number of core race minis, so it’s not too hard to find one that looks like your character. Granted, for the sets not currently in production, it takes a little hunting around to find them, but I’ve yet to see any other line of fantasy miniatures provide as much of a variety geared for D&D as the D&D Minis line.
ETA: I just saw that you said new. You might have been unaware that the minis have been in production for a long time before now. It’s just that with 4E, the Minis game is getting a boost in publicity.
Yeah, I only recently saw them a few months ago, I’ve been utterly unaware of the game until nowish. Listen to Bosstone, not me.
Personally I’m willing to see if they capitalize on the D&D character visualizer on DnD insider and allow you to special order minis of characters you have in your vault.
As for the wizard stuff, no it doesn’t look like we can scribe new spells. However they seem to have added in that ritual stuff (at least I THINK it’s new, I’m fairly certain ALMOST everything described was just encompassed by the old casting system), in which the rules for scribing rituals into your spellbook is basically the old system (up to the ritual taking up the same number of pages as the level, granted the spell level system changed, and scribing scrolls).
Got the books today. Reading them a bit. Don’t care for the flavor, or the sameness of the classes.
One instance of brain-breaking crack so far :
Lawful Good Deities cannot have Good Clerics, but may have Unaligned Clerics.
Good Deities cannot have Lawful Good Clerics, but may have Unaligned Clerics.
That’s dumb.
Once you realize that:
new Good = old Chaotic Good
new Evil = old Lawful Evil
Then this is basically the same rule as it was in 3.X, that clerics must be within one step of their deity’s alignment. Since they jettisoned the other hybrid alignments, “Unaligned” is that one-step.
Also, by allowing Unaligned clerics for any god, they’ve made good on their promise that alignment would be vastly downplayed.
And, seriously, if you can’t manage to houserule that “Good clerics may serve Lawful Good gods”, you really need to find another game to play. Parcheesi, maybe.
new Good is less like the old Chaotic Good than Unaligned is like the old True Neutral. My read of ‘new Good’ is Neutral Good with Chaotic Tendencies.
I certainly can houserule it. But it’s so sloppy, it shouldn’t be there for me to have to do so.
Considering that it’s a real headscratcher of a rule, it does leave someone simply hearing about the rules via third parties (like me) wondering what other idiocies have made it into print, that will need to be house ruled around.
Go back and re-read the 4e description of “Good”. It uses all the same keywords and ideas as previous descriptions of “Chaotic Good” did – “freedom and kindness”, “You can follow rules and respect authority, but you’re keenly aware that power tends to corrupt…”, “… even if a good character thinks a lawful good companion might be a little too focused on following the law, rather than simply doing the right thing.”
True Neutral, on the other hand, has never had a clear definition – it’s been all over the map from AD&D to Planescape to 3.X, and now it no longer exists. Unaligned isn’t the “new True Neutral”, it’s the “I don’t care; leave me alone about alignment.” That was never True Neutral.
And I don’t find the rule that Lawful Good gods don’t have Good clerics to be odd or dumb or a headscratcher at all. Makes sense; gods don’t want someone committed to a completely different ethos than their own, even if they’ll accept someone who is altogether lax about their ethos in the first place.
The headscratcher to me would be if people out there think that this is actually a dire issue with 4e at all. Real issues, for me, are where they violated their design intent for no clear reason (e.g., with Mordenkainen’s mansion), or made things significantly less cool and fun (e.g., the limits on daily uses of magic item powers).
Count me as another one who thinks it’s stupid that a Lawful Good god cannot have Good Clerics. Any rule that is going to be almost universally house-ruled is a bad rule that never should have made the books.
Another questions: Hit Ponts. Starting hit points should be class value + constitution score? As in if I have a 14 constitution, that’s 14 hit points added in, or 2 (modifier)?
A few people on the Internet wanting to house-rule it does not mean “almost universally house-ruled.” It means a few people on the Internet will need to house-rule it.
Starting hit points use the Constitution score. Distinct from the Con modifier (which is referenced just under for Healing Surges per Day). You start with a lot of hit points, compared to previous versions.
Haha, I love the Cure Disease ritual, it has this nice “oh… by the way…” addition. Specifically, if your heal score isn’t high enough the target takes a bunch of damage, if your score is (for whatever reason) negative and you roll a total of0, the character dies. I love it.
Edit: when I said negative for whatever reason I misread. The level of the disease acts as a negative modifier.
There is a difference between what I said and what you said.
Why on earth would this be almost universally house-ruled? Do you think there’s a silent majority of players just dying to play a Good cleric devoted to a Lawful Good deity? Is this a powerful resonant character archetype that the rules prevent?
I mean, I can imagine two different kinds of people joining the priesthood of St. Cuthbert (or whoever the current incarnation of Cuthbert is):
- People who are all about the law and order above everything; and
- People who think Cuthbert is okay, but really see it as a good career move to join the priesthood.
I don’t see a swarm of hippies going to join his priesthood. I don’t see a bunch of people who see the legal system as overly constricting turning out to represent the god of law.
Maybe if I really worked at it I could come up with a character that meets this idea in a plausible fashion. It’s possible I could even make that character compelling. But I sure as hell have never thought of such a character before, and I certainly have no particular desire now to play one, and I suspect that, across the entire nation for all the time people have played all versions of D&D, less than a hundred such characters have ever been created.
This is not something that will be relevantly houseruled, I’ll predict, in even 1% of games. It may be a silly rule, but it’s outlawing something that nobody does anyway.
Daniel
- People who snuck a peak at the session’s adventure or campaign book and found St. Cuthbert was the church you were dealing with and having him as your patron would get you mad discounts and respect.
Yeah, yeah, chaotic evil PLAYERS might want to play a cleric of St. Cuthbert–but they’ll still claim to have a lawful good CHARACTER. 
(In case it wasn’t clear, my examples were respectively of a lawful good and an unaligned character joining the church).
Daniel
Seconding this. Anyone found it.
The DnD site is so bad it makes me want to punch someone in the face. Repeatedly.
And they need to fire Gleemax. I don’t think i’ve once had a page work on that hellhole of a site without throwing some kind of error.
Once again Wizards shines their glaring (in)competence by not having any of the tools up at release. At least they decided not to screw us by making us pay, everything’s free until it’s all in a “release state.”