–or at least that’s the part that stood out most for me after perusing the recently published “Wizards Presents: Races and Classes” at the bookstore today. I get the distinct impression that the game is doing all it can to shed its tabletop RPG roots and recast itself as something more palatable to online gaming tastes. As a Tolkien-reading dork from back before it was fashionable, it makes me a bit sad that D&D apparently no longer regards me as its primary sales target. From the look of the preview, the new game extends the anime-ization trend started in 3rd Edition. There’s a strong **Elder Scrolls ** vibe to the art and flavor text, at least to my eye. They spend a lot of time talking up the art design and consistent ‘look’ of the new system, as if it were a flashy computer game. I’m a great fan of fantasy illustration; but if it were all that critical to the success of D&D, the game would never have gotten off the ground to begin with.
Halflings are no longer Gypsies as in 3rd Edition; instead, they are now Cajuns. They live on riverboats, favoring swamps and marshlands. The logic here is that the race never really had a distinctive “home turf” like elves and dwarves before, and this change is meant to rectify that. What a good idea that is. Of course halflings don’t have a home turf like elves and dwarves, because they were totally ripped off from Tolkien to begin with! There’s no vast folkloric tradition of legendary bog midgets. 4th edition halflings retain their oddly elongated, breadbox-shaped heads, and now their ears are perfectly rectangular (?!), so the catastrophically inbred, stunted bayou dweller image is complete. I hope players running a halfling remember to do the accent.
Since the game is so eager to distance itself from Tolkien, elves are no longer shorter than humans, but tall and slender just as in Tolkien. Also, instead of one race with several subraces (wood, grey, etc), there are now three distinct races of elves: generic elves who live in the forest, eladrin or “high elves,” who live on another plane of existence entirely, and drow. So that should clear that up.
(Why in the hell are drow so popular anyway? They live in the ground, hate everybody, and worship spiders. They’re like a race of insane bag ladies or something, living over a subway vent and naming the neighborhood rats. I just don’t get their appeal.)
One of the main problems with previous editions, we are told, is that the game never really established a clear character for humans. Just who are these “humans?” What are they like? What motivates them? 4th edition proposes that humans are inherently more corruptible than other races, which explains why they’re always fighting among themselves. The preview doesn’t really go into how this is expressed in game mechanics-- there’s not much detail of this sort anywhere in the book. Dice are barely mentioned at all. Again, I am briefly sad.
Anyhoo. Gnomes are being recast with a darker edge. Dwarves remain dwarves, albeit without darkvision (?). Also included are tieflings (half-demons) and dragonborn (half-dragons). Personally I question the need for two half-monstrous player races with horns, but whatever. What exactly is the high-fantasy tradition that includes heroic warriors with barbed tails and reptile heads? Meanwhile, half-orcs appear to be out entirely. Alas.
The preview goes on at length about the need to balance player classes so that they are all able to participate equally in all stages of an adventure. I don’t quite know what to say about that, as such number-crunching details always sort of took a back seat to the roleplaying part for me. I don’t really remember unbalanced classes being that much of a problem during our gaming sessions.
This philosophy of ‘balance’ will apparently manifest itself in some odd ways. The designers cite dungeon traps as an example of an unbalanced play element, since only rogues are equipped to deal with them. This will supposedly change in 4th edition, so that dungeons will now have traps with multiple elements that challenge all members of a party. So a single trap might have a mechanical feature for the thief to disarm, and meanwhile monsters are released from trapdoors for the others to fight while that’s happening, and so on. The unspoken corollary is that if you’re missing any classes in your party you’re all screwed, but thems the breaks, I guess.
Apparently the magic system is going to change radically. Wizards alone will have three types of spell effects available. There will be no formal “schools of magic:” instead, a wizard’s abilities will depend on what type of magic item they wield-- the choices being orb, staff, or wand. The book mentions in passing that arcane necromancy has been intentionally weakened in the interests of ‘balance.’ Screw you, WotC.
I’m depressed. I’m pretty sure I spent more on 3rd edition than everything that went before, though I hardly got any use out of it. This new game is unfamiliar territory again, and I’m not even the intended audience anymore. The book also contains multiple ads for “D&D Insider,” the online resource-- the designers go on and on about how the new system was designed with web support in mind. Apparently that’s another 10 bucks per month. I don’t see that happening.
Ah well, things change. I’m not in college anymore anyway. While I looked away, D&D passed me by. It was a good ride while it lasted. My dice and I have our memories.
