Dungeons and Dragons 4th ed. preview: Swamp Hobbits!

The Game Room
21

[QUOTE=MGibson]
I realize that this is anecdotal but I cannot recall seeing anyone playing a gnome character since the end of the Thief/Illusionist multiclass from many years ago.
[/QUOTE]
What’s fun about gnomes is that since so few people are willing to play them, the few that do are inspired. I’ve played at a table with a gnome wizard, and the guy was entertaining as hell. I’ve also toyed with the idea of making a gnome Knight and calling him Sir Didymus, complete with riding dog Ambrosius, but I haven’t had the chance to use him yet.

As for magic item creation: the Magic Item Compendium is supposed to be a fairly complete preview of the direction they’re taking magic items and magic item creation, and it certainly isn’t just “make up your own shit” with no guidelines. It’s simply that the hard mathematical formulas they tried to apply to value in 3.0 just didn’t make sense a lot of the time.

22

[QUOTE=Bosstone]
I’ve also toyed with the idea of making a gnome Knight and calling him Sir Didymus, complete with riding dog Ambrosius, but I haven’t had the chance to use him yet.
[/QUOTE]

I understand your reason for holding him back. I know I wouldn’t send out a knight on a dog like that.

23

Terrifel, your Op and description of the ongoing and bizarre changes D&D makes with each new [del]money grab[/del] edition, reinforces my belief I made the correct decision to stick with AD&D 1st Edition and just ref it with my own rule changes to fit either my own world or the early 4th age Middle Earth World where most of my campaigns have been.

Good review, I love the rat lady piece, seems like a good character for Futurama.

Mellon,
Jim

24

I made a campaign setting that had all the standard AD&D races, but changed around their origins to make it a sort of SF/fantasy hybrid. The origin story as the races knew it was that their creator god originally populated their world with three intelligent species, the dragons (who ruled the mountains and the air), elves (who ruled the seas), and the gnomes (who ruled the lands). The three species had wars, the dragons drove the gnomes underground, and the gnomes used magic to create new races to fight the dragons for them - their first attempts were the various goblinoid races (who were genetically unstable and whose fast population growth quickly led them to get out of control). Their second attempt was the dwarves. The dragons created the sahuagin by combining elf with shark DNA, and this drove the elves out of the seas and into the rivers and lakes, where a subspecies colonized the swamps and forests with the help of a slave race they made by combining elven genes with animals, the orcs. The dragons created fast-breeding mini-dragons to fight the gnomes, but never got around to using them as the gnomes were wiped out in their wars with the goblinoids, and these kobolds had their own civilization on the isolated continent that the dragons were originally breeding them. Halflings came from another plane after these wars were pretty much over, and a few hundred years before the campaign setting took place introduced humans as a slave race.

There was a twist with halflings, their extraplanar origins gave them limited teleportation powers but most of them could only blink a short distance if they were in extreme distress (they could not give natural birth and halfling infants teleported out of their mothers wombs when the contractions started). They were also mostly evil. They lied and said they created humans by combining halfling DNA with that of great apes. The other races suspect that the halflings abducted and used elven and dwarven DNA to create humans as humans are the only species that can cross-breed with elves, orcs, and dwarves, but in reality the humans were a population that had been in suspended animation for hundreds of thousands of years, and the elves and gnomes were two species of hominids that had descended from humans who had colonized other worlds in their distant past. Dragons were aliens, and the world was originally colonized by the three cooperatively, and the animosity began after a catastrophe caused them all to lose their technology and revert to a more primitive way of life.

I was pretty proud of it.

25

Pretty neat setting, Othar. I hope that most of that information was hidden to the players until they discovered it during the campaign. Preferably with plenty of misinformation thrown in.

I have mixed feelings about 4th edition. Frankly, I never cared much about the campaign setting as given, so I’m not too shaken up about the changes being discussed here. Unless I like the changes, I see no reason why I can’t use the new rules with the old setting. I Think that rather than becoming swamp dwelling, the far bigger blasphemy is that halflings are now supposed to wear shoes. On the mechanics side, I like the idea of making feats a more integral part of character development, and the changes to the magic system seem solid. What I strongly dislike is the new skill system, universal stat increases at every level up, and the overall increase in power level. I also don’t care for the new path system replacing prestige classes. Further, one of my favorite characters was an Artificer, so I’m kind of bummed that they’re doing away with hard guidelines for item creation. Sure, it was far from perfect, (1000gp for an item that can heal an unlimited amount of HP? Cool!) but I had a lot of fun making myself into, basically, a modron version of Batman.

26

I’ll wait and see. Of course the new edition is a moneygrab. Wizards of the Coast is, despite their denials, an organization of people who are trying to get your money to line their own pockets. There’s a name for people like that: they’re a business! OOOOOOOO!

Really, I can’t understand people who accuse WOTC of trying to earn money to pay their workers, like it’s a bad thing. If they were cornering the market on wheat, I’d understand the outrage. But they’re making a luxury entertainment product that you don’t have to buy. They’re trying to do it for a living, so they don’t have to get jobs as transcriptionists or programmers or fry cooks or whatever. Good for them!

As for the changes, we’ll see. Some of the changes look interesting to me; some of them make me say, “meh.” Until I see the whole game, I don’t feel qualified to make a judgment. I certainly won’t be purchasing a preview product, but I have nothing against its buyers or its sellers.

Daniel

27

[QUOTE=Lightray]
I suspect the change was made because the designers are for some reason squicky about assumptions of rape (as with the half-orc), and seem to think that no human would willingly pair off with an Evil creature like an evil dragon or a demon.
[/quote]
Well, phooey. Like there aren’t dozens of ways to address half-orcism without rape? "You are a magically created race that mingles the traits of orcs and men. Your ancestors were fashioned in a clay pit by an evil wizard played by Christopher Lee." There. Done.

And don’t tell me there aren’t any guys out there who’d willingly go for fanged, heavy-browed women. I’ve seen Klingon weddings.

Well, at least drow characters had the fact that their race was pretty much universally evil to play against. The tiefling race concept seems to want to have it both ways. “Oh, we are an outcast race, scorned and mistrusted due to our ancestry and appearance.” But they apparently all choose to dress in ridiculously demonic-looking attire with spikes and flames and whatnot, so it’s hard to feel much sympathy. The “outcast loner” bit really worked better when any given tiefling was in fact an outcast loner, and didn’t have the option of hiking over to the local town’s Little Pandemonium and purchasing custom-fitted hellforged armor at the local J. Orcus outlet.

Oh, well in that case… er… um. Yeah, I can see the importance of that qualifier: “–as soon as they figure out how to make it work.” And the first step toward that goal, of course, is to weaken all the available arcane necromancy spells. :smack: :smack: :smack: So what will they have to have to work with? Are they going to have their own entirely separate magic system, or what? Oh lord, I can already feel the pain from here.

28

[QUOTE=Garula]
Pretty neat setting, Othar. I hope that most of that information was hidden to the players until they discovered it during the campaign. Preferably with plenty of misinformation thrown in.

[/QUOTE]

Yes, the players had limited access to background information. The theology was that there was a creator god who made the world and the three original races and two gods, one of chaos (Sil) and one of law (Ab). All the other gods were members of the intelligent races who were elevated to godhood by either Ab or Sil, who were engaged in a kind of cold war against each other for followers and for the ability to shape history. There were good and evil gods under both sides, and often the chaotic god of X would be what we would consider good while the lawful version was evil, and vice versa. The races knew all knew that the dwarves were created by gnomes, orcs by elves, kobolds by dragons, etc., but only the dragons knew they weren’t created on that world and they weren’t sharing the info. The creator god was actually the original global consciousness that inhabited a supercomputer in an adjacent subdimension that was intended to manage the colony, and it intentionally deleted large chunks of it’s own memory to protect the colony from knowledge of their origins, and this led to it fracturing into Ab and Sil. Ab and Sil’s pantheons were living minds that were uploaded into that computer.

All that anybody knew about the halflings was that they came from another “plane”, but they were actually refugees from a vast war in the rest of the galaxy and they made a deal with Ab and Sil when they came to the world to not pass on that knowledge in exchange for being allowed to live there. All but a few halflings had no knowledge of how humans truly came to exist on their world and believed the official line that they are simply halflings modified to be bigger and stronger. The world has a conspiracy theory about the origin of humans that I mentioned in the original post, that the halflings actually created humans from elves, dwarves, orcs, and goblins and are keeping this secret because this would almost certainly lead to the dwarves and elves aligning against the halflings in a war of extermination (creating new races out of a different intelligent race is seen as an extremely evil act, and the dragons are loathed by everyone for using elven and gnome DNA to create the sahuagin and kobolds). The halflings actually secretly promote this theory to mask the truth, that they discovered an ancient structure far underground that had archaic homo sapiens preserved in a stasis field. When they woke up the original humans, they kept the first generations isolated on an island and would take their infants away so they would not hear from their parents their true origins, then exterminated the original humans once they had a sustainable population of slaves.

The gods have mixed feelings about humans, and none of them have been elevated into godhood (for fear they would be able to deduce their true origins if they had godlike intelligence). There are myths that the arrival of humans is a sign of the end times and that they will destroy the world, planted by the gods as a precaution in case they find it necessary to destroy them.

In my campaign, the group broke up before they could discover the truth. They had just got to the island where the first few generations of humans were bred but hadn’t deciphered any of their writings yet.

29

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
I’ll wait and see. Of course the new edition is a moneygrab. Wizards of the Coast is, despite their denials, an organization of people who are trying to get your money to line their own pockets. There’s a name for people like that: they’re a business! OOOOOOOO!
[/QUOTE]

It’s complicated. WotC bought up TSR, and when they did so, they pretty much screwed everyone. Not that TSR was a gem; it had its own issues with incompetent management. But WotC should have known better. For example, they slashed old but solid settings. Birthright, Mystara, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and especially Planescape. In several cases, there seemed to almost be a hair of Sour Grapes about it, and they went a little out of their way to screw players of those settings by introducing rules which made it irritating to convert them. Some of this stuff got a little bit of support (Greyhawk, Dragonlance) and a couple others got fan-projects. Still, little to no support.

This PO’d a lot of people. It’s hard to find those books anymore becasue they’re not in print. Not supporting them is the kiss of death, and makes it extremely hard if not impossible to make a game of it. And what support they did get was pretty thin stuff.

Second, WotC has a bad habit of making rules so generic they’re meaningless, and then other rules so specific they’re useless. They toss in feats and Prestige Classes willy-nilly. OGL stuff is actually much better and arguably more balanced! They quite often fail to even check their own published material. I think by now they’ve got three prestige classes just for Loviatar, a minor god with a small following in Forgotten Realms! All the classes are similar and none terribly interesting. Point = none. They kept tossing in useless crap into every book they make to pad the page count. I can go into any TSR book and find pages upon pages of intersting and useful material. I go into WotC books and see pretty art and formatting, along with a little bit of material here and there.

Third, WotC has a nasty habit of releasing half-done stuff as new books. 3.5? :rolleyes: It wasn’t done, had no real guidance. Sean K. Reynolds heard that the writers basically had no guidance at all from the management. They were just given a deadline and told to do something. With the result that they tossed something together. And some of it was decent and some of it sucked.

Likewise, WotC apparently thinks we’re going to buy giant but really bad series of books or something. In order to keep their profits up, they charge high and make long lists of books with little-to-no use in most campaigns. You’re paying for artwork and color printing, not useful material. And they make such bad books. I dont’ mind paying for quality product, but they’re stuff is just ridiculous. I don’t need a book full of generic “fire stuff,” and then another for generic “cold stuff”!

Then, when their sales dropped like rocks they dont know what’s going on and try to respond with volume rather than content. They were incapable of seeing they cannibalized their own sales base.

Fourth, They have no idea what they’re doing with their settings. They honestly seem afraid of actually changing things up, then make a mad rush to try and switch things around, which rather diorients their player base. They first hit superficial changes, but can’t seem to make any deeper ones which would actually help. To be blunt, they writing staff seems to have no idea what they’re doing from one day to the next.

On a relate note, I’ve noticed a LOT of turnover at WotC. This somewhat makes me think the problem may be that they’re not keeping people around, and that may be causing a lot of the mess.

Fifth, they keep releasing this kind of crap. Obviously, they’re not forcing us to buy it, but the insult inherent in the offer is there. It’s a book which offers you precisely DICK, and they want to charge you $20 bucks for it. It also suggests they’re so desperate they’ve decided to whore out their design documents, and is rather pathetic and ignoble.

30

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
It’s complicated.
[/quote]
I wrote out a long snarky post full of line-by-line refutations. I hate that kind of post. Suffice it to say that I think you’re way off base, seeming to think WOTC has a duty to make the kinds of materials you like, and really unaware of the business basis for their decisions. Suffice it to say that I think I’m much more educated on this topic than you.

Daniel

31

[QUOTE=LHOD]
For good reason: they were money sinks. Yeah, they were awesome, but they were money sinks. Remember: WOTC is a business. THey’re not a charity or a nonprofit arts group. If you want ars gratia artis, start your own gaming nonprofit.
[/QUOTE]

What if I want Ars Magica gratis?

32

[QUOTE=Terrifel]
Oh, well in that case… er… um. Yeah, I can see the importance of that qualifier: “–as soon as they figure out how to make it work.” And the first step toward that goal, of course, is to weaken all the available arcane necromancy spells. :smack: :smack: :smack: So what will they have to have to work with? Are they going to have their own entirely separate magic system, or what? Oh lord, I can already feel the pain from here.
[/QUOTE]

We’ve been told that the Book of Nine Swords is a good indication of what 4e will look like, and that spells and such will be vastly simplified. I suspect that spells are going to look a lot like the B9S maneuvers look – and also divided into “at will”, “per encounter”, “per day”, etc. abilities. So not only no entirely separate magic system, but maybe not a magic system separate from other systems, at all.

And they’re not weakening the available arcane necromancy spells – it’s just that wizards (and warlocks, etc.) won’t have access to many necromancy spells. So they won’t be in the first books, at all. When they later come out with a necromancer class, there’ll be necromancy spells in those books.

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
I wrote out a long snarky post full of line-by-line refutations. I hate that kind of post. Suffice it to say that I think you’re way off base, seeming to think WOTC has a duty to make the kinds of materials you like, and really unaware of the business basis for their decisions. Suffice it to say that I think I’m much more educated on this topic than you.
[/QUOTE]

Eh, the easy refutation is “TSR lost money on every campaign setting book they put out” (at least, at the end of the TSR era). Including… Birthright, Ravenloft, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, and especially Planescape.

WotC is not only not obliged to support those, but would seem to be pretty darn stupid if they picked up money-losers again. Moreover, farming out their intellectual property to others really did nothing much for their business, either. I don’t think they really know what to do with all those settings, really.

Nonetheless, they are in business, and expecting them to go back to stuff that lost money is rather silly. What they’ve found that makes money is… books with lots of Prestige Classes, even if they duplicate PrCs already published elsewhere.

And, yes, their book sales have declined. Because, seriously, what else is 3.5 missing. The damn thing is just about done. They’ve covered enough ground. Time for something new.

Ironically, for the complaint of WotC not changing up their settings enough… Forgotten Realms is due to get a complete overhaul and a jump forward on timeline in 4e. That would seem to address smiling bandit’s complaint on that account. Their doing so has Internet FR fans howling for blood.

There’ll always be someone who hates whatever decision they make.

[QUOTE=DocCathode]
What if I want Ars Magica gratis?
[/QUOTE]

You’re over a year too late, then. Atlas Games was giving away free Ars Magica 4th edition (pdf) up until their 5th edition came out.

I already had two copies, so it was of no use to me, and so I didn’t download it.

33

[QUOTE=Lightray]
Ironically, for the complaint of WotC not changing up their settings enough… Forgotten Realms is due to get a complete overhaul and a jump forward on timeline in 4e. That would seem to address smiling bandit’s complaint on that account. Their doing so has Internet FR fans howling for blood.
[/QUOTE]

He knows. He’s one of them.

34

For everyone’s edification, here’s what Mike Mearls posted over at RPG.net as the things people complained about that 4e is supposed to fix:

  1. Generating numbers for NPCs is like doing (really boring) homework.
  2. The game seems to function best at about levels 5 to 12.
  3. High level games are cumbersome and difficult to run.
  4. Low level games are swingy.
  5. The CR system is confusing and produces wonky results.
  6. Spellcasters outclass everyone else.
  7. Multiclassing works for only certain combinations. Classic tropes (warrior-wizards) need new core classes because the core system doesn’t work.
  8. Characters have too few skill points.
  9. Monsters are unnecessarily complicated.
  10. You don’t get enough feats.
  11. Attacks of opportunity are confusing.
  12. Magic items are really important, but it isn’t equal. Some items are critical, others are complete chaff.
  13. There are a number of weird little subsystems that introduce unnecessary complexity, like grappling.

The original post is here, buried in a thread gone seriously whacko, and with only a post or two more by Mearls (including one earlier with the noted weird analogy). Although I cross-posted this information since it bears on what changes they’re covering in Races & Classes, let’s keep their flame-fest over there, please.

Also, the online Dragon has a new article up about changes coming to the Forgotten Realms…

35

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
I wrote out a long snarky post full of line-by-line refutations. I hate that kind of post. Suffice it to say that I think you’re way off base, seeming to think WOTC has a duty to make the kinds of materials you like, and really unaware of the business basis for their decisions. Suffice it to say that I think I’m much more educated on this topic than you.

Daniel
[/QUOTE]
That’s an interesting perspective. What is the business basis for WotC’s decisions, if not to make the kinds of materials players like? I am intrigued by your “no customer feedback” business model.

36

[QUOTE=Terrifel]
That’s an interesting perspective. What is the business basis for WotC’s decisions, if not to make the kinds of materials players like? I am intrigued by your “no customer feedback” business model.
[/QUOTE]

Given that I’ve spent several years as a moderator on the largest unofficial D&D fan site, it’s untrue that I support a “no customer feedback” model. Rather, I believe that the ultimate customer feedback for a luxury product is the consumer’s dollar. Given WOTC’s tremendous success at revitalizing the D&D brand and increasing its market saturation, I’d say the feedback has been very positive.

They’ve made some recent changes that I don’t like. I’ve stopped purchasing products. That’s some significant feedback. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d send an email to Mike Mearls et al., after reading everything I could find on the reasons for the changes I don’t like, describing in polite, measured tones what changes I don’t like and suggesting alternatives to those changes. I would send only one email, and I would recognize that they’re making the game for millions of people, not just for me, and I would therefore expect them to refuse to make any of the changes I’d like. That’s how mass markets work.

Many of the complaints I see about 4e strike me as histrionic, irrrational, and uninformed. That’s not what useful consumer feedback looks like.

Daniel

37

I think you’re missing my points. I don’t mind them not wanting to publish certain products if they think they can’t make money on it. What irritates me is that they won’t sell them or make them available for other poeple to use, outside of Ravenloft.

Likewise, I explicitly noted their schizophrenic attitude toward setting changing. I’m not a fdan of their 4th edition setting changes, but they don’t seem to comprehend that you can change something incrementally without a total overhaul. Nor are they the only developer with that problem.

I think it looks like they botched the design of 4th. I also think they identified the problems correctly. The two positions are not contradictory.

38

[QUOTE=smiling bandit]
I think you’re missing my points. I don’t mind them not wanting to publish certain products if they think they can’t make money on it. What irritates me is that they won’t sell them or make them available for other poeple to use, outside of Ravenloft.
[/quote]

Why do you think they should do this–that is, how do you see it as being in their best interest, and why do you think you understand their best interest better than they do?

You sound as though you’re unfamiliar with 3.5, which was an incremental change without being a total overhaul. This is a new edition, and like each previous edition, it will be a total overhaul. It might suck–generally the changes from 1st to 2nd are viewed as sucktastic (I really got my chops playing 2nd edition as soon as it came out, so I’m not qualified to judge)–but expecting it not to be a complete overhaul is odd.

Sure. It’s the idea that they’re insulting you, or sabotaging your play, that is irrational. When you stick to pointing out specific changes that you don’t like, that’s fine.

Daniel

39

[QUOTE=Left Hand of Dorkness]
Given that I’ve spent several years as a moderator on the largest unofficial D&D fan site, it’s untrue that I support a “no customer feedback” model. Rather, I believe that the ultimate customer feedback for a luxury product is the consumer’s dollar. Given WOTC’s tremendous success at revitalizing the D&D brand and increasing its market saturation, I’d say the feedback has been very positive.

They’ve made some recent changes that I don’t like. I’ve stopped purchasing products. That’s some significant feedback. If I weren’t so lazy, I’d send an email to Mike Mearls et al., after reading everything I could find on the reasons for the changes I don’t like, describing in polite, measured tones what changes I don’t like and suggesting alternatives to those changes. I would send only one email, and I would recognize that they’re making the game for millions of people, not just for me, and I would therefore expect them to refuse to make any of the changes I’d like. That’s how mass markets work.

Many of the complaints I see about 4e strike me as histrionic, irrrational, and uninformed. That’s not what useful consumer feedback looks like.

Daniel
[/QUOTE]
Perhaps not, but responding to complaints with: “Guess what? They’re a business! OOOOOOOO! If you don’t like the game, don’t buy it! Why do you think they have a duty to make the kind of game you like?” isn’t very useful either, is it? You could drop the the same rebuttal to most threads in Cafe Society, and it’d be just as appropriate:

“Wow, Sucky Movie 2 really sucked. Why does Sucky Pictures keep making such sucky movies?”

“Guess what? They’re a business! OOOOOOOO! If you don’t like their movies, don’t buy a ticket!” etc., etc. Repeat as needed in as many threads as possible. See how helpful that is?

I don’t see that we’re doing anything different here. We’re talking up the parts of the game we like, and bitching about the parts we don’t like. *This will never, ever change. * People will never stop complaining about D&D. I’ve quit buying it, and I’m still complaining about it. Don’t be such a killjoy.

Maybe you’ve been moderating on a D&D fan site too long, if criticism of the game gets under your skin so badly. Seriously, I’m pretty sure WotC doesn’t want you to have an aneurysm on their account.

40

[QUOTE=Terrifel]
aneurysm
[/QUOTE]

:dubious: