I will reserve final judgment until I can look at the damn book. I really cannot understand why people are all up in arms about it one way or the other when there’s nothing concrete to look at. Although I will say that a friend of mine has the Book of Nine Swords (the one that’s supposed to be a sort of 4th Ed. preview for 3.5), and there is some pretty cool stuff in there.
I love it someone, astonished by my refusal to submit before the awesome power of their argument, decides that the only possible explanation is willfulness! Yes, of course that’s it.
What Exit, fair enough; I’ll get off your lawn, and I won’t take your joke seriously next time. Terrifel, I for some reason always get Starving Artist and Smiling Bandit confused; I meant the latter. Sorry for the confusion! I, however, see no moral element whatsoever to WOTC’s actions: they’re selling a luxury product, and people can buy it or not as fits their whim.
Daniel
One thing I just noticed!
Earlier in the thread, Lightray suggested that my use of the term “anime-ization” regarding the evolving art direction of D&D was a mischaracterization. In my defense, I would like to point out that the sword the guy is holding on the cover of the Races and Classes preview has a blade that appears to be about nine inches wide. How is that anything but a Japanese cartoon blade? That’s not a sword; it’s a spatula. A glowing, runic battle spatula.
One guy is my oldest friend, I have known him since 1977. Not too long after I started playing with the original small format 3 book D&D set. He plays a lot more than I do and will buy 4th edition. The other regular player is also our age and has been playing on and off with us for 20+ years. I would like one more player, but I don’t hang out with gamers anymore.
**Left Hand of Dorkness **: Cool.
Jim
Nope, I’m talking about this piece o’ crap.
-Joe
In that case, bad news, homey. Not only could our playtesting fighter cast spells (essentially), but our Cleric couldn’t heal.
-Joe
Again, all I can go by is, you know, playtesting, but the Ranger in our six person group could have taken all five of the rest of us pretty easily.
-Joe
Or it could be that you’re simply not using whatever reading comprehension God gave you and aren’t even responding to the points. I’d call it a strawman, but it didn’t even rise to that level. I don’t mean this in some emo “you just don’t understand!!!11” level. I mean you literally did not understand.
Now if any class should be given more “well-rounded” super-duper-i-can-do-anything-a-little-bit spellcasting abilities, it should be the Ranger. Now if – IF – they HAVE to be a spellcaster, at least give them some, you know, spellcasting abilities. Either that or buff their survivability (their attacks are okay.) Cause a dual-class Fighter-Cleric is better at everything a 3.x Ranger does that doesn’t involve tracking someone or happening to run into one of the 1-5 things you really really hate and hope the DM puts you up against 
But taking on everyone in a 6 person group…can you say overboard with the rebalancing?
I don’t care for the MMO-ization of D&D. I don’t like the adoption of the aggro mechanic, I don’t like the downplaying of magical items, I don’t like the homogenization of classes with all the self-heals and pseudo-spellcasting abilities. I don’t like the adoption of the dragonborn and tiefling as core races because they scored better with some focus group. I don’t like the loss of wide swaths of the spell variety of the system - necromancy, enchantment, etc. I really don’t like what they’re doing to FR. I don’t like the general cosmology changes. I don’t like the game seems to be acquiring a specific flavor and losing the generic fantasy feel.
There are some positives - I like that the Vancian magic system is being downplayed and supplemented. (It’s not quite gone, but … nearly.) I like the idea of a streamlined skill system.
And that’s about it, really. I intend to buy the 4e core books so I can give the system as a whole a fair shake. But what I’ve read so far doesn’t sound fun, and doesn’t sound adaptable to my home-brewed campaign setting.
Then again, I’ve never run into most of the problems that they’re claiming 3e had, either.
Ironically, that’s one of the few things I like about 1.0 (I call the explosion of stuff around the Unearthed Arcana era 1.5) It had a specific flavor. Now, the flavor was what we would call “generic fantasy” but the feel was very specific to the archetypical fantasy setting. Although it was going more generic as time went on, 3.x made a clear break and you could easily adapt it to any fantasy setting you wanted, not the ages-old archetypical D+D one. Which is okay by me, as you could still adapt it to the specific old-school D+D feel.
But I too don’t like the specific flavor it’s developing into: if I wanted to play a MMO-flavored game, I’d play an MMO. I don’t like the aggro concept: I like the combat system as it is: if you’re involved in so much combat that you waste significant gaming time with slow game mechanics, you might as WELL be playing an MMO because you’re rollplaying instead of roleplaying.
The difference with MMO’s is that you lose the wonder of everything when everything is so widespread and copied. Dozens of races and classes means that nothing is special. Craploads of +3-5 items means there’s no room for sagas, no room for an epic feel, and no sense of adventure left in an adventure.
I mentioned this in a previous D&D thread, but I think the problem with magic items is not that your character has too many of them, but that if the wealth-by-level is taking optimal configurations into account, then you’re kind of screwed with a less-than-optimal configuration. Why keep that Bag of Tricks when you need the money to buy the biggest Gauntlets of Strength you can get? Instead of a bunch of interesting magic items, you end up with genric magic items that serve to boost your most essential combat stats. I’m interested to see how 4th edition handles this.
The complaint about iterative attacks slowing down combat is puzzling to me, possibly just because of the way it’s talked about. I get the impression that they think players hate having to make attacks more often. Surely the real issue is that by applying a cumulative -5 to each subsequent attack the iterative attacks quickly become excercises in futility at those levels in which iterative attacks start really kicking in.
I’m confused by this part of your post. If that is a perceived problem, then it is up to the Ref to inflate the cost of items like Gauntlets. We are still talking about D&D with Paper & Pencil and a DM, aren’t we?
What rules indicate that magic items need to be available for sale or that the prices listed in the book are anything more than a rough guide?
Jim
It’s also called “Devoted Defender” and was a prestige class in 3.0. Apparently it is an ugly duckling that just became a swan, because they thought it unimportant enough that they didn’t bother to port it over to 3.5 (or the feats that gave him the abilities you describe).
Given that you’re still on 1st edition, and so presumably hammered out your own house rules 20 years ago, you may have forgotten that designing, implementing and playtesting rules changes requires time. You can take some shortcuts by simply not worrying about whether such changes are arbitrary or heavy-handed, but it still takes time to make sure the information about the changes is available to your players since it will differ from what’s available from their own ready reference sources.
The 3.0-3.5 DMGs have an elaborate system for calculating the GP value of a magic item, and this value also serves as a measure of relative power. PCs and NPCs are allotted a certain GP value in wealth according to level out of which they buy their equipment, and that GP value in equipment is treated as part of the overall power level of the character. Availability of magic items is determined by a rating given for each town of the maximum GP value of gear purchasable there, which is in itself a function of size category.
If your question is really why I can’t just ignore the rules, then the answer obviously is that I can. But then I don’t get to take advantage of the entire system that was elaborately designed and implemented on several levels of game mechanics to make my life easier. In many ways it is a model of advanced thinking in RPG design, an attempt to make disparate elements of game power comparable, and it more or less works except where it doesn’t. Certainly hand-waving and intuitive (a.k.a. arbitrary) decision making works, too, except where it doesn’t, but I find it a poor substitute for having an integrated system. Third Edition gives you tools for determining a level-appropriate amount of wealth and magic.
Admirable as that project was, it has ultimately been a failure because it removes a couple sources of fun. Magic items are no longer very special. Perhaps more importantly, the awareness that the whole thing is systematized makes the aquisition of wealth and magic items a non-game. You can still enjoy roleplaying the looting process, but you know that whatever you get is going to add up to approximately what a table in the DMG said you had coming to you. Some people may prefer to play the game so that desire for wealth is really just a roleplaying choice, but I find the roleplaying is that much sweeter if both the player and the character can’t wait to see what’s in the chest.
I loved that class, too. It was actually quite a good one, and very useful for keeping the mage alive. It was a good one for a Fighter to take post-level 10 or so, when he already had every raw feat he needed. Sadly, in DnD, your worth seems to largely dependant on your ability to kill, and the Devoted Defender doesn’t do that.
Both entirely doable under 3E.
Well, I write for BattleTech, a wargame that never truely had a second edition, so it’s bit different, but from what I gather it is the casual gamer that drives the industry. Not the guys who buy everything nor the other folks who just buy the main rulebook. The causal gamer seems to buy a few rulebooks and some suppliments.
Not the point, but I’m sure you knew that.
-Joe
If I recall aright, BattleTech’s been going for a good long while. What is the difference between a game like that and D&D, that later editions never became financially necessary?