A Look At – 4th Edition D&D

by Jim Yoho

Part One – New Beginnings, Outside Influences and Defined Roles!

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Summer of 2008 saw the release of a new version of an old classic – the 4th Edition (6th, really, if you want to get TECHNICAL) of Dungeons & Dragons.  This is Wizards of the Coasts’ third attempt at remaking the franchise, and to this gamer they more than made up for their fumbling previous attempts since nearly destroying what TSR had built.

A major credit to the designers at WotC this time around, they sure went out of their way to examine what works and what doesn’t.  To this end they not only looked at the many failings of 3.5 (and if you listen to the designers they will freely enumerate many, many of these flaws – check out their awesome podcasts) but they looked outside of D&D to the one place where games are constantly being playtested endlessly, with feedback, by tens of thousands of players – MMORPGS!

I, personally, am not the biggest fan of MMO’s – but they do get one thing abundantly right, through endlessly tweaking the games – and that is balance.  In the interest of making money, game companies putting out MMO’s want players to keep paying that subscription fee. The game designers therefore never want a new player to come to the game and make a “nerfed” character – I know this all too well, as I was involved in the beta testing of quite a few of these games (from Darksun Online to Everquest to Dark Age of Camelot to City of Heroes) and read what the developers were saying and contributed to making sure the character creation selections were balanced (along with thousands of others.)

What is good that is gained from MMO’s and the idea of balancing characters?  You gain Defined Roles, Quick Healing, Multiple Cool Powers and the near eliminations of Min/Max.  More than anything 4th Edition is a tactics game and as such characters being balanced for combat is vitally important.

MMO’s don’t want you grinding through combat – resting endlessly to regain your abilities at low levels.  At least, they’ve learned this after taking years to evolve from the table-top models of role-playing games.  MMO’s don’t want newbie players coming into the game and not knowing what it is they should be doing with their character.  MMO’s don’t want you to get bored with doing the same old attack after many hours of play.  MMO’s have learned, as well, to fight against allowing players who devote their lives to the game dominate the game with “perfect builds.”

This is, in many ways, a shout back to the original Basic D&D game – you had a few options of characters (Fighter, Cleric, Thief, Magic-User, Elf, Dwarf) and then you could choose from a small list of spells for the spell casters (Cleric, Magic-User, Elf) and, other than that, your weapons and armor and that was your choices.  4th Ed is far more complicated and complex than that, but for 1st level each class in the Player’s Handbook has two recommended builds – quick and easy to dive into the game.

Multi-classing has also been tamped down tremendously.  One of my biggest pet peeves about what WotC did to D&D was to allow any race to be any class, and any combination of classes with very few exceptions.  You could take a level of most classes if you wanted to, and you rarely ever saw a player take a single class across multiple levels.  There is something to be said, positively that is, about the concept of Prestige Classes – but that’s different than having a Monk/Rogue/Wizard.  A Defined Role in a party is hard to keep if every member of the party has blurred those lines to almost meaninglessness.

In 4th Edition the Multi-Classing system takes into account the question of “if character A spent twenty years of his life training to be a fighter and it’s gotten him the abilities of a Level One Fighter, why does the character who’s spent twenty years of his life studying to be a Wizard go on a few adventures, continuing to act as a Wizard, but then suddenly knows how to use armor and weapons equally as well as the guy who spent most of his life learning those skills?”  It is sheer ridiculousness, even for a fantasy game with magic, to assume that someone who trained for years to be a Monk would only be of equal skill to another who spent years as a thief on the street but suddenly decided “hey, Monk’s have cool talents” and is now as powerful as that 1st level Monk in what a Monk can do.

If you Multi-Class in 4th Edition, you probably gain a Class Skill and one Power of the new Class but you use that Power less frequently.  Without getting into the nitty gritty of At-Will, Encounter, Daily and Utility abilities, I’ll just say that if a Fighter can Cleave as often as he wants in combat, a Ranger who Mutli-Classes into Fighter only gets to Cleave once per combat.

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Next A Look At – 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons will zero in on Quick Healing, what healing has meant in D&D prior to this, and what MMO’s taught WotC about “fun” versus “boredom.”