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There are 5 Alignments: Good, Lawful Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, Unaligned. Among the gods I did not see any evil or CE listed.

Wow, that will be terrible. I suppose it does cover the alignments that WotC actually used though. Generally in WotC writing entities that where lawful evil came across as neutral evil, while neutral evil and chaotic evil where hard to tell apart.

Nearly every class has 4 At-Wills available to chose from at 1st level, Wizard has 5. Same goes for Encounters. Fighter, Paladin and Rogue have 3 Dailys, everyone else has 4. More become available at higher levels.

That is about what I expected. Not nearly enough for real character variation, but once the power expansion books are added it should be OK.

Rituals: range from cheap to learn and cast to expensive. As an example: Raise Dead costs 650GP to learn uses a 500gp reagent, and "scales" at levels. At lowever levels, it's "free" except for the reagent cost." At medium levels it's 5,000gp. And at epic levels it's 50,000. Oh, and the raised person gets a penalty of -1 until you've passed "3" milestones.

That is interesting. Raise Dead is apparently available right from the start or very early on. I'll have to think about that in my game.

Oh, and another interesting/weird feature....there is an easy to cast ritual that clears 1 status ailment (curse, disease, etc) each time it's cast, but with a catch. You make a heal check, and your result ='s how much dmg the TARGET sick player takes while being healed. SO, a low roll can kill outright, or can do dmg. A high roll causes very little dmg.

That will be cool, though I expect in practice it would be impossible to kill a character who wasn't on the verge of death already.

Timestop is a spell in 4e. Gives you 2 extra actions, neither of which can be used for attack.

Right, not really Time Stop but close enough to fake it. A lot of the converted spells seem to be like that.

Minotaurs are a MM race, and get a fun per encounter charge attack, and +2str and +2 con.

That is what I was afraid of. Rather then figure out how to balance an actual Minotaur or just disallow it, they nerfed it down until a Minotaur is no more powerful then a human.

Warforged were in the book too, but stripped down a bit. Less immunities. And their encounter ability felt to me a bit meh...once per encounter when blodied you heal con mod + 1/2 level. Still, not a bad race...but not so zomg overpowered as they once were.

I did get a bit on the Warforged: +2 STR, +2 CON, Speed 6, Vision Normal, +2 to Endurance Skill, Can wear armor.

Looks like they did the same thing to the Warforged. No longer different enough from human to be interesting.

Jay

JayM wrote:

That is about what I expected. Not nearly enough for real character variation, but once the power expansion books are added it should be OK.

To be fair, except for the casters thats 4 more choices for any class than in previous editions.