I wasn't talking about setting-specific stuff. For the sake of simplicity I'll just provide a link.
In reference to your link, while the introduction of the PHB only includes about a page and a half of setting each race and class includes additional details to help you get a handle on where your character might fit in the world. But because this is cooperative game a huge part of the specific setting is going to come from the DM who runs the game and decides where it's set.
Which is why there is a more extensive section on "The D&D World" found in the DMG that includes both the core assumptions, followed immediately by discussion about it being your (the DM's) world and considerations about altering those assumptions, notes about the purpose of civilization in the story and the components that make it up, about commerce and the magic item economy, organizations that play roles in a typical world, the wild and the planes are described briefly, the nature of the evil gods is discussed, some example artifacts are given, information about the languages. It also gives a sample place to start a campaign by detailing the town of Fallcrest and the Nentir Vale (where all the Heroic Tier modules WotC released take place). It includes notes on how to involve the players based on both race and class and gives a short adventure to give players and new DM's an idea of the feel of the game.
The point is... unless you're playing in a pre-established game world (like the Realms where there is a whole Player's Guide worth of fluff about the world of Abier-Toril) then a big part of the atmosphere is going to come from the DM's choices. So it makes sense to me that more of the campaign setting fluff is found in the DMG and not the PHB.
So nothing's changed, that was the case with 3e, too - much to the dismay of those who had to make their settings work with this ruleset. I consider being too specific, rules-wise, a shortcoming for a system that wants to be the system for heroic fantasy settings. Granted, the GSL works differently from the OGL, but this problem started with 3e, after all.
But that's the point I was trying to make and the designers talked about in the preview book "Worlds & Monsters" (which has tons of the background fluff that you'd probably enjoy... and you can usually find them dirt cheap these days); the 4E design team decided that they did NOT want their game to be "the" system for generic heroic fantasy settings. Rather, they said (paraphrasing because my copy of W&M is in a transitory state of existance atm) "We want the rules to support the specific campaign world we devised for D&D to the best of the rules' ability even if that means we aren't a truly universal system anymore."
They felt that the mistake of 3E was in trying too hard to be a generic ruleset that could be used for any and all settings (to the detriment of the actual D&D setting) and so they reversed that thinking and built the 4E rules to specifically support their game world in the same way White Wolf built its rules to support the World of Darkness settings or the original L5R rules were built specifically for that setting.
If you want a universal game system then 4E is not for you; the designers didn't build it that way this time around.
I'm not saying nobody can possibly like this approach - in fact I can see how one can even applaud it, having expectations totally different from mine.
My expectations by contrast was that the system would give me and the other players room to flex and fluff things out to our own desires. Where my mage hand is an shadowy raven that flys out to grasp things for me at my command, whose magic missiles are ebon spikes that rake across a target, whose thievery check is an "open locks" spell and my "thieves' tools" are a magical focusing crystal that aids me in that spell, whose conjured flames are a sickly blue-green... you get the idea.
I'm free to exercise my creativity within these rules because they aren't all mapped out. All wizards did not start their careers as apprentices and are not required to wear robes (mine learned his magic from a stolen spellbook and prefers to wear leather armor... all the better to get in close and beat you over the head with his magical staff if you threaten his friends). There are no starting age tables or aging penalties (or bonuses) so my wizard was able to start at age 35 because he was already in his late teens when he stole his spellbook and had to figure it out from there by himself.
Then again, D&D is only a tool for me because I already know what I want and just need this tool to achieve it. But more often than not I try to view things from a newbie's perspective and ask myself if I, not knowing a thing about roleplaying, would want to devote myself to this hobby after having read this.
I can only speak anecdotally, but the new edition of D&D has brought a lot of new players into the game in our area. One thing that is often ignored in the discussion of 4E being able to capture the feel of fantasy is that pretty much all the new players I've encountered have already been steeped in high fantasy stettings by everything from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Star Wars, Narnia, and Harry Potter, to the Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and yes, even Everquest and WoW. They know what clerics and fighters and rangers and wizards and elves and dwarves and dragons and orcs and demons are already because the popular culture is steeped in them.
They don't need a lot of setting information because they're already informed by pop-culture on a lot of it. Anyone who's watched a Michael Bay movie knows what a fireball looks like. Anyone who's watched Revenge of the Sith knows what an evil wizard hurling bolts of lightning looks like. What they're looking for are just rules to let them play out the stories they already have in their heads and that's what 4E provides them.
Oh, if they had only done that... (I mean, not just by their graphic design, but with their game design and advertising.)
Maybe you didn't hear the news, but the PHB2 actually made the New York Times' Best-Sellers List. It's pretty much the first supplemental rulebook in the history of gaming to ever do so. That doesn't happen unless the game is growing and people like the core rules enough to buy the second PHB in the series.
It may not do much for you, but for the general audience, it's doing better than any previous edition of D&D ever has.
This thread has gotten very interesting the last couple of pages. The discussion about graphic design was very informative as I know my feelings towards the 4E books layout has pretty much been the same as Dexters. I can see the point about making it more readible like a textbook to help with "mainstream" readers.
I would like to pointsomething else out though. There is a tendency for people who make remarks even the least bit critical of 4E to get attacked en masse on these forums. I donh't see any 4E haters here in this dsicussion so I'm confused by this response.
One can be critical of something and still be a fan. And it may be that there is something to some of the criticisms raised of 4E and Wizards in general. Some of these points of criticism, I think, should be considered irregardless of wether you like 4E or not, whether you judge it a success or not.
For instance, Wizards PR said leading up to 4E that one arguments for a new edition was the huge amount of material perhaps scaring off new fans. I would like to point out that 4E has been out about a year, right? Look at the shelf full of stuff that is already out for it. Critics of this pouitn would say that Wizards is running a business and that they are here to sell us D&D stuff. That's true and its been argued thusly ad nauseum (spelling?) since before the launch. But do we need all this stuff and could they have done it with smaller numbers of product?
There are people honestly unhappy with the way Wizards has run DDI from the beginning and look at the digital mags with a very sceptical eye. Their track record here is atrocious-in terms of PR, honesty and delivering on promises.
I don't want to go on and on. I would just ask everyone to look at what Wizards says and does, in terms of business practice especially and think about it. Just becuase they are a business does not excuse exploitive behavior and success does not excuse anything either.
That's what artifacts are for. As detailed in the 4E DMG, artifacts are your only allowed in at the DM's whim items with hidden powers that fit perfectly the type of thing you want. In 4E artifacts don't HAVE to be unique nor super-powerful either, though giving them specific names even if it's just "The Sword of Saint Bathomier" certainly lends them a better mystique.
In a general sense it's also hard to have mystery in magic in D&D because out of 18 PC current classes only four do not use magical power in some way. The other 14 use either arcane, divine, or primal magic on a regular basis.
Likewise, general purpose magic items are far less powerful than their 3E equivalents. Indeed, they are generally weaker or more limited than actual PC powers. What's so incredible about a belt that, once per encounter, gives you a +2 bonus to save vs. poison when compared to the ability to hurl balls of fire at your foes at will? That wand of magic missile mastery may be nice, but without the ability to actually hurl bolts of magic force from your fingertips to begin with, it's really not all that impressive.
Maybe it would help to think of 4E magic items as the equivalent of 3E potions and scrolls; comparitively minor pieces of magic that provide a buff to the capabilities of the players. Meanwhile the real 3E magic items would be consider more akin to artifacts in 4E; powerful magic items that bestow major abilities which a character would not otherwise have.
Good points. Although I may not like that players have free access to them, I like the magic item format in 4E, because the item's properties are so explicitly defined (moreso than in 3E); some items also work better (or even more according to the item's flavour, e.g. Cloak of Resistance) with 4E mechanics.
I've never heard the term 'Big Six' applied to items in 3E, but for 4E you really only NEED to keep three items up to snuff... your weapon/implement, your armor, and your neck slot item. Everything else is gravy; it will provide some bonuses or a minor power, but the bulk of your effectiveness is going to be determined by those three items.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood; you're correct that reliance on magic items seems to be far less of an issue in 4E, as you only need three to function more "effectively" (and those three may be part of the character optimization or not). In 3E, you needed the 'Big Six', or you where seriously screwed; I've even played in campaigns in which I was told that I don't know "how to play the game", because I didn't buy a Cloak of Resistance and Ring of Protection for my melee guys. In 3E, some items just were "must" acquisitions, unless the DM compensated for this (for example, I run a campaign in which any Will-based saving throw is 90% likely to take out three out of five PCs, so I try to keep them to the minimum).
So you never drop items that your players would like to have? I can kinda see not allowing them to buy items, but pcs can make their own items so they should have access to the items in question.
I do, but I don't let give me any "wish-lists" or tell them when or where I might drop, say, a magical Greataxe (or which powers it might have). If they want to make items, I generally give them enough downtime to do that (max. one item per PC per four or five sessions). I usually give one or two "useful" items (i.e. items that the players have said they want or items that I know will help with their weaknesses) over the course of several sessions; the rest of magic items and loot will be chosen to fit the monsters/NPCs that use them or the location they're found in (e.g. religious items in a monastery).
Note: I'm a DM who always takes into consideration that I don't dish out a lot of magic items or let PCs buy them, so this is never a major issue in my campaigns.
Some of it is this, magic items are meant to be a part of the game, the idea of mystery in magic is all well and good except for the fact that magic permeates the world. Conceptually all but the martial classes wield some form of magic or at least mystical energies (technically the same thing but eh). They were part of the optimization process back in 3.5 too, supplimental items less so perhaps but they were still relevant to it.
As for making it take longer, why? Let me explain, when making a magic item takes most of a year the group either does the one year downtime bit, make it a bit at a time during an adventure, or there is much handwaving. The timetable thing allowed for theoretical staggering, a player got a massive load of gold, great, they can use it to commission something from a local mage/priest/artificer/maguffin man and get it when it's level appropriate again. Only this method keeps that in check relatively well and thanks to the internal economy of the game I'm not making profits hand over fist which might have been the other reason to use the staggering timetables.
Well, that time could be used for some story-telling purposes that the DM could exploit later (e.g. the fighter building a small keep that will be invaded in the next session), but I agree with you that the time for crafting items in 3E is a bit too long (ever seen a high-level druid creating an artifact-level item that trumped even the Staff of the Magi? I have... took a year or two, and almost the whole session in RL and seriously messed up the DM's campaign deadlines). Still, I wouldn't mind if the ritual took something like two weeks or even two months ('Volo's Guide to All Things Magical' has *brilliant* and "flavorful" magic item creation suggestions that would actually work quite well in 4E) because that's expected of the creation process; however, if that proves to be a problem (e.g. messes up the DM's plans), I'd at least want such a ritual to take a day or two so that it's not an "automatic" roll and the item's finished (this sort of rituals offers nice role-playing opportunities, too).
As for the optimization process, I replied to Chris on that subject; it seems I misunderstood your point about items and character optiomization in 4E.
For instance, Wizards PR said leading up to 4E that one arguments for a new edition was the huge amount of material perhaps scaring off new fans. I would like to point out that 4E has been out about a year, right? Look at the shelf full of stuff that is already out for it.
Well, I think the PR people misspoke a bit, personally. It's not so much the volume of material in 3E that scared off people (at least not around here), it was the difficulty finding what you're looking for because after the first year or so you started getting character-based items (feats, prestige classes, magic items, even base classes) in the darndest places. Off the top of your head, if you were told there was a True Necromancer base class out there in 3E, which book would you look in? How about the Undead Leadership feat? (The answers, incidentally, are the "Heroes of Horror" and "Necronomicon" supplements.)
3.5 In this case did NOT help matters because suddenly you have new and old versions of the same things so have you really found what you're looking for an old version of what you're looking for?
4E seems to have developed a much more cohesive plan for presenting the huge amounts of material such that, if their production schedule holds, five years from now to select a race and class you only need to look through the PHB series of books (1-5 by then) and maybe a Player's Guide to X if you're playing in a specific world setting. If you want to make sure you've got all the possible power and feat choices for your class you know you can go look in the X Power series of books (1-4 by then). Looking to find additional magic item options? Go check out the Adventurers' Vault series (1-5 by that point).
You'll also know that you won't need to bother with the DMG, DMG2, DMG3, DMG4 or DMG5. Nor will you need to consult the MM, MM2, MM3, MM4, or MM5. Nor will you need to check any of the X Campaign Setting books (all 5 of them by that point).
For those who actually have an old physical set of encyclopedias in their home, looking at a row of 20-30 books would be rather daunting, except that because they're alphabetized they're easy to search through for what you want to look up. You know you aren't going to find any martial classes in the PHB2 because it says so right on the cover. If you're looking for Psionic classes though PHB3 is one of the ones you're going to want to reference because it says "for X, X, and Psionic Heroes" on the cover.
But do we need all this stuff and could they have done it with smaller numbers of product?
Short of increasing the page count, not really. If you shrunk the current font size by more than 10% you'd have start to have severe readability issues (anything below an 9-point serif font or 8-point sans-serif font... and sans-serif is much harder to read in large quantities) and, even then the number of pages you'd cut would be less than that 10% because of chapter and section breaks (while you could have the races and classes run into each other and start in the middle of pages, the result is not nearly as visually pleasing to the majority of readers). The result is that, at best you'd only be able to squeeze about one additional race (two pages) and one additional class (15 pages) into the PHB1 by shrinking the font-size without increasing the page count.
Similarly, they're not going to cut the proportion of art to text because they're already at the graphic design minimum of 12.5% as it is. Further, as I mentioned previously, while it's by no means hard and fast, I've found you generally need more art as the density of the text (due either to reduced font size, leading, and/or white space between line) goes up.
That leaves the only other option for increasing content, which is adding pages at a rate of about two per race and about 16 per class (including about a page of feats and class specific magic items per class). Even if you dropped the new 4E races and classes to go with the exact same race/class mix as the 3E PHB, you'd need to add about 48 pages to the PHB (bringing it to 365 pages). If you wanted to add those into the PHB on top of the ones that already exist you'd need to add 84 pages bringing the book in at nearly 400 pages. If you combined the PHB1 and 2 into a single volume; even with reduced font size you'd be looking at a 500+ page volume.
And those added pages are going to increase the entry cost into the game. Instead of a $40 game book you'd probably be looking at $60-70 game book (it gets progressively more expensive to bind thicker books). How many people are really going to be willing to pay $200 all at once on a game system? Spending $40 for a PHB that lets you play the basic game is a lot more palatable to a larger audience. Then, once they've played and like the system it's a lot easier to get them to shell out another $30 here and there for the additional books that interest them.
There are people honestly unhappy with the way Wizards has run DDI from the beginning and look at the digital mags with a very sceptical eye. Their track record here is atrocious-in terms of PR, honesty and delivering on promises.
I wonder if those who are unhappy have ever played MMO's or done any work with coding software. Delays are to be expected (Champions Online was supposed to be out over a year ago and just recently got delayed AGAIN to pretty much Christmas of this year... unless there are more delays). Frankly, given where it is in its developmental life and how often they're updated it, I'm amazed the Character Builder is as bug-free as it is.
As for the magazines, going digital was going to happen eventually because the market for them is just too small relative to the printing costs to sustain the physical magazines. They have released a surprising amount of useful material (relative to Dragon and Dungeon at this point in 3E) in those two magazines in my opinion.
Is DDi perfect? Not a chance. I think they bit off WAY more than they could chew with the character visualizer and online play ideas. What they wanted for the character visualizer was at least as robust as the costume generator for City of Heroes and they had a large staff who spent YEARS of development time on that aspect of that game's engine. If they could afford it I think they'd be much better served licencing the character builder engine from Cryptic so then they'd only need to worry about specific geometries and textures for same, but I have no idea what such a licence would cost.
Just becuase they are a business does not excuse exploitive behavior and success does not excuse anything either.
Historically speaking, success forgives just about anything. I remember several tales of Hollywood producers being told they could NOT do something, only to sneak what they wanted to do in anyway, and then get away with it because their gamble paid off. Likewise, if you do something stupid and it ends up working, well, it's not really all that stupid is it? (I've often heard friends who were in the military say that the difference between stupidity and bravery is whether or not it works).
I'd be interested to know though what you consider so exploitive about WotC's business model, because to me they've been about as straight forward as any business dealing with intellectual property rights that I've ever seen.
Ah, sorry, I misunderstood; you're correct that reliance on magic items seems to be far less of an issue in 4E, as you only need three to function more "effectively" (and those three may be part of the character optimization or not).
More accurately, you only need the enhancement bonuses for three items to keep up with the game's math. Every other magic item, and even the additional features of those three magic items is gravy. They'll help in certain situations, but none of them on their own is going to turn the tide of a battle.
In 3E, you needed the 'Big Six', or you where seriously screwed
I'm still wondering what exactly those "Big Six" actually were because I've NEVER heard that phrase used before in the game circles I frequent and only really joined the boards here with 4E. You apparently listed two; ring of protection and cloak of resistance; and I can guess that magic armor, magic weapon, and magic shield (if appropriate) were on the list. Was the sixth a stat-booster item (headband of intellect, cloak of charisma, belt of giant strength, etc...)?
Yes, the stat booster(s) would be the last one I can think of. Just about every character needed all these items as they gained levels to stay on par with each other and the CR system, or at least close enough to it. The really big problem wasn't just that you needed these items, but you had to give up other items for it.
You want a cape of the mountebank, sure, just give up your +1 to +5 to all you saves. Granted I believe near the end of 3.5, there were some items that were mixed and they had rules about mixing magic items of the same slot and the cost, whereas that is standard in 4th now.
More accurately, you only need the enhancement bonuses for three items to keep up with the game's math. Every other magic item, and even the additional features of those three magic items is gravy. They'll help in certain situations, but none of them on their own is going to turn the tide of a battle.
And, as many have suggested, you can replace the magic items with "inherent" bonuses per Tier; it is even easier to do in 4E than 3E, in which DR and SR are part-and-parcel of monster abilities (and you would have to modify CRs to reflect this).
I'll readily admit that 4E relies a lot less on magic items than 3E.
I'm still wondering what exactly those "Big Six" actually were because I've NEVER heard that phrase used before in the game circles I frequent and only really joined the boards here with 4E. You apparently listed two; ring of protection and cloak of resistance; and I can guess that magic armor, magic weapon, and magic shield (if appropriate) were on the list. Was the sixth a stat-booster item (headband of intellect, cloak of charisma, belt of giant strength, etc...)?
Yes, I think that covers them all; I've often said that "fixing" assumptions in the game math by feats and/or magic items is a poor solution (e.g. fighter's will saves at high levels with the "mandatory" Iron Will and Cloak of Resistance) and I hope PF RPG will address this issue.
Yes, I think that covers them all; I've often said that "fixing" assumptions in the game math by feats and/or magic items is a poor solution (e.g. fighter's will saves at high levels with the "mandatory" Iron Will and Cloak of Resistance) and I hope PF RPG will address this issue.
Their preview gave Valeros, 14th level Fighter with equipment, a +3 Will Save.
There are other things that I don't like, but that made me a little sad.
These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling, And took their wages, and are dead.
Playing: Mongoose Traveller GMing: Barbarians of Lemuria Planning: Reclaiming Neverwinter, a 4e D&D campaign
