My Thoughts on 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons
I just came home from dming another session of dnd encounters. This made me think a little bit. My tabletop journey started with 4th edition, more specifically the module Keep on the Shadowfell. It was great. Never have I played anything like it before. To me 4th edition dnd was awesome. The system was great, my naive mind proclaimed. I felt like people that completely shut down 4th edition were just haters. These were just closed minded fools who didn’t give this new system the chance it deserved.
After my 4th edition group fell apart I joined a 3.5e game. It was different, but very fulfilling. The game’s mechanics were more complicated, but the homebrew story my dungeon master had created kept me enthralled. His campaign was a book. Unfortunately I felt more of a secondary character in his game than the protagonist. Soon after much stumbling and helpful advice from my fellow players I was finally adept at 3.5e. I still wasn’t able to play a wizard, because spells still confused the hell out of me, but I became a competent ranger.
My third game was my own. Seeing other people’s stories made me realize how much I wanted my own, so I started my own homebrew 4e dnd campaign. My game is great! We are two years running strong. I must be doing something right, because my players keep on coming back. The role-playing aspect was missing though. I began to ask myself, was it the edition I picked or just the way my players gamed that contributed to this lack of roleplay? In the end the answer was both, but at the time I felt it was mostly my players.
I decided to try a pathfinder game,which is hailed to be nd 3.75. My dm is amazing. He has a funny and entertaining way of presenting information. Being a semi-silly evil character is so good. Combat is fluid, everything is…so good. My eyes have opened a little bit more because of him.
I now see why people are so adverse to 4th edition. Granted I still like it, but it’s easy and I probably wouldn’t have gotten into gaming had I been introduced to something like 3.5e dnd or pathfinder. 4e is the gateway drug, but then you want something with a little more kick. When you make something easy you take away from other points. I’m trying to put those points back with house rules to make my homebrew game a little more complicated, but still fun. I can see myself migrating to pathfinder completely in the future. There has always been a little storyteller in me and she can’t use 4e to convey her ideas to their full potential.
Don’t really see what stops from telling your stories in 4th edition. When I see 3.5 or PF convulted monster stats and other mechanics it sends shivers down my spine (and mind it – 3.5 was the edition I played most, though I started with 2nd). I will never get back to these monsterous versions of D&D. And my stories are not hindered by mechaincs.
With the combination of convoluted monster stats, named attacks of players, and just the overall simplification of the system it plays more like an mmorpg. I actually think that’s why I got into dnd, it felt familiar. To me telling a story in that type of atmosphere doesn’t work. It might work for someone else but not me. In a silly campaign it might, but not mine.
I’m running a rather serious, story-focused, long-arcing campaign in 4e right now, and it’s not even silly.
If you’re curious: http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/corydon
The problem with 4th edition isn’t that the rules are “bad”, or the game is not “fun”, but rather the mechanics of the game are now completely divorced from the setting and story. It is like playing a JRPG (which I actually do enjoy), you deal millions of points of damage and throw fireballs from space down upon your enemies, but one slight sword thrust in a cut scene finally fells you or the “bad guy”.
In 4th edition, you train to cast spells as a “wizard”, but your fighter character has equally pseudo-magical abilities to lay waste to hoards and hoards of enemies. So what is special about a “wizard” over a “fighter”. Different stats? Different “spells”? But fundamentally any player character is now a walking special moves army. Every character must somehow be imbued with special abilities because the average Joe on the street can’t just “think” to lure another person over to do something just because. If they can’t then there is a huge disconnect between how the “world” works and how the game plays (problem). If the average Joe *can* then how does society function? How would one walk down a seemingly medieval society having pseudo-magical abilities being thrown at them (problem).
So, Snarls-at-Fleas, it isn’t that us old-timers don’t like 4th edition. We like it fine as a game. But we don’t like that 4th edition has purposefully and willfully gone away from the increasing immersion and realism and instead gone the way of JRPG’s. Something D&D is not supposed to be.