And the Pendulum Swings

The pendulum of my opinions about 4E has swung yet again.

Although I still hate the whole revision of the Forgotten Realms, I am still mostly looking forward to the new version of the game.

Once again, because I can’t go a week without repeating myself – the crunch looks good and the fluff looks bad. But my anger from the fluff announcements has calmed to a mild simmer. I still want to smack somebody, but this is an improvement from dropping an anvil on R&D’s collective heads.

(For those who don’t know; “crunch” = rules and game mechanics, “fluff” = role-playing information.)

I’m not sure about me gaming with the group soon. It’s kind of a bad time for several of us. The last two months of the year always are though.

But Worldwide D&D Gameday, or whatever it’s called, will be on the Saturday of that weekend (I think). So if I can’t do one, I’ll do the other.

Baby related stuff is about the same (little sleep, lots of complaints from the babies). When I get the extra cash to waste, I’ll buy them a tube of giant stuffed dice. I figure I have a better chance of getting that okayed by my wife than getting the baby shirts at www.tshirthell.com that say some hilariously offensive things.

Once again the 4E news appears to be pretty light.

Due to a released cover of the 4E preview book, with a tiefling on the cover, and probably some other information tossed out by one of the WotC R&D bloggers it appears that the tiefling will be one of the initial races. Since I’m not a fan of the tieflings, this will be another aspect of 4E I’m going to have to ignore.

Semi-rant; I know it’s not just me, as I’ve read others opinions on it, but it looks more and more like 4E is going all anime on us. This whole tiefling thing just gives me that feeling, but nothing specific I can put my finger on. I want D&D, not Dragonball Z (or whatever violence driven anime cartoon that 10 year old boys watch today). I used to watch that stuff too, but I would never mix D&D with the Transformers, or Thundercats, or Voltron, or Silverhawks, or G.I. Joe, or…ah hell you get the picture. Semi-rant over.

As part of my sleep-deprived perusals of 4E, someone brought up the point about how the designers are going to make it possible for multi-classing casters to keep up in power. Many people piped up about how they would like to see it handled. As usual the ideas ran the gamut from good to bad.

Here was my idea; feats or class options that give power to multi-class casters, doesn’t break them by making them stronger than their single-class counterparts, fits with the character concept, and can still scale a bit to make sure the ability is still useful 10 levels later – it just needs some requirements to limit to certain character archetypes.

A level 10 fighter can lay out some damage with his sword.
A level 10 wizard can lay out some damage with his spells.

A fighter 5 / wizard 5 can’t really do either very well outside the occasional lucky shot. But what if there was a character option that allowed you to burn off a spell slot that is no higher than your BAB that allows you to deal an extra d6 of damage for the spell level burned for that round (for 4E this would be +5d6). It is very similar to a dusk blade’s abilities, but simpler, and scales in levels.

You are burning a spell, your BAB is still not as high as a fighter of equal level so your chances of hitting are slightly smaller, and you’re dealing more damage. It sounds like a decent option to me.

I’m sure many people could poke holes through this idea, but once again, hey I’m not a D&D designer, though sometimes I wish I were.

I’ve also heard/read that there are going to be effectively 4 armor classes; your regular armor class and then what used to be your 3 saving throws. Regular melee attacks will be handled like normal, touch attacks will go after your reflex AC, and so on. The names may change, but so far they’ve converted the 3 saving throws into armor classes, and then removed your touch and flat footed armor classes. That sounds like a good change to me; 2 less things to worry about.

I received an e-mail from Aaron not too long ago. He likes the idea of doing Rappan Athuk as gestalts and going out of 3E with a bang. I just hope he likes all the changes I’m making in my attempts to speed the combats up.

I still want to make combats go even faster, but can’t think of anything more to do that could work and won’t irritate the players.

Making the math simpler is one way to go, but that is already too ingrained into 3E and can’t be easily removed without some heavy rewriting of the d20 game system.

My fix to Power Attack was an easy and obvious change I could make, but it has its drawbacks. It could potentially make some combats longer, but I feel that will happen less often and the change is an improvement overall, and I believe it balances the feat out a little.

I could put up a chart for average damage, which helps at higher levels. I’ll just make some modifications that will allow players to still roll a couple dice. The average result of 10d6 is 35, the average result of 8d6 is 28, so I could say that a 10d6 fireball does 28+2d6 damage which will still average 35 damage, but doesn’t involve tons of dice.

Banning certain classes that complicate the game too much (druids and duskblades) is something needed. As I remember more about the knight class, I’m thinking maybe that class isn’t so easy to run, but so long as no one goes crazy with weird builds then the class should be fine.

Which is something I will have to ban from the players, but hopefully isn’t a problem; screwy and complicated character builds. Your PC’s should be simple and easy to run. Don’t pick a class you’ve never run before that has a lot of different options. If you’ve never run a monk before, don’t make one now unless you’re going the simple monk route.

On that note; I’m not going to ban grapple or disarm as we’ve used those often enough to be able to deal with them. But I will insist that any player who likes to use those rules have that page marked for quick access.

By “poofing out” PC’s whose players didn’t show I’m saving quite a bit of time. Playing someone else’s PC is hard enough, but adding the gestalt combo is some heavy duty training. The only real issue is if they party loses all of a single, needed class-type. But with gestalt, that should not happen often. When it does I might take pity on the party after I’ve taken out one PC, if just to make a point. (That point would be to diversify your party.)

One thing this dungeon will not do is be nice to the party like 4E seems to be heading to (a.k.a. the wussification of D&D). There will be “save or die” spells and traps. The monsters will not necessarily be placed logically to provide the “optimum challenge” for the party. Some monsters will be incredibly easy, some will be the proper challenge level, some will be hard, and some will be literally impossible to defeat. It’s a good thing to realize when you’re outmatched. And this dungeon changes from the ultra-easy to the ultra-hard encounters from room to room. You could be a group of level 3 gestalt PC’s easily taking down a single ghoul one moment, only to be running from a horrid shapeless beast the next.

I don’t think I’ve really discussed what races I’ll allow PC’s to be in Rappan Athuk. Hmm, I want to keep it open, yet simple. So humans, mountain dwarves, hill dwarves, deep dwarves, tallfellow halflings, lighfoot halflings, deep halflings, half-orcs, half-elves, rock gnomes, forest gnomes, high elves, wood elves, grey elves, and wild elves. All these races go by the stats in the PHB and MM. You’ll notice there are no EL+1 or higher races. Maybe I’ll add them in later, but not now.

I’m going to make sure that the 15 minute long adventuring does not return like it did in the WLD. In region N of the WLD the party buffed up, ran through room after room, bashing down anything in their way. Then when the buff spells were close to wearing off, they stopped and returned to each room to search it.

In Rappan Athuk they still can do that. But the dungeon and its surrounding region is alive with activity. Something could could dill a void while the PC’s return to town and rests for a week. Now maybe that Iron Golem can’t be replaced so easily, but I’m sure a bunch of goblins could be recruited within a week. There are plenty of wandering monsters and plenty of intelligent monsters who are used to having their territory invaded, especially by adventurers. They know when to retreat, wait for buffs to fade, and return.

And unlike the WLD, I’m only allowing divine casters to get their spells at the time of day they need to pray (usually morning), plus I will be enforcing the resting rules appropriately. Casters attempting to rest that get a short term interruption have to add an hour to their rest time (or reset it to 8). Casters that have their rest interrupted for an hour or more must restart their rest. And they still need to spend time getting their spells (praying, concentrating, etc.). This is an expansion and clarification of the rules, which we really haven’t paid that much attention to in recent memory.

To reduce that last paragraph to its simplest form; only one rest period per day and casters can’t go on guard duty if they want to get their spells back.

This doesn’t prevent the party from resting in the dungeon, but it sure makes it a lot harder.

The dungeon is going to be hard, and the PC’s are going to be powerful.
This should be entertaining, so long as we don’t have a clone of Tomb of Horrors.

Another Week Goes By...

It’s been over a month now since I’ve played D&D.
I’ve felt very few signs of withdrawal so far; just a few twinges to install a D&D computer game.

I might be able to play one Friday coming up soon, but that’s not guaranteed. Hopefully a couple other of us will be free to play as well.

In spite of my drastic reduction in free time I still fit in some time to peruse ENWorld, including looking for 4E info that is more than simple speculation.

It appears that the wealth of initial 4E information has slowed to a trickle for now. Anything new seems to be teasers or more fluff that means nothing to me.

Though WotC did release one small thing that gave a wealth of information; a teaser of what the 4E monster stat blocks will look like in the form of a demon/devil. I am in fact impressed with its simplicity. I’m not 100% pleased with it, but nothing I can’t let go until I get more information. The info also leads several people (on ENWorld) to believe that bonuses from ability scores will start at 6 rather than 12. So it looks to me like they’re working hard to turn 4E into an additive game as much as possible with less subtraction to force the mathematically inept from having to change gears so much.

I finally got around listening to the “Monsters, Monsters, Monsters” D&D podcast. My opinion of it is “eh”. They’re making a big deal of monster “roles” in combat and how many foes a party can or should face. I just don’t see how much of a difference the monsters make; it’s how the PC’s are different that makes or breaks this game. My opinion of them putting specialized monsters in the MM4 & MM5 was low because I can make a leveled drow on my own. I know how to run monsters and how to make them stronger so shut up and make new monsters or remake old ones.

If you just have to make monsters with levels, do it with what you would expect to see. The goblin chief should have some levels of rogue, the orc warlord should have levels of barbarian, elf tree-hugger archers should be made with levels of ranger, and so on. Those might save me some time, but making a score of gnolls with different class levels does not a monster manual make.

Sometimes I wonder if the designers are too busy trying to figure out new and interesting things to make that they forget to deal with the basics first.

Since I’ve exhausted my remedial wealth of 4E information, I guess it’s time to move on to my Rappan Athuk planning.

Let’s see I’ve already talked about making it gestalt, upping the hit points for classes, XP modification (if needed), alignment, spell non-changes, allowed classes and class options, party treasure, and some speeding up of the game.

So let’s talk about speeding up the game some more; since it is the biggest bane of 3E’s existence in my experience.

Well for one since I’ve cut down on the number of spell choices allowed to PC’s by allowing only sorcerers and favored souls as the arcane and divine classes, buffs probably won’t be too varied. And even if a player does take a lot of buff spells for his PC, that’s ok. It will be the same buff spells over and over so the math won’t be much of an issue. We could just use our “spell note cards” and have them ready at all times.

One thing in our group that seems to cause a lot of time sink in a game is thinking too much about your movement. First you need to figure out where you want to go, then you have to determine the best route while avoiding attacks of opportunity, and then you might have to make some tumble rolls, and so on. Screw that! For this game, you only suffer movement AoO’s during your first step of movement. Just grab your mini and move it. I’m sure this will interact with other bits of the game where some feats gain power and others lose, but I think things will be fine.

I’m also -this- close to kicking the “5’ step” to the curb. Unfortunately it’s too ingrained into the system to remove easily without penalizing the PC’s.

And if PC movement still takes too long, I’m canning the battle-mat, tossing the minis into the bin, and we’re going to play without any table representation of what’s going on. Sometimes I wonder if we’d be happier doing that anyway. With no battle-mat, the tactical part of the game turns into an imaginary battle-mat where not everyone has the same view, but players’ individual turns can go so much faster, and the only time a table is needed is for dice rolling and something hard to write on.

Let’s see, what else?
Oh yeah, the Power Attack feat. It’s either all on, or all off. That way you only have one set of numbers to deal with that will only change when you level rather than a formula you need to figure out every round. This is kind of a thing from way back in the Basic D&D Master’s Set that allowed you to pull your punch, but you couldn’t partially pull it; it was all or nothing. Same concept here; you either throw everything you have with abandon, or you continue with the controlled attacks that deal less damage but hit more often.

Since only paladins will have the turn undead, I think it’s fitting that we should use the holy bomb rules like we did with Ravenloft. Though instead of a way overpowered 60’ radius blast, I think I’ll limit it to a 30’ cone. At higher levels that could still hurt some undead and gives paladins something they don’t usually have, area nukes.

I thought about making everyone’s saving throw bonus equal to their level like in D&D minis, but I realized that a change like that could actually hurt the gestalt part of the game. Gestalt PC’s tend to have some sweet saving throws as one of their strengths (unless you pick classes with the same good saves).

I’m debating on changing the death at -10 hit point rule. Potentially -10 or “negative your level”, whichever is greater. I’m still waffling on this one, but leaning towards no change at all.

Sudden Metamagic Feats – gone. I want to remove the allure of “blowing your wad” early (the 5 minute adventuring day), and if anything, these feats encourage that mindset. Regular metamagic feats are fine.

Dodge (and all feats similar to it) – like I’ve done in previous campaigns, it gives a +1 dodge bonus vs. all attackers, not just one specific attacker.

I think I’ve already mentioned that there is a small village that exists near Rappan Athuk, and as much I can, I’m going to make that village a living and breathing place.

It will have the standard places that should exist to support adventurers, and in this case “adventurer tourism” is the bread and butter of the town. Several businesses in the town exist simply to supply equipment to new and foolhardy adventurers looking for their fame in Rappan Athuk; though many of their customers don’t come back.

There will be places the PC’s can buy magic items, but by no means can they buy anything they want. The shops only have what can be made locally, shipped in from elsewhere, or sold to them by other adventurers. And the prices will be adjusted according to supply and demand since I’m going to attempt to give this town a working economy.

There will be temples that can help the party, but the Church of Wee Jas isn’t among the friendliest churches around.

In other words, if an adventurer needs something, it just might be there. All they have to do is find it and bring money.

I’ll start the group off at level 1, allowing the group some time to learn to work together and get used to the gestalt power.

For PC equipment, everyone gets 200gp but they may not buy anything magical. Now you may freely save some of that money to buy magic items later at a shop, but don’t expect 200gp to go far, if anywhere. Otherwise PC’s can buy whatever standard equipment they can carry, so long as that equipment won’t kill game speed with special or complicated rules (like a spiked chain).

I would like to tie some other potential 4E changes into this game, but I just don’t know enough about it yet. So I’ll just reserve the right to change aspects of the game that slow the game down too much if I can find a better alternative I like.

As for actual stat generation, I almost don’t care. I don’t want broken stats, and a 25 point buy is too low for gestalt PC’s to split up between two classes. This issue should probably get player input.

In fact I should talk to my group and see what ideas they might have that could speed up the game.

Maybe that’s what my next blog entry could be about.

More Prattle from Me

In case you’re wondering, my previous blog entry was written the week prior to the arrival of my twins, with some modifications thrown in when I snuck in a minute or three (a very rare occurrence any more).

Now that my babies are here and healthy, sleep is a valuable commodity that the wife and I try to get. We’re not very good at it, but we’re getting better.

Having two newborns is hard work. And it’s not like the work itself is hard, it’s the never-ending schedule that kicks your ass. Next time I hear some new parent whine about how their newborn is killing them I think I’m legally allowed to smack them stupid(er). Until they’ve been double-teamed by two screaming babies at midnight, 3am, and 5am, they have no idea what tired is.

We even have friends and family helping us out a lot, and we’re still constantly exhausted. I can run on four hours of sleep for a day, but not several consecutive days like that. Once I returned to work, well forget it.

But all that aside, I’ve seen nothing new on the 4E front that’s been all that interesting. Though I’ve spent a fraction of the time I used to spend checking things out.

Dale and I are in agreement that the idea of playing 3E feels a bit hollow since the 4E announcement was made. It’s a “what’s the point?” feeling of starting a campaign that you know you’re going to abandon.

I still don’t like the general “feeling” I’m getting from all of the little updates on 4E. Yeah, they’re mostly fluff updates that I can ignore, but it’s the changes overall that aren’t giving me that good old “warm and fuzzy feeling” that I think I should be getting.

Oh and get this load of bull – while the Forgotten Realms is being knocked around with this new edition with a lot of people very ticked off and just as many happy with it, Eberron won’t be touched. Instead of advancing the timeline up to 100 years like FR, Eberron might be only advanced a year. And guess why – because Eberron players complained. So even though a lot of FR people aren’t happy and are just as vocal about it, their complaints were not heard.

You can look at it a lot of different ways, but my view is that the “newer and younger” crowd of players likes Eberron and the grognards like FR and they think that their future money is riding on the Eberron train.

Of course I’m sure it helps quite a lot to have one the lead designers to also be the creator of Eberron. Suffice to say I am not a fan of that Baker fellow.

I’m not the only long-time player (a.k.a. grognard) who is getting less thrilled with 4E as we hear more and more. I talked to a friend the other day who had the privilege of talking to a WotC VP at a convention a few weeks ago for 45 minutes. And he tore into the VP basically telling him that WotC was forgetting its core following with the direction the company is going. The VP reacted as if he had never heard it before. So either I am member of a small group of people who are totally oblivious to everyone else’s wants out of 4E, or WotC is utterly blind to the wants and wishes of everyone who started playing prior to 1990.

Ok, rant over; let me get a little back on track. I don’t want to turn into one of those anti-WotC hate-spewing critics, but at the moment I feel it’s justified.

When we start back up, we won’t be continuing with Brian’s Cormyr campaign. The module itself sucked (no surprise there – way to keep that crap-module trend going WotC) and Brian was just canceling too often. So we just moved our characters to a campaign of Justin’s design.

Justin is running a cityscape campaign with political intrigue and families at war where we were “drafted” to be part of. It’s really not my thing, but that’s just me.

Personally I’m more of a dungeon gamer myself, with cityscape intrigues used as a tool to move the game along to the next module (something my Valley campaign did a lot of) rather than being the module.

Now given my baby situation, I’m betting I won’t be gaming again until first Friday in January. They will be almost 16 weeks old, which is around the time where babies can sleep more than a few hours at a stretch.

The group will resume gaming without me sometime in mid-November, whenever Dale’s Friday schedule opens up again.

So until then my only interaction on the blog will be the occasional 4E update + opinion or more of my “what am I going to do in my next campaign” entries.

Speaking of that, I had actually begun planning two campaigns (Rappan Athuk Reloaded and the Valley), but that was prior to the 4E announcement. Now I’ve got to adapt my plans.

First off, I have to accept that I may not get to run at all. If someone else if running a successful campaign, who am I to come along and kick them out of the DM’s chair? This is just preparation for “just in case”.

Next, my Valley campaign is getting scrapped for the time being. I actually used it for my first foray into running a 3E campaign, so it only seems fitting to repeat that history with an advanced timeline to account for some of the game mechanic changes. Plus I can guarantee I won’t be pulling that new Forgotten Realms deity soap opera stunt that I’ve read about.

So that leaves Rappan Athuk. But, as usual, I’m going to spice it up a bit. I’ve put some thought into this and I kind of want us to leave 3E with a bang.

Number one, I’m making it a gestalt game. Yeah it was overpowered when we did that with Dale’s game last year, but it was a lot of fun.

To prevent the party from overpowering the module too easily, I’m cutting XP down a bit. Until level 3 the party gets 100%, then they get 75% until they reach level 6 where it drops to 50%. I may massage these percentages later in case my math is too far off. Of course I could just increase the power of the challenges to keep things on par. If it helps, you can just think of it as the older style multi-classing where each class gets a share of XP.

PC’s can be whatever alignment they want, but with some caveats. First and foremost, playing an evil PC is not an excuse to become a sociopath. Those PC’s quickly become NPC’s. Evil PC’s will have to face the repercussions of their actions if they act a bit too extreme. Second, alignment restrictions on classes like the paladin could cause an issue, so the DM will have to adjudicate – and that will usually be in favor of the PC that’s been with the group longer, or in the case of a tie I’ll default to the good-aligned-side.

I still want the games to go fast in kind of a way that 4E is promising. So here’s my biggest hit – no wizards, clerics, or druids. Druids as a PC class are nothing but a time sink, and wizards and clerics can cause the similar problems. When you’re playing a gestalt game, double that problem. Remember, I played a druid/wizard, and even in spite of my tons of pre-game planning, sometimes I still held the game up. Spellcasting classes with a limited number of spell options helps prevent the never-ending looking up spells X, Y, Z, and Q to see what they do. With gestalt, you really don’t lose that much anyway.

That being said the following classes are allowed: barbarian, favored soul, fighter, knight, monk, paladin, ranger, rogue, scout, and sorcerer. Others may be added upon player request and DM approval. But I can guarantee you that warmage and warlock are out.

Hit points I’m putting a big, and positive change to. Everyone gets to roll 1d4 hit points per level then they add a bonus to that roll. So barbarians get 1d4+8 (range of 9-12 vs. 1-12), fighters get 1d4+6 (7-10 vs. 1-10), rangers get 1d4+4 (5-8 vs. 1-8), rogues get 1d4+2 (3-6 vs. 1-6), and sorcerers don’t change one bit. Basically it keeps hit points high in classes that need them and removes the worries of pathetic hit point rolling by mitigating the randomness to a smaller value.

To keep things simple, there will be no multi-classing or prestige-classing. Pick your two classes and stick with them. In a gestalt game, there’s already enough complication and plenty of power so there’s no need to make your PC even more powerful by exploiting the system and/or making the game that much more complex.

And to remove some nearly pointless but occasionally used (and complicating) options, there will be no animal companions, familiars, or the like. PC’s should take an alternate class option that removes the companion/familiar in favor of another ability, less involved ability. Familiars and animal companions only seem to be used at low levels before they are in too much danger of being killed to easily or are otherwise nearly worthless. Personally I prefer the sorcerer option that allows them to use metamagic feats without having to add time to the casting and all they lose is a familiar. Let’s see, the Quicken Spell feat, or a toad that I can cast touch spells through? Ooh, that’s a tough decision.

Stuff from outside the core books may be allowed with DM permission, but the player will have to ask. The DM might require something in exchange from the PC to get it; such as spell research to pick a spell that exists in the Spell Compendium. In other words, try to stick with the core rules, but you’re not stuck with them. The DM just wants to keep things simple and not open up the game to needless complication. And of course the DM might throw in some things from outside the core rules.

Players can also have multiple PC’s, but can only play one at a time unless we need another PC to fill the void.

Also, if you’re not there, your PC isn’t. That means no XP for you and more XP for those who made it. Your PC will poof out of the game if need be, unless a critical plot requires that PC to be around.

Oh yeah, screw group treasure. I want to know who has the stuff the moment it’s found. That allows for plenty of player backstabbing, sneakiness, and DM-screws-the-party opportunities. Maybe the troll sees the cleric with sack of gold as a more enticing meal than the beefy fighter.

This dungeon has a reputation as a meat-grinder. Some deaths will be sudden and utterly unfair. Keep a backup character ready just in case. Yeah, rolling a 1 on a save vs. 40d6 damage sucks, but that’s how this dungeon can be.

Most of my spell changing will not exist this time around.
Wish and Limited Wish work as written. Haste works as written. The DM will even lift his usual backlash against the Augury line of spells. And Miracle will cost the caster 5000xp unless the doctrines of the granting deity are 100% in line with the intended Miracle. No god of destruction will grant a healing spell without the 5000xp cost.

The city that exists near the dungeon will be well fleshed out with plenty of role-playing opportunities and other fun, so as to prevent the boredom that can be caused by long dungeon crawls, or waiting for others to level their PC’s.

Well I hope that’s enough for now.
Hopefully I’ll be back in a couple weeks.
More hopefully WotC will have done something that makes me see them once again in a good light.

No Response

Well none of our group received an e-mail from WotC asking us to be play-testers.

That kind of sucks, but what can you do?

They only chose 50 non-RPGA play-testers that they picked randomly from their Gleemax forums. That stacked the odds against everyone.

I obviously don’t like the random choice route, but it certainly saves WotC employees from having to read through thousands of applications. Using 50 people isn’t enough, and having them all be random sounds like a plan for disappointment. Hopefully they’ll take that time they saved and put it towards making a good game engine.

Granted it’s their problem if they pick moronic yahoos to play-test, but it’s still “our” game they’re taking the risk with.

Sour grapes? Possibly, but I have a reasonable fear that what will be released as D&D won’t be D&D to me. Or perhaps I’ve become a grognard D&D player who has become too old of a gamer that views things with an eye of “it’s not as good as it used to be”.

I already have no intention of running the new Forgotten Realms any longer.

Nor am I a big fan of playing a FR module whose results mean nothing when the next FR novel comes out.

In fact, it’s probably for the best that we’ll never finish the Cormyr: Tearing of the Weave modules. I didn’t care for the small bit of module we played. I have no explanation for specifically why I didn’t like the module; I just couldn’t “get into” it. Perhaps it was the concept that we were just along for the ride while the story played out.

That’s probably a lesson for all DM’s; let your PC’s actions have long term consequences if they merit them.

So I’m thinking homebrewed campaigns are the way to go for us, or, if I’m feeling ambitious, the Kingdoms of Kalamar.

It’s not like we have an option. You have the royally hosed up and ever-changing excuse for what they call the Forgotten Realms, or you can play in Eberron where swords and sorcery fantasy has been replaced by sci-fi posing as swords and sorcery fantasy, or you can make your own world where things work as you see fit.

Still nothing released about the Digital Initiative intrigues me in the slightest. I bought one Dragon Magazine and zero Dungeon Magazines during Paizo’s run because I had no interest in it. So what would the DI give me that I could use? A 3D computer display of my character? At $10 a month, I think I’ll just paint a figurine instead. Maybe they’ll give a non-magazine price, but I’m not holding my breath.

The changes to wizard classes I’ve read a little about seem “eh” to me. They’re giving wizards foci (like wands and staffs that you see in movies) and removing most of the need for spell components. But let’s face it, when is the last time you worried about mundane spell components? In this case, WotC is just doing what the rest of us have done already; hand-waived material components.

I am definitely intrigued by how they are going to implement changes to initiative. The system I have in my head of what I think they are going to do makes “realism sense” but probably won’t speed the game up and it requires people to do simple math (double-digit addition can cause some people’s head to explode). I know 19 + 16 is 35, but there are too many people out there who need a calculator for it and not all of them are mouth-breathing junior high dropouts.

WotC is promising to make multi-class caster classes viable. I’m curious to see how they attain that without just making up new classes like the duskblade. I just don’t see it happening without a major rework of how multi-classing works.

At first, the few released tidbits of information were interesting and struck upon a few of the things I have felt needed correcting in 3E.

But the more recent information released has me worried that the game is being worked on by people wanting to rip the game apart and make another game that vaguely looks like D&D but really isn’t, then put the D&D stamp on it, call it D&D, shove it down your throat, and then stand back and wonder why you resent them.

To me it looks like they aren’t trying to tweak D&D 3E to make it run more smoothly, they’re rebuilding the game from the ground up and implementing what they think would make D&D better. And that would be all fine and dandy, if their ideas of making D&D better matched mine.

Right now my biggest 4E fear is that the people who think that Eberron was a good idea, are the same people making the calls for the new game design.

As you can see, as of this writing, I’m back on the pessimistic side of the 4E pendulum.

But maybe in a week or two my opinion will swing back.

If you’re one of those people who think that what they are doing to the D&D cosmology is a horrible thing, just remember this; it’s all fluff. You can put the inner planes back into your game and probably not even affect anything. If you want the Great Wheel of alignment planes back, I see no reason why you can’t do it. If you want the Blood War to continue, the only thing holding you back is you. It’s just information that you can change so long as the game mechanics don’t rely upon the information given.

If I want to play in the Realms as I remember them, very little is actually stopping me as it’s just a campaign setting.

To me getting rid of the inner planes, changing how demons and devils act, and so on is just a continuation of everything else I’m seeing with 4E, the designers seem to have no care about how the game previously worked so long as they get a good product in the end.

Unfortunately what a “good product” is depends on everyone’s opinions. And I’m seeing those making the good products as people a little out of touch with gamers like myself.

Just go ahead and label me a grognard right now I guess.