4dventure

It has been nearly two months now since 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons hit the shelves. Two months of forum goers decrying it as the death of gaming, proclaiming it the savior of the tabletop, or just making peace with it. Since the release of the game, I've had an opportunity to read the books, be a player (a wizard), and a dungeon master (DM). I feel I've gotten a pretty good grasp of the game and can adequately critique.

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With 4th edition being so different yet sharing some similarities with 3.5 D&D, it is impossible not to compare and contrast the two. The design goals of 4e took into account all the things I didn't like about 3.5. Player character should be need to make interesting decisions every turn in combat, DMing shouldn't be a headache, and the system should be streamlined as to remove game stopping rules.

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In the end 4e accomplished all of this. The power system gives players interesting choices by breaking things into at-will, encounter, and daily powers. As every class now uses the same system for their powers this results in balanced characters. No longer does the fighter start to feel obsolete at mid to high levels.

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The spells that were once game breaking or strickly out of combat endevors, were moved to rituals. Anyone with the right feat can perform rituals. Rituals are a great subsystem that keep the balance between characters and provide just the right amount of controll for the DM to challenges from becoming trivial.

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But my favorite changes have to do with the simplification of the system and monster stat blocks. Running 4e is fun rather than a chore. Monsters are fun to run. They have neat abilities but not so much they you get bogged down trying to run them. Minions are also a great addition. Now you can throw hordes of monsters that are easy to take down, but still have a chance to harry and disrupt the player characters.

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Over all, I've decided that this newest edition is the edition of D&D I'd most like to run and play.

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RUSS