Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Geek Related Gives a 4e Rundown

Over at Geek Related, mxyzplk has posted a rundown, with links and commentary, of most of the previews released by WotC to date on D&D's 4th edition. He's not terribly impressed, and I suspect it has a lot to do with sharing my appreciation of verisimilitude:

Every damn monster they’ve showed off “marks” someone and does stuff to it. I still haven’t heard any kind of “what does this mean in game world” explanation - it’s a clear gamism over simulationism decision and it grates on me.


Keeping his point-of-view in mind, I'd definitely recommend taking a look if you haven't had the time to keep up with WotC's daily release of preview material.

2 comments:

James Maliszewski said...

I'm not a big fan of verisimilitude, as you know, and I think the design of 4e is much to "gamist" for my tastes. It's one thing to give a monster an ability whose mechanical implementation involves singling out a specific target and doing bad mojo to him, but you still need some kind of explanation of what this mechanic means in the game world or else it's just an analog video game.

As for multiclassing, I respectfully disagree. It may be that 4e's particular take on multiclassing stinks and smacks of lazy design -- and I think it does -- but I also happen to think that 3e-style multiclassing is fundamentally broken and abusive and needed to be ditched.

trollsmyth said...

Yeah, these things are certainly a matter of taste, and it's easy to turn the dial too far.

I've mixed feelings about 3e multiclassing. Honestly, though, after I'd poked around with True20, I pretty much came to the opinion that what the game really needed was to drop the pretense go full-bore point-buy.

- Brian