Thursday, July 10, 2008

"...imagine a magic missile crushing the darkness, forever."

Heh...

Ok, I'm still playing catch-up on all the great blogs out there. (Have you seen all the cool blogs Mr. Maliszewski's added to his blogroll? I was reading some of them already, but not all. There are some hidden treasures there.) Jeff's report on his experiences with 4e line up a lot with my expectations, especially this:

The most interesting thing I've noticed about 4e so far is how powergaming the system seems to work. Some people will try to tell you that the simplified character creation makes powergaming impossible. Those people lack vision. The munchkining of the game obviously lurks in synergizing among your teammates. The era of the overpowered "character build" may be over, but I predict that the smart munchkins will be all over "team optimization" like stink on poop.

Yeah, I've been talking that up for a while now. I think by Christmas you'll be hearing how every group needs a "striker-striker-warlord fireteam" or some such. I'm really looking forward to seeing how that sort of thing shakes out. Often in games as complex as D&D, the unintended bits are cooler than what the designers consciously put into the game.

1 comment:

Natalie said...

My hope is that this sort of powergaming will be less crushingly anti-social than the 3.5 kind could be. I could see it tearing apart groups with underdeveloped social skills ("I don't care what you want to play, you need to play X so we can be effective.") but at least it gets people thinking about the other players at the table, instead of just one or two forum-reading obsessives making such bizarrely powerful characters that no one else gets to actually participate.