NEWS: Wil Wheaton's Geek In Review: Keeping The Borderlands Alive

GEEK: Wil Wheaton's Geek In Review: Keeping The Borderlands Alive

Last week, I spent an entire day playing Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition with some of my friends. Big whoop, you say. So did I. Ah, but I played in Seattle. With Gabe and Tycho from Penny-Arcade. And Scott Kurtz from PVP. And, to really twist the +3 dagger in your back, our DM was Chris Perkins from Wizards of the Coast, who made an adventure specifically for us to play. For the crushed peanuts and maraschino cherry topping on this sundae of HAWESOME, I got to play a class from the unreleased Player's Handbook 2. We recorded the entire session for a podcast, which will be released early next year.

Did I mention this class is unreleased? Because it was. I played a class that you haven't seen yet. I just want to make sure I get full bragging mileage out of this. I posted a little bit about it on my blog and Twitter (I can't go into specifics, for obvious reasons *cough* awesome unreleased class *cough*). I should not have been surprised (but I was) to find out that a lot of people seem to want to know what I think of D&D Fourth Edition.

If you're not a serious tabletop gamer, you may be surprised to learn that this version of D&D was extremely controversial in the gaming community. Mr. Peabody, fire up the Wayback Machine . . .

In August of 2007, Wizards of the Coast announced that they were updating Dungeons & Dragons to a new, fourth edition. I was mostly happy with the current edition, but I was cautiously optimistic. "Maybe they've absorbed a lot of feedback from gamers who played 3.0 and 3.5, and they're cleaning things up accordingly," I thought. (Yes, there really was a third-and-a-half edition. That's a topic for another column, ideally written by someone else.)

By October of 2007, I had heard a lot of crazy talk. Nothing was sacred, they were saying. Magic Missile was going to require a to-hit roll and there would be some kind of dragon character race. As I absorbed each bit of new, my condition was downgraded, from cautiously optimistic to increasingly wary. "Nothing is sacred? Dragons are for killing, not for playing! What next, are they going to replace the swords with walkie-talkies?" There was a definite "WTF? Han shot second?!?" vibe in the community. Gamers, like hardcore SF geeks, tend to fear change. Especially change which we determine, sight unseen, to be stupid.

I didn't spend a lot of time thinking about Fourth Edition until May, when I got a copy of The Keep on the Shadowfell, a first-level adventure with some pre-made characters and simplified rules, designed to be a teaser before the core rule books went on sale in June. I paged through it with as open a mind as I could muster, and though I saw that the rumors about Magic Missile and Dragonborn were true, I liked pretty much everything else I saw. In fact, it looked like it could be a lot of fun, and it reminded me more of the streamlined Red Box "Basic D&D" system I played when I was a kid than of the math-heavy, table-laden version of AD&D I traded for GURPS when I was a teenager.

I lucked into a set of core rule books a week before they were officially released. My world came to a complete halt while I devoured them. I'll eventually give each one its own review, but the short version is: The Fourth Ed Dungeon Master's Guide is the book I've wanted to read since I was 12. Everything you want to know about running a game Ñ and having fun doing it Ñ is in this book. I have a ton of experience playing D&D, but very little experience running games. I still wear a scarlet letter for several total party kills when I was a kid; this book gave me the confidence and guidance to sit behind the DM screen again. The Player's Handbook has a terrible index, and they made the mistake of telling us early on that something does "1[W] + Wis" damage without telling us what [W] is until the end of the book (SPOILER ALERT: it's weapon damage, like 1d8 or 1d12 or 2d4+6. Also, the monsters are calling from inside the castle!), but other than that, it gives you everything you need to create and outfit a character. The Monster Manual is full of Monsters. 'Nuff said.

I didn't actually get to play a game (stupid real life responsibilities) until last week, but reading the 4E core rule books inspired me to get all of my D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, GURPS, True20, Mutants & Masterminds, and World of Darkness books out and remember exactly why I started playing these games in the first place. I didn't have to look very long; it was printed right inside the cover of the Player's Manual in my very first Basic Rules Set (the red box that served as my introduction to the system). "This is a game that is fun. It helps you imagine." You'll notice that it does not say, "This is a game that helps you feel superior to other people because you can calculate THAC0 in your head before the dice stop rolling," or "This game is deliberately designed to exclude anyone who doesn't have a degree in higher mathematics." When I played Fourth Edition, it was like they'd taken everything I didn't like about D&D, everything that had made it overly complicated and cumbersome, and thrown it all away. All that was left was the best lessons taken from 3.0, and the philosophy that made basic D&D so much fun in the first place.

So now you know where I'm coming from, but I need to add one disclaimer before I describe my impressions of 4E: I've only played once. It was for 10 hours, and it was with people I really, really like, but it was just one adventure. Having said that, however, what I experienced fulfilled and even surpassed the expectations I had after reading the core rules, a couple of adventure modules, and talking to people who play 4E in their weekly game. In the briefest of terms, it was hella fun.

How does it play? I think the best way I can describe it is: simply, without being simplistic. Gamers who play an RPG have to decide for themselves why they're setting aside the time and making the effort to get together. Almost every time, whether people have fun comes down to the DM and the players. It took me years of gaming, and no small amount of frustration, to conclude that a system's rules should provide a structure and some basic expectations for the game, but that a campaign or adventure is more fun when it's supported by the rules, instead of being defined by them. (Caveat: No game is suitable for everyone. If you can't stand horror movies, you won't have a good time playing World of Darkness, no matter how much you like the system and your fellow players. Further caveat: There are some badly designed games out there. I'm not talking about games with design decisions you disagree with; I'm talking about games with contradictory rules, broken cross-references, poor or no indexing, and probably little to no playtesting.)

My 4E experience started with character creation, which I did sitting on the floor of my office with pencils and paper, the Player's Handbook, and the Adventurer's Vault. I know there are online tools available to do it all for you, but I couldn't bring myself to use them; I'm an original analog gamer, man, that's just how I roll. (4d6 and drop the lowest FTW.) It took awhile because while I had read the books, I had never tried to use them, and there was some page-flipping while I wrapped my brain around the system. However, and this is crucial, I never got frustrated or felt bored. The process took some time because I had a learning curve and because there are several decisions to make, not because I was confused or because the rules were disorganized.

Now, to address some of the things I worried about before I played 4E. I keep hearing people complain that 4E is just WoW on the tabletop. Quite tellingly, I haven't heard this from anyone who has actually played 4E, but I understand the concern, especially if you're only looking at the combat rules in the store and listening to people complain on the Internets. Many of us have a lot invested in our 3.0 and 3.5 books, and may not want to take a chance on something that's going to be just like a damn video game. Aren't we playing this to get away from video games? I haven't played WoW and don't really care to, but if Blizzard's combat system is this fast and easy to understand, and this much fun, I can see the appeal. Every player got to do something important to help the party, and all of us contributed to each challenge, whether it was solving a puzzle, disarming a trap, or actually fighting lots of monsters.

(Speaking of WoW, I wonder if WoW is, for some gamers, "the other woman," threatening to split the party with a siren's call that's taking potential players out of our world and never giving them back...could that be why so many hobby gamers hate it so much? And if so, wouldn't it make more sense to hate on CCGs, which sucked away RPG players ten years before anyone knew what Warcraft was? Hey, as long as I'm kicking over anthills today, I'm going to make sure I stomp on as many as I can.)

You may have heard that player characters are much stronger at lower levels and that it's harder to die than it used to be. That's true. I can only speak for myself, but I don't see the problem. I like that my character isn't going to die from one encounter at first level. I like that I can use cool powers and feats and feel heroic right out of the gate, instead of slogging through several rooms of kobolds or skeletons, with numerous breaks to rest and heal between each encounter.

Speaking of healing, player characters get to use a certain number of healing "surges" each day, sort of like guzzling down an energy drink when you're pulling an all-nighter and start to flag. This does indeed fundamentally change the game I grew up playing, but I can't believe I ever campaigned without it. I don't want to keep going back to town whenever I have a tough fight. I want to keep exploring the world and meeting new NPCs. I want a trip back to town to really mean something, either that we've made some major progress in the campaign and have something to report, or we barely escaped a Gelatinous Cube and had to follow Sir Robin all the way back to Winterhaven, eating his minstrels on the way. (Yaaaaay.)

I'm not going to attack people who can't stand 4E the same way I've seen some anti-4E people attack others for liking it, because that just reminds me of watching two guys with ponytails argue about which Linux distribution is better while they ignore the stripper grinding on the rail right next to them. (She's working really hard for those singles, guys. Show some respect.) I will say to the 4E haters, though, that Hasbro's idiotic handling of third-party 4E support (also a topic deserving its own column) has effectively alienated a huge portion of the indie publishing world, and there's going to be plenty of 3.5 support out there for a very long time. Paizo's Pathfinder and Green Ronin's True20 seem to make a lot of people very happy, too, and there are a ton of other systems out there, so it shouldn't be too hard to find something that fits your game and your circle of friends.

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for 2d12 years. I remember when magic-users couldn't wear armor, when edged weapons didn't hurt skeletons, and even when an elf was a class. I have more polyhedral dice than [SOMETHING NORMAL PEOPLE HAVE A LOT OF]. I routinely tell my wife and friends that I have to "save vs. shiny" when I go to my friendly local game shop, and I didn't realize that graph paper existed for a purpose other than making dungeons until I'd been in high school geometry for a semester...and even then, I remained skeptical.

Few things in the world make me as happy as gaming, and I have two shelves of RPG books to prove it. I have a lot invested in those books, not just money, either, but time and memories. Each time I hear that one of the systems I care about is in danger of getting the Jar-Jar business, I have to save vs. kill crush destroy. At substantial minuses. If you'd told me six months ago that I'd be sitting here today writing about how much I love D&D Fourth Edition, I would have laughed in your face and called you a silly person. It is almost certain that I would have taunted you a second time, called your parentage into question, farted in your general direction, and observed that you were best suited for a career in empty animal food trough wiping.

Yet here I am, anxious to go pick up my Fourth Edition Manual of the Planes, and counting down the days until Winter Break so I can take my kids and some of their friends to the Keep on the Shadowfell, where I will get to play Kalarel himself, and try really hard not to kill them all in their first few encounters. Remember, it doesn't matter what edition of what game you're playing ... a system is only as good as its DM and its players.

Wil Wheaton rolled a critical failure vs. make deadline this week. Sorry, Nicole!

Amen about D&D 4E...didnt think much of it at first then I tried and was blown away by how cool it is. Also, great to have your colum back Wil. Now, time to Save vs. Mythbisters and get some paper work done for work.

I'm sorry but, Magic Users can wear armor now?

@D&D: You changed, man.

regarding complex rules, i understand why some people prefer a more streamlined system, and i even enjoy it myself sometimes. and i don't like rules that are complex for the sake of complexity, or complex because of bad design (i'm looking at you, THAC0).

but one of the things i enjoy about a well-designed RPG is the complexity. i like being good at manipulating the system to achieve my goals--not finding loopholes and breaks, but finding synergies and ways to turn the mechanics to my advantage.

Ok...let me get this stright. You were mere miles from where I live, playing D&D, playing an unreleased class. In the city I call home. Without me.

*cry!*

So, I didn't get a chance to read as much of this article as I would have liked, but will go back to do so. Got through the first few paragraphs and all I have to say is that is the most epic game of D&D anyone could have without having Gygax himself (R.I.P.) there to DM. wow.

Having played 4E and WoW, the two are very similiar, but it's a two way street. WoW ripped a lot of things from D&D to begin with and then Wizard's took alot from WoW and the MMOs out here, and I think they did that to try and bring in new players. Which we can't blame them for.

Magic-users can wear armor, sure. They just don't wear it very well and it fucks with their spellcasting, so most of the time they don't *want* to.

Anyway. I haven't really gotten to play 4E yet, but I'd like to. My limited fiddling with it (a demo game, essentially) suggested that it made combat a lot more exciting, low levels less dull, and generally improved the game in many ways. Much like 3.0E was a huge improvement before than, and 2E a huge improvement over 1E. And you will still find people to say otherwise. *shrugs*

Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name.

I just want to know one thing:

Does a housecat still do 1d4 scratch damage? Because those things are deadly to 1st level characters. Why a non-adventuring NPC would ever keep one in the house is beyond me. I think that perhaps the name "house"-cat is an oxymoron.

I am running my second 4E campaign, and converting the Pathfinder stuff over. 4E is a fine system and tons of fun. It has been much easier to teach the kids in the neighborhood and is really an ideal platform for recruiting newbies.

I also am still playing 3.5. The largest issue for most of the folks who are still devoted to 3.5 is the ability to differentiate characters through the rules set and character generation. The best core complaint I have heard is a fighter is a fighter is a fighter in 4E and the best choices are so distinctly optimized that you see very little diversity within classes. If you are a very rules driven player, this is important to you.

I have had a great time running and playing 4E and am supporting a game day in Atlanta this weekend as a judge.

It looks to me like about 1 in 5 folks is still playing 3.5 exclusively. More than anything else I think that comes from a very, very poor marketing campaign, and a tactical decision to focus on new player acquisition and penetrating a younger demographic. Looks like some bifurcation in the player base and a strong sense of alienation.

I'm interested in your opinions on DDI. Have you used the etools? My issues have been with a horrible lag against release schedule and failure to set expecations in the player base realistically.

I love your comment about graph paper...it made me lol good. Even in school I found a reason to use graph paper for a dungeon / castle...in my western civ class

Dude, I love you. In a totally platonic, male way.

Hrm.

cats do 1d2-4 dmg. they actually end up starving to death, unable to do enough damage to their prey to kill it.

Since no one else has done it, allow me to congratulate you on your thread title.

Though I never adopted any of the later versions of D&D, this was a very interesting read. Thanks.

While I'm still playing 3.5 with my friends (we have fun, and we've invested a lot of cash in those books to switch over right now), your enthusiasm definitely makes me want to check out the 4th ed books I have.

Too funny.

Luckily, the 4E respawning rules keep housecats from going extinct.

I've enjoyed 4E enough so far, though I can't help pining for the open fields of GURPS or Hero System's wide open "build whatever character you want, so long as it's point balanced". 4E is fast, clean, and tactically interesting, but it straps me into a character archetype system that I have a hard time going back to. Sure, wizards can wear armor now, etc., but once you set your imagination free, it's hard going back.

You sir, just rolled a d20 against my mind.

I don't love it, but it wasn't as bad as I was expecting it to be. It is streamlined, which is a nice way of saying dumbed down. Basically, while 3.0 was written with a high school/college education in mind, these feel like they were written for a 12 year old. I understand marketing pressures to try and capture some of that younger video game demographic, but things like the healing surges feel like random power-ups.

Now, I could say it was also written to be a barely role playing version of a miniature game, but I like that tactical aspect of it. I also believe most (if not all) *role-playing* opportunities are generated by the game master, which is good, since the rules don't encourage them at all (if fact, the first adventure I played, none of my skills can into play at all.)

What was really fun, though, was a modified superhero adventure someone ran at a local gaming con. Is it good or bad that it plays much better as a super-hero game?

As Wil stated, a game is only as good as it's DM AND players. Players, let your DM know what you like and what you don't. DMs, don't let your players run your games through their complaints, but don't stick too exclusively to the "letter of the law" (according to the rulebooks), either. The best games I've ever played were when the DM and the players met somewhere in the middle, used the rules that are necessary, and bent the rest to fit their adventure/campaign/world. Working along those guidelines I've never had any problems with any of the various editions of D&D. To be quite honest, I can still sit down and run a night of gaming without ever opening a rule book. Again, as stated, it's all about using the ol' melon. I mean, really, the only reason for new editions is because people have thought of different angles on the old rules that might be worth trying.

In response to baudot and mQx, and again, it's just my opinion, but I do believe that a great DM should be able to encorporate whatever other system, world, character, etc. their players wish to use/inhabit. There should be no boundaries so long as all the people involved are happy with the outcome. I took D&D players to outerspace once because that's where they wanted to go (it works in the context of deities and other planes of existence).

"when edged weapons didn't hurt skeletons"

i remember! I REMEMBER!

Quoted for truth!

I haven't played 4E yet, but do have the books. I have to say I disagree with you on the "I like that I can use cool powers and feats and feel heroic right out of the gate" bit. It's my fear that this power-up of low level characters will come at the expense of actual role playing. Really developing a character instead of what amounts to little more than a weapon. Killing the monster is fun... but it's more fun being the hero (or villain as the case may be).

But again... I should probably play the thing before I judge it. Still immersed in a WoD campaign I'm running now though. I'll get round to 4E sometime... Maybe.

I only have a few problems with 4E's distribution. First, I don't like how they released the new system (which completely invalidated the old one) and have since been barely trickling books out. I at least partially understand that because a lot of the reason behind making 3.5 was having to fix all of the overpowered prestige class stacking from the class books they released right after 3.0 came out.

The thing I don't understand is why did they stack a mountain of hype behind D&D Insider and then take 6 months after release to get any of it running? The part that really burns my ass about D&DI was that they claimed that they'd have it available for a trial basis and at some point switch to a subscription service. In retrospect it seems like they offered the free trial because they really didn't have anything for people to pay a subscription for, because as soon as they got the dungeon and character creator running they started the subscription service so I didn't even get to see the features that I was interested in for the "free trial".