Dungeons and Dragons 4e what do you guys think?

[Priest of Asmodeus]

Well I have to tell you I Loves it. I hope they do a nwn style game for the 4th edition at some point.
so If you guy have played it what do you think of it

[nickbeat]

I'm diggin it so far. I play in a game on the wizards boards and we are fighting a dragon at level 1!

[Priest of Asmodeus]

yea seems awesome i was going to see if i could locate a virtual table group to play with since i dont know any one in sf that plays

[nickbeat]

Dude, check the RPG board at Gamescape on Divisadero. They got games.

[Priest of Asmodeus]

well i guess your from sf then huh?

[MKartMaster]

yea seems awesome i was going to see if i could locate a virtual table group to play with since i dont know any one in sf that plays

MapTool (and the rest of the RPTools suite) is my Virtual Tabletop of choice. Combine with your choice of VOIP client (Ventrilo or Teamspeak are good; GTalk can be adhoc'd to work; Skype has a nasty EULA, ask around on the RPTools forums to find how bad). It's coming up on the final 1.3 release version.

ORPG has better system support (its node tree is extremely customizable) but is, IMO, butt-ugly compared to MapTool. It also has native support for midi playback to the group.

FantasyGrounds and Battlegrounds have pricetags, but have features to make up for it like rules integration.

Apparently, WotC is putting out some kind of "Game Table," but all I've seen are disappointing screenshots and empty promises. [/sarcasm]

[Priest of Asmodeus]

actually i was thinking of fantasy grounds 2 or battlegrounds the ddi is like 15 a month to use and im not to thrilled about that whole thing so who knows i also got itabletop and im checking that out.

[MKartMaster]

Yeah, the DDI suite looks like it's going to be rather underwhelming.

I'll post something more about 4e in the morning.

[Sammael]

Oh, so that's why D+D has been popping up in major bookshops recently. Guess I ought to go check this out. I'm curious as to what they've done to sorcs.

[nickbeat]

They no longer have sorcerers. You got wizards and warlocks now. Of course every class is variable from the beginning, so one can create a wizard which is very much like a sorcerer.

[Cade]

It is very much different mechanics wise from 3.5 IMO. I have not played it in depth, and as such, do not know if I will like it or not. I want to get the books, and since my brother wants to play PNP, I think Ill test it out on him.

So far, having played through three 2 hour adventures, I don't like it.

[Priest of Asmodeus]

man i cant say enough good things about the game. Power gamers and character "builders/optimizers" are outta luck here. multiclass works differently, along with combat so you dont have that ranger,bard,monk blah blah blah character thats just a set of abilities that was running rampant in 3.5 great game. best of all all characters are useful during combat
wizards dont run outta spells. clerics job is to heal and lead and not be the universal bad a$$ like in 3.5 [common some one has permawood when it came to clerics]. overall every thing good from 3.5 is in every thing bad is gone

[MKartMaster]

CharOp lives on in 4e, without a doubt.

The best I've seen so far are setups to one-round Orcus. They were a Cascade of Blades and (ab)using the Blood Mage's Blood Pulse and Bolstering Blood abilities to deal several hundred dice of damage via forced movement.

Otherwise, you can find the 4e CharOp boards here and here.

However, the 4e core is definitely a lot less breakable than 3.5e's. Classes are locked down in what they can do much better.


However, they might have gone a bit too far with the multiclassing rules. Paragon Multiclassing is underwhelming, the power-swap feats are better to being on par with other feats (which, as a whole, have a lot less bang than 3.5e's, but you do get more I suppose), while the class-specific feats are probably the best of the bunch so you can snag another class' paragon path. For example, a wizard gets a good amount of mileage from grabbing Initiate of the Faith and taking the Divine Oracle paragon path.

My other big qualm with 4e so far is that there is a very disappointing lack of Epic Destinies. I'm hoping/expecting WotC to release something like "Epic Power" with loads of Epic Destinies.