System Spotlight: Dungeons and Dragons (4th Edition)

I have had fairly poor experiences with Dungeons and Dragons.  My generation was all about 3.5 Edition, and I found it to be dreadful.  The overwhelming nature of D&D 3.5 was that you were either in, and bought all the damn books, or not, where you maybe owned a player's guide.  Every time I tried to play it, mostly for the sack of hanging out with a body or two on a given day, my mind was so bobbled by how many rules there were for every damn thing, it seemed.  My first couple of experiences I tried to keep simple, so I tried to play a fighter.  Navigating the feats was like researching for a thesis paper, especially when I was handed more books than one.  The multiple times I tried to play a fighter, I ended up with some generically deceit feats and hoped for the best.

The last game I tried, I wanted to be something, oh, I don't know, useful.  So, I tried to be a cleric.  We finally encountered our first undead, and I shouted "I turn undead!" having seen this before.  The rules for turn undead are a page long, and neither myself, my rule-nazi friend (at the time), nor the dungeon master could derive a clear understanding of what the hell I was suppose to roll, or not roll.  Anyone who knows about D&D 3.5 knows that a cleric can turn undead.  It's like milk if clerics were cereal.  And yet, we couldn't, for the life of me, figure the damn thing out.  "I'm sure it's clarified in another book," they said, and let me just turn the damn thing and move on.  Another book?  What bull.

So, when I tell you I decided to pick up Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, you know how I feel about the franchise already.  First, let me explain (perhaps again, as I tend to repeat myself) that I love picking up systems and just reading them, cover to cover.  Even if I hate the system, I want to learn from it.  I take everything I hate and everything I love and then move on if the bad out weighs the good, and keep the good in mind when making my system, and remember the bad as well.

What finally got me to purchase 4e was that everyone was complaining how simple it was.  After thinking back on my experiences in 3.5e, I thought maybe simple was better.  The D&D crowd is so large in the roleplaying scene, I just wanted to reach out and maybe find some more gamers with it.  So, my brother and I bought the Dungeon Master's Kit, the Monster Vault, and the Player's Handbook.  I read the rules, and we got a game together.


At first, this game felt like it - as in the game.  We played it for a month or more until we started to lose our fresh eyes and see the cracks in the armor.  By the time we started to realize just how meh-worthy D&D 4e was, we had bought Player's Handbook 2 & 3, the Monster Manual, Dungeon Master's Guide 1 & 2, and a plethora of map-design supplements.  Because of this, we dragged through a few more campaigns, for a few more months, before we had finally had it.

What is wrong with 4th Edition?  First of all, the system only cares about combat.  It has a skill list, but that's just there to allow for actual roleplaying in between fighting.  Second of all, the higher level you obtain, the weaker you get.  Allow me to explain.

At level one, you receive two "At-Will" moves, which you will pretty much use for the rest of your campaign, forever.  You also receive either one or the other, or both, of an Encounter move and a Daily move.  I've already forgotten.  As you level up, you gain Health, Damage, and Defense bonuses, and you start acquiring more Encounter and Daily moves until you lose track of them all, or have to start replacing them.  Encounter moves can only be used once per encounter, and the daily moves can only be used once per day.  So, naturally, you try to save those for the bigger enemies.  What is enormously, enormously disappointing is that you Encounter and Daily moves couldn't kill a standard enemy at your level.  Ever.  Your enemies gain so much damn health the further you go, gain so much defense, and yet maintain a rather pathetic attacking ability, that even after you've used all your dailies and encounters, you still have to slug it out for another six turns before the battle is finally over.

Also, I tried to play a "tank", and I found it the most disappointing.  No matter how high your Armor Class (which determined the difficulty it was to be hit) got, the enemies had enormous attack bonuses.  I was hardly ever missed, and I was playing the tankest-tank ever.  After that, I knew tanks were useless except for their large amount of health points.

Every combat system is just a battle of attrition, in RPG systems.  Mostly, you position yourself and slug it out.  It's actually quite boring if there's nothing to spice it up.  We thought the encounter and daily powers were the spice, but the higher level you go, the more useless they became.  When we finally reached Paragon level (which is the second stage in D&D 4e that begins at level 11 - it goes Heroic, Paragon, then Epic), the battles were so sluggish and monotonous that we ended most of the fights with, "And, eff it, you kill them all."  Thinking back on it, the only time I felt like a hero was levels 1-5.  After them, you just feel like a moron, whose beating his axe against a stone wall until it caves.

Wizards of the Coast has announced that they are putting Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition in the works, and frankly I don't care.  I might pick up a DM's Guide and Player's Guide, just to expand my knowledge, but I certainly won't let it trap me after my experiences with 3.5 and 4e.  So, when I was talking about 3.5e, I mentioned that there are two people who know of it:the one's in, or the one's that weren't.  I guess I'm just not in to it.