I keep thinking of things to blog about and not blogging. :( Bad Lizard.
Lizard might also be very short of free time over the next few months. I have to decide which, if any, of my personal activities to cut down. Without going into details, I have An Opportunity, and while I am fairly leery of some of the particulars, it would be damn foolish of me to pass it up, as it will cost me no money and the time invested will still be worth it even said Opportunity does not pan out. (No, it doesn't involve D&D 4e. It does involve some of the stuff Jane is up to, and I don't want to post spoilers for HER blog, so when she talks about it in public, so will I.)
Speaking of 4e...
I'm getting really wavy about it. For every good thing, there's a bad thing. The problem is, I can't make a final judgment w/out the actual rules. Some of things I think are missing/wrong/bad might actually be covered in the parts of the rules we haven't seen. Other things are pretty much set in stone -- the skill list cut down to 17 skills, for example, which is borderline useless, not to mention the removal of skill points. On the other hand, the rules do reflect the way play for the groups I'm with has evolved over the past few years -- complex terrain battlefields, lots of enemies with Cool Powers, and a lot of 'chesslike' tactical options. One thing I love about 3e is that it's almost two games -- a story-intensive roleplaying game and a tactical miniatures combat game, and it's easy to shift between the two mindsets when playing. (Or, as had been noted, "Everyone turns into Sun Tzu when the DM rolls for initiative.")
In any event,
here's some of the character sheets from the recent D&D Experience. Gives you a lot of info about the current state of the rules.
And you have to love how, after three years of playtesting, no one found broken rules which showed up in the demo games. (Paladins can 'mark' someone. If the target attacks anyone but the Paladin, they take 1d8 points of damage. Problem: It's a ranged ability, so all you need to do is keep the target from engaging the Paladin and he (the target) has a non-removable 1d8 DOT on him, which at low levels is nasty.) WOTC has admitted this was "unexpected" and is changing the way the power works to deal with it.This tells me the playtesters were enjoying the "spirit" of the rules (obviously, it's supposed to be used to let the paladin go mano-a-mano with a target and perform his 'defender' role) and not thinking like
real D&D players and trying to break the crap out of them. I've pointed out several obvious rules exploits on ENWorld and RPGnet, and the answer from supporters of 4e (though not, to be clear, WOTC devs), has been "Well, the DM should just disallow anything like that". Yeah, and if I wanted to spend every game session arguing DM calls over vague or incomplete rules, I'd be playing AD&D 1e. I have better things to do, as a DM, then trying to arbitrate if a player is violating the "spirit" or "intent" of the rule. I'd rather have two pages of befuddling grappling rules (and a Josh or a Chuk at my table), then a "simple" one paragraph rule which wasn't at all clear about edge cases or unexpected synergies.
Now, it might be some of these "obvious exploits" aren't, when seen in the full context of Actual Play. But when at least one has turned out to be, there might be more...
You don't playtest a game by doing what the designers want you to do. You do it by doing what you think they never expected you to do. A group which sits down to test a game and just plays it in accordance to the "intent" of the rules, not the letter of them, has failed to be playtesters -- they're just people getting to preview a game. Yay for them, but sucks for the developers relying on feedback to see all the bugs in the system -- and there's always bugs.
Comments (2)
If they really want 4e playtested, just give it to the denizens of the Wizards Character Optimization board for a week. Those glorious bastards will flay off the "spirit of the rules" and devour every tasty loophole and edge case until all that's left is the shining, marrowless bones of the system.
I've been unimpressed with both the parts of the system I've seen (with a couple of exceptions) and the way that the PR has been handled. And I begin to worry that what happened with the playtesting is the same thing I've seen with other QA testing: "Oh, that's an unlikely scenario; we can leave that in/ignore that and deal with the small number of issues it causes after release."