Get busy livin’, or Get busy dyin’

February 11, 2008 · Filed Under 4E, Dungeons and Dragons

So, I want to talk about 4th edition today.

I’ve got to say, I’m getting geeked. I absolutely love what I’m seeing as of late. What am I liking? I’ll bullet-point it for ya:

The new approach to death & dying.
Eladrin and Tieflings. It’s nice to see them shake the game up a little. Maybe it’s because I always played a Gray Elf back in the day, and because having a Tiefling in the party gives me a great excuse to screw with character backgrounds. I don’t know.
Worlds & Monsters. It’s just a cool read.
The overall flavor. It’s inspiring, frankly. The whole “points of light” discussion is, in many ways, at the root of the new campaign I’m designing.
The spellplague in the Realms. How cool is it that Abeir has returned? A whole new freaking continent, and, best of all, Maztica is gone.
Sigil in the DMG.
Race matters throughout the adventuring career. Oooh, and no racial ability penalties.
DM Tools, although I’m starting to get a bit concerned as we’ve not heard much in the way of previews on these in a while. Not the first time we’ve been burned on a software promise, but I’m still hopeful.
James Wyatt is a major player in the story/flavor area. I’ve always been a bit of a fan of Wyatt, in the same way my good friend Randy is with Monte Cook.
It just gives us all something to talk about.

I know I’ve hit some of those before, but a recap is always helpful. At any rate, the bottom line is that none of us knows exactly what we’re going to see in D&D 4E. Except for designers and play-testers, of course. But I haven’t seen any deal-breakers yet.

One of my good friends declared, over the weekend, that unless WotC “did away with hit points” he wasn’t switching to 4E. I get the dissatisfaction with the hit point system (though I don’t agree with it). I argued that hit points had been there since the beginning, and that hit points were no more going away than ability scores. I asked if that meant 4E had to fix things that had been broken since the inception of the game in order for him to switch. He said, “yes.”

———-

I want 4E to be good. Heck, I want it to be great, for so many reasons. If it sucks bad, I’m not switching. I’ll take what I like in terms of both mechanics and flavor, and I’ll leave the rest. But I really really need for it to not suck. I feel like it has the potential to breath new life into my whole extended gaming group. As it is today, we’ve been a bit unenthused, and we were that way before the announcement.

Does that hope make me a blindly devoted fanboy? I don’t think it does. Maybe just the eternal optimist.

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