First impressions about 4th Edition

At Gen Con I finally caught up with the rest of the world and bought the core rule books for 4th Edition. Well, most of them anyway; I didn’t get the "Monster Manual" yet. So far several things have struck me as odd.

The first thing that I noticed is that gnomes are gone. What gives?! While I personally have never played a gnome, I know many several people who have and these characters always brought something (normally humorous mischief, or great insight) to the party that I was adventuring with.

The second thing that I noticed is that there seems to be a lack of variability that – at least for me – kept many aspects of the game interesting. For instance, hit point increases are constant instead of rolled dice; while I understand that this means that no one gets a really low number of hit points, it also make the game bland in my opinion. Also, I don’t want players to think, “oh, I killed that orc by doing 8 damage to it, I can kill the next orc by doing 8 damage”. I like to keep players guessing one orc may have 6 hp and the next 9 for instance.

Also in relation to this complaint is that it feeling like players are being “tracked” or “slotted” into rolls with certain characters. For example, I normally play wizards and the "Player’s Handbook" indicates that a wizards role is to damage many creatures at once. That however is not how I normally played my wizards. My wizards do always have several area effect spells in their arsenal of course, but most of the spells that I pick tend to be designed to do lots of damage to one enemy, or are utility spells like grease or heat metal. I don’t like it when Wizards of the Coast seems to imply that this is not a valid way for me to play my mages.

The third negative complaint that I have is that I cannot figure out the rules for multi-classing. I started playing not long after 2nd Edition came out (back in Junior High) and that multi-classing was the main reason for playing a non-human. Sure most of the other races had infravision as well, but unless you were doing a lot of dungeon crawls without a torch or lantern, this was not a huge advantage. Then 3rd Edition changed the rules for multi-classing and even humans could do it (instead of the less-than-appealing dual-classing that they had in 2nd Edition); this put all of the races on a more equal footing. In either case, the rules were easy to locate.

I have looked in the contents and index of both the "Player’s Handbook" and "Dungeon Master’s Guide" and cannot find any reference to this. I do not know if there are restrictions on multi-classing (certain races only, a level requirement, classes that cannot be mixed, etc.). Also, do you pick all of your classes up front (as in 2nd Edition) or as you go along (like in 3rd Edition). Either method is fine with me, but I can’t find the rules. Granted, I have not read the books cover-to-cover yet, but it seems bloody difficult to find any references in this feature. If anyone has page numbers for information – or can point me to another book like the "Player’s Handbook 2 – it would be greatly appreciated.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I did find a lot to like about 4th edition as well. For starters, the information is laid out extremely well. The "Player’s Handbook" seems to have all the rules in it and the "Dungeon Master’s Guide" is mainly focused on campaign design and how to run a game. It never made sense to me that in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition half of the rules were in one of the books and half were in the other. The 2nd Edition was so bad that they had to cross-list the index. This layout is a definite improvement.

Second, character generation appears to be much simplified. I remember in 3rd Edition it sometimes took half of a gaming session for people to create new characters. In 2nd Edition most of the groups that I played with knew the rules inside and out and normally characters could be created in about 30 minutes. This new edition feels more like 2nd Edition or the White Wolf games in terms of time. I haven’t actually had a chance to generate a character yet though, so this is just my impression at this point.

I know people in several groups right now, so I may see if there are any openings, or sometimes my wife and I swap back and forth DMing single-player campaigns for each other and this may be how I first experience the game. In either case, I hope to have more concrete information to post shortly instead of just my initial feelings on the game from reading the source books.