cerebralpaladin

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition (“4E”) (actually more like the tenth edition of a D&D game, depending on how you count, but who’s counting?) came out a little over a week ago. I followed the reports about 4E pretty closely, and my expectation was that it would be a very good game for people whose interests in RPGs were different from my own. Nonetheless, I’ll inevitably play a fair amount of 4E because of friends’ preferences and at conventions and so forth, and I figured I might run a 4E campaign at some point, so I picked up the “gift set” of Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual as soon as it came out. Since then, I’ve DMed two games—a session of WotC’s “Into the Shadowhaunt” scenario for Worldwide D&D Game Day and a game for 11th level pregenerated characters that I wrote. I figured that I would share my thoughts about 4E.

Overall, I don’t like it. This is significantly a matter of taste, but I also think that the game was badly underplaytested and that it has some significant flaws even for its core purpose. I also found that some of my objections were stronger than I expected. This is based on a small sample set of games, one of those games was a lousy module, and I haven’t been a player in any 4E games—a crucial step in reaching a fair overall conclusion. But so far, I’m not impressed.

( Much, much more below the cut )

I'm not going to post often on this account, but I wrote an e-mail to some of my Democratic friends encouraging them to vote for Obama.  I thought I would repost it here.

Cerebral Paladin is a lawyer, father, husband (of orichalcum), writer, and gamer, among many other activities. His ENWorld Story Hours can be found here at  Aphonion Tales, or Journals of a Licensed Diabolist.