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Wizards Presents: Races and Classes
Wizards Presents: Races and Classes is a 96-page preview for D&D 4th Edition (hereafter, 4e). It serves several purposes - one, to inform people of what the new edition may look like; two, to provide "behind the scenes" designer commentary on the process and rationale for the changes; and three, to market the new edition to prospective 4e players. I plan on describing the content but not in minute detail, and though I'll mention some things I like and some things I don't, this isn't meant to be an essay about my opinions about 4e; I'm trying to keep it a review of this specific product.
Style
This book showcases what is supposed to be the new look of the 4e line so it bears some commentary. The cover is nice and clean, with the art taking prominence, and the new "Dungeons & Dragons" logo is attractive. It's good that the art is prominent, it never made sense to me to, as some games have, commission some nice art piece and then have it be 1/4 the size of the cover. The Basic D&D boxed sets, for example, were well designed and clean but they made awesome Elmore art way too small. It's also a nice departure from the completely abstract 3e covers, which make absolutely no impression - ask anyone to draw the 3e PH versus DMG versus whatnot covers, all they'll be able to say is, "Well, the DMG is bluer, right?". The interior layout is fine - clear headings and two columns - in fact, it's kinda just a more modern version of the standard layout in all those '80's RPGs like Star Frontiers, DC Heroes, etc. In fact, they could have taken a hint from D&D Basic/Star Frontiers cover design; I think the art would pop a lot more if it overlapped its borders a little bit. On this cover the fighter's sword and tiefling's foot, for example, could come "out of the rectangle", it would make the look much more dynamic.
I am ambivalent about the art. There's art throughout, all of various characters. Each piece is nice and well-done per se. However, the look is so homogeneous - taking the 3e homogeneity to an even higher level - that I find all of the people therein to be almost indistinguishable from each other except for major racial features. I wish they had more of an iconic look to them. Gear notwithstanding, it seems to me that I wouldn't be able to recognize the same character if they appeared elsewhere in D&D art. It's like a line of action figures where they use the same "buff dude" body cast no matter which figure they're rendering. Some of this may be due to the heavy coloration they're using; the book is full color but in any given picture you'd swear they're only using a couple colors at a time, with the same limited palette in the character, their gear, the (usually minimal) surroundings... I personally don't like the effect. I'd like more variety and more boldly inked colors. But I'll never love any fantasy art like I love Elmore's, so maybe I'm just difficult. Although I do have to say I feel like people responded very well to the eclecticism in earlier D&D - here's an Erol Otus black-line, here's something different... I still like the 1e Monster Manual for its widely varied illustration types.
Substance
The book starts out with a very interesting look into the 4e development timeline and process. There were early noodlings, but work begain in earnest in October of 2005. The Book of Nine Swords and the Star Wars Saga Edition were both used as ways to test out some of the ideas the designers were working with - I really liked both of those works. There's commentary from designers, artists, and others. You get to see the design goals and ideas. There's a lot of details about the default 4e metaphor that come through. For example, they do talk about the new "points of light" setting, which is set after the fall of a large human empire called Nerath and is a sort of dark ages in its wake. As a result a good bit of the fluff (as often in previous versions) is clearly not truly setting generic. Statements such as eladrin live in the Feywild, dwarves now have aboveground cities, and most humans know how to use a weapon because of the chaos following Norath's fall clearly tie things into a meta-setting.
Races
The most interesting metric in this is that they researched and found 135 playable PC races from 3e, and that's not counting Savage Species. The designers talk about trying to balance the historic races with the desire to take all the available races and boil them down into things that really benefit the game. They also talk about taking off the "balance" restriction from 3e, where if a race had an ability bonus it had to have an ability penalty. This is one of the numerous examples where they mention easing up on the strict rule-based generation in 3e, where all the monsters, encounters, races, etc. follow very strict rules - which is nice from a balance point of view but bad from a "how much work you have to do" point of view. It makes me wonder, however, about the fate of OGL products going forward. If nothing else, the strict builder rules made sure that third party stuff was less wildly out of sync with D&D core that it would have been otherwise.
The races mentioned at length are humans, dragonborn, dwarves, eladrin, elves, halflings, and tieflings. Celestials, drow, warforged, and gnomes are mentioned briefly in the "other races" section. For the main races, they talk about design decisions, showcase art for the race, and in many cases show off a script alphabet devised for the race. The totally new race is the dragonborn, which they wanted to add to have something new and dragony. I've seen a lot of PCs play dragon disciples, dragons, and half-dragons so it may be a good choice. They split the traditional elves into the magical fey high elf eladrin and the wild wood elf elves. Which is fine except "eladrin" is an especially retarded name. Halflings have "left Tolkien behind" and are kender-like river gypsies. There's no mention of half-elves or half-orcs.
Some of the changes seem a little funny - nearly all the demihumans are bigger, for example - elves for no particular reason and halflings because they were "too small, like toddlers". Although I'm sure that's what ogres think about attacking humans... And they seem to have a little obsession with symmetry. Since many demihuman races have a traditional signature terrain (elves=forests, dwarves=mountains) they decided everyone did, and saddled humans with plains and halflings with rivers. That bothers me both because I like diversity (humans live everywhere on Earth, any claim about "evolving on the plains" is for way way back before known civilization) and because it starts to feel artificial, like a trading card game setup.
In general the race mix seems good from my experience with what players I know play. I hope the eladrin will be 'fairy' enough to handle those freaks that play pixies all the time. And the dragonborn, besides handling the dragon fetishists, may stand in well for the folks who always want to play a humanoid (half-orc, orc, gnoll, you know the type). Fairy, dragon, and brute are the three archetypes outside human, dwarf, and elf that I see a lot of and it appears they may have that covered.
Classes
Class Roles are the first thing they talk about. These are new specific "jobs" in an adventuring party that they designed for. They are defender, striker, controller, and leader. The defender is a typical MMORPG tank, with high defenses and abilities to cause foes to focus on him. The striker is a one-on-one damage dealer. The controller is oddly named - this covers damaging or affecting multiple targets (like with a Fireball). The leader heals, aids, and buffs. I suspect that last name is going to cause no end of arguments in gaming groups across the land.
Like in the Book of Nine Swords, they've given all classes powers that can be used discretionarily, which makes being a fighter a lot more interesting.
The listed classes explored in depth are cleric, fighter, rogue, warlock, and wizard. Under "Other Classes" are listed barbarians, bards, druids, monks, paladins, rangers, sorcerers, swordmages, and warlords.
Clerics are mostly unchanged, except that the gods have been altered from 3e -both specifically and also in kind; 4e wants to support more of a Hercules/Xena or D&D Basic Set conceit that humans can challenge, defeat, or become gods. They are meant to be the definitive "leader."
Fighters differ in that they have Nine Swords type powers. Also, they have to choose sword and shield or two-handed as a primary fighting style. They state the goal of having a lot of flexibility in builds for fighters. They are meant to be the primary "defenders."
Rogues are the melee "striker." Building on the 3e sneak attack, which made rogues much more of a combat force than in previous editions, and clearly adopting a number of World of Warcraft ideas, rogues are the ones able to do the most damage one on one. Also, the simplified Star Wars Saga Edition skill system affects rogues more because they're the ones with all the skills.
Warlocks got promoted to a tier 1 class and are positioned as the ranged striker, with their blasts and invocations. They are largely replacing the sorcerer as the "other arcane class." They can make pacts with various powers and focus on curses and blasts.
In the middle of the Warlock section they go on a wide tangent about alignment in 4e. They are greatly reducing its scope because of the harmful pigeonholing it's done in the past (which I agree with, and I suspect that the new class roles will do now in 4e).
Wizards are the main "controller." They have been changed a good bit so that they have powers usable at will, like "arcane strikes" and "power words," as well as depletable powers more like traditional spells. They talk about having arcane foci, so orb, staff, and wand wizards would be different (though I recall discussion on ENWorld or wizards.com about how that's no longer the case). Schools of magic are dead. And they specifically note that the have toned down enchantment spells to that when they add psionics it'll have a niche.
As for the other classes, they seem to imply they're all in 4e core, which makes for quite a bunch of them. Each only gets a paragraph and are all clearly in flux. All are described as being "better in 4e" of course. The new one is the warlord, which is like the marshal from the Miniature's Handbook, and it concentrates on leading people tactically in battle, giving bonuses and buffs.
The Rest
The book also mentions the "tiers of adventure" - heroic (L1-10), paragon (20-30), and epic (20-30). Heroic tier is business as usual. Paragon tier has "paths" which replace prestige classes, and the Epic tier has "destinies" that are reminiscient of the Immortals rules in Basic D&D.
Summary
I have to admit, regardless of this book's merits or demerits (let alone Fourth Edition's), it's not a good buy. First of all, it's $20 for a 96-page sales piece. A lot of the value of this book is preselling 4e to consumers, which should in my opinion justify a bit of a lower cost. There's nothing "usable" in a game in the book, it's purely the equivalent of a DVD extras disc. Most of the factual information in the book can be gleaned (in a much more updated manner) from ENWorld (http://www.enworld.org). It's only a buy for the most determined of completists (or Luddites) who want insight into what the development team was thinking and how they went about it. However, if you're reading rpg.net, you have a pretty high chance of being a determined completist, so don't let me stand in your way!
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