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First, I should say what my perspective is on the game for writing this review. I'm a DM, I've been running roleplaying games for close to 30 years having started with Basic D&D blue cover. I run lots of different systems, as the mood takes me and as the game system fits with the story or setting I want to run. That includes D&D campaigns of every edition except 3.0 (I jumped straight to 3.5).

I'm looking at D&D 4th edition from this perspective. What will it be like to run, and what "feeling" is it likely to produce when you play it? Because I haven't had chance to run it yet, this is just a capsule review based on reading the three core rule books and the H1 beginning scenario pack. I'm not going to attempt a point-for-point description of what the rules cover and what is missing from previous editions (other reviewers have already covered that). That isn't really important to me because if my heart is set on gnomes, I can write homebrew rules for gnomes in half an hour. What I care about is what the game is actually going to feel like.

My first impressions reading the books were, in order:

1. World of Warcraft
2. Miniatures war game
3. A sinking heart at "exception based design"
4. Sounds bloody complicated to load all the exceptions into your head in order to run it
5. But also sounds fun to play
6. It does not feel like D&D. It has mechanicals similarities but the changes are profound, far-reaching, and change the whole flavour of the game.

Which is why I thought I'd write a review concentrating on the feel of the new edition, rather than the mechanical changes: because it is the first time the feel of the game has really changed.

1) World of Warcraft

Many of the mechanical changes feel like they were inspired by MMORPGs. Reading the way that powers work "at will", "once per encounter" or "once per day", one can almost see the little timer in the icon at the bottom of your character sheet ticking away until the power has recharged. The description of characters by the roles that they take in combat "Leader", "Controller", "Defender" or "Striker" feels just like City of Heroes' "Blaster", "Controller", "Defender", "Tanker", "Scrapper" and the common argot of MMORPGs. They even refer to monsters as "mobs" once or twice in the rules. Clearly, the developers have played plenty of online games and the bosses at WotC are either feeling threatened by them or reckon that there's a potential big new audience for D & D among the World of Warcraft millions.

The new races (Dragonborn, Tieflings and Eldarin) and classes (Warlock and the buffing warlord) also feel very much inspired by online games. Read the DMG and MM descriptions of "elite" and "solo" monsters and the transformation is complete. You go up levels faster, and pick a few things at each level- unlocking new powers on the basis of level as you go. It really does feel more like grinding your way up levels in an MMORPG than achieving the rank of Master Thief by cunning and acclamation in the thieves' guild.

2) Miniatures War game

The oldest editions of D&D clearly had hangovers from miniatures wargaming- ranges were described in inches, meaning inches on a gaming table. Those references were sensibly excised in favour of real-world units in later editions: feet and yards are pretty universal and can be used whether or not you had figures on the table. In 3rd edition the miniatures war game feeling started to creep back in with the insanely complicated and convoluted rules about attacks of opportunity and the like, but they were sufficiently ignorable that a streamlined combat run without figures by a freewheeling GM felt pretty similar to the way earlier editions played.

The miniature war game rules are back with a vengeance. Everything, and I mean everything, in the rules is described in terms of squares on a battlegrid. Running 4th edition without figures sounds like it will be an almost impossible task, with even first level rangers having at-will powers like "Hit and Run" whose only reason for existence is described in miniature wargaming terms. (If you are curious, it lets you make an attack, then move away afterwards without attracting an attack of opportunity). Everything's range and area of effect is described in terms of squares on the table; nothing is ever described in terms of real world units.

Even the earliest editions of D&D were less combat-centric than 4th Edition. Most of the powers available to characters as they go up levels are combat-based, defined in terms of miniature wargaming and their effectiveness in doing damage, moving you a few squares, or maybe adding to your defences. You won't find a first level wizard with anything as subtle as a charm person spell in 4th Edition, nor will you find much in the way of non-combat powers or powers with hour-long or day-long (rather than combat-long) durations. Everything starts and ends with a fight or a "non-combat encounter", which is just a bunch of skill rolls.

This is not separable from the rest of the game. It is too pervasive. For example, characters get extra abilities like uses of magic items or action points when they have reached a "milestone", which is two encounters in a row without stopping for a rest. How on earth does that fit into a city-based diplomatic game? What counts as an "encounter" when you are talking to nobles at a ball? The system reads like a great way to run a combat-heavy campaign (like an MMORPG... ) but rather misses out on the more interesting possibilities of pencil-and-paper-around-a-table thinking RPGs.

This is further made clear by the simplification of skills- many previous edition skills have been amalgamated into one (pick pockets, open locks and disarm traps all become Thievery, for example) and there are only three "ranks" of training in a skill you can have. "Untrained" gives you the same as anyone else of your level. "Trained" gives you 5. "Trained and taken the skill focus feat" gives you 8. There's not much room for subtle differences between characters here, and as you go up levels you add level divided by two to all your skills. That means a 30th level doofus who blunders around and has never sneaked in his life gets 15 to stealth, a number completely out of reach of the sneakiest first level rogue.

There are no non-combat characters, and everyone has the same number of abilities and choices at a given level. (Except the ones that don't- wizards have twice as many choices, bizarrely). I've played in 3.5 Ed games where the poor rogue archers only have one thing to do- plink from cover, roll d20, hit or miss. Wait half an hour until their turn came again, being very bored. Their melee fighter compatriots had a plethora of feats to play with, and the spell casters had dozens and dozens of tactical choices and interesting spells to choose from. The lack of non-combat stuff in the game does have the very positive side effect that those rogues are going to have a lot more fun, and the wizards and clerics will have a less baffling array of choices which should speed up combat.

It is a fine streamlining of the system, and works well for the combat stats, but I feel it shortchanges detail in the skill system for games where combat is not going to be the focus. It wouldn't be so hard to expand the detail in the skills system if you wanted to as a house rule, mind you.

3), 4), 5) Exception Based Design, Running and Playing the Game

To quote the quickstart rules in H1 Keep on the Shadowfell:

Every class, race, feat, power and monster in the D&D game breaks the rules in some way. From minor to significant, the game is built upon exception-based rules design. For example, a normal melee attack always deals a few points of damage, but every class has powers that ramp up the damage when they get used.

I don't know about you, but that makes my blood run cold. What they are saying is that in order to run the game, the DM cannot grasp the basic rules and go with it. BY DESIGN, ON PURPOSE the DM instead has to look up or memorize not just dozens but HUNDREDS of exceptions to the rules. Gods. It means that whenever someone at WotC wants to make something behave totally differently, they just do it. Sooo, encounter powers. They can be used once per encounter, right? Well, not if you are a cleric. Healing word is an encounter power that can be used twice per encounter. For the love of god, why??? Why not give them two encounter powers that do the same thing, so that at least you don't break the rule? Daily powers, they can be used once a day, right? Not if you are a wizard. If you are wizard you get two daily powers per daily power and have to decide at the start of the day which of your two daily powers you can use today. Ten times after reading the sentence "After an extended rest, you can prepare a number of daily and utility spells according to what you can cast per day for your level. " and I am still none the wiser as to how many daily spells a wizard of a certain level can actually cast. There's no helpful table to show you. And it could be anything, anything at all, because this is exception-based rules design. It is actually intended that each new power they write goes against any number of rules they feel like.

Does this still not sound like a problem to you? Still don't see why a DM has to memorize, in detail, EVERY power in the PHB before running a game? What if the players come up against that staple of D&D games, an NPC party? You've got to hold in your head dozens and dozens of powers they can use, each and every one of which can have totally unpredictable side effects which no general principle of the rules is ever going to let you deduce. Like attacks which do damage on a miss, or which allow adjacent allies to move, heal, or do other stuff.

I think the designers realised this, because they have provided some "rules hacks" to make NPCs which fake up NPCs with PC classes without actually having to memorize everything, and the Monster Manual stat blocks are very good at telling you what you need to know to run a combat with that monster without looking anything up. I think the method in their madness is that all these exception-based powers that the PCs get introduced to the game slowly, level by level as the PCs advance, and give the group time to figure out and remember how each of the powers that the PCs around the table have actually chosen work. The stuff you need for the NPCs is then read off the stat blocks in the Monster Manual.

This is the aspect which causes me the most concern for running the game, and I think one will just have to see how it all pans out when you give it a go. It might be that it all clicks and runs very smoothly. Or it might be the nightmare of 3.5th edition rules-breaking feats and prestige classes from obscure supplements, squared. Only time will tell. I must admit to being a fan of "non-exception based rules design" where everything works the same and is described by the same system, but that system is flexible enough to encompass a very wide variety of things. (The Dragonlance 5th Age card based system is my favourite example- elegant and simple, the entire rules fit on a small piece of card and yet it is so flexible that I've used it with minor changes to the magic tables for a very wide range of campaign settings from ultra-high fantasy all the way to modern day).

On the other hand, I have to say that the game does look like great fun to play. Leveling up will no longer generate groans, but will provoke eager thumbing through a small selection of new options which have just opened up and choosing the coolest. You just need to learn what your handful of powers do, and no more first level wizards sitting out hours of game play searching for the one chance to do something useful. The rebalancing that the heavy combat emphasis of the game produced means that actually if you are playing a dungeon romp, I reckon you will have a whale of a time.

It's a clear response to the minimaxing in 3.5th Ed where you had to optimise your character choices at low levels in order to be able to take the right feats and prestige classes at high level. I played in a campaign where this aspect really ruined the game for all concerned. It wasn't just that you might be down a point or two in one or two stats- you make the wrong feat choices at first level and you could be really hamstrung compared with the other characters and the opponents in the written scenarios that were thrown at you. So you'd sit there with Heroforge spreadsheets looking at what you wanted to take at 12th level so you could go up to level 2. It was categorically not fun for me or my group. The ability to "trade in" old choices as you go up levels in a slow but steady manner is a real help to develop-in-play people like me, too.

I wonder how this exception-based rule design is going to withstand the inevitable onslaught of new supplements with yet more exception based powers. Are WotC going to make sure that you have to buy the martial character book in order to get decent powers which knock the ones in the standard PHB into a cocked hat? I fear they might. If it does, I will do what I did with 3.5th Edition and forbid anything outside the core rule books, just to keep a lid on this arms race proliferation. It is a good way of milking more money from your players but a bad way to design a satisfying game.

Separating out the rules system description of the player characters from everyone else in the world doesn't make for easy simulationist world building (which is one of the reasons Ptolus would be so hard to convert to 4th Ed- it has done such a good job of extrapolating the logical consequences of the 3.5 Ed rules that the world just doesn't fit for 4th Ed). However, it does make it a lot easier for the GM to quickly prepare encounters and write an evening's adventure, because the rules explicitly have NPCs and monsters covered by completely different rules sets to PCs. Whether you like this or loathe it is probably a matter of taste; for me, I'm keen to see if it works or not in play. I do love the idea of a minion monster who falls over the first time you hit him, for example... great for heroic battles against a proper horde of two hundred rampaging skeletons commanded by the evil lich, for example.

I'm rather dreading running it, but also looking forward because if it clicks in play, it could be a real romp.

6) It doesn't feel like D&D

This is the first incarnation of the game which does not "feel" the same as that blue book basic D&D book I read all those years ago. This is intangible and hard to describe, but I'll give you a few for-instances.

The wizard, warlock and cleric magic powers are all about fighting, with all the non-combat stuff shifted off into rituals. Whilst a great idea in principle, this is shunted into eight pages at the end which feel grafted onto the end like someone said "hey, but where did all the cool non-combat spells go?" In comparison with the richness of the 3rd edition spell selection, it feels like they've hacked away 75% of the interesting stuff, and I'm not sure they have thought it all through. D&D purists might be shocked to learn that wizards can cast raise dead rituals exactly the same as clerics can, as can anyone else who takes the ritual magic feat. I feel the difference to the game-world society of having Joe Fighter able to bring his buddies back to life at 8th level, as opposed to needing an anointed priest of a god, feels like quite a big one.

The use of magic items is very heavily restricted. If you are below 10th level, you can use one daily power from one item, once per day. No matter if you have somehow got your hands on a whole horde of stuff, you can't fire up the daily "freeze power" of the Staff of Winter and fire an icy ray from your wand of icy rays. One is your lot. To my mind, this really changes the feeling of the magic. For good or bad, D&D magic has always been reliable and production-line. Give a first level wizard a wand of fireballs and set him on the wall of the keep on the borderlands, and he can repel wave after wave of orcs until an archer gets lucky or the wand runs out of charges.

A 4th Edition first level wizard can't do this. Even a thirtieth level wizard can't do in the same way (blatting things with a wand like it was a machine gun), although he'll have plenty of ways of dealing with the horde. It puts a much greater emphasis on the personal capabilities of the character and much less on the magic-as-reliable-technology feeling that reached its peak in 3.5 Ed with the magic item creation rules. I've been having lots of fun running a city campaign for a bunch of thieves who plan their heists and escape routes treating fly potions and invisibility potions as business expenses. You really couldn't do that with 4th Ed, not least because there are only four potions in the whole game: healing, life, recovery and vitality (i.e. all basically some sort of healing).

No more first level fighters are king, high level wizards are king. AD&D 1st edition specifically had magic users weak and getting stronger, fighters strong and getting (comparatively) weaker as the levels went up. I think they've done a fine job in evening this out... and the fighter won't be so helpless without the benefit of magic items at high levels. Magic items really enhance what a character can already do, and add one or two interesting things they can do once a day. They don't supply powers that the character needs to remain competitive as the levels go up and the balance between classes change.

I'm not saying amy of this is good or bad... it is just different. Significantly different. That's the first time I would have said that about any previous change to the D&D system: if I looked back at the PCs my 12 year old friends had under blue book basic D&D, those characters would look and feel just fine in 3.5 Ed. I've frequently run 1st Edition AD&D scenarios in 3.5 Ed with the only change being having the Monster Manual open beside me for new stat blocks. The game has run just fine, and feels the same even if the mechanics are a bit different and a few magic items come and go or change their stats.

I'm not convinced that the same would be true for 4th Ed, and that's the bottom line of this review. It does not feel like the world described by the 4th Ed rules is the same world that was described by the basic, expert, 1st Ed AD&D, 2nd Ed or 3.5th Ed rules.

Good or bad, only time will tell. But is is different.