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Dungeons & Dragons has always been a standard by which all other roleplaying systems are compared. By virtue of being the first product and by market dominance it has become to outsiders almost synomymous with the hobby as a whole. Despite this it has been subject to widespread criticism within the hobby and with some justification. Often the game appeared to provide a confused fantastic setting that is a quasi-medieval-Conan-Tolkien-Vancian swamp that have led to glorious mockery such as Head Injury's "Thirty Years of Stupid Monsters". The rules, it is oft-stated, are arbritary, unrealistic, convuluted and sometimes just downright confusing.
Much of this has to do with the peculiar evolution of the game. It started, as explicitly stated on the grubby-brown A5 booklets from 1975, as a fantasy miniatures wargame, dealing with single units. In the immediate years that following the game transformed from a wargame to a roleplaying game, but it still held a great number of the wargaming elements; not the least being high levels of abstraction that did not scale particularly well into the single unit. It was at this time the game split into the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line and the Dungeons & Dragons line. Both continued independently with somewhat similar rules throughout the 1980s and 1990s with a second edition of the former being produced and the latter developing the Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters and eventually Immortal sets before most was compiled into the Rules Companion. To give an extremely brief summary, the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line provided more support material and greater flexibility, whereas the Dungeons & Dragons line provided a cleaner and more plausible system.
In 2000 Wizards of the Coast, the new owners of Dungeons & Dragons, released third edition until the skilled craftsmanship of the Skip Williams, a long-time worker on the D&D line, Monte Cook, the former editor for ICE's Rolemaster and Johnathan Tweet, responsible for innovative game systems such as Over The Edge and Everyway. The two game lines were merged into a single, more cohesive product. The worst elements of implausibility were taken out of the system - whilst retaining those that kept the sense of "heroic fantasy" - and the plethora of different ways of doing similar things was radically reduced. Despite the fact it was the biggest change that the game system had seen, it was quite easy to port characters from any of the previous systems to the new game. To be sure, it was pretty crunchy, as with all such systems it was prone to abuses leading to a revised edition in 2005. But one thing can be stated with some conviction; each edition of Dungeons & Dragons has been an improvement to the previous and that has certainly helped retain its market dominance and loyalty of supporters. My own exposure to Dungeons & Dragons dates back from about 1981 with the "purple" and "blue" box sets of the Moldvay editions. I have since played scores, if not hundreds, of games of original D&D, BECMI D&D, Advanced D&D, Advanced D&D (second edition), third edition D&D and, following many sessions at GenCon Oz, fourth edition D&D.
Introduction to Fourth Edition
With a mere three years passing, somewhat fast in the world of new D&D editions, a fourth edition of the classic game has been released this year. Reviews have largely been leaning towards the positive, although this is far from universal and it has been noted this a substantially different game with poor backwards compatibility. As with all other editions of Dungeons & Dragons the quality of production is very high. The solid, hardback books with stitched binding, gloss paper and artwork displaying good technique are quite notable; as is the 800-plus pages of material, continuing the tradition of massive rulebooks.
The three books follow the classics as outlined by the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and followed through to third edition; Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide (James Wyatt) and Monster Manual (Mike Mearls, Stephen Schubert, James Wyatt). The cover art for each of the books is somewhat indicative of the contents within; the cover of the Player's Handbook does show a fighter, albeit something that looks like a lizard-man (more on that later) and a female wizard. The cover of the Monster Manual does indeed feature a monster, albeit humanoid. The best image however is that of the Dungeon Master's Guide which shows a red dragon looking into a crystal ball featuring the characters of the player's handbook which old school gamers will recognise as thematically reminscient of the covers of Erol Otus on the early Moldvay editions of Basic and Expert Dungeons & Dragons. The internal art likewise indicates high skill in technique, but not so much in creativity.
The books are mostly written in two-column, ragged-right alignment with a serif font for most of the text. Each book has a good one page table of contents. The organisation of the chapters in the Player's Handbook could have been better, but is just fine in the other books. The Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide also comes with an index, whereas the Monster Manual has an alphabetical listing of creatures, their level and combat role. The Player's Handbook also comes with a character sheet, whereas the Dungeon Master's Guide also includes a PC and Monster "Combat Card" and stone-floor style grid pages. The writing style isn't particularly special and indeed some criticism can be levelled at the consistent use of the second-person throughout. Whilst this is explicitly stated in the first paragraphs of character generation in the Player's Handbook it does read like it's aimed at the slightly dim of mind, which is confirmed by numerous explanations, perhaps the worst being the explanation that a bonus is always a positive modifier and penalty is always negative (PH, p25).
Player's Handbook
The Player's Handbook begins with a several pages of "what is roleplaying" and includes the simple core mechanic; roll d20, add modifiers and beat the target number ("Difficulty Class") along with three conventions; simple rules, many exceptions - specific beats general (the same thing really) - always round down. It then moves in character generation, a fairly standard process of pick race, class, generate ability scores, choose feats, skills, powers and equipment, and finally select roleplaying elements.
The races are standard fantasy fare, Dwarves, Elves, Half-Elves, Halflings, the ubiquitious humans, plus a couple of new additions including the Dragonborn ("proud, honor-bound draconic humanoids"), the Eladrin ("graceful, magical race born of the Feywild"), and Tieflings ("descended from ancient humans who bargained with infernal powers"). The different races gain different ability bonuses, skill bonuses and racial powers all of which are positive (there is no negative modifiers for Halfing strength, for example). Whilst reasonably balanced in their powers, and lengthy in their description, the races seemed more about what they could do that what they are.
Available character classes include Cleric, Fighter, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Warlock, Warlord and Wizard. In addition these classes have combat roles namely Controller (e.g., wizard), Defender (e.g., fighter), Leader (e.g., Cleric) and Striker (e.g., Rogue). Ability scores are the standard D&D version consisting of Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma with a + or - 1 modifier for every two points above or below 10-11. They are generated from a standard array (16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10), or on a point-buy method, or the good-ol' fashioned 4d6 drop lowest.
Whilst the Player's Handbook describes D&D as "first and foremost, a roleplaying game", the roleplaying aspects are largely colour with no systematic meaning in the game. Alignment has been cut down from the lawful-chaotic and good-evil axis of nine alignments to a mere five; Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned, Evil, Chaotic Evil. The changes to alignment to be a step are backwards in design, let alone developmental psychology which D&D did surprisingly well at in previous editions. A few notes and suggestions are made for personality dichotomies. Again it is emphasised that these have no systematic value.
Every power, skill or special ability in the game is keyed to an ability score which all use the core mechanic. Usually the Difficulty Class is against a static number (e.g., a Strength attack check against an opponent's AC), however the can be based against the opponents check (an opposed check). Attack rolls, skill checks and ability checks all include half the level of the character as a bonus, a net result meaning that differentiation between the classes is significantly lessened.
Dungeons & Dragons has always been a level-based system and this edition is no exception. All classes require the same number of experience points per level and gain the same number of feats, powers and other bonuses. Levels are gained by experience points and provide improvements in ability scores (at levels 4, 8, 11, 14, 18, 21, 24 and 28), bonuses to checks every two levels, additional hit points, additional feats and additional powers (retraining an "at will" power, gaining encounter attack powers and daily attack powers). Retraining of any one feat, power or skill selection can be made at each level. A new level is gained every ten encounters, on average, and every encounter or quest provides experience point (XP) rewards. At 11th or 21st levels characters must choose between taking a Paragon path or an Epic destiny as appropriate and eventually immortality at 30th level and the completion of the campaign's final Destiny Quest. These levels are considered break-points in character capacity and the benefits they accrue adds to this claim.
Powers are extremely important to the new edition, to the extent that it is not unfair to say the game is almost all about the "kewl powers" one's character can gain from a particular race/class/level combination. One of the widespread of these powers is “healing surges”. Characters start with significantly more hit points than previously editions of the game (for example, a first level human fighter with 13 CON with begin with 28 hit points and gain an additional 6 per level . In addition a character may spend a “healing surge”, one quarter of a character's maximum hit points, as a standard action, once per encounter, plus a number per day depending on the class; a fighter received 9 + CON modifier.
It is true that Dungeons & Dragons needed a means to make the life expectancy of first level character's at least plausible (remember rolling 1 for hit points?), but this extreme level is probably not what most people had in mind. As a counterbalance of sorts, attacks are potentially more powerful as well, although the number of powers that do significantly extra damage are limited, meaning that D&D 4th edition combats are longer in real time. As a whole, Powers take up an enormous section of the Player's Handbook, with a small selection per class, per level and distinguished between “at will”, “per encounter” and “daily”. But despite claims to the contrary, their variation is fairly minor, usually of a damage times level over area x variety. Most of the powers are combat abilities with a modicum of “utility powers”. With a modest evaluation they do appear to be somewhat balanced in respect to each other, however because they are not based on a transparent system of construction (like powers in the Hero System are) it is reasonably certain that imbalances will be found in coming months. In many ways, the powers make a combat encounter somewhat of a resource-based card game with opponents trying to trump each other with a power. On the other hand, by providing all classes “at will” powers it ensures that the “one trick pony” problem of low-level wizards is not an issue anymore.
Skills have been reduced to a mere 17 in number and the 5% increments of third edition and earlier has been abolished in favour of a “trained” or “untrained” status, the former giving characters a +5 bonus to any skill checks. The list of skills is, as can be expected, far from comprehensive but represents at most of an “adventuring” party would do, although even a single generic Craft skill perhaps would have made a world of difference for numerous situations that have occurred in actual play. This said, the actual descriptions of the skills are quite good with each being described with example applications and on occasion, some clever design (e.g., using Bluff in combat to represent a feint maneuver) .
Characters gain a Feats at 1st level (two if human) and one every even numbered level as well as 11th and 21st,. These usually provide bonuses to some skill or ability. The stacking rules are a little unusual; if the Feat applies in all contexts, then only the highest applies, if however they have a limited context or they are of different 'types', then they do stack. The types are Class Feats, Divinity Feats, Multiclass Feats and Racial Feats. The example given is if the character has Alertness (+2 bonus to Perception checks) and has Dragonborn Senses (+1 bonus to Perception), only the +2 bonus applies. It would be surprising if this doesn't lead to “full and frank discussions” at the actual gaming table.
There are roughly one hundred and fifty Feats, differentiated by Heroic, Paragon and Epic tiers, are described with a few lines each with over 90% having a strong combat orientation. In addition to this there is a handful of Multiclass Feats allow character to “dabble in the class features and powers” of another class. On a oddly related manner, the Equipment chapter is largely magic items, and these two are arranged in Power/Feat like descriptions, a couple of evocative lines of colour, a price and level chart, and the various bonuses they provide; again they are mostly combat orientated. This said, there is a few pages dedicated to mundane equipment, although not surprisingly it's mainly weapons and armour – even the list of “adventuring gear” is quite slim.
This is followed by the Adventuring chapter, which defines the goal of all adventures to be the quest with a particular narrative that provides XP, action points, and treasure. Fairly useful information is provided here concerning travelling distances, illumination and the like, although it is a far cry from that provided in classics like the Dungeoneers Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. Taking up more pages however is the chapter that accounts for combat; which follows a familiar account of determine surprise, roll for initiative in the six-second round (1d20+DEX bonus+ half level), take turns. Attacks are roll high, achieve Armour Class (or other defense as appropriate) plus as a target number and apply damage. A lot of effort is spent in establishing standard actions, figure-based movement, line of sight and scale issues and to the extent that the game concentrates heavily on these matters (indeed, one could argue it has “returned to its roots”, in this respect) there is evidence of excellent crafstmanship. Further, a lot of what is described as combat effects can also be applied to more “mundane” activities (e.g., falling, pushing and shoving etc). One of the more interesting new elements is the status of “bloodied”, when a character is at half or less hit points certain powers work differently.
Finally, very strangely, at the end of the book, is a chapter on Rituals. The chapter explains how to acquire these complex magical ceremonies, how to perform them, and gives some examples. These is perhaps the most interesting chapter in the book, insofar it describes almost entirely non-combat utility magics of which almost thirty are described, such as summoning animal messengers, discern lies, creating magic feasts, curing disease, raising the dead, water walk, breathe water and so forth. The key difference between Rituals and other kewl powers, is these take substantially longer than a combat round to cast. Somewhat unexpected, Rituals are not class-specific, although they do require the Ritual Caster Feat, which Clerics and Wizards acquire at first level. It is almost as if at the end of the book the authors suddenly realised there was a whole non-combat orientated magic tradition within Dungeons & Dragons that could not be effectively represented by the kewl powers, feats and equipment that took up so many pages.
Dungeon Master's Guide
After the detailed run of rules and tables in the Player's Handbook, one can be forgiven in wondering what could possibly be in the two hundred and fifty plus pages of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Well, the book starts in exactly the right direction; how to be a DM, making some fairly distinctions between the gaming group, the players, the dungeon master and formation of table rules before launching into how to run the game itself. This second chapter details a linear approach to the game, such as preparation and time expectations, along with providing tips on narration, pacing, and improvisation, and ending the game along the use game tools such as props, and in-game tools such as passive skill tests. Most of these two chapters provide fairly useful information, and although it is fairly obvious advice to seasoned GMs, a number of different angles have been explored and it is certainly worth a read and recognition. On the other hand, the material dedicated to what is perhaps one most important tasks of the DM – teaching the game – is woefully inadequate.
The next three chapters deal with encounters, specifically combat encounters, building encounters, and non-combat encounters. Here the DMG defines the game as “Stripped to the very basics, the D&D game is a series of encounters”, which is not necessarily an agreeable statement, but perhaps does represent the outlook of the new order. Given the emphasis of the new edition on combat, it is perhaps not surprising to see the level of descriptive detail in running and building (challenging but balanced) combat encounters not to mention some of the strange inclusions of what constitutes a combat encounter – like disease? Like the previous edition's Challenge Rating, D&D 4th edition has well-defined target XP totals to distribute to each encounter with a number of sample templates for DM's lacking in time, imagination or both. The “Building Encounters” chapter also has some odd inclusions; apparently this is now where 'dungeon dressing' such as the famed difficulty classes for bashing down doors and raising portcullises is located. Finally, non-combat encounters are defined as skill challenges, puzzles, and traps and hazards. Skill challenges are defined the number of success required – anything less than four does not constitute a challenge. This chapter does include a very modest recognition of the importance of roleplaying and social interaction between PCs and NPCs, but it is certainly one of the least in any contemporary RPG.
The next four chapters deal with Adventures, Rewards, Campaigns, and The World. An Adventure is defined “just a series of encounters”, which again is perhaps not entirely accurate. Nevertheless, the chapter does provide some handy advice for incorporating published adventures into a wider campaign story, and how to modify said adventures as appropriate. As with much of the text, the material is moderately useful but the substance per page count is fairly low, although the section on good and poor structure stands in contrast to this general statement, which is exemplified by the vague commentary which is applied to the immediately following section on adventure settings. Rewards are defined as experience points, treasure, action points and “intangibles”. Again this is largely obvious, and at times a repetition of material already provided, and the provision of level-based “treasure parcels” seems a little childish – it's almost like an easter egg hunt.
Campaigns are described as a series of adventures, which does bring in the question of how exactly these encounters are supposed to become a story. Although the chapter does begin with an emphasis on the published variety and the adaption thereof, a better effort is made here to develop what is incorrectly described as “themes”, how to start with narrative scale, providing backstory, linking adventures and so forth, along with expected roles in the wider campaign world at particular broad levels of character advancement. Apparently campaigns are meant to “end with a bang”, and there is no discussion of denouement, which is a little surprising given its obvious prevalence in fantasy literature. Equal to this somewhat truncated discussion of narrative is the chapter for setting with advice for managing civilised, wild regions, and other planes of existence and their inhabitants. The information is extremely rudimentary, although again the page-count is hefty, and certainly not to be taken as even a beginners guide to the basics of geography, let alone cosmology. Somewhat amusingly, it is here that the authors actually give some thematic elements in the “core assumptions” of the D&D world. In addition to these marginal notes, the chapter also includes a number of artifacts.
The final two chapters are “The DM's toolbox” and a sample scenario “Fallcrest”. The toolbox is simply rules for modifications to creatures, equipment and so forth. Again the information is of modest utility, with poor substance per page-count, with the single largest sections taken up with templates, “a recipe for changing a monster” and the random generation of dungeons and encounters. In contrast the same scenario, Fallcrest, is quite good. It is well described, it makes sense, and it is well positioned for a story. Major locations are appropriately described, and a couple of colourful NPCs are mentioned along with stats for the one the PCs are most likely to have a physical disagreement, two they may very well take along on an adventure into the wilds and one whom they'll may have some social (and eventual physical) conflict with. The wilds are presented with a simple but well-designed regional map, with several locations of adventuring potential all of which receive some description. Significant notes are given on how to involved the players in the region (a little lengthy and out of place), before moving into the meaty section of Kobold Hall which, apart from being a community of kobolds, has a number of other adventure hooks. The dungeon itself is classic D&D with all the design improbabilities that causes those with architectural knowledge to groan at, but is otherwise interesting and challenging and the story does come with a special surprise at the end as well.
Monster Manual
The Monster Manual is perhaps the easiest of the three core books to review. It is simply, like its predecessors, a almost three-hundred page compendium of monsters arranged alphabetically (almost 150 in total) with a few pages for racial traits, a glossary and monsters by level. As far as lists of monsters go, it's not a particularly bad one with the requisiste attachment to the more carnivorous breeds and the plethora of humanoid sapient species. All the old favourites from decades of Dungeons & Dragons are there of course, the Beholder, the Carrion Crawler, the Otyugh, the Githyanki and Githzerai, the Shambling Mound and so on, as well as those derived from myth and legend such as Ogres, Chimera, Dryad, Fomorian and from Tolkienesque inspiration, the Elves, Halflings, Orcs, Dwarves, and Treants. There's even a few natural creatures which perform the usual roles of beast of burden (horse) or standard opponent (e.g., bear, wolf).
The descriptions themselves however, are mostly stat blocs and descriptions of how the creatures engage in fighting, along with an assigned combat-orientated 'role', although credit is given for continuing the tradition started in third edition of giving monsters a full range of characteristics, skills, alignment and powers. Quite a number of the creatures are given multiple stat-blocs to represent the different 'roles'. For example, there is a stat-bloc for the sample cyclops, one for a cyclops warrior (a level 16 minion), one for a cyclops impaler (a level 14 artillery), one for a cyclops rambler (a level 14 skirmisher), one for a cyclops hewer (a level 16 soldier), one for a cyclops battleweaver (a level 17 skirmisher) and finally, one for a cyclops storm shaman (a level 17 artillery).
Sometimes there is a little bit of ecological or historical data, but nothing like what the Monstrous Compendium of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, second edition, was famous for. One notable difference is the lack of a standard treasure type - as mentioned this is now derived from the level of the player characters, not the monster itself. One of the more useful and interesting components of the descriptions however is the inclusion of information derived from successful lore checks, although these are often represented with only one break point. Finally, mention must also be made of the quality of the artwork in the Monster Manual. It is superior to the other core books and, as one would hope, always contextually appropriate.
Overall
Fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons is the most radicaly departure from previous editions of the game to date, although the lineage remains clear. In terms of substance, the game remains as ponderous as ever, with a very poor substance to page-count, an element which remains a continiung Achilles Heal from a design perspective but may translate well into income and sales - we all like hefty rulebooks on our shelves, don't we? The scope of the text is also extremely narrow, being almost entirely about combat which is very surprising given the new directions the game was heading in second edition AD&D, the D&D Rules Compendium and third edition D&D. For players who like the incremental improvements to a variety of skills, the internal and social conflicts of a two-dimensional alignment schema and such elements there will not be much joy in this new edition of the game. In contrast, for those who prefer more martial-orientated gaming, there is a plentiful, indeed almost excessive, supply of opportunities and pathways. However given that most players fall somewhere in between these extremes, the 'fun' element of this over-emphasis is likely to be of a modest duration.
Stylistically, some complaints can be made about the organisation of the book, the indexing and so forth, but in general this is above average. The artwork, as mentioned, is of very high quality although somewhat lacking in creativity and internal narrative. The game is readable, albeit a bit simplistic, but the combination of the art quality, the physical presentation of the product and the opportunity to accumulate kewl powers will appeal to many.
Overall however, recommendation for the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons is limited only to those who will fit in the narrow scope which the game is orientated towards. In this regard it has incorporated the design considerations from various collectable card games, unit-based fantasy board-games and, as often mentioned, online fantasy combat roleplaying games. If this does not appeal then there is little opportunity for other styles of play in a systematic sense. It may come to pass that this truncated approach to design will mean that a large section of the D&D market will remain with the previous edition or, if they do well in their design, move to the 3.5-derived Pathfinder system.
Style: 1 + .6 (layout) + .7 (art) + .8 (coolness) + .6 (readability) + .9 (product) = 4.6
Substance: 1 + .3 (content) + .1 (text) + .4 (fun) + .6 (workmanship) + .7 (system) = 3.1
