Books for Prep | |
 - New rules are fine, if you remember the old days.The new rules almost feel like a tribute the old days of D&D. Just in concept really. These are just rules and guidelines. You do with them as you see fit. You are the roleplayers. Stop saying that 4th edition is not for roleplayers. Heck look at LARPERs, their roleplay sessions are nothing but beating on each other with foam bats, yet they are role playing. You aren't very imaginative if you can not roleplay using 4th edition rules. Posers. Rating:  - World of Warcraft RefitD&D has been around in one form or another for 31+ years, which is about as long as I've been playing. The advantage of D&D and the D20 game system in general is that everybody knows it. There's no huge learning curve needed to just start playing the game. Every previous edition of D&D has understood this basic strength. Fourth Edition, plain and simple, is not D&D, and is not the D20 system. It's an entirely new game. Wizards of the Coast has made a huge mistake with this. They're trying to attract video game players by turning D&D into a pen and paper version of World of Warcraft. That tactic is simply not going to work. Current World of Warcraft players are not going to stop playing World of Warcraft to play this. Current D&D enthusiasts simply are not going to bother learning this new system, not when third party vendors are still supporting edition 3.5, and not while better RPG systems already exist (Note: This based on my discussions with customers from game stores in the fifth largest city in the US). Bottom line, fourth edition is going to go over for Wizards of the Coast the same way that "New Coke" went over for Coca Cola. My advice would be to save your money, and stick with an older edition of D&D. At its best, fourth edition is simply not an improvement over what has come before it. It's just something different. Rating: - And now they're telling us what to do with our monsters!First of all, I have very little to add based on all the other responses. If you want to know how this version of D&D is bad, they'll tell you. What we need to look at now are the implications of this new era of gaming. This edition does not allow for the flexibility necessary to tell fun, unique stories. Not really. Not if you think about the limits imposed by the system and the archetypal themes the designers have abandoned in favor of playability or, rather, simplicity. The kind of role-playing I like to do focuses on the story, and I have always had an ear toward writing when I'm gaming. It's not like that for everyone, and some people may like the "game" elements of this edition. I don't like what I've seen and read because I don't feel like I can tell a good story with this rules set. This edition is more about powers and miniatures and those other elements of D&D. It's less about a generic fantasy system where everything is possible and more about combat and what story the designers have set forth. Role-playing should be less about what tropes the system demands and more about your own imagination. Just look through the books and see how the designers are telling you how to play. What races do what. What classes work this way. What powers this type of character should have. How you should interact with the rest of the party. The list goes on. Rating:  - Good ideas stuck in a bad game.The new edition of D&D is headed for some problems, in my opinion. The Monster Manual is not the worst of the three core rulebooks - that honor goes to the Player's Handbook, without a doubt. The MM and the Dungeon Master's Guide are duking it out for second place. I rated this book at 2 stars, so there must be something good about it, right? Well, yes. Actually many of the individual monster entries have interesting features that could be mined for use in other games. The art is mostly very good, and the monster stat blocks are clear and easy to read. Unfortunately this book has the bad luck to be part of the 4th Edition rules, which are broken in many fundamental ways. The goal with 4E was simplify, simplify, simplify. Regrettably Wizards of the Coast seems to interpret "simplify" to mean "eliminate options for players and DMs," and that shows here as it does throughout the new rules. There's little or no cultural information given on most monsters. In fact generally there is not even a physical description. If the DM can't come up with a good one based on the art, he's out of luck. Everything has been cut out except for combat abilities - because 4E has almost no support for anything that happens outside combat. For most monsters, of course, combat information is all you absolutely need - the bare minimum. However 4E takes this to extremes, and it is really glaring in the case of monsters that used to be oriented toward non-combat. Subtlety is gone from the 4E Monster Manual. Mastermind and manipulator monsters are either gone or revised into combat opponents now. A shining example is the succubus. Those who remember earlier editions (or even basic mythology) will recall that the succubus was never really a combat monster. She was a string-puller who worked behind the scenes. A big part of an adventure involving a succubus used to be just figuring out who your opponent was, because her powers were all about deception, seduction, and temptation. She controlled other NPCs and made life tough for the player characters from afar. No longer. The 4E succubus has few if any abilities that are useful outside combat. Even her "charming kiss" (which used to be a charm monster effect in 3.5) now has one and only one effect: it causes her victim to step in front of an attack directed at the succubus and take the damage that was meant for her. It has no non-combat uses at all, and can't even do any more than that in combat. As for seduction and temptation, the 4E succubus is literally no better at that than a pretty barmaid. This has happened to the succubus, the vampire, the lich, the mind flayer, all demons and devils, djinns, even those old schemers, the Drow. A DM who wants to build an adventure around a devious mastermind who avoids combat will have to make it up himself - and at that point why pay for this book? Also gone from the rules is any pretense at internal logic or verisimilitude. Monster abiities often work by completely different rules than PC abilities. For example an "encounter" power works only once per encounter for a PC, but many monster "encounter" powers can "recharge" on a successful die roll. PCs don't get this ability. Even if a monster happens to be of a PC race (such as an elf or dwarf) it still gets abiities that player characters do not get even with feats. No explanation is given for these differences; the game simply treats monsters as collections of powers for PCs to fight, and their connection to the larger universe is never considered. Players and DMs who like the World of Warcraft experience may not be bothered by this and similar rules issues in the game, but those who like an immersive experience that makes sense internally will likely find it jarring. My advice is to skip 4th Edition. Perhaps pick this book up second-hand, or download the PDF from a torrent site, and mine it for ideas for your 3.5 game, but save yourself some money. Rating:  - Not only "lots of monsters", but also "lots of easily tweakable monsters"The Good: The new monster manual helps the DM where he needs it most, giving hundreds of easily read and usable monster statblocks. These statblocks seem to be evenly distributed along all 3 tiers and all 30 levels. Additionally, the new rules for creating and modifying monsters mean that you can alter many of these on the fly. The Bad: Some of the extra "crunchy" content comes at the expense of "fluff", meaning that sometimes you only have a picture and a couple of sentences describing each monster. Some claim its an advantage (because that allows you to better integrate a given monster to your campaign), but I kinda miss the more detailed descriptions of old. The Ugly: Some art was reused from 3.5 books... very likely a result of the art director disliking some new commissioned pieces. In association with Amazon.com | |