I think D&D 4th ed ignores all the best ideas from tabletop and card games, with the intent of being a tabletop MMO — an utterly pointless concept. Half my gaming group already plays WoW together, strangely they’re the same contingent that happily plays 4th ed together. Personally, I just do, not, understand it. It’s like they’re making cosmopolitan icecream, all the flavors I love, but instead of being wonderful in their own special ways they’re all mixed together by a machine into a black mound with a nasty flavor.

While I used to disregard card games as a money-sucking maw in the earth, removed from its capitalist ways it’s really a hell of a lot of fun — Cryptic Comet’s Armageddon Empires is my basis for loving the concept of card games. The wealth of options available in deck building, combined with the random factor of when those options will come into your hand, and the shifting situation on the game board, combines into an incredibly deep, interesting formula.

D&D 4th edition, however, gives you 9 powers to choose from for your class, only about 3 of the options being worthwhile, and lets you pick 3 to 5 of them. The choices are obvious — but you get more choices if you shell out 35$ for a class manual. Once you’ve made your choices, they’re always right out there in front of you. You’ve got At-Wills which will be your basic attacks (because there’s no reason to ever, ever use anything else), the Encounter powers that are 75% stronger, and Daily powers that are 125% stronger.

The anemic feat system (you have about .75 valid choices per alotted feat) are rigorously level and class-locked, just like the magical items, to ensure that every character is their own identical snowflake, exactly as good or bad as every other, and that their choices are next to meaningless in light of that. They’re different blends of DPS, area effect, mez, or heal, but all so blended together that it doesn’t frankly matter, and there’s no effective difference between two characters of the same class and level.

As a roleplaying system, you absolutely must have a book to play as every power (which is the core of the game) has its own special rules you must refer to until you’ve got it memorized. It lacks the universality of concept, everything is a “special case” with varying flanking, advantage, ‘procs’ rules, that makes it a f**king bear to learn, but once you do learn, you’re far more limited in choice than you’ve ever been with earlier or especially the recent models of D&D. Everyone is balanced, everyone is equal, and yet they all require their own special rules you need either the player guide or the class book to begin to understand.

It can’t completely fail as a tabletop game because good players and a good DM can still tell a great story with it, but the system just gets in the way. It has too many kooky-ass powers for most people to comprehend so every round is a lot of pushing figures around and consulting the manual, you’re less able to roleplay combat since every attack must be an abstracted yet specific power.

For a PC game, its many abstractions and profound lack of combat choices would be a chore. Everybody is a Warlock, you can stack weird effects onto your attack but it’s still just the same power shot through a different lens. Even having multiple spellcasting classes in 3.5 is less of a pain in the ass than managing six party members with wildly differing powers — and ultimately pointless since once you DO understand, they all play the same. I would bet it’s simpler to run, all the math’s already been done for you and you no longer have to rein in powergamers since there’s nothing to game or power about it, but you’d better tell a damned good story because it’s all the same slog to play.

That’s just my opinion, but to me, D&D for electronic RPGs is dead because the people holding the license are now intent on pushing out another edition of the books, and therefore no new 3.5 CRPGs can be made, despite the rules being inferior to everything else on the market. I’d rather play a Shadowrun CRPG (any edition) or RIFTs or World of Darkness (new or old) or HeavyGear/Silhouette, or just… damn near anything. They’re all superior systems in their own right, and the setting of 4th ed D&D has been jiggered enough that it no longer has any meaning to me, so why should I bother? Even most MMORPGs have better guts.

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Atari, if your gonna spill action in my RPG, then just make it God of War style, but let me play as Minsc. Jobs a Good ‘un.

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Secondly – Torment may be pretty old these days, but it’s a spring chicken next to the Dark Sun and Ravenloft games.

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Top down small squad strategy. I’d love a game along the lines of Commandos, DOW2, the new CoH expansion, etc. but where you can also ‘talk to the monsters’, and am surprised there isn’t one in development by now.

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Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy fluff as well. But in 3rd Edition books were damn near 50% fluff, 20% rules, than 30% rules amidst a paragraph of fluff. It got annoying, fast.

I like what they’re doing with 4th edition, If the FR Campaign Guide is any indication. Fluff books are, well, what they should be. A fluff book contains lore and the like for the group to draw upon, with some monsters and magic items to go along with it; whilst rule books are rules with some explanatory fluff.

Also, can anyone tell me who thought it was a good idea to make a Complete Mage, Complete Arcane, AND Unearthed Arcana? I’ve been flipping through them, all my copies missing indexes, trying to find the Wu Jen, whom I want to homebrew over to 4th edition.

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Where D&D games go wrong is in assuming that they should be primarily about combat. Sure, Icewind Dale was fun (if shallow) and IWD2 even had some shiny moments, but the very best D&D games have always been about story and characterization rather than wargame-ish fighting. With MotB, Obsidian has shown that it understands this and can work with it.

Well, like it or not, D&D is a combat wargame. Sure, you can engage in amateur dramatics or run a lucasarts point and click adventure game on the side but the rules and content are all “turn based tactical wargame” heavy. If D&D combat isn’t going to feature then maybe they shouldn’t be making a D&D game at all; unless it’s some brand name based bait and switch operation. At least some people will be annoyed that they are not getting what they expect.

There should be Kobolds as well. Lots of Kobolds with silly voices.

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After all, it’d be silly to call the Hobbit movie Lord of the Rings 4…

Of course it would be silly… they’ll call it Lord Of The Rings 0: The Hobbit ;)

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It would only work if they kept the controlled party setup and even then optional isometric view would be a must, even Bioware understands that for their spiritual successor to BG.

“I’m beginning to think that the whole “BG legacy” was totally thanks to Black Isle. I read just recently that Interplay constantly kept rejecting BioWare’s story ideas for Baldur’s Gate, so they put their own (read: Black Isle’s) writers on the job.”

I don’t know where you read that but David Gaider and co never worked at Black Isle, which served as nothing more than Interplay’s publishing label for the Baldur’s Gate PC games. Icewind Dale, Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment were pure Black Isle games yes and especially the latter game showed BI could write even better things than Bioware.

NWN wasn’t even meant to have a singleplayer campaign and other newer Bioware titles got that console taint on them. DA is their chance to get some street cred back on PC if you ask me.

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Combine that with the fact that it won’t be something that is designed to recreate BG 1 & 2, it’ll be something that takes the name/”IP” and sells it with modern ideals and you have a big ol’ meh from me.

On a side note: I’m all for modern remakes. Just don’t forget what people liked about them.

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