Green Ronin checks out Fourth Edition (3/11/08)

Chris Pramas’s blog entry doesn’t tip my opinion either way.  The long and the short of it: it’s a completely new system (no 3.9e here, folks) but it may be inaccessible to RPG newbies.

I have three major beefs with the current 3.5 system.

1)  Character creation takes too long.  The counterargument would be that the Player’s Handbook provides pre-made characters, and that at first level throwing in a couple of abilities shouldn’t be too hard.  Unfortunately, few and far between is the gaming group that doesn’t want to make sure their character isn’t getting hosed in the long run by leaving out a feat, spell, or stat combination.  On our current campaign, the DM had us starting at fifth level using the point buy system.  It took us two hours of poring over stats, abilities that modified stats, figuring out what we qualified for, etc before we were ready to game.

2)  Ongoing stacking effects make for a bear during gameplay.  With buffs and debuffs of variable durations flying across the table, especially past level 7 or so with magic users, bookkeeping gets nasty.

3)  Spamming attacks/abilities is usually the best option.  My necromancer is going to sit back and throw skeletons every turn while our fighter rolls 1d20 to see if he hits the enemy.  70% of a fighter’s turn currently consists of handing him the dice, letting him roll, and then proceeding to the next player.

From what I gather from the interview, the question of interesting choice instead of spam has been addressed.  Apparently there’s a new system where abilities are limited resources instead of free.  Unfortunately, I think my hope for the simplification of combat effects is fading.  From the interview:

“While it does fix many of the ongoing issues with 3.5, my feeling after today's session is that it's just complicated in a different way. It's not something I think experienced gamers will have a huge amount of trouble with, but it does seem that 4E may be even more unfriendly to new players than 3.5 was. It looks like 4E requires newbs to make too many choices and track too many things to make it truly accessible. Since D&D has always been the entry point for most RPG players, this is my most serious concern.”

He doesn’t go into great detail about what exactly needs to be tracked, but I’m guessing it’s the ability resources that are being used and currently in play.