1) I don’t like the MM cut out flavour. I like everything in the MM, but I wish it still had the flavour. It’s true that the DM should be in charge of flavour, and I pretty much use my own monsters and flavour them myself because I love doing it. But I also love just flipping through the old MM’s and just reading the entries, just for the fun of it. The old MM’s were not just game books, they were also enjoyable reads in their own rights. This MM not so much. Not a huge thing though, just a minor issue.

2) Originality and personalization of character builds/abilities/etc has been drastically reduced. In 3.5, you could imagine pretty much anything as far as character concepts go, and the rules had a way to make it work. Personally I was playing a ninja character that I made up as I went along by multiclassing rogue and fighter. I used a katana and a wakizashi and had some feats and some rogue abilities and so on and I was really happy with the fact that I could make a ninja using the D&D rules as written and had no problems. Now in 4e I HAVE to be a ranger to be able to use 2 weapons, so I had to multiclass rogue/ranger, and then I found that pretty much all of the rogue abilities were the same as the ranger abilities anyways, just with a different name, so it seemed like I didn’t have any meaningful choice. Another player was playing a sorceror/swashbuckling fighter that concentrated on buffing himself before fights and then doing some kickass Errol Flynn style shit with light armour and a rapier. Now he’s gotta be a warlock, which is cool, sure, but it’s not what HE imagined.

Bottom line is that this was done to correct the problem with powergamers poring over a dozen rulebooks to come up with insane character builds that could dominate everything. Perfect example: friend of a friend who made an aboreal druid/bard with a rhinocerous animal companion and used a spiked chain. He mashed together so many rules from so many different books and came up with a character that could easily kill the entire rest of the party singlehandedly. (My friend killed that character with water trolls 3 CR below his level that grappled and drowned him as he was trying to cross a river just to make a point about being a gay powergamer). So anyways, because there are guys like that out there, the system takes a heck of a lot of options out of the player’s hands in order to ensure balance. And if you want to houserule a custom class that matches your concept, have fun coming up with 30 levels of balanced powers. The bottom line is that in 3.5, you started with a character concept that could be 100% fantasy trope, or it could be 100% original, and then you could find the rules to accomodate you. In 4e it seems more like there are X number of classes, and each class has 2 logical ‘builds’ and you just have to choose which one of those you want to be. When people play RPG’s, they want to be original, they want to do something that’s never been done before, or at least not that they know of. So yeah, in that respect, it’s videogamey. If you just want to choose who you are from a discrete list, you might as well play Soul Calibre or a D&D computer game or whatever because the only real edge that tabletop RPG games have over video games is that in a tabletop game you really CAN do and be anything and anybody. When it comes to the actual mechanics and gameplay, videogames will always be way easier.

Another thing, 5 out of the 6 hours were spent running a boss battle. And damn do bosses have a lot of HP. The boss was not out of our range of defeatability–we did take him out and only one character came close to death once. But man it really takes a looong time to whittle down 250 hit points for a 3rd level party. The average damage output for our characters on a given hit was around 5-18 I’d say, with more for per encounter and daily powers. Only my rogue/ranger with stacking hunter’s quarry and sneak attack was able to get up over 24 average damage. And since it was 4 levels higher than us, we mostly only had about a 15 to 30% chance to even hit the guy in the first place. So yeah, I’d say combat is streamlined and fun and tactical and great, BUT, monsters have too many hp. So big advice to anyone who wants to run many short combats as opposed to one long one in a session: reduce monster HP.

Also we haven’t run a skill challenge encounter yet but I have a few reservations. For one thing, it seems like a lot of work, much more even, for the DM to design a good skill challenge that lets characters make use of a wide variety of skills. And secondly, the whole thing seems way too rigid. I don’t like how a given skill challenge MUST have x successes before x/2 failures and the DM is supposed to plan that out ahead of time. Who knows what the players will come up with? And, if the players come up with a way to succeed at the whole skill challenge that would only logically require 1 roll, then it’s going to be damn hard for the DM to suddenly pull a bunch more stuff out of his ass to justify the other 7 rolls the skill challenge is supposed to require.

Oh, and my fellow DM (we take turns running campaigns) doesn’t like the magic items at all. He’s having a nightmare of a time figuring out what gp cost/level to apply to homebrew magic items that give enhancements to skill checks and so on.

Still and all, everything else is ok, and the core rules are an improvement. Looking forward to the future books.

Looks like D&D 4e will definitely NOT be for me based on a couple of factors (minis being one, our group having migrated to Burning Wheel/Burning Empires with massive success leaving any iteration of D&D before that in the dust), but I actually like that it sounds like they have scaled down the complexity.

In particular I’m interested in what Wizards has in store with D&D Insider. If the gaming tools make it as easy as they HOPE it will be to play some solid D&D online (even if it is largely tactical combat), it could still be quite a bit of fun and worth purchasing for some amusement outside the regular weekly tabletop game.

I don;t know about the wait, except that most printers have two installments in printing, a “opening rush” selection and the the “second wave” to stock in areas that sold out too quickly. It’s to reduce uneven distribution in the opening launch. Two weeks sounds about right. The wait is worth it, the books are good.

WTF?

In my mind, those of you who run this game with no battlemat will have a really rough time with it, as many of the classes really shine by being able to manipulate the battlefield and its participants. If nothing else, you’ll end up yanking, I suspect a lot of exploits from warlords and rogues, who thrive on setting up their foes and party members.

4th Edition will be an excellent game for newcomers. The D&D community should keep expanding, and as long as the expansions can be reigned in somewhat to trim down the amount of exploits and broken items/abilities/races, the game should survive well. Old-timers who cling to their massive libraries of 3.x books should not feel pressured to assimilate, though. It is quite different. That Heal spell you so love? Gone. Teleporting? Now a battlefield tactic to avoid attacks of opportunity. Wish? No more. Rolling handfuls of dice, massive numbers of attacks, ending battles with single spells? Not going to happen so much. But in the meantime, everyone gets to participate in a game from the beginning to the end and feel valuable.

My own thoughts are this: I’m not scrapping my own 3.25 Edition campaign to hustle to 4th Edition. I own the core books, yes, but I’m also taking a wait-and-see attitude. WotC has a lot of steps to take before I’m 100% sold on it, including getting D&D Insider online (which they admit may be months away) and putting out supplements that expand on their world (no bard, barbarian, monk or druid, but they hint that they’re coming…) Until then I’ll haunt blog sites like this one, the WotC message boards, and wait.

I’m not saying “Use a battlemat or go home.” If you can make 4e work without one (and again, with a shaker of salt: I haven’t played it yet, with or without a grid) and have fun, awesome. I just think there’s a line in there with any RPG where the amount of work required to hack it into the shape you want makes it more viable to just start with a game that fits your tastes better.

@Matthew: Good point. Anyone with a ritual book still needs the feat to be able to use it, although my hypothetical party of fighters is fine with a scroll and nothing else.

@Darthkrzysztof: You can have more or less monsters. If your group likes less, use a few amount of higher level monsters or elites or solos.

People keep saying that this version emphasizes X or Y. It’s D&D. You make it what you want. The new rules allow for far more flexibility than any other edition. If your group likes non-combat encounters, 4e gives you tonnes of great options for it. The choice has always rested with the group, not the system.

Really, I’m more concerned about my player who loves psionics… ; )

For example, the pages of my books are warped (as if the paper was wet when printed then dried during processing) and they’re not all the same depth (if you put them in the jacket, the backs aren’t even.)

Also, take a look at the gnome entry in the MM (page 134). Look at the level 3 encounter block:
2 gnome arcanists, 2 Iron defenders, 1 pseudodragon. Neither Iron Defenders nor Pseudodragons are in the ToC and no page number, or notes on where to find them are in the encounter list. You can note their level and role, flip to the indew of monsters per level by role, look them up there and find that Iron Defenders are Homonculi on page 156 and that Pseudodragons are Drakes on page 91, but those page numbers should be right on the encounter list and not putting them, or at least the monster type right on the encounter list was a pretty bonehead move.

Re: the battle mat:
As far as I’ve seen, there are plenty of options for powers if you never want to use a battle mat. While not using one does make some of the skills/powers less (or more!) useful than they’d otherwise be, that’s been the case for every edition. That’s the price you pay when actively excising a chunk of the system. Instead of viewing those “shift” or “castling” powers as “useless without a battle mat” Try looking at them the same way everyone looked at the fireball spell in the previous edditions w/o a mat. Not using a mat allows you the narrative freedom to declare “I place the AOE so it hits all the foes and no allies.” or, in the case of shifting: “I shift the injured mage out of melee with his opponent and take his place.” With a mat, you may not be able to maneuver that exchange.

@Gomez: I didn’t see what you’re talking about explicitly called out in the rules, but I can see how the game could play that way — especially if you follow the guidelines for combat and noncombat encounters pretty closely.

I don’t think it would be quite as pronounced as an RPG like Primetime Adventures or Burning Empires, though — where the rules literally say “Play only the important scenes.”

@Darth: I logged into Insider this morning, and apart from the new skin and preview info on all the features, it doesn’t look like anything’s up and running yet. I also didn’t see a way to give WotC my money or start a free trial, and I’m pretty sure the Game Table is paying subscribers only. I’m curious about it too.

Looking at the web enhancement pregen tiefling warlord for Keep on the Shadowfell was my first real warning: almost all of the warlord’s powers involves shifting, swapping places with the target, or some other movement on the grid. If I’m not planning to use the mat, then these powers are nerfed. Even assuming that there are options in the PH which players could take “instead,” there’d still be a lot of powers, feats, etc. that are “less awesome,” or outright useless, to us.

“No battlemat” isn’t just a side effect of my chat-based game, either. If I may venture into heresy territory, I don’t like miniatures. I don’t like hunting for minis that look like characters I’ve already drawn. I don’t like writing up encounters based on the minis I have, instead of the other way around. I’m terrible at painting them. I’ve got nowhere to keep them. And I definitely don’t like randomized packs of minis. If you have to burden me with this stuff, give me counters…

That being said, the online D&D Game Table might make this whole issue a moot point for my campaign. Will you have to subscribe to D&D Insider to use it? My players won’t like that, I’ll give you that for nothing.

I would really like to see some writeup on the Game Table.