Having completed my playtesting, here are my current thoughts on the matter:. They are fundamentally disconnected from the game world caring not about what the PCs have done, but merely how much they have done and create strangely skewing probabilities, among other problems.
If you follow the rules in the DMG you are supposed to a write a script for the PCs to follow; b tell them the script; and c if they try to deviate from the script, punish them for it with more difficult skill checks. This is obviously not working properly.
The author has also done some interesting things in terms of adding some depth to the gameplay of skill challenges. In the best case scenario, skill challenges simply duplicate the gameplay of previous editions: The players propose a course of action, the DM determines the skill and the DC, and then a check is made to determine success.
In the worst case scenario, skill challenges turn one interesting die roll into six to ten monotonous die rolls. If you use hard DCs, increase the levelof the challenge by two.
When we look at the table for DCs by Level on pg. The guideline is claiming that if you take a 10th level challenge with moderate DCs and redesign it with easy DCs, you should end up with something equivalent to a 9th level challenge with moderate DCs.
At 9th level, the moderate DC is 19, not A 10th level challenge with easy DCs is, in fact, equivalent to a 6th level challenge. Similarly, a 10th level challenge with hard DC 25 is not equivalent to a 12th level challenge with moderate DCs. The DCs by Level table on pg. So levels are all grouped together and have the same DCs for skill checks. Once again, however, this requires you to scrap everything the DMG has to say about using traps and skill challenges before rebuilding the system from scratch.
What it really boils down in the final analysis is that complex skill checks are a useful mechanic. In other words, when you have a specific task defined by a concrete goal and a single method of success — such as disabling a trap, disarming a bomb, or playing a game of Chess — that is best modeled as a sequence of discrete actions, the basic formula of X successes before Y failures is a useful way of representing that mechanically.
Even the S-curve probability distribution works well for these types of scenarios it becomes a feature instead of a bug as skill trumps luck in larger and more complex tasks. This is, frankly, bizarre. And it speaks, again, to the fundamentally and inexplicably sloppy design of 4th Edition.
I know it's standard practice in WotC's errata to simply include the relevant changes, but in this case the changes are of a nature which makes neither the rulebook nor the errata usable. Notably, the revision of the skill challenge mechanics also included a revision of the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on pg. For those of you unfamiliar with 4th Edition, this table is the heart and soul of the system. And it's been rendered unusable by the errata And since they didn't get this problem fixed before they printed the Dungeon Master's Screen for 4th Edition You'll need to recreate the table yourself by combining the information from the DMG and the errata.
Skill challenges are still dissociative, slightly less broken, and useless. It took me awhile to really come to grips with this because there is a large degree to which familiarity with previous editions causes you to simply glaze over what's missing from the new edition. Part of this means reducing the flexibility and freedom of choice to be found in 3rd Edition while gaining no appreciable benefit from the loss , but the other part of it is the systematic removal of non-combat skills and non-combat skill uses.
When I have brought this up in discussion with diehard supporters of 4th Edition, I have often been told that I'm wrong: There are still some non-combat skills and skill uses left in the game. This is true. But if you cut off both my legs and one of my arms, the fact that you left me with one working hand doesn't mean that you haven't mutilated me.
Disguise and Forgery have been dumped into the Bluff skill, but have no associated skill uses. This is the entirety of their description in 4th Edition: "You make a Bluff check to [ And when you look at the skills which do remain, non-combat uses for those skills have also been widely removed from the game. On the other hand, several new combat uses for skills have been added -- so it's not that they were just paring the whole list down.
In play, this wasn't just hypothetically problematical. Twice in our very first session of 4th Edition the players ran straight into the wall of missing non-combat skills.
And, of course, I was left improvising house rules on the fly to cover over the gaping holes left in the rules. I don't expect any rule system to be encyclopedic, but the advantage 3rd Edition had was a comprehensive structure of skills that made improvising non-detailed tasks really simple.
In years of playing 3rd Edition, I can't remember a single time I ran into a situation where I could say, "There's no skill for that. In mere hours of playing 4th Edition we ran into "there's no skill for that" multiple times, necessitating the creation of entire mechanics. The sheer number of mandatory minor house rules you have to track in order to run 4th Edition in a consistent fashion is truly mind-boggling to me.
What leaves me scratching my head over this design decision is that, with the new method of handling skills at character creation, it was so totally unnecessary. The only legitimate complaint against having lots of skills in 3rd Edition is that some PC classes arguably don't have enough skill points to take a significant selection of those skills.
However, in 4th Edition that concern has been completely negated. So why not invest the 2 or 3 pages of text it would have taken to provide the same level of comprehensive support for non-combat skill use in 4th Edition that you had in 3rd Edition? This includes staples of the dungeon crawling genre like foot poles, chalk dust, and the like. And this, naturally, spills over into the magic items available in the game, as well.
As with skills, it's not as if there aren't any non-combat powers in 4th Edition. It's just that the number of non-combat options have been drastically reduced, while the number of combat options has been increased. But 4th Edition puts its hand firmly on the combat side of the scale and pushes down hard. Frankly, the game hasn't been this myopic in its combat-focus since the original boxed set It's little wonder, I suppose, that we have been given rules that look like a tactical miniatures game and adventures which are explicitly designed as a series of tactical combat encounters complete with set-up instructions for the miniatures.
Personally, I have little interest in the direction this has taken the game. Tactical miniatures combat is not the primary reason I play roleplaying games. And, honestly, I feel that WotC has made a wider strategic mistake.
They have stated that one of their design goals with 4th Edition was to appeal to a new generation of gamers and that, to win the attention of that generation, they would need to compete against video games like World of Warcraft and Diablo. You can get the same basic style of combat in Diablo , after all.
But you get it faster, with prettier graphics, and without having to do the math. Plus, you can play any time you want to. You can even play with your friends whether they live near you or not , and with a minimal effort no larger than hauling a sizable miniature collection around you can set up a LAN party and play with them in person. Where pen 'n paper roleplaying games can separate themselves from the video variety is outside of combat.
It is the truly open-ended nature of the game -- the GM's ability to respond to any scenario or action the players might propose -- that video games are still decades away from emulating. Instead, with 4th Edition, the game embraced its weaknesses. Personally, I doubt it. When you look at the poor statistical analysis being applied to problems like the minute advenuturing day and skill challenges, I see no reason to assume that the system is particularly robust.
I mean, if the designers couldn't be bothered to calculate the most basic probabilities of their core mechanics, why would I assume they spent any time balancing the complex interactions between different powers and abilities?
Meanwhile, the playtesting for 4th Edition was significantly reduced in scope from the rigorous playtesting that 3rd Edition was subjected to. So we have a game with a less playtesting and b demonstrated sloppiness in the design of its most basic elements. And you're telling me it's "more balanced" just because the designers told you that they "fixed the math"?
Within mere days of the game being releasd, the designers had already publicly admitted that they'd actually screwed up the math instead of fixing it. It's true that, as I write this just a few short weeks after the game was released, the character optimization boards have not yet ripped Pun-Pun size holes in the game.
But it's not like Pun-Pun cropped up in September , either. It took four years, a revision of the core rulebooks, and multiple supplements. This is one of those areas where I'm fully willing to admit that my experience may be extremely different from that of other people playing the game, but frankly I can't figure out what they're talking about.
Particularly since they seem to be primarily talking about the ease of prepping stat blocks. For another thing, with the exception of wizards who had the extra hassle of trying to prep spellbooks , the amount of time spent prepping NPCs in 4th Edition has actually increased compared to 3rd Edition.
Because the number of decision points due to powers has increased for every single non-caster class and has remained largely unchanged for the caster classes. Nor is it any easier to create entirely new monsters or tweak existing monster stat blocks in 4th Edition. However, one thing I do like in 4th Edition is the multitude of stat blocks in the Monster Manual.
It really is a huge time saver to have a half dozen different stat blocks for orcs that I can immediately plug 'n play into an adventure, instead of having to build every orc by hand from the basic stat block for the race. It's a design choice that I liked in the later 3rd Edition Monster Manuals and it's just as valuable here. Unfortunately, the Monster Manual as a whole is probably one of the worst ever published for the game.
Descriptive text has been pared down to a bare minimum It would be tempting to blame this lack of descriptive text on the multiple stat blocks, but that's just not the case: Monster Manual V for 3rd Edition, for example, featured multiple stat blocks without gutting the descriptive text.
One example of this would be the guulvorg. First appearing in Monster Manual V , guulvorgs were recently created by goblin transmuters experimenting upon worg stock.
Huge creatures with a tail of bulbous bone and blood which literally boils in their veins and scorches those who wound them , the guulvorgs were given enough detail that they stood out as a unique variant of the standard worg. In 4th Edition, on the other hand, guulvorgs "are often encountered in pairs a male and a female.
They are capable of bearing Large riders into battle. That's the entirety of the creature's description in the Monster Manual. And this is a pattern which is repeated over and over again throughout the book. If you already know what these monsters are, then the book has a high utility. If you aren't already familiar with older editions of the game, however, the book is nothing more than a collection of extremely bland stat blocks.
This contributes heavily to the feeling that 4th Edition is nothing more than a tactical miniatures game. And the dissociated mechanics in the Monster Manual are just actively painful to read. I think my "favorite" of the moment is the cyclops who has better depth perception because he only has one eye. The Evil Eye is also an example of another 4th Edition design principle that I just can't wrap my head around: Racial traits that aren't.
In the case of the cyclops, every single cyclops stat block has an Evil Eye ability listed One grants a free basic melee attack; another grants a bonus to ranged attacks; another lets the cyclops shift 2 squares instead of 1; another applies a penalty to a target's speed; and so forth. There's no common thread to these abilities except that they're all called "Evil Eye". Not only does this negate any utility that might be gained from having a common ability shared across multiple stat blocks a form of utility specifically disparaged by the 4th Edition design team , but it actually goes in the opposite direction and creates unnecessary confusion.
I've previously described how I first got into roleplaying games. I spent months saving my allowance money in order to buy one boxed set after another, with each new purchase expanding the scope and depth of the game for me. Then I picked up a used copy of the 1st Edition Monster Manual , which I used in conjunction with the 2nd Edition rulebooks for nearly half a decade until the hardcover Monstrous Manual was released in During this half-decade span, I was playing with classmates and discussing the game in a variety of online forums, most notably the ADND FidoNet echo.
It was here that I first encountered the concept of PBeM campaigns, and watching multiple games play out in slow motion across the echo helped shape my perceptions of what roleplaying games were capable of. When Bruce Norman got an adventure published in Dungeon Magazine , it inspired me to start submitting my own work.
John Givler's prodigious output of homebrewed items, spells, and monsters taught me kit-bashing by example. If anyone reading this has text archives from those days, I'd love to hear about it. Mine are fragmentary and incomplete. Why were the core mechanics such an inconsistent and random jumble?
Why couldn't wizards wear armor even if they weren't casting spells? Why was the alignment system so punitive? Why did demi-humans have level caps?
Why was there both a multi-classing system and a dual-classing system that produced such blatantly unbalanced results? And so forth. This really just scratches the surface. And like a lover who has become discontented with his mistress, the existence of so many faults quickly made other foibles and quirks intolerable.
Classes instead of a skill system? Vancian spellcasting instead of spell points? Hit points instead of a wound system? I was hardly alone. And eventually I grew sick of doing it. By the late '90s, I had stopped playing the game entirely. Then, in , the development of 3rd Edition was announced.
I was skeptical and cynical beyond belief. Why would anyone use those rules as a platform for development? I got involved in countless online debates, scoffing at the entire concept. And then Ryan Dancey did something really audacious: In response to my relentless criticism and skepticism, he made me a playtester and sent me a playtest copy of the Player's Handbook. So I read through the playtest document and I sent Dancey a lengthy list of comments.
And then I playtested the game and sent him another list of comments. In short, I did my job. And Dancey had done his: By the time I finished reading through the playtest document, I was sold on 3rd Edition. What I was holding in my hands was essentially the game I had been trying to create with my binder full of house rules: A unified core mechanic. A skill system coupled to a flexible class system. Arbitrary prohibitions replaced with logical consequences.
It even took away with the alignment strait-jacket. It wasn't the perfect game. It still felt like that game I had fallen in love with back in the summer of '89 when I first peeled the shrinkwrap off the Basic Set. Yes, the XP tables had been mucked with. Yes, the saving throw categories had been streamlined. Yes, skills and feats had been added to the game. In fact, the list of changes -- if you wanted to be sufficiently nitpicky with it -- could be almost endless.
But here's the rub of it: Playing a fighter still felt like playing a fighter. Playing a wizard still felt like playing a wizard. Some of the names are still the same, but playing a fighter doesn't feel like playing a fighter and playing a wizard doesn't feel like playing a wizard. Is it still a paper 'n pencil roleplaying game? Is it still about exploring dungeons and slaying dragons?
The gameplay has been fundamentally altered. In similar fashion, both Chess and Stratego are boardgames featuring a highly abstract presentation of war played out on a grid. But Stratego isn't the same game as Chess But it isn't the same game -- any more than Rolemaster or Earthdawn or Exalted all fantasy roleplaying games are the same game.
Or would become the same game just because you slapped the same name on the cover. New Coke may have had the Coke trademarks on its can, but that didn't make it the same soda. Meanwhile, the 4e design team was trying out some of their ideas in live products. Not all of them made the cut.
The general public had been speculating about a new fourth edition since at least ; they finally got their confirmation at Gen Con Indy Eberron was one of the few lines that filled the gap, while many publications were editionless — including The Grand History of the Realms , Dungeon Survival Guide , and An Adventurers Guide to Eberron Wizards also spent that year previewing the upcoming game. Publication for the fourth edition finally began in May … with an quickstart adventure , H1: "The Keep on the Shadowfell" Though it maintained core concepts like classes, races, and rolling high on a d20, everything else was up for grabs.
Many of these changes were the result of new philosophies for the game's design. Fan were able to hear extensive details about these design goals thanks to numerous articles that ran in those two Wizards Presents books, then in Dragon and Dungeon magazines. The result might be the most publicly designed roleplaying game ever. However, lead designer Rob Heinsoo has also detailed a number of subsidiary goals intended to push the game in that direction:.
The most important one was probably moving the game away from being a simulation and toward being a more cinematic gaming experience — something that would allow players to simply reskin their character fluff without it changing the game itself. To start with, all the character classes were unified in how they were defined and how they progressed.
They had set bonuses that went up with level, and they each gained set powers as well. For example, at starting level each character got two at-will powers which could be used constantly , one encounter power which could be used once per fight , and one daily power which could be used once per day. The difference in the character classes now focused on what powers they had and what they could do.
As Heinsoo had promised, they had roles that described what they did: controllers like the wizard reshaped the battlefield, defenders like the paladin sucked up attacks, leaders like the cleric healed, and strikers like the ranger did piles of damage. Levels were heroic, levels were paragon, and levels were epic. At the higher levels of play, players also got to choose paragon paths and epic destinies for their characters.
These class variants had one big difference from the 3e prestige classes that they superseded: they didn't replace the core classes that the players were working on, but instead working in tandem with them.
Meanwhile, everything that was associated with characters changed too — mostly through simplification and a reduction in randomness. Thus, hit points were no longer rolled, while skills no longer accumulated skills points; instead these stats were based largely on character level.
Magic items were also built into a character's progression, with each item having suggested levels; variants were often available at many different levels of power. There were just five alignments remaining: good, lawful good, evil, chaotic evil, and unaligned.
Generally, this took the form of standardization. Spells now tended to have hit rolls, for example because everything else did , while higher-level powers tended to multiply damage rather than adding static bonuses because that fit the traditional high-power model for spells. Saving throws were also changed to become targets like armor class , rather than something requiring an additional roll.
The mechanics of the new game were also more focused on combat than in previous editions. Meanwhile, spells and other abilities that weren't combat-oriented either disappeared or were revamped.
With combat becoming more important, healing became more important as well, and so a "healing surges" mechanic was introduced that let anyone heal themselves. This was probably also intended to give leaders more opportunity to have "fun" in combat. By the late '00s, a number of different RPG publishers had published hugely revamped new editions of their games that had resulted in fan rebellions. However, rather than long-running flame wars, it instead resulted in the creation of old-school publishers like Necromancer Gamers , old-school survivalist communities like Dragonsfoot Present , and ultimately the whole old-school revivalist movement Present.
The biggest complaints which were often seen as total gospel by 3e fans and absolute silliness by 4e players were:. So much had changed, that some people felt like it was no longer the game they'd loved. Even designer Rob Heinsoo later acknowledged that they'd changed too much at once. So, 4e had a hard road to hoe, with so many different issues piling atop the massive changes in its core mechanics … and the result was five years of controversy.
A Different Sort of Player's Handbook. Not only did it contain all the character creation rules, and all the other core rules, but for the first time ever it included magic items though not artifacts. The 4e Player's Handbook contained an impressive eight races and eight classes, but the exact races and classes that were highlighted surprised some.
Of these, the dragonborn, eladrin, and tiefling all appeared as core races for the first time. However, this was a big upgrade for them. Meanwhile, the character races were also extensively reimagined, with the designers thinking of new ways to give the races niches and to make them more evocative. It would appear much more extensively in 4e's other books from Again there were two surprising newbies.
With so many new races and classes, it's not surprising that some classics got dropped. The gnome and half-orc were the most notable omissions from the race list, while the assassin, bard, and druid were all classics that were missing from the class list. Many more races and classes would appear in the years to come.
About the Creators. He quickly moved on to contribute to Atlas Games, then to work for Chaosium. Please feel free to mail corrections, comments, and additions to shannon. These PDF files are digitally watermarked to signify that you are the owner. A small message is added to the bottom of each page of the PDF containing your name and the order number of your purchase. Warning : If any files bearing your information are found being distributed illegally, then your account will be suspended and legal action may be taken against you.
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Error: No match for email address or password. Password forgotten? Click here. Advanced Search. Player's Handbook 4e. From Wizards of the Coast. Watermarked PDF. Average Rating 21 ratings. To ring in more savings, visit our New Year, New Campaign sale page. However, lead designer Rob Heinsoo has also detailed a number of subsidiary goals intended to push the game in that direction: Expanding the Sweet Spot.
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