Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition

I think we may have been too young to appreciate it the first time we played Dungeons & Dragons. Either that or our dungeon master was being a douche bag for no reason. I think I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and chalk it up to inexperience. After all, he has plenty of embarrassing stories about me and I'm writing about my first D&D experience, so you can imagine how bad they must be.

Despite the rocky start, I tell anyone who'll listen about how great I think tabletop role-playing games are. Even as video game technology advances, paving the way for more realistic simulations and allowing greater freedom and individuality, I'd still rather spend an evening with friends and dice. Entertainment is all the more rewarding when you're intellectually engaged with it, and there is no better example of that than the tabletop RPG.

Unlike most uber-nerds, D&D was not my gateway to that magical land of imagination and social ostracism. It happened years later, in a different basement, playing White-Wolf Games' Werewolf: The Apocalypse.

White-Wolf was notorious for their other game, Vampire: The Masquerade. You may remember the story. It was sometime during the nineties and some stupid kid did something stupid and happened to own a copy of the rulebook. The next thing you knew, one television news magazine or the other broadcast an alarmist expose on "the game which will turn your kids into children of the night, delusional killers, maniacs!" It gave housewives something to worry about until they caught the obligatory choking hazard toy segment on the eleven o'clock news the following week.

Werewolf is probably more violent than Vampire, but it's a charming, Earth First!, righteous anger of the natural world sort of violence. However, there were far more brooding goths than stoner post-hippies back then, so it was never as popular. Indeed, the company had many different titles, most of which were set in a somewhat darker version of our world where supernatural forces worked their magic behind the scenes. It was a rich setting, well-conceived and inspired by the mythology and folklore of many different cultures.

I bring this up because the White-Wolf titles and Dungeons & Dragons represent two disparate forms of tabletop RPGs. This is a review of the new D&D, but I think it will be useful to compare it to other examples of the hobby, since most people probably never knew there were different kinds.

The main characteristic which sets the two styles apart is their approach to setting. D&D games are set in a sort of amorphous stock fantasy world. Although a creative group is free to bend the rules, it's still just picking through J.R.R. Tolkien's bowel movements. You typically have to break the game and rebuild parts of it if you want to go outside the lines, setting-wise. This would be fine if said setting was innovative at all, but it's not. You're supposedly paying for both the balancing work that goes into creating the gaming system and the artistic work of establishing the setting. If the setting is going to be paper-thin, the system should at least be robust and adaptable.

I remember the previous versions being better at that. My second D&D experience was with the 3rd edition rules and a group that ended up spending more time creating the world than we did playing in it. I didn't even have to invent too many rules to add steampunk elves to our game. That's right, steampunk elves.

The 4th edition carries with it the stink of That Guy. You know who I'm talking about. That Guy insists on playing some sort of ridiculous crossover character and then when you finally work out something you can both live with, That Guy is the first one to strike off on his own and leave the group behind, messing up the session for everyone and then you wish you hadn't included him at all. That Guy has a character sheet so smudged with graphite it's barely legible from the constant, unending revisions to his stats because he started min-maxing before you gave it to him and you're lucky if he stops before the first session. I've been playing games for a while now, and I'm certain That Guy has been asking to play a half-dragon or half-demon since D&D was invented and now he has what he wants.

Shame on you, Wizards of the Coast. Shame on you.

Yes, the new edition has three new playable races: The Dragonborn are exactly what they sound like, the Eldarin are elves, but elfier, and the Tieflings are the previously mentioned half-demons. in my world, they all went right out the window before I even invited people to play, but it's a lot of waste when you cast aside big chunks of the game. Those races belong in the appendix to the Monster Manual, not part of the core game and they know that. They are vindicating That Guy behavior and I will not stand for it.

One thing I do appreciate is the incorporation of miniatures and a grid into the rules. I know that this looks like a way to squeeze more money out of their players... Okay, that's precisely what it is, but you don't have to use their miniatures or anyone's, really. Krogdan the human Cleric can be represented by the shoe from Monopoly if you want.

I have yet to play a session of any RPG in which the game's pace doesn't slow to a crawl once a fight starts. This is unfortunate, but difficult to avoid. Miniature Strategy games, on the other hand, are one of the best examples of streamlining simulated combat, thats pretty much exactly what they do. When they party is investigating a room or questioning an NPC, D&D 4th Edition works the same way it always has, but when it's time to throw down, you break out the minis and the grid. It's much easier to keep track of who's in range and who can do where than when that information is only in your head. Or even worse, in six heads.

I don't give them too much credit. That option has always been on the table, and it was recommended from day one, but I do think it's a good idea to build the game with that assumption. The group is always free to abandon it if they feel it cramps their style.

That's really the key to D&D in general, but it's particularly important with the 4th edition so far. You're not playing a video game with design flaws, you have the power to change the rules, adapt he setting, kick That Guy out of your home forever. On top of that, the official game is added to by the professionals often enough that none of the class omissions or other thin areas concerned me too much. After all, it is in their best interests to expand the game.

This new edition is just starting out. I hope future content expansions will not be quite so cheesy. I pray they'll add useful classes and not, I don't know, Badassatron (like a fighter, but also fast like a thief and can use magic, too). It doesn't look too promising, seeing as how the game in question already features Elves II: Revenge of the Smug, but I can dream, can't I?