Now dammit, Wizards of the Coast, make up your mind!
Yeah, this is about two weeks late for a reasonable complaint, but something has to be said! By me! Because my opinion is very highly regarded. Also by me!
Okay, I started playing DnD probably in 2006, right before the end of 3.5, so I want you to know where I'm coming from. I know that every DnD player has their own system that they started with that they believe is the 'best.' I am fully aware of that and, dammit, I am still going to complain! I loved 3.5, it was complex without being (most of the time) overly complicated, it offered diverse options for players, a sorcerer could actually feel legitimately different than a wizard and a warlock was substantially separated from a battlemage. Before anyone tells me this, I am well aware of how easily broken the system is, I mean Pun-Pun has worked his way down to level 1. For those of you outside the far, far too geeky realm that is the optimization community, Pun-Pun is the ultimate concept, you exploit a series of loopholes to create a character of essentially limitless power.
Yes, it's broken, but you know what? I really don't care! Most of the time that I played it, I was with people who weren't optimizing, at least not too much. We were playing to have fun and sometimes we were playing character concepts we wanted to explore. There was fun enough for everyone and, to be fair, the most fun I had was at epic levels, beyond level 20, when you start being able to do stupidly powerful stuff. But it was fun because the players were constantly trying to find ways to outdo one another.
For instance, in one encounter, a group of us were facing a series of conjured monsters and animated colossal columns. We had my brother, a thiefly kind of guy, myself, a warlock, and two of our friends, one of who was playing a Red Wizard built for the boom boom and the other who was playing an epic vow-of-poverty druid, which is insane because it gave him levels of divinity and he had no need for items. At all.
The druid turns into a big thing and starts tangling with the baddies, the wizard is trying to blow one of the columns apart, the thief is trying to get into position to end these poor, little things and it got to be my turn. I cast an eighth level spell, maze, on a column. Maze requires an intelligence check to escape or the target remains trapped in a parallel world until 1xcharacter level minutes pass. There are six rounds in a minutes, I was level twenty-five. Columns have no intelligence score, therefore cannot make that roll. Ever. So, the party won the encounter, but I won the style points. Later on, the druid thwomped the tarrasque by turning into something bigger than it, he won that round.
In any event, that's the kind of thing I loved about 3.5, it was broken, but everyone, even people who filled the same kinds of roles, felt different. 4E never felt like that for me. Fourth Edition simplified the game in order to try to appeal to new players and I can deal with that, it kind of turned the game into a WoW type MMO, only on a tabletop. Each character class falls into a subheading, leader, striker, defender, there may be more but I forget them if there are. They all fill the obvious roles as they are named, strikers deal the most damage, defenders take damage, and as I remember, they heal, leaders supply some kinds of boosts. So, we have three kinds of classes (at least), and the classes themselves are supposed to fill in how they're different. So, a warlock and a sorcerer are both strikers, but ideally fill the bill in different ways.
This is where my problems come in, they really aren't different. I mean, flavor wise they seem to be, sure, but in effect, they both shoot at things from range with magic. You could say the same thing about 3.5, sure, but in that edition the sorcerer had an expansive spell list and had to make choices about spell slots and what they were willing to use them on while the warlock had a small number of abilities but could use them all as much as they wanted.
They simplified the game to make it more accessible, but in the process I feel like they simplified the feel of the game right out of it. Instead of having spells or a spell list, you have powers that essentially go on cooldown and you use certain abilities to as your basic attacks, for instance the warlock had an eldritch blast and an ability called eye-bite. They were 'at-will', you could use them as much as you wanted, but they had other abilities that were encounter, you could use them once per fight, or daily abilities that you had to take an extended rest between them. You don't get spells! A wizard doesn't have dozens of spells to use, they have maybe ten. So I don't feel like I'm playing DnD, I feel like I'm playing WoW or DnD Online.
That's my 4E rant, this is a new rant. Wizards announced recently that they are building a new system, and that, in the process, they're crowd sourcing it. They're asking potential players what they want out of it. That's cool, but it's only been about four years since 4E was released. I know that 3 and 3.5 were both over by 2008 and that 3E had started in 2000, but 3.5 started in 2003. Again, only five years, but it wasn't a complete overhaul.
I'm kind of afraid of what this means the future of the game. 2nd edition, AD&D version one had eight years and second edition AD&D had eleven years. They had small, I mean very small, books for most classes to give more options and a high level of complexity. I wish I knew how to play 2nd AD&D, I bet I'd like it pretty well. But while I haven't cared a lot for 4th, they did some cool things with it and it feels like they're going to kill it well before its time has come. I can only hope that the crowdsourcing makes it work better.
In the mean time, I wait for the price of Pathfinder to drop.
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