Raving Rant: 4th Edition is a Curse - Editorials

Axel takes a critical look at the dilution of Dungeons & Dragons with the release of the 4th Edition to mimic popular PC MMO's.

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Raving Rant: 4th Edition is a Curse

Like many gamers who like to pull themselves away from their computers and return to their gaming roots, I bought a copy of the 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons shortly after its release. I wasn't fanboy enough to order the super deluxe box set that I absolutely had to have on launch day, but it wasn't too long after they came out that I plunked down my money for the three new core rulebooks. I've managed to play a little of the first published module, Keep on the Shadowfell, and I've had plenty of time to peruse the books in between sessions.

Let me tell you, friends and gamers, there is something rotten in the state of Greyhawk.

Actually, there is no Greyhawk anymore. The entire setting which was considered the "default" world for any D&D adventure that wasn't set in the Forgotten Realms or Eberron universes has disappeared. I'm uncertain how many people will lament its passing. I won't be one of them. The book for the Forgotten Realms setting was thick, and it used small print, which crammed even more detail into a limited space, and it remains my favorite setting. The Eberron book used slightly larger type, but it was still nice and juicy on the details. But Greyhawk never seemed to be as developed for some reason throughout the 3rd Edition. In some ways, by making it the default setting, Wizards of The Coast seemed to basically kill the viability of the setting by essentially piling everything on higher and deeper. The setting got watered down by too much stuff.

Now, if we're not going to be running around Greyhawk by default, what do we have in its place? Hasbro (yes, Hasbro, Wizards of The Coast is as much a separate entity as Blizzard was from Vivendi before the merger with Activision) has given us what can only be described as a hot mess of a setting. In fact, calling it a "setting" is perhaps far too generous a term. There are some vague references to fallen empires, big apocalyptic battles long in the past, yadda yadda. But just because it's squished together doesn't mean it hangs together. Having picked up and played way too many RPGs over the years, I'm of the opinion that you should either put some thought into the setting or just forgo it entirely. Savage Worlds is an example of the latter path, absolutely no setting at all on its own, but just the

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barebone rules so that you can create damn near anything. Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu has a rich and dense setting, derived from the pulp horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the other writers of the Cthulhu Mythos. In contrast, the most recent iteration of White Wolf's World of Darkness manages to split the difference nicely, giving you the basic rules while creating a minimalist modern horror setting,

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though it's certainly expandable with the various setting books that are out there. The d20 3rd Edition rules half-assed it and relied on both the memories of older players who'd done their adventuring with the venerable 2nd Edition "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" ruleset and the utter ignorance of newcomers not to notice there wasn't much meat to the setting. I'll get back to this point in a minute, but rest assured, this particular design decision will come back to bite Hasbro on the ass.

Character creation on the new 4th Edition is rather different than the old 3rd Edition. The good news is that some classes which were perhaps a little more susceptible to physical damage for no reason other than years of fiat are now a bit burlier. The bad news is that they made character progression remarkably like an MMORPG, so much like an MMORPG that it's actually kind of hard to read at times. For a player, it certainly is colorful, and from what I've been able to divine from other folks running 4th Edition D&D games, new players certainly pick things up easily enough. But what's easy for the players has proven to be rather difficult for the game masters. The last iteration of D&D gave you a fairly good level of flexibility when it came to designing NPCs, new character classes, new prestige classes, and pretty much anything else you might want to stock your campaign with. Now, it feels like you're being punished for wanting to tweak, adjust, bend, spindle, and mutilate. For a game that notionally relies on imagination, Hasbro seems hellbent on punishing the one person who has to put in the bulk of the imagination workload on the back end to make a session playable, to say nothing of being enjoyable.

It was with a due sense of dread that I waited for the new release of the Forgotten Realms setting. The folks at Hasbro got it in their heads to break it up into two books: a Campaign Guide which laid out the world in general and covered things like history and geography, and a Player's Guide which covered the fine details of tricking out your characters with new paragon paths and what not. What I cannot, for the life of me understand, is why the hell they decided to release them three weeks apart. They'd be getting the same amount of money if they were released at the same time. The Campaign Guide makes reference to various details that can only be found in the Player's Guide, which essentially means you're stuck until it comes out. If Hasbro released the three core books at once, why couldn't they see it was in their interest to release the two Forgotten Realms books at once as well? Since they'd make the same amount of money either way, it can't be simple greed. I can only surmise that it's some half-assed attempt to "guarantee" sales of the Player's Guide.

Having bought the Campaign Guide, I read through it a couple of times, and eventually went ballistic. Not content to force the revised D&D cosmology onto Forgotten Realms, they lift more than a few pages from World of Warcraft. I mentioned before how Hasbro already seemed to be modeling MMOs for character creation. It seems the designers went a step further redesigning the setting and actually "borrowed" some ideas from the biggest MMO around. We've got a massive "Spellplague" that causes vast tracts of land to become unhealthy if not outright deadly to live in (Eastern and Western Plaguelands?), we've got a new major continent that just appears out of nowhere (vaguely similar to how Kalimdor was "discovered" in Warcraft III), the nation of Thay is now ruled solely by the archlich Szass Tam (could make parallels to both the Forsaken and the Scourge here), and flying chunks of mountain called "earthmotes" that hover and float and generally pretend to be part of the natural geography (Nagrand and Netherstorm from Burning Crusade, to say nothing of the material component "motes of earth" needed for various crafting skills). Now it's entirely possible that these are all just incredible coincidences, that the guys who were writing up the new version of Forgotten Reams were blissfully ignorant of what all was going on within World of Warcraft. Unfortunately, I can't quite bring myself to be that gullible.

Now, it can be argued that some of this was already present to an extent in the last version of Forgotten Realms. Netheril and its flying mountains were certainly present, though I would argue that those were engineered instead of a "natural" phenomenon. Szass Tam was certainly painted as being the sort of guy who'd like to get rid of the other zulkirs of Thay and rule uncontested. And the Spellplague was mentioned in The Grand History of The Realms, which came out quite a while before this new edition of Forgotten Realms. Taken all together, however, and combined with the very MMO feel of the 4th Edition rules makes for a highly suspicious bit of publication.

This brings me back to my earlier point about Hasbro half-assing the development of settings. There are two settings out now for 4th Edition D&D, the "base" setting and Forgotten Realms. I imagine they're working on Eberron as we speak. But so far, Hasbro's batting zero. The "base" setting has absolutely nothing going for it. And the reworked Forgotten Realms just makes me want to weep in disgust. I can understand the need to update, to expand, to improve, to create new stories and breathe new life into worlds. It is certainly not my intention to be the sort of player who loves only the "official" canon and jumps down the throats of anybody who tries to change it, even if it's the developers. However, change only for the sake of change is worse than no change at all. Even more egregious is the idea of "dumbing down" a system in an attempt to pander to a broader audience. Granted, some companies go the other route (such as White Wolf and the positively byzantine combat system they cooked up for Scion and the 2nd Edition of Exalted), and that too presents its own problems. And there is a world of difference between simplifying or streamlining the rules and "dumbing down" the rules.

Yes, Hasbro is a game company in the traditional stripe for the most part. Board games are still their bread and butter. Trading card games, miniatures, and pen ‘n’ paper RPGs represent a diversification of that core business, but it still comes down to physical game pieces and play spaces. The hope is that they can get more people into D&D by making it more like an MMO. I'm sorry to say that I believe they're on a fool's errand. Even the online gaming tools that Hasbro will be releasing and charging monthly subscription fees for won't be doing them any favors. I smell marketing wonks behind this strategy. I perceive people who see the money roaring into the coffers of Blizzard, Sony, and NCSoft who fail to understand anything beyond the money and the raw numbers. I foresee disaster.

The lure of an MMO is not simply running around in dungeons and getting loot. It's the possibility of forging connections with people from around the nation, if not around the world. It's getting your buddies from the office into a situation where everybody can let off steam. It's (sometimes) the province of small-souled cretins looking to prove how tough they are, even if they've power-leveled their characters and would blubber in the real world if you so much as looked at them funny. The nice part about an MMO is that it does all manner of tedious calculation and dice rolling for you, behind the scenes, and without any of the annoying questions of rolling surface or what to do if the die gets cockeyed and lands on an edge. But for all the benefits, MMOs are drastically limited spaces that do not brook any sort of exercise in imagination. The quest lines are always the same. The NPCs you need to talk to are always in exactly the same places. The bosses you need to kill are always in the same chamber of the dungeons. People still give me shit because I like to read the quest descriptions and all the ancillary information that the developers put into an MMO. As much as I hate the analogy, MMOs are quite similar to modern day theme parks. You come into corporate owned turf and accept a given set of rules that you cannot change or even really complain about. You play how you're told to play, in essence. For those who disagree with me, I submit to you the various guides out there on fansites which regurgitate the same basic information about how to buff your toon for maximum PvP damage dealing ability. A truly open system would allow for a near-infinite variety of play-styles. The only one that's come the closest is Guild Wars, and even then there's a hint of the "min-max" mentality.

Pen ‘n’ paper RPGs have been, and may always be, a niche product. It might be a big niche, all things considered, but you're never going to get the sort of numbers that you would for a game like Candy Land or even a big TCG like Pokemon. Part of me would like to believe that Hasbro is trying to do the RPG community a mitzvah, that in trying to make D&D more like an MMO, they're trying to increase the "install base" for RPGs across the board. Again, I can't quite bring myself to be that gullible. Part of 3rd Edition's relatively great success was the Open Game License, the GPL-esque text at the back of each and every book for 3rd Edition D&D which basically made it so that any schmuck could publish his own setting, his own adventures, his own arms and equipment guides. Things opened up and there were thousands of books and small booklets for the system. You couldn't go into a game store without seeing something new for D&D. With 4th Edition, there is no OGL. Now, if you have a great setting idea, you have to put yourself on a list of Hasbro approved developers and they have the final say over whether or not your work will be seen. Now, to be sure, this might cut down on some of the really poorly written adventures and settings that probably should never have seen the light of day. But it also eliminates material which, while adult in nature, could potentially open up the audience of RPGs as a whole. Somehow, I just don't see a 4th Edition compatible version of Book of Vile Darkness or Book of Exalted Deeds coming out under this scheme. Those two books attempted to seriously examine evil and good, respectively, and educate players and GMs on how they could use those examinations to try and bring new life and new depth to their games. And no matter how much Monte Cook did for 3rd Edition, I think those two books remade for 4th Edition would be a hard sell.

Where do we go from here? Do we give up on the pen-and-paper RPG all together? Do we turn a blind eye towards Hasbro's questionable direction for their only major RPG franchise and simply drink the Kool-Aid they hand us? No. For those who've already bought the books, return them if you like. But I would strongly advise looking to other sources for your RPG fix. Steve Jackson's GURPS system is also in its 4th Edition, and it hasn't undergone much in the way of radical changes. White Wolf's new Storyteller system is worth a look all on its own, even if you don't like the reworked Vampire or Werewolf settings. For myself, I find their Promethean series and reworked Mage series to be fascinating stuff, and the reworked Hunter looks to be intriguing. Crafty Games took over the Spycraft RPG setting, which puts d20 D&D style gaming into a modern context a lot better than Hasbro's own D20 Modern did for 3rd Edition. And with tough economic times ahead, you can't find a better deal than Pinnacle Entertainment Group's Savage Worlds system. The basic rules will only set you back $10 US, and everything is pretty bloody simple, all in just 160 pages. The money you save on books is money better spent on snacks for the gaming group.

You, my fellow gamers, have better options than giving Hasbro your money just so they can tell you how to play your favorite games. Exercise them.

- Axel Cushing

(October 13, 2008)