Ask me about 4e!

For many, the big news of GenCon 2007 was the announcement that Wizards of the Coast will be releasing the 4th edition of their flagship RPG Dungeons & Dragons during the summer of 2008. And yet more than a week has gone by, I've made a good half a dozen posts and I really haven't said anything about it other that a reference in passing.

What gives?

Mostly what gives is that I'm not a huge fan of D&D. Way back when I started this blog and I tossed a few placeholder topics up, one of them was D&D editions through the ages and I never did that, so maybe now is the time.

I first played D&D, like many others, in the late '70s, using the old Basic Rules that came in the red box. It actually didn't take for me right away (I do have a memory of an old friend of mine named Clark who was trying to run a game for me, but all I cared about was playing with his massive collection of Kenner Star Wars action figures.) I did kinda catch on and had my eye on the hobby a little bit later; in the early 80s, still with the Red Boxes and eventually also with the AD&D books. I also discovered things like the Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks and even Rolemaster and MERP, Top Secret, Star Frontiers and a ton of older games, mostly by TSR, during these years. However, I left D&D behind before the 80s were over and before the second edition came out. Primarily this was because D&D did not do what I wanted a roleplaying game to do.

Later on, a friend of mine in college and I used to play some old Top Secret S.I. and MegaTraveller, so I kinda got back in the groove with RPGs. I had always kinda sorta had my eye on them even when I wasn't playing, but for some reason I got big into it in college, when I had no time and no money. I still managed to scrape together a fairly decent collection of Werewolf: The Apocalypse books. At the time, the Storyteller conceit appealed to me; that games were more than just going in dungeons and killing things for XP and GP. Looking back at White Wolf now, it all seems so pretentious, but honestly I was probably a pretty pretentious prick back then as well. Not sure that's changed.

In fact, I became almost an anti-D&D advocate. I was a latte set gamer who couldn't be bothered with such low-brow entertainment. All that changed during the summer of 2000 when I quit school, started working, and discovered that a third edition of D&D was about to come out. It did, I bought it, I liked it. It had enough flexibility that I could conceivably take it away from it's roots and play whatever game I liked with it. Wizards then released a Star Wars and a Wheel of Time game using the same basic mechanics, and they were fairly well done. But wait! I said. After all, Star Wars and Wheel of Time use fairly similar conceits to D&D, so it's no surprise that d20 works well for them too. Then WotC produced d20 Call of Cthulhu. I was sold.

From that moment on, I decided that d20 was mutable and modular enough that I could do anything I wanted with d20, and there was no reason for me to look at other systems anymore. My interest in D&D itself actually waned considerably, as the inmistakable "D&Disms" started to annoy me more than ever, but I still maintained (and maintain today) that d20 itself is a flexible enough mechanic that I prefer it to any other still. It's not perfect, but barring the release of a Holy Grail system, which I can't see happening, it does the job. Not only that, it's got so much source material, especially via the OGL and d20 license, that I feel there are tools out there for anything I could imagine.

The only snag here was the release of 3.5. This fell very flat with me; it changed stuff for the sake of change and to get people to upgrade their books when IMO there was no real need. While it did make some improvements, some things it did were worse, and tons of changes were just different for no net benefit or loss, but suddenly stuff we thought we knew we didn't really anymore. All in all, the update was poorly timed, IMO, it came way too early, it wasn't a good upgrade that made it seem exciting, and it felt like a money-grab opportunity to sell more core books. I was not impressed, I only bought the Monster Manual and simply used SRD print offs for other upgrades, and it's part of the reason I turned away from D&D again.

Of course, that brings us to the 4e announcement. As of right now, I don't know how much 4e will differ from 3e. Hints are that there are some fairly massive changes, and hopefully most of them will ease playability, especially at higher level. Things that were clunky or frustrating from d20 as it currently stands will be replaced by streamlined systems. The "sweet spot" will be extended. So all this means, I don't know if 4e will really be compatible with my current d20 stuff or not. Honestly, I'm not terribly intrigued by D&D itself anymore, so I could take it or leave it, but I'm intrigued by these putative improvements to the system. If I can take some ideas that work really well, reverse engineer them into d20 Modern, and release a "hacked" d20 Modern pdf to my players that gives me the best of both worlds, while still maintaining enough compatibility that I can use all my material that I currently have with a minimum of fuss, than that's great.

If I can't, chances are I'm not going to do much beyond picking up the 4e core rulebooks and occasionally playing a game with my group when they're in a D&D mood. Because otherwise, I'm pretty happy with d20 where it is now. Not D&D d20, but d20 as a complete suite of modules that can be layered to create the effect that I want.

So I haven't really talked much about 4e because I'm not that excited about it. I don't think it's the end of the world, because I'm already not playing D&D anymore anyway, so I don't care if it makes putting together a 3e group hard or not. I don't care if it's a massive improvement, because I'd still prefer to play something other than D&D. I'm hopeful that it's got some nifty ideas I can mine to improve my game, but if not, I'm not really at that big of a loss.