Saturday, November 22, 2008

Taking your stuff

In one way or another Dungeons and Drangons has been part of my life ever since I was little. My first picture book that I really remeber liking was an old 1st edition monster manual. The other one was dieties and demigods. Some of my earlyest toys were old AD&D minatures, compleate with lead! Yes that's right lead, I think we all know why I've turned out the way I have now. Cat's out of the bag. Despite these beginning I never really got to play much D&D. I wasn't allowed to have friends over after school throughout all of elementary/middle school, my weekends were occupied half of the time, and it took me a long time to make friends in high school. Despite the lack of actual hours logged I still managed to devote an impressive amount of time reading variouse rpg books that I could get my hands on, and thinking up swooping campains that I would never ever get to play. Oh yeah and my step mom is an idiot and thought that role playing was horrible. So it wasn't until late highschool where I had friends, the balls to tell my step mom to piss off, and time where I could actually play dungeons and dragons. We ended up playing Shadowrun instead. No regrets there! Now that is one hell of a game. Woo! Anyway by the time I got to collage I knew how to find fellow geeks and was quickly involved in an array of 3rd edition D&D games. They all sucked. So I ende dup taking them over and we played SLA Industires instead. FUN! Okay that's not true Andrew's game had potential but he didn't like GMing. So now here we are.

4th edition D&D has hit the shelves. I've decided for varying reasons to do an extrended review of 4th edition and what it is and what it is like and how I feel about it. Before I do all of that however, I've decided to go back and really get down into why I hated 3rd edition so much. It took several years and an array of GMs for me to figgure it out, but I finnaly have. In all actuallity it is only two things that fill me with a burning hatred but thouse two things are a fairly big deal and I feel that they did an excelent job ruining the game system.

1) Attacks of Oppertunity
2) Spot/Listen checks

So lets do one first. God attacks of oppertunity who the fuck thought that one up ought to be punched in the nuts, repeatedly, with a hammer. Okay see at first when you read about them, they makes sense. If you do something like try to run away, ignore an opponent, or get up from being knocked down they get a free swing at you. Okay I can deal with that. The thing is that apparently they were having a hard time trying to figgure out what to do with feats, so they tacked attacks of oppertunity onto EVERYTHING. You want to trip someone, knock somone back, ride past them at full gallup on a horse, cast a spell, do anything other than saying "hit him again" then they got to punch you in the face. So you would have to take a feat just so that you could trip someone effectivly. Ugh. It may not seem like a big deal but the problem was that attacks of oppertunity were autofucking matic. I could have a dex of 3, and if you tried to run away I could punch you in the face. There was no dex check involved, no wisdom check, nothing, atacks of oppertunity happened and that was that. In addition attacks of opertunity were given with no negative modifiers to them and full postivie ones, so it wasn't worthwhile to just sort of "chance" it. They happened, they hurt, and they made low level combat boring as fuck, and they made high level combat seem fiddly.

Then there is the listen/spot checks. Most times I played a bard who would have both listen and spot, yay! The most recent time I played a Paladin! I was a shining paragon of virtue that would murder everything that got in my way, which I did. However, I could niether see or hear them until they were punching me in the face first so it didn't really fucking matter. I learned to hate thouse checks pretty immeadiatly. It wasn't the gm's fault either he never really asked for them when they weren't nessisary. Its just that when you don't have thouse skills you find yourself standing around with your hands on your hips marveling at the scenery while eating a sneak attack. Ah well.

So 4th edition is here. I'll be talking about it quite a bit, we will be playing it on tuesday afternoons which is kinda exciting. I have a player's handbook already and I downloaded the monster manual and the DMG so I'll be giving thoughts on them at some other point and time. Now I want to play City of Heros so I am going to. I'll up load everything else latter there are nazi romans to kill!

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