Friday, January 23, 2009

Onward ho!

Our group recently came to the nearly unanimous decision to continue on with 4th Edition, at least through the next module in the WotC series. Guess who the lone dissenter was.

Anyways, I’ll carry on, even though I feel like the kid being forced to eat his vegetables before he can leave the table. The thing is, I’ve tried cauliflower before and I don’t like it. Trying it again isn’t going to change my opinion. Its not going to suddenly become good. Even putting melted cheese on it won’t hide the underlying yuckiness.

Same thing with 4E. I’ve tried it for several months and it simply isn’t as much fun as 3.5. Another several months isn’t likely to change anything. The addition of the PHB2 and the Powers books might help, or they might be the melted cheese.

At any rate, I’m going to “retrain” my Dragonborn wizard into a fighter. My thinking is that part of the problem might be the expectations I’ve carried over from 3.5. Namely in that when I play a spellcaster, I want some actual choices in what spells he knows. By switching to a fighter, a class I never got around to playing in 3.5, I’ll drop that expectation. Then we’ll see if it’s just the spellcasting classes that are boring or if it’s all of them.

So I’ll have another bite. Pass the melted cheese please.

4 comments:

Crwth said...

I was at first hesitant when you mentioned you wanted to swap out the Wizard for a Fighter -- this means our party no longer has a Controller nor a character with an Arcane power source. Instead, we no have another Martial character and another Defender.

But if anything, I think this will be a good test of the roles system. Can a party be successful without a Controller? Who, exactly, are the Defenders going to defend?

That one, at least, I can answer: our hemophobic ranger.

Anonymous said...

At first I thought it read "Homophobic", and based on who played our ranger you couldn't have been farther from the truth.

Crwth said...

Has he been spurning your advances again? Aww...

Anonymous said...

I DM for a group now (I'm stationed in Canada) and we stuck with 3.5 and when I go back to MD, the group I'll join up with again has decided to continue with 3.5 Edition. There several reason for this. Personally, I will not let WOTC control me. I stopped playing Magic the Gathering because unless you bought the new cards, which were continually getting more powerful, you could no longer compete. I wont a tournament at a college once and I had some pretty pricey old school cards, but it was crazy. I quit playing. I have a few decks for sentimental reason.

That's the same reason, at first, that I refused to switch to a different edition. I bought 3.0 books RIGHT BEFORE 3.5 came out. I was pissed, what a waste of my money. My good friend and I have hundreds of books from WOTC and other sources based on 3.5 rules. It's an incredible collection. What a waste that it would be suddenly useless.

The final straw is when I went to Chapters and sat down and started reading the Players Handbook. My 7 year old daughter reads books that are more advance than that! I felt like I was reading something for children. As an avid reader and an intelligence analysts, I was shocked that WOTC decided to write their core books at the 2nd grade level. It is shameful that they would do that.

I have no desire to switch to 4th edition. 3.5 might not be the absolute best thing every, but it's great and the amount of material for it means you can do pretty much whatever you want as a DM.

Long story is that when they went from 2nd edition to 3rd edition I was mad too. I have my own world and it's extensive....very extensive, custom gods, detailed 20 page history, timelines, detailed city data, ect. Took me weeks to switch that from 2nd to 3rd and then some modification when 3.5 came out. I'm not going to do that again. I have better things to do....Like play AD&D.

Don't switch. This is about money and trying to get kids hooked on WOW and PS3 to play AD&D by making it super simple. There are "AD&D for dummies books" - I've seen them. No need to make the core books "for dummies."