“I just think 3.5 feels a lot more like UNIX.  You can do whatever you want.”  That’s what one of my players said to me.  That would be great, an gaming edition that lets you do practically whatever you want, writing scripts to let you perform any action, putting input in one end, and getting a phenomenal result on the other side.  Hundreds of small single-purpose pieces that let you pipe input and output however you need to.  You could have a wizard where you put components, casting time, and targets in one end of the equation, and get a a targeted mini-Fireball with each foe’s name on it out of the other side, telling you how much dice to use for each one so that it is balanced with your abilities and the other classes of the same level.  You could have a paladin script based around how the enemy responds to his Smite Evil.

But, the more I think about it, 3.5 is not like UNIX.  It’s kind of like DOS.  It’s kind of clunky, and has pieces you never use (i.e. Rope Use), and pieces you overuse (i.e. Spot).  You can do some things in it, and it works OK, but you will often find you can’t do what you want to, or what you need to.  Push a boulder onto an enemy?  Improvised weapon.  You’re better off hitting him with your sword.  Want to grab an enemy and throw him off the cliff?  Maybe it will work, but after too many rolls, you find that odds are better that you would have been more successful hitting him with your sword again.

I have no delusions about 4e being UNIX.  But, I do hope that is like Mac OS X.  I mean, really, do we want the game that I just fawned over in the first paragraph?  Sure it would be a neat simulation, but we’re trying to tell a story here.  We need a system that has limited options, but has the options you want.  And works like it is expected to.  But, for the most part, we need a system that just gets out of the way, and lets the DM and the players do what they need to.

I’m not sure if 4e is like Mac OS X yet.  It could be like more like Windows 95.  Quite a few options, but none that you need.  Things don’t work like you expect them to.  Your audio driver’s IRQ needs to be reassigned because it is conflicting with your modem, but the OS just keeps setting it back to for you, and the Device Manager keeps showing the yellow question mark no matter how many times you re-load the driver.  OK, that last one probably completely ejected you from the metaphor entirely, but you get the point.

Now that I have discussed both D&D and Operating Systems in one post, effectively squaring the geekiness of this blog (if only I could find some way to involve Star Trek…), I’ll enumerate my findings from my first session of 4e:

1) Players have to work together more – If you use a daily power, and miss, then you’re just out of luck.   Players really need to maximize all the bonuses before one of the players goes mini-nova.

2) It is possible to kill the players – At first, I thought that with all the healing surges and such, that it would be nigh-impossible for the players to die.  Not so.

3) Sometimes they should run away – As a corollary to #2.  The players had no rest between encounters, and were given an option of a skill challenge or turning to face the Shadow Hounds chasing them.  They chose to fight, although they were already wounded.  Which leads me to #4.

4) Make Skill Challenges more obvious – Really, probably my fault.  I’m not sure if everyone declares when they enter into a skill challenge, but that would have let the players know that they had a way to escape the encounter.  Like how Picard escaped the Encounter at Farpoint in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (YES!! I did it!).

• How hard is it for a character to die in 4e?  To me, with all the checks and healing surges, it seems nearly impossible.  That seems to really rob the game of any sense of danger.
• Do the limited number of ‘paths’ make it difficult to truly ‘customize’ a character?  (i.e. do all Fighters feel alike?)
• Are the number of given options in combat overwhelming or freeing compared to 5th ed?  Do they eventually get tedious?
• Do the healing surges, in practice, really mean that you’re never carrying around any damage?
• Is there anything I should know about the learning curve?  Any beginner’s mistakes I need to look out for?

When 3rd Edition hit, and we saw how good it was, we all bought a copy.  Finally, we had enough PHB’s for everyone.  It was joyous.  There was some initial resistance to 3.5, but after seeing the improvements it made, and the broken things it fixed (remember 3.0 Rangers, anyone?), we eBay’d our 3.0 books and upgraded.

Now, in a little over a month, I am going to try to run my group’s first 4e game.

Most mentions of 4e are met with derision, even at the time when we first heard about it.  Admittedly, there is some things I don’t like about 4e (mosly about having to shoehorn new things into our game world), but there’s quite a bit I do.  I feel it’s important to stress to my players that this is a new rules system, and comparison to 3.5 is not exactly comparing apples to apples.

There’s a few things that I know already won’t go over well.  It’s funny how I haven’t heard these mentioned as negatives anywhere else, but nonetheless will cause groaning at our game table:

• Not adding con bonus to HP every level – adding their full con score to HP at first level may throw them for a loop, though.
• Fixed HP at each level – the more I think about this, the more I like it, especially since I’m always the guy who throws a ’1′ on my HP roll.  It’s gotten so bad that I usually have other people roll for me.
• WTF is an Eladrin? – I’m not too sold on them, either, and I’m not really sure how they’ll fit in my game world.
• Why is the cheese-tastic Dragonborn now core? – We may be able to put these people in somewhere, but for the most part they will cause women to scream and babies to cry if they show up in our established villages.
• No Druid or Barbarian (yet, anyway) – I was usually the Druid player, but we had quite a few that liked to play a barbarian.

What they may like, if given a chance.

• More balanced classes.
• More options in combat.
• Interesting terrain, playing a bigger role in fights.
• Skill challenge system, for situations bigger than a single DC.
• The Warlord.

So, I’ll keep you updated as to how it goes.