4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

4.5 out of 5 stars

• Publisher: Wizards of the Coast
• Author: Wizards RPG Team
• Released: July 22, 2008

I (finally) got my box set of 4e books two weeks ago, so I thought, now that I’ve held them in my hands and read them over, I’d do a little mini-review of some of the changes 4e has in store for gamers.

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If you haven’t checked out the 4th edition errata recently, you might want to do so.

WotC has completely overhauled the skill challenge system in the DMG errata. All skill challenges now end with 3 failures regardless of complexity. So Complexity 5 challenges are going to be very difficult. However, WotC has also dropped the difficulty of all skill checks by 5. All Easy skill checks, whether part of a skill challenge or not, are now difficulty 5 instead of 10. Moderate skill checks are now DC 10 instead of 15, and Hard checks are now DC 15 instead of 20. This still scales up with level of course.

I like this change because it mean that you are no longer woefully incompetent in untrained skills and have a reasonable chance of even making a Hard DC with an untrained skill. And with a Trained skill, Hard DC’s should now be reasonably easy to make. Additionally, WotC added clarifying text that the point of a skill challenge isn’t for the whole party to line up behind a single expert. They now officially recommend that DMs limit the number of PCs who can use Aid Another to boost an ally’s check to only one or two.

Update (by Cameron) - I’m reposting this to note that the soon to be released DM Screen has posted errata on skill challenges too.

I’m totally geeking out.

Wired Magazine posted an excellent commentary on the fan responses to 4th edition called Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd.  Funny, yet disturbingly accurate, the author tells a tale of a new edition of a cookbook that has cooking fans in an uproar.

Wizards has posted an excerpt of the Forgotten Realms campaign guide today, an encounter called Raid on Loudwater.  Summary: a town, a tavern, and goblins.

With Green Ronin now sidestepping the Game System License from Wizard of the Coast, that brings up some areas of concern for 3rd party products.  Paizo is out, Green Ronin is out, Adamant Entertainment appears to be sidestepping, Joseph Goodman at Goodman Games appears to be sidestepping, and Kenzer Co is officially sidestepping.  It looks like official 3rd party publishers are shrinking.  Strangely, it’s Mongoose, the publisher who appears to be one of the major causes of the GSL being so tight, that looks to be the first one officially on the hook for a GSL licensed product.

Wizards has released the first adventure in the promised Scales of War adventure path in this month’s Dungeon Magazine. The first part of the path is Rescue at Rivenroar.  The adventure is set approximately a decade in the future from the 3rd Edition adventure The Red Hand of Doom.

In all, I like how this adventure is structured.  Using the new landscape layout, David Noonan has managed to craft a fairly detailed entry point for 1st level characters.  The setting of Elsir Vale is geographically unchanged from the Red Hand, although the social landscape has shifted dramatically.  The Red Hand’s uprising has psychologically and emotionally scarred the Vale’s residents, particularly those living in the capitol city of Brindol.  The monsters and NPCs presented are pretty well fleshed out, and the adventure itself reads like a fun game.

I do have one complaint though--the adventure starts in a tavern in Brindol with a bar brawl and ends with a mission to rescue some citizens from a location named (ready for it?) Rivenroar.  The rescue mission is a stage-setting to envelop players into the machinations of Sinruth, a hobgoblin chieftain with dreams of raising the Red Hand again, and ultimately leads to the larger threat behind Sinruth.  The adventure itself looks like it will play out enjoyably, but the trope of a tavern fight as a way to introduce player characters to each other is something that I know I’ve deliberately tried to avoid since I started Dungeon Mastering.  It’s a shame to see it here.

The art, all done by Jason Engle, is nice but quite frankly there just isn’t enough of it.  The cartography by Mike Schley is decent enough, but the pixellation as you zoom in means you really can’t use the maps for table-top.  It’s one of the few things I really thought might come out of Dungeon being online, and it is a disappointment to find that I will still end up having to recreate the maps in third party software to use in face to face games.  A few hi-res maps to print and use with miniatures would be a welcome change to gaming.