I can't say that I honestly have much invested in the D&D "edition wars" that seem to be neverending, but I have nevertheless been observing sort of the back and forth between proponents of different systems. For instance, Pathfinder, at least to me, seems to be the system that has been fully adopted by people who didn't want to let go of 3.5, and then there are any number of "retroclones" for the previous editions of OD&D, AD&D, and even BECMI. I see nothing wrong with any of these, in and of themselves, I've even downloaded the OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord free pdfs and have been pawing through them in order to sort of see what the distinguishing features of those clones are, since it seems like even among the OD&D fans, there is dissention over what's the "best" part about that system.
But the property which I think really separates D&D 4e from ANY previous edition is the relative downplaying of magic items (and the devaluation of magic items that comes with 4's very casual dispensation of them) and the emphasis on "class powers" rather than equipment in and of itself. In other words, you've got your At-Wills, Encounters, and Dailies, and if you've built a decent enough character you may never even have to use a basic melee or a basic ranged. And it seems like this level of abstraction is what especially alienated a lot of OD&D fans, who were used to having to account for a lot more details, coming out of specific different kinds of weapons, rather than abstracting so much stuff like weight, length, shape, material, and attack style and just saying "1d6+Str." It doesn't matter whether it's a warhammer, a sickle, or a broadsword. Then even among the "military" or "masterwork" sort of weapons it's just a matter of another +1 or +2 bonus; weapons aren't interesting at all in 4e, they're just a nondescript vehicle through which to deliver (some) class powers.
So I've been thinking about this, especially with regard to 4e "Essentials" and the possibility of a 5e coming some time in the next couple years, and wondering why you couldn't build a weapons "subsystem" into 4e, which is already very modular and easy to modify, and create your own rules for weapons-heavy characters, emphasizing not only the particular qualities of the weapons themselves, but the proficiency with which each class handles those types of weapons. In other words, say you have a dwarven paladin with a particular proficiency in military hammers, which rather than to just simply get another +1 on attack rolls, you could unlock the "proficiency" option on a weapon, at the sacrifice of the regular At-Wills for the class, to instead use the weapon's special qualities.
So using the hammer example, you could swing the hammer in different ways in order to knock the enemy aside, daze the enemy, sweep the enemy's feet from under them, etc. in order to actually be "proficient" with using the weapon, and still get to keep class features, or have the option of turning one at-will or encounter into a "class feature" in order to still preserve some of those qualities. I haven't actually tried to stat out any specific weapons or make a build using this yet, so I'll have to see if it introduces too much imbalance. But I do think that it may be a way to introduce a more "old school" feel to the original game, and remove some of that abstraction that makes weapons by themselves sort of worthless, as well as remove the occasionally very silly and unbelievable class powers that have come out for each class. Though there would be a lot of work on behalf of the DM in order to set this up, it would be a much more satisfying, I think, exercise in the basic striker than what Essentials provides us with the fighter.
Showing posts with label essentials. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essentials. Show all posts
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
Rules Compendium, Dungeons and Dragons Essentials
After having paged through the Rules Compendium as well, many of my reservations about where Heroes of the Fallen Lands left me have been alleviated. It seems that they basically split the PHB in half for the Essentials book. The Rules Compendium copies and pastes a large amount of the material present in HotFL, but also adds in everything missing from it from the PHB. I think, overall, it's again nothing new, but it's a much better book in terms of actual substance. I think that even if you own a copy of the PHB, it may be worth getting a copy of the Rules Compendium as a "table book," because it's much better organized and contains all gameplay-related things, on top of being smaller and lighter than the PHB. It does not, however, lie flat, so you need to prop it open or leave a bookmark if you want to keep a page in mind.
Overall, it's again nothing new, but as a tableside companion (or if your copy of the PHB has fallen apart, like they are so good at doing), it may be worth getting this as a replacement. It's like the Quick Start Rules, except has all the relevant gameplay rules as well. A handy reference guide, nothing more.
Overall, it's again nothing new, but as a tableside companion (or if your copy of the PHB has fallen apart, like they are so good at doing), it may be worth getting this as a replacement. It's like the Quick Start Rules, except has all the relevant gameplay rules as well. A handy reference guide, nothing more.
Heroes of the Fallen Lands, Dungeons and Dragons Essentials
The thing that baffles me most about Dungeons and Dragons Essentials is the question of "why?" What purpose does this line have in the grand scheme of Dungeons and Dragons, 4th edition? Why did they feel the need to "reboot" the edition, several years in, as opposed to reprinting the core books with errata and rule changes included?
Heroes of the Fallen Lands is the first book in the Essentials line of products besides the Starter Set, and is intended to guide players through the creation of low-level characters, as well as more broadly introduce new players to the world of Roleplaying Games generally. It begins with a very verbose section of what a RPG is, what you need to play it, how you play it, and general questions that were already addressed, in an abbreviated fashion, in the Essentials Red Box, and are very similar to the introductory words of the Players' Handbook. Heroes of the Fallen Lands does explain some of the basic mechanics better, and much earlier in the book, so it seems that their editors are not sleeping.
We are introduced to Dwarves, Eladrin, Elves, Halflings, and Humans in HotFL, and we are also told that in the followup volume we will also be introduced to Dragonborn, Drow, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Tiefling characters. Then, most maddeningly, we are also told that there is another type of character, a Revenant, which is only available if you pay for a subscription to Dungeons and Dragons Insider, the nebulous online service that is not sold very well in the description. We are also told that HotFL will tell us how to develop a Knight, a Slayer, a Warpriest, a Thief, and a Mage character, but for others (Sentinel, Cavalier, Hunter, Scout, and Hexblade), we have to buy the other book. And again, if we want to learn how to make an Executioner type character, we have to pay for a subscription. Then what follows is a very reasonable and straightforward step-by-step method of creating a character, something that the Players' Handbook completely and utterly lacked. Largely a lot of information that the PHB waited for the closing chapters to introduce is up front and center in HotFL, and much better organized.
In the "advanced" sections explaining what each character class is like and what it does, it spends much more time than the PHB explaining why some races are better at certain classes than others, as well as gives personalized level tracks for what each class gets at what level; as this is very streamlined and there is a dearth of options, leveling is a purely mechanical affair that minimizes player decisions and resembles more leveling up in Final Fantasy. While it walks each character build from level 1 to level 30, it is a purely linear progression. There are very few variant builds for each broad class (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, etc). We are occasionally told that we could build a variant character if we had another of the books, but it seems pointless to add in little asides like that, as they do nothing but advertise for your own product.
There are slight differences in the races section, as pointed out in a previous post, but nothing radical or crazy. Like I mentioned before, I don't see these as variant rules, as these alternate builds would work perfectly well with PHB-built party. Hey, even the art is the same as in the PHB. It's mostly just copypasta, with a little bit of extra stuff added in that doesn't really have much of an overall effect on how D&D4 handles races.
In the skill section, we see that DCs for different levels of challenges have been fiddled with (made easier), but other than that, more copypasta. Perhaps the skill applications are explained a little bit better than in the PHB, with little examples peppered in for how each skill might be utilized in an encounter or a social situation. Feats have been (strangely) categorized into what "realm" the feats fall under, so there is a group of feats dedicated to learning and lore, another dedicated to endurance and stamina, another to weapon and armor proficiencies. So rather than just long lists as in the PHB, they are subdivided based on what the feat does for you. The book ends with armor, weapons, magic items, and the like, that are largely lifted directly from the Players' Handbook.
What the Players' Handbook has that this book does not are lots of pictures of what Burst, Blast, Wall, and so on actually look like in terms of squares. But that chapter from the PHB is available online from Wizards.com as the "Quick Start Rules" so that is not a big deal. All in all, there is not enough changed to really justify buying this if you already have a copy of the PHB; if you get the Deluxe Dungeon Master's Screen it has all the updated DCs and damage levels, and so ignoring all the Wizards Weirdness about DDI and temporarily forgetting that that exists, there is no reason to get HotFL if you've already got the "other" player handbook. It's much less information, in a smaller book, at a lower price; but which is also better organized, better explained, and easier to follow.
Overall I'd describe this book, and perhaps by extension Essentials, as being a form of "pregenerated characters plus." Following the steps makes a very generic character, much like starting with a pregen, but there are a few small flourishes that the player can add. With the linear level progression, it is again very pregenerated feeling, and a player can choose to follow the track for that character all the way to level 30 or, as I suspect the intention is, act as "training wheels" as long as the new player needs before they are interested in buying OTHER Dungeons and Dragons products, like the Players' Handbooks or the * Power books. For this reason again I don't think that Essentials constitutes any reasonable step towards a "4.5" edition, but is rather a hyper-simplified form of the "real" rules and is intended exclusively for beginner players without any reasonable RPG experience. It "essentially" (ha ha) walks players through the learning process (something that under the core rules is assumed to be under the purview of the DM), taking some work off of the DM's side, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
Is it something that somebody who has already been playing D&D4/has already invested in the 4e core books would want? No.
Heroes of the Fallen Lands is the first book in the Essentials line of products besides the Starter Set, and is intended to guide players through the creation of low-level characters, as well as more broadly introduce new players to the world of Roleplaying Games generally. It begins with a very verbose section of what a RPG is, what you need to play it, how you play it, and general questions that were already addressed, in an abbreviated fashion, in the Essentials Red Box, and are very similar to the introductory words of the Players' Handbook. Heroes of the Fallen Lands does explain some of the basic mechanics better, and much earlier in the book, so it seems that their editors are not sleeping.
We are introduced to Dwarves, Eladrin, Elves, Halflings, and Humans in HotFL, and we are also told that in the followup volume we will also be introduced to Dragonborn, Drow, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Tiefling characters. Then, most maddeningly, we are also told that there is another type of character, a Revenant, which is only available if you pay for a subscription to Dungeons and Dragons Insider, the nebulous online service that is not sold very well in the description. We are also told that HotFL will tell us how to develop a Knight, a Slayer, a Warpriest, a Thief, and a Mage character, but for others (Sentinel, Cavalier, Hunter, Scout, and Hexblade), we have to buy the other book. And again, if we want to learn how to make an Executioner type character, we have to pay for a subscription. Then what follows is a very reasonable and straightforward step-by-step method of creating a character, something that the Players' Handbook completely and utterly lacked. Largely a lot of information that the PHB waited for the closing chapters to introduce is up front and center in HotFL, and much better organized.
In the "advanced" sections explaining what each character class is like and what it does, it spends much more time than the PHB explaining why some races are better at certain classes than others, as well as gives personalized level tracks for what each class gets at what level; as this is very streamlined and there is a dearth of options, leveling is a purely mechanical affair that minimizes player decisions and resembles more leveling up in Final Fantasy. While it walks each character build from level 1 to level 30, it is a purely linear progression. There are very few variant builds for each broad class (Fighter, Cleric, Wizard, etc). We are occasionally told that we could build a variant character if we had another of the books, but it seems pointless to add in little asides like that, as they do nothing but advertise for your own product.
There are slight differences in the races section, as pointed out in a previous post, but nothing radical or crazy. Like I mentioned before, I don't see these as variant rules, as these alternate builds would work perfectly well with PHB-built party. Hey, even the art is the same as in the PHB. It's mostly just copypasta, with a little bit of extra stuff added in that doesn't really have much of an overall effect on how D&D4 handles races.
In the skill section, we see that DCs for different levels of challenges have been fiddled with (made easier), but other than that, more copypasta. Perhaps the skill applications are explained a little bit better than in the PHB, with little examples peppered in for how each skill might be utilized in an encounter or a social situation. Feats have been (strangely) categorized into what "realm" the feats fall under, so there is a group of feats dedicated to learning and lore, another dedicated to endurance and stamina, another to weapon and armor proficiencies. So rather than just long lists as in the PHB, they are subdivided based on what the feat does for you. The book ends with armor, weapons, magic items, and the like, that are largely lifted directly from the Players' Handbook.
What the Players' Handbook has that this book does not are lots of pictures of what Burst, Blast, Wall, and so on actually look like in terms of squares. But that chapter from the PHB is available online from Wizards.com as the "Quick Start Rules" so that is not a big deal. All in all, there is not enough changed to really justify buying this if you already have a copy of the PHB; if you get the Deluxe Dungeon Master's Screen it has all the updated DCs and damage levels, and so ignoring all the Wizards Weirdness about DDI and temporarily forgetting that that exists, there is no reason to get HotFL if you've already got the "other" player handbook. It's much less information, in a smaller book, at a lower price; but which is also better organized, better explained, and easier to follow.
Overall I'd describe this book, and perhaps by extension Essentials, as being a form of "pregenerated characters plus." Following the steps makes a very generic character, much like starting with a pregen, but there are a few small flourishes that the player can add. With the linear level progression, it is again very pregenerated feeling, and a player can choose to follow the track for that character all the way to level 30 or, as I suspect the intention is, act as "training wheels" as long as the new player needs before they are interested in buying OTHER Dungeons and Dragons products, like the Players' Handbooks or the * Power books. For this reason again I don't think that Essentials constitutes any reasonable step towards a "4.5" edition, but is rather a hyper-simplified form of the "real" rules and is intended exclusively for beginner players without any reasonable RPG experience. It "essentially" (ha ha) walks players through the learning process (something that under the core rules is assumed to be under the purview of the DM), taking some work off of the DM's side, and I don't think that's a bad thing.
Is it something that somebody who has already been playing D&D4/has already invested in the 4e core books would want? No.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Repost from elsewhere: D&D Essentials Starter Set, aka "The Red Box" from August 9, 2010
I picked up the new Dungeons and Dragons "Essentials" box, henceforth referred to as the Red Box (a bit of D&D nostalgia implied) because I was interested in the monster tokens and the choose-your-own-adventure style of character generation, as well as just to see what it did to try to make 4th edition even "more" accessible than it already was. The choose your own adventure game is surprisingly fun, but that may be partly because I was obsessed with those kind of books when I was young and added a bit more nostalgia into the package. It also presents a way to get introduced to the game mechanics including the battle system in a one-player capacity by having you roll as the enemies as well as yourself, which is basically what Dungeon Delve does and so it's not exactly new, but it is really helpful. It sure beats having to get together three or four other people just to learn how to play the game. The whole thing, if you actually roll through the adventure, can take up to about an hour if you're really determined to work through it, and it's not just idling, you're actually interacting with the story since your choices change the events like in any "real" choose your own adventure book.
The process is mostly straightforward and works through the different stats, starting with what are the most pertinent to whatever class you select at the beginning and going all the way through weapons and defenses, although there are some minor snags like if you end up kicking the crap out of the goblins as a wizard, you won't get a chance to fill out your constitution score, and then when you move on it tells you to fill out your hit points based on your constitution score and you don't know how to do that so you have to backtrack to find what happens if you missed the goblin so you can get that number. Not completely elegant. Just for fun I've worked through it making a Dwarf Rogue and a Halfling Wizard. The wizard, even with the wonkiness of halfling racial mods, was pretty easy. The rogue, on the other hand, was jacked to all hell. There was a LOT of backtracking to get all the stats filled out, then once you got one filled out the next step in the adventure changed the numbers so you had to erase everything and put in new numbers, and then the numbers weren't consistent based on what it told you before. Part of this may have been because I chose one of the weirdest combinations I could think of just to see how strong the character creation system was; I intentionally chose a race that was incompatible with the class. In 4ed, rogues are "supposed" to be halflings, like dwarves are "supposed" to be fighters. I ended up having to change so many numbers around throughout the process making my dwarf rogue that I'm really not sure at this point if they're anywhere near right, since the end result was a super-powerful, nearly 90 point build. When I made my halfling wizard, it turned out an 82 point build. Later, I tried to make another halfling wizard based on the instructions in the regular 4ed player's handbook and it cranked out a 76 point build; I added 6 more points to make it in accord with the Red Box one just for comparison of the "end result" as a whole.
I think the most jacked up thing about the Red Box are the power cards. It's cool that it comes with power cards, color coded for your conenience into At-Wills, Encounters, and Dailies, it makes keeping track of them a lot easier and it's fun to turn cards over. The problem with the Red Box power cards is that they are often at a great variance with the "official" rules; moving a Red Box build into the regular game would not be without casualties. For instance, Magic Missile in regular 4ed is 2D4+Int modifier vs. Reflex against a single enemy, giving the damage usually in the 4-10 range. In the Red Box, it is 2+Int modifier automatic damage, against one OR two targets. So depending on whether your Int modifer is +3 or +4, it always deals 5 or 6 damage. OK. And your target can't defend or dodge; you use it, it hits. And you can smack two people with it. It seems like they're trading power for reliability here, but what if after you've worked through the Red Box and you've got your level 2 or 3 wizard and you want to move into the full game and all of a sudden you're rolling dice on something that was previously a gimme. Apparently this was the quandary way back when between the Basic Set and AD&D, but I don't know why Wizards would want to introduce *that kind* of nostalgia back into the game. Another jacked up power card thing is with the rogue. In the set-up adventure, it's established that the rogue has a dagger and that deals 1D4+Dex modifier; that's fine, the rogue is a dex-based class, so trading str for dex and limiting it to small blades is totally reasonable. However, when you get to the power cards and get to the rogue's special sort of traits, which boil down to blade arts, the damage magically upgrades from a dagger to a shortsword and all of the powers become 1D6 plus whatever modifiers the specific skill adds instead of 1D4. Now, I am totally fine with being upgraded from a dagger to a shortsword, but it seems like they'd have mentioned "Well, now that you're done doing this build, you find a shortsword on one of the goblins and toss your dagger in in favor of that!"
A last little nitpick that I actually sort of like, but is in variance with the regular rules, is that they seem to have introduced alternate builds for some races. In the Red Box, you can build a dwarf with +2 con and wis OR +2 con and STR; in the PHB you only get the +2 con and wis type. On top of that, they sort of streamline the thief/rogue dichotomy in the PHB by allowing you to build your rogue on acrobatics OR athletics. I'm too lazy to see if they have dual builds on all races and classes or just these. If so, that's a potential 64 differently nuanced characters that could be generated (4 races, 4 classes, 2 builds for each class, 2 builds for each race); however I doubt this. And the changes are so subtle it hardly makes a difference for some builds. Whether you use a wis or str based dwarf wouldn't much matter with the wizard build, since all the wizard's attacks are int based. It certainly didn't matter on the dwarf rogue, since all those attacks are dex based. None of these variant builds come at odds with integrating the character back into the full 4ed rules though.
Apparently the Fighter has some jacked up stuff but I haven't worked through that build yet. I DO like how supposedly the fighter just... fights. One of the big complaints about 4ed was that the fighter was given so many extra things that the spirit of the fighter, the "I want to hit it with my sword" mentality, was quite far away. So the Red Box fighter apparently just hits things with his sword. Probably has some powers like cleave and double strike, but no triple luxe spins with a battleaxe while singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Clerics are honestly pretty straightforward in 4ed, so I can't imagine the cleric OR the fighter being as jacked up as the rogue or to a lesser extent the wizard.
As I mentioned earlier, I did do a side-by-side comparison of the PHB method and the Red Box method, and I gotta say I like the Red Box one a lot more. What the Red Box DOESN'T have is a quick summary of what it did through the adventure to get you to those stats, so if you want to create a new character you have to go through the adventure again. I think they really could have just slapped one more page in there that explained what each step meant and how it was used to build the character, since it leaves those sort of up in the air and esoteric and are quite content with "just follow the adventure again." Of course, the PHB has a similar problem, which may even be worse. You've got to trudge through all three hundred or something pages to get all the information you need to put the character sheet together, and it saves how to calculate your AC, Fort, Ref, and Will until near the very end of the entire book. Making a character out of the PHB means you have to actually READ the PHB cover to cover at least once, and then if you aren't bookmarking the relevant tables and boxes for putting a character together, you've got to flip all around to find it again since the index is not very great. At the end of it, the Red Box creates a more powerful character than the PHB; you get more attacks, better stats, and a first-level feat (Jack of All Trades is the greatest thing in the entire world), but at the cost of having a less versatile character. At the end of the Red Box adventure, I felt more entertained but less "involved" with my character, since there weren't any ways to make the character unique. I found myself sort of screwing around by the end to try to make it stand out by being funny, coming up with absurd names and marking "Alignment" with things like "straight" or "bi-curious." With the PHB method, it takes a lot more time, you have a lot more options (especially if you've got the supplemental books that have EVEN MORE powers and feats for all levels) and the pen hits the paper more; I feel more "scholarly" when I do it "longhand," which I suppose is probably exactly the opposite of how a lot of people will feel about getting the chance to interact with their character as they create them with the Red Box adventure. Overall though the two characters came out evenly enough matched and I don't feel like one method is "superior" to the other one, just different. I did sort of like my Red Box wizard a little bit more despite the differences, but I was working out of just the PHB, I don't have Arcane Power so the choices for first level wizard powers are super limited. And I like not having to wait until level 2 for my first feat.
I think overall the Red Box succeeds exactly where it wanted to: to be a really great, solid piece of D&D introductory material, the "gateway drug" to the full game, as it were. They're coming out with enough Essentials line stuff over the next few months that you can keep the training wheels on for quite some time. I don't expect that the slight mechanics and rules changes from Essentials to regular 4e will be all that jarring or surprising once someone gets familiar enough with gameplay in Essentials, and maybe as with the case of magic missile, a wizard will be glad to have the thing do a little more damage than just an automatic 5 (which is, incidentally, the sort of damage a minion does). Essentials takes its place about halfway between the ultra-simplistic D&D Miniatures Game rules and the full 4th Edition rules, and the Red Box rules are elegant enough for new players and hardly require any time-consuming rules disputes, which are the speed train for pissing potential new gamers off so bad they never want to tabletop again. I'm looking at you, Rifts.
In the end, I think that having the Red Box is an awesome way to start on D&D, and I think it is a savvy advertising move for Wizards to make. The Red Box just doesn't have enough options to make it really fulfilling past level 2; unless Heroes of the Forgotten Lands has a LOT more stuff to spec out the characters with, it's going to sort of force players who want to continue to buy at least the PHB ($34.95 MSRP). I'm sort of curious to look at the new Essentials "Rules Compendium" book to see how they've fiddled with the PHB for the "complete" Essentials rules. I don't think that Essentials constitutes a "4.5" build of D&D at this point, not like what happened between 3 and 3.5. I see absolutely no major conflict at all with working Essentials into regular 4ed, slight mechanics changes be damned.
The process is mostly straightforward and works through the different stats, starting with what are the most pertinent to whatever class you select at the beginning and going all the way through weapons and defenses, although there are some minor snags like if you end up kicking the crap out of the goblins as a wizard, you won't get a chance to fill out your constitution score, and then when you move on it tells you to fill out your hit points based on your constitution score and you don't know how to do that so you have to backtrack to find what happens if you missed the goblin so you can get that number. Not completely elegant. Just for fun I've worked through it making a Dwarf Rogue and a Halfling Wizard. The wizard, even with the wonkiness of halfling racial mods, was pretty easy. The rogue, on the other hand, was jacked to all hell. There was a LOT of backtracking to get all the stats filled out, then once you got one filled out the next step in the adventure changed the numbers so you had to erase everything and put in new numbers, and then the numbers weren't consistent based on what it told you before. Part of this may have been because I chose one of the weirdest combinations I could think of just to see how strong the character creation system was; I intentionally chose a race that was incompatible with the class. In 4ed, rogues are "supposed" to be halflings, like dwarves are "supposed" to be fighters. I ended up having to change so many numbers around throughout the process making my dwarf rogue that I'm really not sure at this point if they're anywhere near right, since the end result was a super-powerful, nearly 90 point build. When I made my halfling wizard, it turned out an 82 point build. Later, I tried to make another halfling wizard based on the instructions in the regular 4ed player's handbook and it cranked out a 76 point build; I added 6 more points to make it in accord with the Red Box one just for comparison of the "end result" as a whole.
I think the most jacked up thing about the Red Box are the power cards. It's cool that it comes with power cards, color coded for your conenience into At-Wills, Encounters, and Dailies, it makes keeping track of them a lot easier and it's fun to turn cards over. The problem with the Red Box power cards is that they are often at a great variance with the "official" rules; moving a Red Box build into the regular game would not be without casualties. For instance, Magic Missile in regular 4ed is 2D4+Int modifier vs. Reflex against a single enemy, giving the damage usually in the 4-10 range. In the Red Box, it is 2+Int modifier automatic damage, against one OR two targets. So depending on whether your Int modifer is +3 or +4, it always deals 5 or 6 damage. OK. And your target can't defend or dodge; you use it, it hits. And you can smack two people with it. It seems like they're trading power for reliability here, but what if after you've worked through the Red Box and you've got your level 2 or 3 wizard and you want to move into the full game and all of a sudden you're rolling dice on something that was previously a gimme. Apparently this was the quandary way back when between the Basic Set and AD&D, but I don't know why Wizards would want to introduce *that kind* of nostalgia back into the game. Another jacked up power card thing is with the rogue. In the set-up adventure, it's established that the rogue has a dagger and that deals 1D4+Dex modifier; that's fine, the rogue is a dex-based class, so trading str for dex and limiting it to small blades is totally reasonable. However, when you get to the power cards and get to the rogue's special sort of traits, which boil down to blade arts, the damage magically upgrades from a dagger to a shortsword and all of the powers become 1D6 plus whatever modifiers the specific skill adds instead of 1D4. Now, I am totally fine with being upgraded from a dagger to a shortsword, but it seems like they'd have mentioned "Well, now that you're done doing this build, you find a shortsword on one of the goblins and toss your dagger in in favor of that!"
A last little nitpick that I actually sort of like, but is in variance with the regular rules, is that they seem to have introduced alternate builds for some races. In the Red Box, you can build a dwarf with +2 con and wis OR +2 con and STR; in the PHB you only get the +2 con and wis type. On top of that, they sort of streamline the thief/rogue dichotomy in the PHB by allowing you to build your rogue on acrobatics OR athletics. I'm too lazy to see if they have dual builds on all races and classes or just these. If so, that's a potential 64 differently nuanced characters that could be generated (4 races, 4 classes, 2 builds for each class, 2 builds for each race); however I doubt this. And the changes are so subtle it hardly makes a difference for some builds. Whether you use a wis or str based dwarf wouldn't much matter with the wizard build, since all the wizard's attacks are int based. It certainly didn't matter on the dwarf rogue, since all those attacks are dex based. None of these variant builds come at odds with integrating the character back into the full 4ed rules though.
Apparently the Fighter has some jacked up stuff but I haven't worked through that build yet. I DO like how supposedly the fighter just... fights. One of the big complaints about 4ed was that the fighter was given so many extra things that the spirit of the fighter, the "I want to hit it with my sword" mentality, was quite far away. So the Red Box fighter apparently just hits things with his sword. Probably has some powers like cleave and double strike, but no triple luxe spins with a battleaxe while singing Gilbert and Sullivan. Clerics are honestly pretty straightforward in 4ed, so I can't imagine the cleric OR the fighter being as jacked up as the rogue or to a lesser extent the wizard.
As I mentioned earlier, I did do a side-by-side comparison of the PHB method and the Red Box method, and I gotta say I like the Red Box one a lot more. What the Red Box DOESN'T have is a quick summary of what it did through the adventure to get you to those stats, so if you want to create a new character you have to go through the adventure again. I think they really could have just slapped one more page in there that explained what each step meant and how it was used to build the character, since it leaves those sort of up in the air and esoteric and are quite content with "just follow the adventure again." Of course, the PHB has a similar problem, which may even be worse. You've got to trudge through all three hundred or something pages to get all the information you need to put the character sheet together, and it saves how to calculate your AC, Fort, Ref, and Will until near the very end of the entire book. Making a character out of the PHB means you have to actually READ the PHB cover to cover at least once, and then if you aren't bookmarking the relevant tables and boxes for putting a character together, you've got to flip all around to find it again since the index is not very great. At the end of it, the Red Box creates a more powerful character than the PHB; you get more attacks, better stats, and a first-level feat (Jack of All Trades is the greatest thing in the entire world), but at the cost of having a less versatile character. At the end of the Red Box adventure, I felt more entertained but less "involved" with my character, since there weren't any ways to make the character unique. I found myself sort of screwing around by the end to try to make it stand out by being funny, coming up with absurd names and marking "Alignment" with things like "straight" or "bi-curious." With the PHB method, it takes a lot more time, you have a lot more options (especially if you've got the supplemental books that have EVEN MORE powers and feats for all levels) and the pen hits the paper more; I feel more "scholarly" when I do it "longhand," which I suppose is probably exactly the opposite of how a lot of people will feel about getting the chance to interact with their character as they create them with the Red Box adventure. Overall though the two characters came out evenly enough matched and I don't feel like one method is "superior" to the other one, just different. I did sort of like my Red Box wizard a little bit more despite the differences, but I was working out of just the PHB, I don't have Arcane Power so the choices for first level wizard powers are super limited. And I like not having to wait until level 2 for my first feat.
I think overall the Red Box succeeds exactly where it wanted to: to be a really great, solid piece of D&D introductory material, the "gateway drug" to the full game, as it were. They're coming out with enough Essentials line stuff over the next few months that you can keep the training wheels on for quite some time. I don't expect that the slight mechanics and rules changes from Essentials to regular 4e will be all that jarring or surprising once someone gets familiar enough with gameplay in Essentials, and maybe as with the case of magic missile, a wizard will be glad to have the thing do a little more damage than just an automatic 5 (which is, incidentally, the sort of damage a minion does). Essentials takes its place about halfway between the ultra-simplistic D&D Miniatures Game rules and the full 4th Edition rules, and the Red Box rules are elegant enough for new players and hardly require any time-consuming rules disputes, which are the speed train for pissing potential new gamers off so bad they never want to tabletop again. I'm looking at you, Rifts.
In the end, I think that having the Red Box is an awesome way to start on D&D, and I think it is a savvy advertising move for Wizards to make. The Red Box just doesn't have enough options to make it really fulfilling past level 2; unless Heroes of the Forgotten Lands has a LOT more stuff to spec out the characters with, it's going to sort of force players who want to continue to buy at least the PHB ($34.95 MSRP). I'm sort of curious to look at the new Essentials "Rules Compendium" book to see how they've fiddled with the PHB for the "complete" Essentials rules. I don't think that Essentials constitutes a "4.5" build of D&D at this point, not like what happened between 3 and 3.5. I see absolutely no major conflict at all with working Essentials into regular 4ed, slight mechanics changes be damned.
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