Hi all!
I know we've had several of these scattered about, but I wanted a create a place where we could do all the following, in one place:
- Share our favorite RPG gaming group tales
- Discuss systems, rediscover old campaign settings (and maybe think up a few new!).
- Craft new items of wondrous power, horrific evil, and utter retardation.
Things this thread is not for:
- Video Game and Computer RPG's.
- Flaming (Other posters. I am well aware that certain systems deserve to be purified in magma. So long as you don't flame the one guy who likes the system (and he doesn't flame everyone else who hates it))
And with that out of the way, I'll start this thing out.
I've been playing D&D 4e for a couple of months now. When it first came out, I went and read through everything I could find about it, paying attention to it's mechanics in comparison to my first love, D&D 3.5. I was horrified by it.
Having said that, after getting a group put together and playing most of the way through a campaign, it's grown on me, not unlike a particularly interesting piece of fungus. Let's look at some of the things I like and dislike about the game:
Likes:
- They totally reworked the system. All characters advance the same way, but get different powers based on their class, rather than class determining advancement. Playing as a race other than human actually has benefits now, unlike in 3.5 where it was often a handicap.
- Paragon Path and Epic Destiny. These two additions rock so hard. D&D 3.5 never really gave your characters an end point that made sense. You hit level 40, and you killed things by looking at them. 4e ends at 30, the challenge remains constant throughout, and your characters actually move on to other things. (Pre-made GM NPC's! SWEET!)
- The races are different enough that it's fun to play something new, without one being overpowered in comparison to all the others. The Dragonborn breath weapon is the first example I've seen of a breath attack available to a first level character that doesn't make said character ridiculously over-powered.
And now for some of the things I don't like:
- They totally reworked the system. You get better at everything as you advance in level, I hate 90% of the new feats, starting armors make no damn sense (only the paladin has access to plate? My cleric and Warlord can only wear up to chain, and I need to blow two feats to use plate?), and multi-class should be retitled "out-of-class-dabbling" because that's all it really is now. At least they're useful, and often the best place to blow a feat.
- There is no longer any benefit to playing as a human. They only get +2 to one ability score, instead of two. In exchange, the get an extra at-will power (that they probably won't use), an extra feat (drawn from a list of feats that suck), and a bonus skill (offers a +5 boost to a skill in their class list, that they probably won't be able to use very well anyway).
- Also on the racial front, I have mixed feelings about the art used in the books. Piddling, I know, but still. I love the new dwarves, gnomes, devas, and halflings (and dwarven chicks are officially hot.) but the rest annoy me. Female dragonborn have breasts, despite being egg-laying reptiles. Eladrin look like friggen aliens, and Elf's look like Native Americans (American Indians). Half-Elves look like the humans, and humans look like half-orcs. Speaking of the Half-Orcs, they look like civilized orcs. And as for shifters... ugh.
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Topic: The P&P RPG Mega-Thread (Read 2061 times)