General Discussion

I wonder if the VTT from WotC will allow you to create house rules . .  . or revert back to 3E or 3.5E.

I think a good thing would be to let the DM do anything he pleases.  If I want to throw my axe with a rope tied to it through a window and swing across, but the VTT rules do not allow for that, the sytem should let the player make his dice roles (whatever the DM says he needs) and let the DM move the character to where he is supposed to be.   Did that make sense?

Just how much room we'll have to customize the Virtual tabletop will be what gets players off the fence, so to speak.  The game is what you make it, truly.

omg this is the end..................

5th edition will have an option to walk away from the table and let a bot handle the grind....
5th adition will let you pay 5$ to wotc for powerleveling your character from 1 to 26
5th edition will have a petition queque for your gm

in all honesty the "features" described by the author came from limitations that computer games have in contrast to pen and paper.

the reason why each mmo and their siblings use standard grp layout of tank,healer, dps (and buffer) is because the quests/ encounters relay on linear, scripted computer ai. in pen&paper its totally ok and challenging for 2 mages and a clerik or a group of thieves to do an adventure.

the origin of pen&paper rpg for me is not some ruleset but to tell an interactive story by the gm with an audience of players. the rules are only there to ensure that the actions are some kind of limited and fun to play out. in that aspect computer mmorpgs have still years to catch up to classic p&p

Also remember that we have Three core books at this time of writing. 4E will keep expanding and the rules makes IMO more sense than those of 3.X.

I like the fact that there's defined roles to fill. One of my pet pieves is when a guy in my group makes some useless charcter that will be extremely overpowered at level 20, but not till then and the rest of the group has to piggy back him most of the way there. Plus, even fighters are useful now :)

Simple is good.

Complexity for the sake of complexity was never Gary's goal.  New rules where added to make the game better, this simplification is well done IMO.

^{For those of you who are not familiar with the P&PRPG genre let me inform you here; it has been dying and losing players by the thousands to online games. Wizards of the Coast did what they had to do; try to capture their player base that was been lost to MMOs. The only reason I play MMOs is due to the fact that I can longer get a group of 5 adults together to play a P&P game anymore. Most of my friends have families and careers that prevent them from dedicating the amount of time that is needed to participate in a game, and I'm not even talking about the Dungeon Master, just the players.}

^{As a DM who never uses published adventures, as I prefer to write my own, it's almost like having a second job. I put in several hours a night crafting a story, creating characters, and producing storylines that my players may or may not use. On average I would say about 40 hours go into starting a new campaign. Most people who have grown up playing P&P dion't have that kind of time anymore, and this is where MMOs come into play.}

^{If you have never played in a P&P game then you are surely missing one of the best interactive expierences in gaming, period. The hard part is finding a good group of  players who play the game, but don't take it to serious. I welcome D&D back into the fold, and hope that it continues to push the envelope of gaming.}

Earth

Originally posted by aka_mythos

4th edition, having tried it, feels like a mmorpg. It seems to me that they watered d20 down for the sake of making it easier to program into games. I enjoyed 3rd and 3.5, I found it better than 2nd edition; even though I thought 3.5 could get overly complicated at times 4th is overly simplified. My friends and I are sticking to 3.5. Maybe 5th will be better. PnP games though the inspiration for mmorpg, despite this odd co-mingling, they really are two separate entities.

All the web utilities really could have been done for 3rd its really about time. I really don't know if 4th will bring anything to the table. Most independent developers want to continue working with 3.5, mostly because its establish but also because 4th ed isn't free for them to make modules for. Bye bye open gaming license.  All that said you have to question what will come out of 4th that benefits the players.

Games must evolve to keep their player base interested, AND bring new players to the table (so to speak). Example: Rifts (by Palladium Books): best setting in P&P, but the rules havnet changed in 20 years. So, players stop playing and stores stop stocking the games. D&D while I don't agree with 3 rule changes in less than 10 years, I can understand why. Evolve or become non existent, basic rule of the universe.

Originally posted by AgentHoze

...so, if I understand this correctly, they're ADDING the need for the holy trinity to D&D? Tank, healer, CC/DPS... That's the one part I always hated about MMORPGs, you always needed a specific group setup. D&D you could really pull off any sort of group setup without need for specific classes (though some form of healing obviously helped quite a bit in making stuff easier).

This should never happen in a pen and paper RPG: "Ooh, I wanna play a rogue" "actually, we need a tank, you're rolling fighter" "...screw that *leaves*" "ok guys guess we can't play tonight, we don't have the right group setup"

Are you sure you were playing D&D? Because if you were playing without a rogue or a cleric then your DM was hacking the game to pieces and unlocking doors like crazy. No party from base D&D up to 3.5 made it far without  a healer unless the DM was fudging every roll. Case in point, according to the rules an Ogre will drop any level 3 class but a fighter or barb in a couple of swings, or close to it. Play DDO a bit and you'll see how fast most monsters take people down without a DM there pretending your rogue didn't just take a tree to the chest for 1.5x his max HPs for that level. Throw in crits and it's a party wipe in short order.

And wouldn't it seem odd that this evil overlord hasn't locked a single door in his palace or bothered to booby trap his treasure room?

The fact that this is a complaint is proof that you haven't read any of the rules for 4E, because if you had you would know that this actually does away with most of the class restrictions in this regard. There are 2 healing classes now, and anyone can heal themselves for a considerable amount(healers are only really needed if you're taking a good beating while actually in a fight, no more of this 2 HPs a day crap), and all theivery based actions are rolled into one skill that anyone can learn, with the DM's option(isn't everything?) that some stuff is specialized to the rogue only.

I'd encourage you all to at least familiarize yourself with some of changes before you make blanket assumptions.

Originally posted by Quethel

Are you sure you were playing D&D? Because if you were playing without a rogue or a cleric then your DM was hacking the game to pieces and unlocking doors like crazy. No party from base D&D up to 3.5 made it far without  a healer unless the DM was fudging every roll. Case in point, according to the rules an Ogre will drop any level 3 class but a fighter or barb in a couple of swings, or close to it. Play DDO a bit and you'll see how fast most monsters take people down without a DM there pretending your rogue didn't just take a tree to the chest for 1.5x his max HPs for that level. Throw in crits and it's a party wipe in short order.

And wouldn't it seem odd that this evil overlord hasn't locked a single door in his palace or bothered to booby trap his treasure room?

The fact that this is a complaint is proof that you haven't read any of the rules for 4E, because if you had you would know that this actually does away with most of the class restrictions in this regard. There are 2 healing classes now, and anyone can heal themselves for a considerable amount(healers are only really needed if you're taking a good beating while actually in a fight, no more of this 2 HPs a day crap), and all theivery based actions are rolled into one skill that anyone can learn, with the DM's option(isn't everything?) that some stuff is specialized to the rogue only.

Well, are you sure you've played a pen & paper RPG at all? Because if you imply that picking a lock is the only way to open a door or to get to what is around it, I'm blaming you and the other players for lack of imagination. Fighters and barbarians just bash the door, druid shapes the wooden chest (or metal, or stone), monk can ignore object hardness (useful for cutting steel bars in prison), wizards and sorcs have 'knock' spell that unlocks stuff and disintegrate that, well, does... And that's just the ways the rules directly support opening stuff up. That still leaves out dozens of ways imaginative players can get doors opened (find the guard with the keys, knock on the door and wait until they open etc.)

And traps... Don't talk to me about traps. *half-orc fighter walks into trap.Trap goes off, half-orc takes damage.* "Grunt. Trap." *half-orc goes to kill the guy who set the trap.* Monks and paladins simply save vs. the trap, clerics buff themselves, barbarians have improved evasion, and both ranger and bard class can see it before stepping on it. And of course there's the old staple 'let the minion go first'. :D

In pen&paper, all these systems work. You don't need to have someone who gives '30hp/sec' during a fight to the fighter, since if he's getting knocked about he can do something different to avoid taking that damage (expertise, disarm, knockdown enemies etc. etc.) And there's always running away or letting someone else take the beating (like the wizard, who's bound to be real appreciative).

In most MMO's simplified fighting rules, everything is based on modding the damage per second, hit point buffer, aggro range & level, and incoming healing per second for a character. You could simply calculate the relative values between the party and the encounter, and declare a winner right away.

I'm not saying that simplified rules are a bad thing. I've played with even lighter, storytelling type rules, and they work fine. What I'm saying is that I don't like what I see in the new rules system, and think it's a huge change from the basic feel of the old system, even larger then the leap from 2nd ed to 3rd.