My Gods… what have I done. This review is going to be insane.
I've trimmed things down a bit... I am deciding not to do reviews on Chainmail, or any of the 'progenitor' editions of Dungeons and Dragons. This is going to start at the iconic Red Box edition.DnD was what I cut my teeth on. It’s how I discovered roleplaying. I went over to a friend’s house one night in the wild outback of Washington State, and I woke up chewing on his book. I was about 8 years old.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a group of four 7 to 9 year olds play Dungeons and Dragons, or any tabletop game, but they don’t precisely follow rules. We would roll up characters, and then roll a die randomly to determine what level we were, and then just pick a bunch of spells that were cool out of the book and hurl ourselves relentlessly at random stuff included in the books.
For those of you that don’t know what DnD one is like, here’s an archeological reference:
We didn't read this.
I remember half way through our first combat round we suddenly realized that we didn’t have hit points on our sheet. The monsters all had hit points.
Instead of looking at the rules, we deduced, by simple logic, that this meant that we couldn’t be damaged, and we pushed forward.
This lasted for months, I think actually maybe a year or two, until one day we got bored after our 54th black dragon mage golem and someone opened the book and started reading from the beginning. It might have actually been on a dare, come to think of it. I don't recall. But suddenly, there were rules up in this here country.
This has come to be known as My Fall from Grace. My PC had hit points, and therefore could now die… which I did. Over, and over. And over. And over and over and over and over. I’m pretty sure, somewhere, there was an entire nation of undead beings created from the bodies of my fallen characters.
Basic DnD is just that. It’s very basic. It’s a very swift system, with very little in the way of situational modifiers to confuse beginning players. Unfortunately, it also has a staggering amount of loopholes and situations that are not covered by modifiers which will confuse the crap out of beginning players. Basic DnD is the Catch 22 of the gaming world. It’s a great place to start, but only if you have someone who knows what they’re doing to show you how to start. The very nice thing about the system is that if you do have a DM who is experienced at just running games in general (not even DnD) that they can usually cover most of the situations with some off-the-cuff modifier or role-making decision. This makes a terrific game for a casual weekend with friends.
Basic DnD gets 6 crits out of 10.
And then the damn system evolved (or a new one was created, depending on your particular religious idiom) which just went further with the pooch screwing.
I hauled my bitter, broken, angry ten year old butt down to WarGames West one mid-summer afternoon, and ran face to face into this book right here:
Ogres + Halberds... not a fun combination.
Here's the ironical part. The book sat right next to this one:
Who the fuck needs rules anyway?
It wasn’t until I was back in Washington State that I realized I actually needed the rule books too. Yep, somehow, Advanced Dungeons and Dragons was more Advanced than normal Dungeons and Dragons, and you couldn’t play ADnD with the old rules. I think it was two or three months before I actually got the rules.
I was blown away. Was this the same game? It had HARD COVERS! On all the books!? No longer could we fold the cover back and show how right we were to Player X or DM Y with vicious stabbing motions of our pre-pubescent fingers. Now our game was Official. Now we treated the books like tomes of ancient lore, handling them with the utmost of care, and being careful to never put a single mark in them. Yeah. Right. Within a month, all the books looked like they’d been covered in meat and thrown into a pool of water filled with sharks that had pens and pencils for teeth. Rough doesn’t begin to cover it.
Everything fucking made sense. Races were races. You could be an elf AND a wizard! Classes were classes, and you could even, if you really kicked ass, be more than one! Monsters were even more super-deadly, the pictures were more super-awesome, and the modifiers were more super-modifier..ing. If you were carrying 90 lbs worth of gear on your back and you had to jump over a 15 foot chasm which was covered in oil on the other side… you could figure out exactly what you needed to roll in order to die horribly.
This, obviously, was the game for me. This was the ultimate in the gaming experience. I could never find anything better than this, and I played it faithfully for a long while, until this came out…
This taught me the meaning of "Losing My Shit."
Up until current day, with all the editions, and rule changes, and errata, and random bizarre weapons out of Dragon Magazine, NOTHING has topped the Dark Sun setting in DnD. Nothing. Ever. Anywhere. (I still feel confident in saying this because Monte Cook's "Numenera" has not yet released.)
When it came out, I picked up a set. Many of my gaming group thought it was ‘too hard’ because of such rule tomfoolery as “You have to carry enough water to not die.” I could go on for hours about Dark Sun, but I won’t. Because I’m focused on (A)DnD right now. And also because the asshats at TSR came out with this…
Surely this would be the last book I ever had to buy...
All of a sudden, ADnD was more complex. They hadn’t just updated a few things, they had REWRITTEN THE ENTIRE DAMN SYSTEM. For one thing, instead of everything being measured in inches, because all DnD and ADnD1 people were only as tall as the figures that represented them, all of a sudden shit was measured in feet. Spells were rewritten, level requirements for those spells were changed, and some spells were entirely deleted from the system. They made so many changes that even their own comic book series made fun of the changes.
They basically took all of our collective pooches, and screwed them all at once in some massive despicably unnameable act at TSR headquarters. Were we pissed? Nooooo… of course not, we lapped it up. We bought those books hand over fist… and then we went back and tried to change the rules for every single damn expansion we had bought to work with ADnD2. Unearthed Arcana? We did it. Oriental Adventures? Yep, that one too. Ravenloft? Got that one… NOT THAT WE EVER PLAYED IT EVEN ONCE. Dark Sun…. no, of course not. Too tough. Sigh.
In addition to changing the very structure of damn near everything, ADnD2 added something that would someday become the Greatest Goblin To Ever Live. They introduced the concept of ThAC0.
A Goblin Monk. Yep.
Because some of the damn AC scores were negative. Which ones were negative? The REALLY good ones. So if you were in combat with a great fucking phantasmal doom wyrm, you then had to deal with not only getting scalding acid-flame spewed out over your well armored (or scantily clad, if female) body, but you had to deal with fucking double negative pseudo math. All while trying to figure out who didn’t bring enough damn Doritos and Mountain Dew.
Overall, after all the bitching and moaning, 2nd edition was wildly popular because of how much more simple the system was… as long as you didn’t try to hit anything with your sword. The company quickly started updating some of the older products which we ourselves had done so much effort to configure, and then started kicking out some nice tools called “Class Handbooks.” These handbooks gave every single damn class eight more choices on what they could be, twenty more ways to do it, and a ton of background material, class-specific gear, and nifty tricks and traps you could use to completely skullfuck your GM in to submission.
Somehow our GM, Al, managed to keep up-to-date on every damn thing every single fucking character class could do. Mind like an adamantium trap, this guy. Wouldn’t let a damn thing get past him… except for his brother and another player named Terry, who had ninja-monk-psycho-quisinart classes that could somehow manage about 7 attacks in a round, many of which counted as backstabs. How borked were they?
They one-rounded a Terrasque. A fucking Terrasque.
A Fucking Terrasque. The above caption is completely correct.
ADnD 2nd Edition gets 9 crits out of 10 in my book.
And it was truly a glorious game… until TSR fucking sold out to a bunch of asshat lawyers due to some bullshit marital scandal which left a wife who had no concept of how fucking valuable the damn game was with complete and total control of the damn franchise. Where once TSR had been owned by gamers, it was now owned by lawyers.
Fucking lawyers. The only thing in the system you couldn’t kill enough of.
They took our beloved game, rewrote the rules, printed them in urine on pages made of pressed baby flesh, and then sold it to us. How did it look? A little something like this:
Pictured: Loathing.
It’s lawyer speak for “We’re fucking you, and laughing about it while doing coke off of your wife’s tits, whom we rented with the money you paid us.”
3.0 was so entirely, horribly broken that I can’t even believe, for a single minute, that they even bothered to playtest the dice they advised using in this lump of horsecrap. A guy I know got bored one night and created a half-orc paladin who could dual-wield halberds. At first level. Know what a halberd is? It’s an eight foot shaft tipped with a foot-long blade that is used for defending against charging fucking horses and crap. He had one in each hand. Without any negative effects.
You can’t get a negative crit. So I am not giving a crit level to this system. It’s heinously borked, and we’ll leave it at that.
3.5 came out shortly after when they realized how fucked the system was. Did 3.5 unfuck the system? No, not really, but it did make it more palatable to people who liked to focus on roleplay instead of playing a quisinart half-demon half-drow half-giant sorceress/fighter/bard/lawyer who specialized in being a laser-gun sniper dude.
The precise problem with both 3.0 and 3.5 was that they took out all the stops. Roleplaying games are all about building your character into something awesome when they start out as something that can get pwn’d by a damn housecat. You think I’m kidding? Take a human mage from 2nd edition. Give them a dagger. Put them in a 10 by 10 room with a housecat that is aggressive towards said mage. See what happens.
While 3.0 and 3.5 did make being a human amazingly more survivable at lower levels, it also had some serious problems. Like some skills that hinged directly off of stats… and those stats being entirely too high for the creature that owns it.
Example: Wolverines are completely fucking badass. I’m not talking adamantium claws snikt/snikt/snakt wolverines, but the furry not-fucking-cuddly kind that hangs out in forests deep and dreary. You know, the bastards that aren’t even two feet tall when on all fours? Those ones. Wolverines in 3.0 have a charisma of 21 (on a human norm scale of 1-18.) Charsima is the ‘OMG I wanna fuck you’ stat. It’s for social interaction. Since wolverines are intimidating little motherfuckers (I’d sure as hell run if I saw one in the wild), they had to have a high charisma so they could be intimidating. Some genius at WoTC (Wizards of the Coast, who now owns DnD and all things therein) didn’t think “Hey, lets give the skill like a +10 to the roll.” No, they just gave the damn 21 charisma to the wolverine. So now, after it makes your 8th level fighter crap his chain mail pants and run in fear, it will turn to your fighter’s sorceress wife, walk off with her back to the burrow, and raise some half-wolverine half-drow-elf sorceress/fighter/assassin/rangers who it will train to come kill your ass for crapping all over its lawn.
Realizing how completely fucked 3.X was, WoTC left it for dead and plowed forward into the catastrophe that is 4th Edition.
It’s a great game for systemic massacres. Every class has ‘powers’ which are called feats and talents. Each one of these feats or talents has a preset amount of time it can be used per-game or per-day. They are easily hand-printed or even machine printed off the intarnetz for use during your game on note cards. Each one has a recharge time, a damage code, perhaps a special effect like damage over time, negative modifiers to your opponent, or beneficial modifiers to your team mates.
You can even, if you wish, arrange them at the bottom of your character sheet in a row so they’re more easily manageable. Like so:
4th Edition is the latest in the continued dumbing-down of the playerbase. Back in the day, you had to have some real brain power to play DnD, not to mention Rolemaster or Traveller systems, which I’ll do a review on later. These badboy games made nerds into supernerds. You could cross-correlate tables without looking at them, all while doing doublenegative superfractional quantum fucking math and stuffing your face with more Doritos.
In short, DnD made you fucking smarter.
Now? Not so much. Now all the tactics are carefully parcelled out. Every power/feat/talent/moneyshot has a designated ability and can’t be modified because to do so would zomfg break the damn game. Roleplaying is about stepping outside of the rules, about doing things you can’t normally do, about looking at situations you could never be in and figuring out how to conquer them or save the whole fucking world.
That being said, the system, as I mentioned before, is masterfully designed. It works like fucking clockwork, because it has so little wiggle room. It is a machine of dice-rolling and results. There’s no soul, because it is so mechanically perfect.
Due to these factors, I give Fourth Edition a lackadaisical 4 crits out of 10. That’s right, it scores LOWER than the original DnD which was written on napkins and old, mildew scented notebooks in Gary Gygax’s (may he rest in the upper planes forever) fucking basement.
However, if you’re a WoW player, it’ll easily score a 9.5 out of 10 for you. I don’t decry your enjoyment, by all means, go buy yourself a copy, rip it open, and lap it up. The more money you throw at WotC, the more likely roleplaying will continue in the future as an excellent source of inspiration for socially-awkward people who will grow up to write books, tv shows, movies, and whatever else we come out with to waste our time with. The more money you throw at gaming, the more gamers will grow up, and the more we’ll own the fucking world.
Respect the Original Gamester. Rest in peace, Gary.
I can’t thank you enough, sir, for the change you have brought to my world.
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