Players Handbook

I can't decide if I think reviewing the Players Handbook is ridiculous or not. On the one hand, it's a book, and I read it. On the other hand, I've already nattered on about D&D recently and it's not like anyone reads the PHB as a work of literature. So maybe I'll cheat a little a bit and do a "review" but mix in a little 4th edition discussion. We'll see what happens. (Editing? We don't need no steekin' editing!) There's an obvious elephant in the 4th edition D&D room and oddly enough that's World of Warcraft. I guess this is some sort of circle of life thing where you'd have to expect that WoW only exists because my generation grew up with D&D and now it's time to for WoW to return the favor. The first time you see the influence in the PHB is when they start talking about character "roles". They've defined four: defender (cue Crow T. Robot saying "It's not a tank."), striker, controller, and leader. They explicitly describe how each role works in combat and it's a tag on each class - fighters are defenders, clerics are leaders and so forth. In fact they explicitly set out the "classic party" with a fighter (defender), cleric (leader), rogue (striker), and wizard (controller). I think this change is positive really. Putting this explicit focus up front means it's easy to see how each class works and you can see where it helps both a player understand their role and helped the designers really reinterpret each class and "focus the beam" as it were. The next thing a reader will notice is all of the powers. Everyone has a big stack of powers, no matter their class. Fighters have special attacks they use instead of the "basic melee" attack. Rogues have funky moves where they can move during the attack, or trip their target or force them to move or whatever. Wizards can cast a Magic Missile every round of combat if they want. The basic melee attack is pretty much something that somebody only does if it's because they were doing something else that includes a basic attack. Everything is broken up into "At-Will" powers (which can be used every round), "Encounter" powers (usable once per fight), and "Daily" powers (once per day, naturally). Somewhere around here a WoW player will envision a toolbar with powers and recharge timers on it. Again I think this is a great addition. Sure they didn't even bother to file the serial numbers off the WoW implementation, but that's OK. It cleans up so much stuff, it's worth it. Paladins Lay On Hands? That's a power. Wizard casting Acid Arrow? (Melf apparently got demoted. Poor out some CLW potion for the homies!) That's another power. Cleric's Turn Undead? Yep, a power. It makes everything in D&D work in one framework for really the first time ever. But the fact that all of these Powers now have the same structure means one finely honed game mechanic lets everyone do their stuff. Paladins still play completely different from Wizards, but it's not because they have unique game mechanics it's because they have different stats and powers. This means it's possible to grab a character sheet, skim it quickly and nod. You're ready to go and play the game. It doesn't require memorizing your class description so you know how all of your special exceptions work. You still have exceptions but they are all listed as Powers (well, or as Feats, but still. It's standardized.) So, I really like the new rules. From that perspective the PHB is a great success. It' not necessarily that much of a gripping read, but I've read much dryer and less readable gaming rulebooks. I don't think I'd recommend reading the whole thing straight through unless you plan on playing, but it's organized more as a reference than a linear read. I haven't actually played yet with the PHB (but we are Thursday! Huzzah!), but I have done some character creation/review work with it and it seems well laid out. I've already begun to be able to say "OK, for that we'll need to look at the XP chart, which is over here (flip to roughly the right spot)." If you're curious about 4e, you might find enough of interest in the PHB to own a copy. If you're playing or even thinking of playing it's definitely worth acquiring. There's a nice "gift set" you can get if you want the DMG and Monster Manual as well which comes with all three hardovers in a slipcover case.
Read more

Welcome back, good old habeas corpus!

I think everyone knows I don't like blogging about politics much and I'm already flirting with politics in the comments thread discussion about rocket fuel contamination, but I blogged back when we suspended habeas corpus so a brief note welcoming that the Supreme Court just struck down the suspension as unconstitutional seems in order to me. (It's a Hyperlink-a-pa-looza!) Even an "enemy combatant" has the right to see the evidence against them and to have a lawyer present. Somehow I still think the republic will survive. I also can't resist snarking that Justice Scalia dissented because we're "at war with radical Islamists" which first off in a strictly legal sense isn't true, so it doesn't belong in a Supreme Court statement. Second off, maybe we'd do better if we decided to be at war with people seeking to destroy the American way of life? Me, I say the right to a fair trial and the right to confront the evidence used to accuse someone of a crime is pretty key to that American way of life. People who say we have to give up that right because Daddy Government knows best and it's too dangerous for us to know what's really going on? Those are the ones that I think are dangerous to America.
Read more

Born Standing Up

Gah. I've been doing more book reading lately and thus the to-be-reviewed piles begins to loom. Let's talk about Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's memoir of his early stand-up career. I have to admit, I went into this book thinking it was something different than it was. I thought the focus was on comedy, how it works and why it works. There is a discussion about how his stand-up evolved and what Martin was thinking as created his style, but that's not the bulk of the book by any means. Furthermore, that's more of a historical note than a comedy How-To. It's a fascinating topic and his presentation is insightful, but it ends up being a documentary of how Steve Martin reacted to the comedy of that time. If you were going to do comedy today you'd have to react to the comedy of today – meaning you'd have to build off or react to Martin's work. From that perspective knowing his thought process back then isn't really practical information. As I said it's fascinating to read but I had gotten the impression that it there was practical information on creating funny material in the book, and I don't think that's accurate. I've always enjoyed Steve Martin's stand-up and sketch work, as well as his earlier movies. (I don't think I've seen anything he's done from in the last twenty years or so.) The book does a good job of presenting his start going all the way back to working in Disneyland when he was ten years old. I was only seven when The Jerk came out, so I've always seen his comedy after the fact, usually by many years. I think I was in college before I saw the "Wild And Crazy Guys" skits. Seeing how his comedy evolved and where he started is interesting and he tells it well in the book. I enjoyed the book. It's a pretty quick and light read. It's not what I thought it was going in but even as a historical note seeing how Martin played with comedy is interesting. I tend to think of that oddly literal and deadpan style Martin has just being fully formed. He does a good job of walking through how that evolved from the standard comedy routines he knew and presenting his style as a journey. If that sounds interesting to you then I think you'd enjoy reading this. It's more of a memoir and less of an analysis of comedy but it's a fine memoir, and chewing on the techniques presented can yield interesting insights. The glimpse of how Martin approached his craft is intriguing and I think worth the time to read.
Read more

D&D Reviews - For Real This Time, No Fooling

OK so yesterday's post was originally intended to be a book review amalgam before I put on the rose-colored glasses and got out the scrapbooks. Today I want to talk about a pair of book(let)s and I may talk a bit about the first 4th edition module. The books are called Wizards Presents Races and Classes, and Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters and together they are the bulk of the "preview" materials for 4e. The module serves a bit of this as well - it's called H1 - Keep on the Shadowfell. I call them book(let)s because each book is only about 100 pages long. At first I was sort of dubious about them, and I still think they are badly titled. But they aren't really a "This is wizard and look we had somebody draw a picture!" What they are is actually a series of essays by the people who created 4th edition. (Well and to be fair, there is a "This is a wizard" component.) Sticking with wizards, there are six pages about wizards in the Races and Classes book. The first two are clearly going to be in the Player's Handbook and are pretty much "So you wanna be a wizard? This is what you'll do." and some pictures. But then there's a half column on the role of the wizard in combat and talking about how the wizard now has an implement such as a wand or orb (Pratchett fans will wonder if the the implement has a Knob on the End) and that implement shapes what the wizard does. Next up is some "crunchy" (i.e. full of rules information) details about the changes from 3rd to 4th edition, including why the changes were made. Next up is discussion of how the wizard class is balanced against the other classes, both how it worked in 3rd edition and what they changed for 4th. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes these books do cover the fluffy "Wizards cast spells and suck at combat" aspects, there's also a good bit of crunchy "this is how 4th edition works" and a whole big helping of "This is what the design goals of 4th edition are and how we got there." It's almost like these two books are the directory's commentary track of the Player's Handbook. For somebody like me with a more than passing interest in how gaming sausage gets made this stuff is just great. The split of the books is a bit odd. I actually read all of the Races and Classes book and the first quarter of the Worlds and Monsters one before I got the logic. They talk about how 4th edition was developed by two teams - a mechanics/rules team and a flavor/creative/art team. The first book was written by the mechanics team and the second by the creative team. This makes a lot of sense but it's not said explicitly anywhere. Once I got that it was a lot easier to flow with which topic was covered where. I think this is even further obscured by the fact that the "Races" topic is the blurriest and it's what the first book opens with. Are dwarves and elves mechanics or flavor? The answer of course is "Yes". The book focuses a bit more on the mechanics side of the fence but it dabbles more in flavor than the other sections do. The second book shows a lot of good thought. The whole planar system has been redone and one mantra was "lose pointless symmetry". Did anyone ever really adventure in the Positive or Negative Material planes? Even most of the elemental planes were cast in a way that A ) made them uninteresting and B ) made them impossibly difficult to use. "So it's an endless plane of fire? The ground is fire, and the air is fire? And this rock? No, it's fire too huh? And we can't breathe, because of the fire? What a great place to go." Instead now they have a plane called the Feywild which is an eerie mystical echo of the "real" world. All of the fey/faerie creatures come from the Feywild, and ancient elven (technically they are eldarin, but that's a technicality) cities might exist in the Feywild except for the solstice when they materialize in the real world for just one night. Bam! Already that has more adventuring potential than the Inner Planes ever got in 20 years of D&D. I'd say if you have any interest in D&D, or even much of an interest in game design as a topic this are worth reading. I really liked reading them, and if it wasn't clear already they really piqued my interest in reading the actual rulebooks.
Read more