Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

Wizards of the Coast has a problem. Millions of people spend their weeknights marauding through fantastical ruins as orcish warriors and elven wizards. But despite owning the game franchise that inspired many of these dungeon crawls, these gamers are playing World of Warcraft or one of its online kin.

With Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, Wizards hopes to change that. They've forged a new game designed to appeal to more casual gamers, die-hards tired of the previous edition and the legions that deserted their weekly D&D games to hack and slash their way through MMORPGs.

At first glance, much of the game appears the same. Players build a character by assigning points to six physical and mental statistics, pick a fantastical race like dwarf or elf that grants them stat bonuses and special abilities and then select one of eight adventuring classes: cleric, fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue, warlock, warlord or wizard. Classes define what special powers the character will have, allowing paladins to excel at using divine power to smite their enemies and warlocks to cast powerful curses that confuse and hurt their opponents.

One player, the dungeon master, creates the stories, establishes the challenges and referees the results. The other players take on the roles of their characters, interacting with the world through their eyes. Combat- and skill-based conflicts are resolved by rolling a 20-sided die, adding in any modifiers and comparing the result to a target number. If it equals or exceeds that number, the task is successful.

Digging deeper reveals the big changes. Dungeons & Dragons now uses an exception-based mechanic, which means there's one simple set of core rules, and every power in the game then breaks those rules some small way. The most common exceptions are the unique suites of powers that each class wields based on its role. Fighters and paladins are defenders with powers that specialize in close combat and drawing attacks from their enemies. Rangers and rogues are strikers, excelling at hit-and-fade tactics. Clerics and warlords are leaders who serve as front-line fighters that specialize in providing other characters with bonuses.

There are myriad other changes. Saving throws are all but gone. The bard, druid and barbarian classes are gone. Most of the core races are still there, but gnomes and half-orcs have been replaced by the dragonborn, tieflings, and eladrin. The skill system has been greatly simplified, and the game is replete with MMORPG touches, such as "hunter's mark"-style powers for paladins, fighters and rangers, as well a ritual that allows players to reduce magic items to a valuable arcane dust.

Completing the transformation, Wizards is promising its D&D Insider service. For a monthly fee, the online service will provide a rules database, character creator, virtual gaming table and digital versions of the gaming magazines Dragon and Dungeon.

Same name, different game

Every change in the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition serves one of three goals: speed up the game, keep it playable through godlike levels and enable online play. To a certain extent, it succeeds. The new unified rules simplify the game and should be easier for new players (or returning ones) to pick up. The powers-based system will be familiar to players of both computer games and collectible card games, and the rules are streamlined enough that a 25th-level character should be as playable as a 5th-level one.

The unified rules system means that every class is inherently balanced, and while there's some variation through powers, in general the "fighters rule at 1st level, wizards are gods at 20th" effect from earlier editions is gone. The Dungeon Master's Guide offers far better advice on how to set up and run a game than its predecessors did, and it introduces new skill challenge and quest mechanics for non-combat experience rewards. The exceptions-based rule set transforms the Monster Manual into a treasure trove of unique encounters, and its pre-generated encounter lists are godsends for time-pressed DMs. The designers also extended concept of roles to monsters, allowing for such common jobs as minion, brute, skirmisher and controller. These roles make it much easier to create challenging and diverse combat encounters.

All of these improvements come at a price. Fourth Edition's lost a good deal of its diversity and depth relative to previous releases. Sacred cows, such as the wizard's extensive spell list, the druid class and the gnome player race, have been slaughtered to fit the game's new vision. Some of these bovines may be resurrected--druids will return in a future source book, stats for playing a gnome can be found in the Monster Manual--but some decisions there's no turning back from. Powers are a key example of that; they're a radical departure from what's come before, and they're something players are going to love or hate.

Not all of the changes yield the promised results. Combat is less complex, but it can still get bogged down in record-keeping as players and dungeon masters try and keep track of the new "marks" mechanic. The powers system works for most of the classes, particularly the martial ones and the newly designed warlock and warlord, because it allows them to pull off all sorts of stunts and tricks that they were previously unable to do. At the same time, though, it fails the cleric and wizard, which feel hobbled and limited by the new rules.

The online components sound promising and could be just the thing that Dungeons & Dragons needs to compete with World of Warcraft, but were unavailable when the game launched. Wizards' failure to launch these components is disappointing.

In the end, whether someone enjoys Fourth Edition is going to come down to their style of play. Those whose love of fantasy was inspired by video games, anime, movies and MMORPGs should enjoy it, as will fans of the previous edition who wanted a more streamlined game. Those who revel in the idiosyncrasies of the Third Edition, and who draw their inspiration more from novels than computer games, may not.