World War 3 vs 4
August 16th, 2010
Hello everybody. Unfortunately, due to some last-minute work that had to be done on our latest .pdf release, The War of the Goblin King, I didn't quite have time to write an article this week. Luckily, I have a few old, unreleased articles canned and waiting for just such an occasion, and I'll be sharing that with you in just a moment. But first, for those who haven't heard, this month's .pdf is a little different from some of our previous ones:
The War of the Goblin king is an adventure for 6th level PCs, which has the players save the town of Springdale from imminent destruction at the hands of a horde of highly trained goblins led by a self-proclaimed goblin king who seeks to create a surface empire for his people. It's packed with lots of action and adventure, and a chariot chase, because, I mean, why not? But it's more than just an adventure. Lots of time and effort was put into fleshing out Springdale and bringing it to life, meaning that when you get The War of the Goblin King you also get a highly-detailed town you can insert into any game, complete with a variety of fun and interesting prominent locations and a whole bunch of NPCs, many of which are fleshed out both flavorfully, with backgrounds and sections on their personality and how to roleplay them, as well as mechanically, with lovingly-crafted statblocks. The thing that makes it different, though, is that it isn't going to be free.
As I said in a recent article, this adventure will be our first "for sale" product, and will be available through paizo.com for a mere $5.00. If you're on the fence about picking it up, wait until next week, when Josh Zaback will be stepping in to talk about the crafting of the adventure.
In the meantime, one more thing before I move on to today's article: thank you to reader Spencer Fogg, who pointed out to me that, as written, one of the abilities I gave to the fourth edition Emrakul wasn't working the way I wanted it to. The issue has been fixed, and Emrakul should be up to date. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Now that that's out of the way, this week's article:
Hello everyone. Today I’m going to put an end to edition wars. Well, okay, not really. But I am going to give you my take on them, as a player, a DM, and as a designer. I’ve heard both sides of the argument (usually in the form of shouting matches on various internet forums), and I am not deluded enough to think that even if I lay out the case of “the differences between 3rd and 4th edition and why those differences are OK” perfectly and entirely fairly, there wouldn’t still be some die-hard enthusiasts who would stick to their proverbial guns and continue the “war.” Besides, it’s not like there’s really any information here you weren’t privy to before. Still, I hope the journey will be entertaining for you, and that perhaps I can lay the matter out in a way that will make the whole thing clearer to you by this article’s end.
So, for those of you who’ve been living under a rock the last few years, congratulations on getting an internet connection. Finding an outlet in a cave can be quite a task. Seriously though, by now you should all be aware that Wizards of the Coast has moved on from the 3rd (for simplicity’s sake I’ll refer to it as 3rd instead of 3.5) edition of Dungeons and Dragons to 4th edition. This has caused a major rift in the fanbase of 3rd edition D&D, with some happily embracing the new edition, which they felt was an improvement on the last, and many others left feeling bitterly that the new edition was a step in the wrong direction and that Wizards had forsaken them. Like any polarized groups, they fought bitterly, never realizing that they were both right.
What, you ask? See reason, Alex, how can they both be right if one thinks it’s an improvement and the other thinks it’s all wrong? That just doesn’t make sense! Well, luckily for me I’m a game designer, a profession which, in my opinion, requires just a little bit of unreasonable madness. In this case, the answer is obvious: those who like the new edition are the people the edition was designed for, and for them it is better. Those who don’t, unfortunately, are right in that Wizards has largely forsaken them (that’s an ugly term that isn’t entirely fair to Wizards, for the record: they made the changes they did for a reason, and I’ll discuss that below) in favor of the other group who finds 4th edition marvelous. They are also right in that, for them, 4th edition is a step backwards.
But that doesn’t make it any less of a great game for all those other people who like it.
4th edition, from a design and development standpoint, is simply a better game than 3rd edition. It’s clean. The classes are almost perfectly balanced, and because of the way they’re designed you would have to be trying in order to make an unbalanced 4th edition class. Wherever possible, the designers have avoided complicated spells and mechanics that would be difficult for the game to handle. For example, to this date (to the best of my admittedly imperfect knowledge) there is no way for a 4th edition player character to animate an undead creature (such as a skeleton or zombie) as a servant. By focusing on keeping everything internally balanced (something I feel they have done an absolutely brilliant job of, all things considered) they have improved the quality of Dungeons and Dragons as a game. Note that “game” is in italics, meaning, in this case, that I have a special meaning when I say game. I have the good fortune to have inherited a number of my father’s old “bookcase games,” which are basically board games which make Monopoly look like… I dunno… something boring. Like Monopoly, I guess. Anyway, I feel that 4th edition D&D is a game in the same vein as these games, where the rules of the game, and making sure that the game runs smoothly, and that everyone has fun, is the most important thing. I can think of few better things to do on a long, lazy afternoon with a few friends.
The downside of this approach, on the other hand, is that in order for the rules to take precedence at the top of the priorities list, other stuff has to be bumped down. If I had to take a guess at what the number one priority for 3rd edition’s design was, I would say that it was ‘realism.’ Now, all of you who decided to be snarky and say something about how “realistic” Bigby’s grasping hand is get detention. Those of you who were honestly wondering, here’s the deal: if 4th edition is “Dungeons and Dragons: the Game,” then 3rd edition is “Dungeons and Dragons: the Fantasy Simulation Engine.” 3rd edition has more rules and random tables than you can shake a stick at. It tells you how many goblins are in a typical warren, what the average salary of a dirt-farming peasant is, and what the most powerful NPC in a given town is likely to be. Basically, if you got someone with some programming skills and a big computer, you could enter all those tables into the program (you would need some additional information, yes, but I’m pretty sure you’d be surprised at how little) put in some artificial intelligence scripts, and BOOM! You just created The Matrix: D&D edition.
The goal of 3rd edition, then, if I am correct, was not so much to create a game that would be super-balanced and fun to play (though both of those were no doubt concerns of the designers), but to create an engine for running a fantasy world which could serve as a stage for your players. One could argue that 4th edition does this too, and they would be right, to an extent. But ultimately, it can’t compete with 3rd edition in this regard, if only for the fact that NPCs follow different rules than PCs do.
So, which edition is better? Well, it depends on what you want from your game. Do you want a well-balanced, clean (sometimes to the point of sterility) game? 4th edition is your man. Do you want a thorough and in-depth (sometimes to the point of being needlessly arcane) game? 3rd edition is the one for you. Before I go, allow me to apologize to the holdouts who still favor AD&D over either of these: I meant to at least touch on 2nd edition before the article ended, but I kind of forgot. I am, I’m afraid, too young to have very many memories of 2nd edition. From what I’ve seen, however, 2nd edition is to 3rd edition much as 3rd edition is to 4th edition.
Feel free to send me hate-mail for siding with the edition you dislike at ariggs@necromancers-online.com. I promise to read it. Join me--err, I mean, join Joshua next week when he'll give you an inside look at The War of the Goblin King.
Until then, may you always get to play the games you like, and may death come swiftly to anyone who thinks their favorite game is better.