These rats ain't gonna club themselves

[prog]

OK I have heard enough about the nu-wave tabletop rolly-hitty RPGs of the last coupla years to wanna play one.

I would love to try either Descent or D&D4 sometime. Any action around here I can get in on? Anything else I should be playing?

Comments

[prog.livejournal.com]

My impression is that it's less that D&D3 had anything wrong with it, and more that the greater landscape of RPGs has changed significantly since 1999. Wizards of the Coast wants to make D&D appeal to as broad a base as they can, so they completely redesigned the game to be less about role-playing and more like an MMORPG translated into a tactical board game. (I say this without having played it, but this is my best understanding.)

Many have said that D&D3 and D&D4 are completely different games. Wizards could have tried selling them as two parallel lines ("D&D" and "D&D Tactics" or something), but I can guess many reasons why they wouldn't want to.

As for me, the fact that there's not much actual role playing in it any more, and that it's more focused on moving dudes around on a grid, makes me want to try it that much more...

[dougo.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, there's exactly as much role-playing in 4e as in 3e, that is, as much as your group wants. It's just that the combat and skill-challenge systems are the ones that need precise rules, so that's what the books spend the most time covering.

My impression is that 4e is pretty much a straight-line projection in the same direction that 3e started going in (except it happens not to be backwards-compatible). And the asyptotically-approached target seems to be to be something more like a Eurogame than a MMORPG. But I don't have any real experience with the latter, so who knows. Mainly the emphasis is more on having interesting choices rather than being a simulation.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

Descent plays pretty much like any strategy game, with no more role-playing than TI, say. This isn't a complaint--Descent is hugely fun, although the end-game in my experience is pretty unbalanced. You either slam-dunk it, or everybody dies violently and suddenly without any real warning.