Sunday, January 11, 2009

A bit of a rant

Last night I was playing C&C with my son and a couple of his friends. Now my son just found my 4th ed book, and started to flip through it. Of course he found the dragonborn write up and proceeded to create a dragonborn character. I am not surprised at this turn of events. To be honest, I am actually ok with the dragonborn character. It is a non-standard character, but its roots are clearly based in fantasy literature, and to be perfectly honest, I have a soft spot for dragons. In my next campaign I am going to allow dragonborn, but I am going to have my own write up to make it compatible with the Pathfinder rule set. In one of my future blogs, I will include the Pathfinder write up of several races that did not make it into the main rule set.

Going back to my original point, my son found the 4th ed rule book and started to make characters inline with the guidelines in 4th ed. Since my son is just getting into the hobby and I want to make it fun for him, I am being a bit lenient with the rules. As a result, we ended up playing with a crazy mixed breed of rules between C&C and 4th ed, but that was ok too. To a certain extent, I thrive on playing a bit loose with the rules, so it is all good.

My rant is about the weapon damage and the cost of items. I get that they changed the mechanics to appeal to a wider base of players. I get that it is a new edition of the rule set, so they felt the need to make changes. However, I don’t think they needed to change the weapon damages that have been fairly stable since 1st edition. It feels like they have gone out of their way to make it difficult to be compatible with the earlier editions of the game. I like the fact that I can look at a first edition player’s Handbook and a 3rd edition player’s handbook and see that a long sword does 1d8 damage. As has been stated in many places, there is a significant amount of inflation into the 4th ed rules, and I think that some of it is unnecessary, and adds to the feeling that this is a different game than what we played in the early 80’s.

I will probably be ranting a bit more on this topic in the future.

2 comments:

Sneb said...

Just curious, how much damage does a long sword do in 4e?

Mr Baron said...

Actually, the long sword damage is the same, however there are a number of weapons that are different. In an upcoming blog I will create a chart to show the changes throught the editions.