Wizards of the Coast - D&D 4th Edition Launches June 7th

I just hope that they scale back the feats and such some. I'm sure they won't, but the most unenjoyable part of NWN2 OC was trying to figure out which feats to pick. I liked the idea of being able to do spells silently or with extra power, but with so many spells, it got confusing. All those extra options were just way too much.
No, this won't be scaled back. That was the part that the players liked very much :). The problem was that the DM had to do this for each and every NPC and (more or less) monster, which was a huge load of work.

And in NWN2, you could always use the "recommend" button, or whatever it was. This didn't require any decision at all. That's the best for everyone :).
 
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And in NWN2, you could always use the "recommend" button, or whatever it was. This didn't require any decision at all. That's the best for everyone :).

Yeah, but I always found that in these type of games, the recommend using is what you SHOULDN'T do!

I think the one thing that annoyed the most was that I couldn't use certain types of weapons until I acquired a feat with that weapon. I don't have a problem with a feat that gives you a bonus to your use of a weapon, but most weapons in these games could at least be picked up and used by just about anyone, and with a little bit of skill if you had used other similar iteams.
 
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I think that the "recommend" thing has its own extremely simply kind of AI : For example, if you play a cleric, it will recommend a cleric ...
 
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Play your PnP games on your own time, wierdos. The question here is, is 4th ed better for CRPGin'? I've been playing BG2 again, trying to finally break through my mid-game malaise, and I certainly see places where 2nd ed was laming it up. 3rd was definitely a step up, and the mechanics of NWN were much more intuitive because of it. What I've seen of 4th is certainly confusing, after a lifetime (yikes) of the other editions, but if the new system better lends itself do some turn based tactical dungeon crawling... well that would be nice.

I'm not sure I agree with that - my table top PnP gaming is entirely separate from cRPG'ing - and I'm happy for it to remain that way. There are better rulesets (a religious debate I guess) than d20 for cRPG anyway. My issue is with the move towards (as one person put it) the WoW "paradigm" in a table-top game. If I wanted to play WoW I would play WoW (or it's clones). It would not surprise me if some corporate big-wig told the WotC designers "gee, look at WoW - we should be like them, cos we can make lots of munnnnnney!" And they'd been planning this for years! There are a lot of people in their late 20's, 30, and more who enjoy games like the current rule set and who grew up with older incarnation of D&D. Why alienate them? And yes, this is my opinion, but if you cast around the forums and chat with long-time players this feeling is common.
As for not breaking or invalidating your current rulebooks (which one poster seeme dto suggest) - huh? Many of stats, feats etc listed in those books are useless if you want to adopt a 4ed campaign. That requires major PT to go through and re-engineer/rebalance etc encounters, creatures. They've also broken magic in Faerun, where my campaign was based and concocted some really dodgy explanation. To those who are starting from a clean slate (and want an action game) - sure this will be right up their alley. Now let's all pull out our +30 swords of butt-kickingness and go kill some orcs!
 
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No, this won't be scaled back. That was the part that the players liked very much :). The problem was that the DM had to do this for each and every NPC and (more or less) monster, which was a huge load of work.

And in NWN2, you could always use the "recommend" button, or whatever it was. This didn't require any decision at all. That's the best for everyone :).
Actually D&D 4E will kind of have it's own recommend button for the DM - the books will have lots of sample builds already, and the online tools should be able to knock builds up quite quickly too.

I think the one thing that annoyed the most was that I couldn't use certain types of weapons until I acquired a feat with that weapon. I don't have a problem with a feat that gives you a bonus to your use of a weapon, but most weapons in these games could at least be picked up and used by just about anyone, and with a little bit of skill if you had used other similar iteams.
I think that's changed in 4E as well, responding to exactly the same kind of comment as you just gave :p
 
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