Last week the University Bookstore had an author signing event with Mark Ferrari for The Book of Joby. It isn’t too often that my name is in a book, let alone the title. Latter I found out that the author is a friend of a friend of one of my friends: Jeannie. The author, of course, had no idea about my existence when writing the book, but it is still an interesting coincidence (or perhaps the Force at work…). I didn’t attend the signing event because of our Friday D&D game, but Jeannie did.
Last night when Aly came home from Jeannie’s birthday event, she handed me a gift from Jeannie. She had purchased a copy of The Book of Joby, and the author signed it with:
To Joby…
(Wow! It’s so weird to be writing to you!)
Enjoy!
Mark Ferrari
8/24/2007
Thanks Jeannie, that was very nice. I’ll write a full review when I finish it, but I did enjoy the first chapter (PDF).
The first article previewing 4E is a short piece on the fighter. Despite the horrible theoretical dialog (“He’s sword and board, man.”), there are some good hints about the current planning for the 4E Fighter.
Yeah. I thought about going high Con and using a hammer, but I wanted to start with the chance to make a couple of attacks, so I’m using rain of blows as my good weapon attack, and I went with high Wis so that I can switch to the better oppy powers later.
My elf fighter uses a spear. I like the speed and the option to go past AC.
So a fighter’s special attacks/abilities are going to be based on which weapon they use, exactly what mechanism that is used (be it feats, maneuvers, or talent trees) is unknown, but this is a much needed improvement to the fighter that should help balance the fighter compared to the spellcasting classes and also add some great flavor. I also like the idea because different weapons lend themselves to very different fighting styles. For example, to successfully fight with an axe you need to stay on the attack the entire time. With a flail, you must keep the weapon moving until you have an opening to strike. A sabre or scimitar lends itself to wearing an enemy down with disabling cuts before the final blow.
I just hope the “sword and board” and “oppy powers” language vanishes quickly. I hate dialog that is supposed to be between two people with an intelligence of less than 6.
UPDATE: Playability and Speed
Jon brings up a good point that I was going to wait until later to address, but since he brought the issues of playability and speed up. In other tidbits, Wizards has mentioned that ease of play and speed of play are two items that they will be focusing on. The grappling rules have been specifically mentioned as a rule set that was reworked to be easier to understand and quicker to resolve. Another target is the iterative attacks that all players get as they increase in level. For example an 11th level fighter (or equiv) gets 3 attacks in a full action. And if the improved two-weapon fighting and greater tw0-weapon fighting feats are added, he’s up to 6 attacks in a full action. So a fighter ends up spending each turn doing one of two things: move and attack; or multiple attacks.
Continuing the example take an 11th level ranger (two weapon fighting path) with a two-bladed sword. In a full attack, he has 6 attacks, and with his keen edges there is a ~10% chance he’ll have to confirm a critical on each roll. We’ll assume our ranger got one potential criticals and that confirmed. So we’re up to 7 d20 rolls with 3 different attack bonus levels (base, -5, -10). At 11th level it is highly likely that those attacks were successful — we’ll use 4 hits (including 1 critical), so for damage he’ll have to roll 5d8’s for damage and only 2 of those are part of a single attack. With all of this math and rolling, if he was attacking a creature with DR 10 that the ranger could not bypass, it is very likely he did no damage. To be effective, our ranger really needs a magically enhanced weapon.
Conversely, some per-encounter powers that the player understands can simplify play. Most of the maneuvers from the Tome of Battle, gave you a very limited set of powers such as: overcome damage reduction, do some additional damage, or a special attack. This can mean that you only make one attack, but the damage done is considerable — and you can do this in a standard action rather than relying on a full attack action. When I played my swordsage (who died at a low level because I was too aggressive with him), I had 3×5 cards with each of my powers and it was easy to select, execute, and discard.
On Jon’s final point about Splat (rules) vs. Fluff (descriptive text) books, it is hard to strike a balance. Producing too much fluff can be dangerous as well, because their text becomes canonical and can invalidate the campaigns that inventive DMs have created within a World. So that rather than advancing the story of a world, game publishers tend to fully describe a point in time and then jump forward (5-50 years) to cover a new event in the world with rich detail.
At Gen Con last week Wizards of the Coast announced that they will be releasing the fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons in the Spring/Summer of 2008. The announcement was, of course, accompanied with the regular complaining about Wizards. They are either ruining the game, demonstrating their avarice, or both. I am cautiously optimistic for the following reasons:
1) Third Edition was a vast improvement on Second Edition. Second Edition was an attempt to consolidate classes and rules into generics that could be easily specialized, but there was not sufficient organization and frameworking to allow this to be an easy or regular process. Third Edition (with all of it’s currently obvious warts) was a massive improvement. The design goal of simplification and standardization dramatically eased starting play and allowed for a framework that helped keep game extensions fairly sane.
2) Some of the recent innovative rules books (not the more generic stuff) have included some very good alternate mechanics that improve the game. This includes the Tome of Battle, Tome of Magic (I really like the mechanics of the Truenamer), and the Star Wars Saga Edition.
3) The deliberate manner in which Wizards has approached the Magic Items Compendium and the Monster Manual V (and seems to be approaching 4E) demonstrates a concern for simplifying management while enhancing playability.
We’ll see as Wizards slowly releases more information about the forthcoming Fourth Edition.
So I haven’t posted in … 2 months… well I’ve been busy working, building a garage, and more. I’ll try to get back in the habit of posting (instead of just thinking about posting).