PHB Chapters 9-10: Combat and Rituals

Unsurprisingly, combat still takes up a pretty big chunk of the Player’s Handbook. It’s a pretty big part of the game. In fact, it’s a 30-page chunk as opposed to the 27 pages 3.5e took.

That’s somewhat misleading because of the format changes, though. Larger type and better use of whitespace means there’s less raw text to wade through. Sections are either missing entirely (positive and negative energy, which is now simply expressed in Channel Divinity powers) or vastly simplified (attacks of opportunity, grappling).

There are no more full-round actions. Every character gets one standard action, one move action, and one minor action on his turn. Some powers offer additional actions, and there are still free actions, but for the most part, one-one-one. A character who wants to can use a “lesser” action in place of a “greater” one — a minor action instead of a move, a move action instead of a standard.

The chapter explains some of the basics — how melee, ranged, and area attacks work, what the defenses mean, how a “wall” is different from a “burst”. There are just three areas of effect, in fact: the wall, a contiguous line of squares; the burst, a radius of squares around its origin point; and the blast, a square area adjacent to its point of origin.

Conditions are touched on, and there are still quite a lot of them. Everything from surprised and prone to slowed and blinded to helpless and dying. There’s no more ethereal and incorporeal; now it’s one condition called insubstantial, and insubstantial creatures just take half damage from everything. (There’s still a feat to allow a character’s force effects to do full damage.)

Critical hits happen whenever you roll a natural 20 to hit, unless you couldn’t normally hit that creature and only hit because of the “auto-hit on 20″ rule. In which case it’s just a regular hit. A crit means maximum damage with that attack, and possibly some bonus dice of damage. (Almost always, in fact, after the first level or two; all magical weapons add extra damage dice on a crit.)

Flanking, stuns, distraction, surprise, and many other situations now cause the victim to grant combat advantage to the target. That’s a +2 bonus to attack rolls against that target, and if you’re a rogue, you can sneak attack them. Feinting is a once-per-encounter Bluff check; if it succeeds, you gain combat advantage. Pretty elegant, all things considered. There are two types of cover (regular and superior) and two types of concealment (regular and total), similar to 3.5e.

Some of the actions of 3.5e are gone in 4e. Disarm and trip no longer exist as standard maneuvers; there are powers that knock the target prone, though. (I didn’t see any powers that disarm, come to think of it. This seems like a likely addition for the fighter or rogue, at some point.) Bull rush is still here, but simpler. Grappling is completely revamped and now called grab; it’s a strength attack vs. Reflex, and if you hit, the target is immobilized until they manage to escape, or until you’re stunned, dazed, or something similar. A very welcome change to the dice-rolling nightmare that was grappling.

A couple of pages deal with movement and forced movement. The five-foot step has been replaced by shifting, a move action that moves one square but doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks; some powers allow for shifting greater distances, making for battlefield mobility. Teleporting is a lot more common in this edition. Moving around and forcing enemies to move around is also more common, and appears to be key to winning a battle.

Unfortunately, all of this means that a map of some sort is pretty much required to play through combat now. The tactical aspects are front and center. With 3e, it could be pretty difficult to play out an encounter entirely in your head, but in 4e, it’s no longer really a viable option. You’d lose too much of the pushing, pulling, shifting, and other forms of moving that now characterize combat. It might be possible to play out a combat that way, but a lot of the flavor would be lost, and it’d probably devolve to dice-rolling and hit-point-trading.

So I may need to invest in a good wet-erase battlemat, or something. Maybe a decent-sized whiteboard with a printed grid. I won’t mind this so much, provided the combat is interesting. If it’s not, though, that’s a pretty big negative for the game to be saddled with. Fortunately, my Skybreaker GM already has a suitable reusable map surface, and my group already has miniatures or markers. (Rant about the D&D minis forthcoming at some point, though. Fair warning.)

Moving on.

Rituals are what they’re now calling those old specific-purpose spells that were rarely memorized, but crucial to a certain adventure. Scrying spells, wizard eye, enchant an item, water breathing, make whole, comprehend languages… all of these are now castable by taking a feat and acquiring the ritual spell. (Clerics and wizards get Ritual Caster as a bonus feat.)

Rituals tend to take 10 minutes to an hour to cast, which makes them not useful in encounters. They might last anywhere from an hour on up. Oh, and they mostly require a ritual skill check (mostly Arcane or Religion, but also things like Heal and Nature). They also all cost gold. 10 minutes of casting time and 20g per hour of water walk, please, thank you.

That last aspect of rituals kind of kills them for me. I don’t see any need for them to be a huge money sink. Things like raise dead should be fairly available to mid-to-high-level characters, even if death is rarer in 4e. And I’m not sure it will be, at high levels, although it clearly is at lower levels.

I’ll probably just house-rule the gold costs. For spells like water walk, the time is the biggest resource expenditure; if they can take the 10 minutes, I really don’t need to take 20g from my group. On the other hand, something like true portal, which plot-devices a teleport to anywhere, no matter how far away, should be pretty expensive.

Aside from the gold costs, I do like the separation of non-combat magic (rituals) from combat spells (powers). It lets (in fact, makes) the wizard and cleric load up on in-combat spells — healing, damage, control, utility — and still lets them cast those important-to-the-module spells when they need to. And if the group lacks a cleric or wizard, someone else can pick up the feat and fill the role.

Artwork: The combat chapter’s splash page is intriguing, but it’s got some odd angles going on, so it looks a bit strange at first glance. There are only three flavor pieces of artwork in the chapter, but all are nicely done and evocative. More importantly, the graphics illustrating aspects of combat such as areas of effect and clear vs. blocked sight are all clear and well-positioned on the page.

The rituals splash page is simply amazing. Fun things going on, and it clearly conveys the tension of the situation. The perspective is a bit strange again, though — the picture seems slanted. This time it’s a good use of a visual trick to make the viewer feel something’s wrong, though. There are a couple other pieces of art sprinkled through, mostly solid work. The tiefling on page 313 looks goofy, though. Since the picture’s meant to illustrate Tenser’s floating disk, I suppose it achieves its goal; I just wish there were more non-silly-looking tieflings about. Ah, well. Maybe it’s me.

And that’s about it for the PHB. Final thoughts: I like the way the chapter “tab” moves down the page, making it reasonably easy to just open the book to the right chapter. The index, at a mere page, could probably stand to be longer and more thorough. However, the book’s laid out well enough that this isn’t a huge issue. A little more irritating is the lack of a glossary; this is one thing 3e did well, and to see it completely absent from 4e is a letdown. Finally, including a character sheet is nice, but I’ll probably just keep making my own. Yay, word processing.

PHB Chapters 7-8: Equipment and Adventuring

Chapter 7 finishes off character creation with equipment. Armor has been simplified to six types plus shields, now: three light armors (cloth, leather, and hide) and three heavy armors (chainmail, scale, and plate). Shields come in either light or heavy, but no tower shields. A character gets his intelligence or dexterity modifier added to his Armor Class only if he’s wearing light armor, while heavy armor provides a bigger inherent armor bonus. Heavy armor gives a -1 square speed penalty, and chain and plate give a -1 and -2, respectively, to any strength, dexterity, or constitution-based skill checks. A heavy shield also gives a -2; it’s not clear whether this stacks, but I’m guessing it doesn’t. Shields add to both Armor Class and Reflex Defense.

Each armor has two more advanced, “masterwork” versions, which come only in magical varieties and represent higher-level items. So while scale armor has an armor bonus of +7, wyrmscale has a +10 (not counting the +4 or greater enhancement bonus it also has to have), and elderscale has a +13 (again, not counting the +6 enhancement bonus). Light armors go up +1 per tier, heavy armors +3. There are no masterwork shields, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to see them in a future book.

There’s a smaller selection of weapons. The iconic ones all seem to be here, plus a few oddballs like the sickle and war pick. Most of the polearms, monk weapons, and esoteric weapons (kukri, anyone?) are gone. The spiked chain is still here, for some reason, but it seems to be a poor choice now that disarm and trip aren’t standard combat maneuvers.

Weapons are divided into simple, military, and “superior” weapons, mirroring the old simple/martial/exotic. I’m not sure most of the superior weapons deserve the label — the spiked chain especially seems rather weak — but okay.

Loading a crossbow is now a minor action, so you can move, load, and still fire. Very nice change.

Small characters no longer use lower-damage versions of weapons. They just can’t use two-handed weapons, and have to use “versatile” one-handed weapons (which medium characters can use in two hands for a +1 damage bonus) with two hands without getting the bonus. Life’s still not easy for halfling fighters, but it’s no longer quite so bad. They’ll just have to stick with the scimitar for a decent-damage one-handed weapon. Or invest in the rapier.

Lerge creatures still use larger weapons. I assume this is partly because player characters aren’t expected to be Large or bigger. It’s mostly the GM’s to worry about, and the Monster Manual probably already includes the bigger weapons in its stat blocks.

The list of adventuring gear is smaller now — no more fifteen kinds of clothing or 2-copper frying pans listed. A bunch of the useful miscellaneous stuff most people wrote down on their character sheets has been collected in a “standard adventurer’s kit” — a backpack, bedroll, flint and steel, some rope, and so on. That’ll make character creation quicker. It gives a 1 sp discount over buying all the items separately. I find that amusing for some reason.

There’s a brief table for food, drink, and lodging, and another for mounts or transport — a sailing ship can be yours for only 10,000 gold.

Then there’s the best part of the chapter: the encumbrance rules take up about a quarter-page, and they explicitly say “The amount you carry should rarely be an issue, and you don’t need to calculate the weight your character is hauling around unless it’s likely to matter.” Yes! No more encumbrance bookkeeping.

Magic items are now found in the Player’s Handbook, and the chapter ends by presenting a basic selection of them. Prices are standardized based on the level of the item, but they use an exponential scale that ends up costing quite a lot for marginal increases in effectiveness at high level. A +1 barkskin armor at level 5 costs 1,000 gp, while a +2 at level 10 costs 5,000, a +5 at level 25 costs 625,000, and a +6 at level 30 costs 3,125,000. Two and a half million gold for an extra +1 seems like a bit much. We’ll see how it works in play, though.

You can now identify a magic item by taking a short rest (5 minutes). Cursed, unique, and artifact items might take anything from an Arcana check to a quest — giving GMs an out — but basic items? 5 minutes. Initially, I didn’t like this, but after considering it, I think it does make things easier. “I hit AC 25, plus whatever bonus this sword gives me” can be fun for a while, but the uncertainty stops being dramatic and starts being annoying pretty quickly. I might house-rule it to requiring an extended rest instead of a short one, but I think I’ll keep the idea.

Magic items are laid out in nice stat blocks, and 10-20 of each type seem to be provided — except potions, where only four are offered, and they’re all varieties of healing potion. Bleah. Well, we’ll see more of those, I’m sure, and it’s not as though potions are hard to come up with.

Chapter 8 introduces the ways your new character ties into the game world. Quests and quest rewards are more codified now, though most of the information related to them is found in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Noncombat encounters — “skill challenges” — are mentioned, but most of that is also in the DMG. Experience and treasure are touched on, along with milestones — a new mechanic where a character gains an action point (and some of his magic items become more powerful) after facing two encounters without a rest. This gives players a little boost when their resources have begun to run low, and lets them keep adventuring a little bit longer. I like it.

The rest of the chapter deals with overland movement, terrain, light and vision, breaking objects, and resting and recovery. Nothing seems vastly different here, although the rules are again simplified. Light breaks down into bright light, dim light, and darkness, for instance. There are no rules for forced marches and exhaustion. There’s no object hardness and hp. Some might lament these omissions; I rarely used those rules, though.

Artwork: Chapter 7′s splash page is beautiful. Very atmospheric. The chapter contains the usual illustrations of weapons, armor, and objects — the spiked chain looks a lot less ridiculous than its 3e counterpart. Most of the others are character pieces featuring various magic items, which range from a little odd (the dragonborn on page 235 seems to be levitating his spear… maybe it’s supposed to be a dodge, though) to nice flavor pieces (the rogue on page 234 with the dagger, leaping to attack, or the flying carpet and rider on page 254). Chapter 8′s splash page is another impressive, I-want-to-jump-into-a-game-now piece; there’s only one other piece of art in the short chapter, beneath the Quests header, but it’s likewise a nicely styled and atmospheric one.

On the whole, I’m pretty favorably impressed with the artwork this edition.

Skybreaker

That’s the name of the test campaign we’re running for 4e. Skybreaker. Our GM, Ron, loves obscure single-word names, but I’ll admit that it sounds intriguing. (I may not have much room to talk, though; my last GMed game was “A Plague of Angels.”)

We spent the first session creating characters and establishing a basic background. For the sake of simplicity, we agreed that the party had come together at some point in the past, and that we’d all traveled to the initial setting, the mining town of White Haven, because of rumors that a recent mine disaster was something more than just a typical collapse — that the miners had uncovered something meant to be kept hidden. Supporting this evidence was the influx of monsters into the area; it had had occasional problems with goblins and the like in the past, but now things were getting dangerous. The campaign will open with the party on the mountain road outside of White Haven. It’s up to us to decide where to go from there.

I often end up GMing, so it’s nice to have the chance to play.

I was tempted by the warlock, but I’m also one of those odd people who enjoys playing a cleric, so I decided to go with a cleric of the Raven Queen. We’re also using the standard array for stats, and no house rules. All of the core races are available.

This is what I ended up with:

Rodrik the White, human cleric of the Raven Queen

Strength 14, Dexterity 11, Constitution 12, Intelligence 10, Wisdom 18, Charisma 13

Hit Points 24 (bloodied 12)

Healing Surges: 8 per day, for 6 hp each

Defenses: AC 16, Fortitude 13, Reflex 11, Will 17

Alignment: Unaligned

Proficiencies: simple melee weapons, simple ranged weapons, cloth, leather, hide, chainmail

Skills: Arcana (Int), Diplomacy (Cha), History (Int), Insight (Wis), Religion (Int)

Feats: Action Surge (+3 to attack rolls during any action gained by spending an action point), Raven Queen’s Blessing (new power), Ritual Caster (cleric bonus feat)

Rituals: Comprehend Language, Gentle Repose

Equipment: Chainmail (+6 armor bonus, -1 check, -1 speed, 40#), scythe (+2 prof., 2d4 damage, 10#), standard adventurers’ kit (33#), holy symbol (1#), ritual book (3#), 30 gp

(Carrying: 86#; normal load: 140#; heavy load: 280#; max. drag or push: 700#)

Powers:

Channel Divinity: Divine Fortune (free, encounter, personal, +1 bonus to next attack roll or saving throw before end of next turn)

Channel Divinity: Turn Undead (standard, encounter, close burst 2, Wisdom attack vs. Will; hit: 1d10+4 radiant damage, push 3 squares, and immobilize until end of next turn; miss: half damage and no push or immobilize)

Healing Word (minor, twice per encounter, close burst 5; target can spend a healing surge and gains 1d6 additional hp)

Lance of Faith (standard, at-will, ranged 5, Wisdom attack vs. Reflex; hit: 1d8+4 radiant damage, and one ally in sight gains +2 power bonus to next attack against that target)

Priest’s Shield (standard, at-will, melee, Strength vs. AC; hit: 2d4+2, I and one adjacent ally gain +1 power bonus to AC until end of next turn)

Sacred Flame (standard, at-will, ranged 5, Wisdom attack vs. Reflex; hit: 1d6+4 radiant damage, and one ally in sight gains 1 temporary hp or can make a saving throw)

Cause Fear (standard, encounter, ranged 10, Wisdom attack vs. Will; hit: target moves its speed + 1 square away from me, avoiding unsafe or difficult terrain if it can — this movement provokes opportunity attacks)

Cascade of Light (standard, daily, ranged 10, Wisdom attack vs. Will; hit: 3d8+4 radiant damage and target gains vulnerability 5 to all my attacks; miss: half damage, no vulnerability)

Raven Queen’s Blessing (free, encounter, ranged 10; when my attack drops an enemy to 0 hp or fewer, I or an ally within 5 squares of that enemy can spend a healing surge)
That took about 20 minutes to work up, mainly because I’m not familiar with the new character creation system yet. I was pleasantly surprised to find the new encumbrance system takes up only about half a column, and it includes this note: “The amount you carry should rarely be an issue, and you don’t need to calculate the amount your character is hauling around unless it’s likely to matter.” Goodbye, encumbrance bookkeeping. You won’t be missed. (Hell, most of us never did it in the first place, I’d wager…)

Rodrik’s background is still a little sketchy, since the world’s history isn’t exactly filled in yet. But the basic story is that he came from Durinhal, the last bastion of civilization amid the trackless northern wastes. A land where winter holds sway for most of the year, and the goddess of winter is, accordingly, among the most popularly worshipped deities. Rodrik’s parents were both ordained in the Raven Queen’s service, and he followed in their footsteps, displaying at an early age the talent for channeling divine power.

Before he showed his talent, he was a quiet boy, an earnest if not particularly gifted scholar, more often to be found reading a book from the temple’s libraries than anything else. When he became an acolyte, the power changed him. He became more confident and more assertive, though he retained his love of reading. While the northmen are stereotyped as grim, Rodrik is typically lighthearted, quick with a laugh or a quip. Those who meet him are often surprised to learn of his devotion to the death goddess.

This is not to say that he takes his devotion lightly. He feels free to carouse, to laugh, to joke in the face of danger precisely because of that devotion. The Raven Queen teaches that death is the natural end of life, and Rodrik has accepted that his fate lies there — and so he sees no purpose in obsessing over an inevitable end, or in avoiding what pleasures he can find along the way. His cheerful disposition reflects his philosophy, and rarely does it crack. Only when faced with the undead does he radiate the grim purpose most expect to see in a cleric of the goddess of death.

Rodrik earned his styling “the White” from his hair, which turned shock-white when first he channeled divine magic. He’s since developed a preference for the color — his armor is enameled in white, his cloak is of heavy white wool trimmed with white fur, his clothing is white with only accents of color. Even the handle of the scythe he bears as a weapon is shaped from a bleached white wood. Only the black raven’s-head symbol of his deity diverges strongly from the color scheme.

PHB Chapters 5-6: Skills and Feats

The somewhat-complicated skill rules from third edition have been simplified and pared down to around 10 pages in 4e. The basic check vs. DC mechanic is still intact, but the basic assumptions of the system are entirely different.

To begin with, there are no skill points or skill ranks. Training in a skill gets you a +5 bonus to checks using that skill, and, depending on the skill, it might allow you to attempt to use a skill in certain ways that untrained people can’t. Anyone can use the Arcana skill untrained to attempt to identify a magical effect, but only someone trained can use it to detect magic. (Yep, detect magic is a skill now.)

There are still class skills; each class offers a list, from which so many skills can be trained. There’s a feat called Skill Training that, unsurprisingly, allows you to train in an extra skill, even if it’s not a class skill.

All skills now get better as a character levels up; half the character’s level is added to the die roll on each skill check. This means that, even at high levels, a character has a chance of succeeding with an untrained skill check. This is my favorite change to the system so far. In 3e, at any but the lowest level, an untrained roll had no chance of success if the check DC was high enough to challenge those party members who’d actually trained — and if it was low enough to give the untrained a chance, anyone trained would basically automatically succeed. Characters basically had to specialize in order to keep up with the increasing DCs, and then their skills put them into a box where they were only good at X, Y, and Z. This became particularly painful with things like Spot and Listen, where anything hoping to hide from the ranger or rogue had to basically be invisible to the untrained party members.

In 4e, skill checks are still a good bit easier with training, thanks to that +5, but an untrained check is no longer an automatic failure.

A further help is the way skills have been compressed. A few very useful skills, like Diplomacy and Bluff, remain more or less intact. Others have been combined, so that the three “notice something” skills (Search, Spot, and Listen) are now encapsulated into Perception. All told there are 17 skills. On the whole, I like the spread of options; the only thing I’m not certain of is the decision to leave out a Craft/Profession skill. To a large extent, that could be worked into the character’s background, though — if the fighter wants to have been an apprentice blacksmith, I can handwave it and let him roleplay things like making a new sword instead of buying one, or repairing his own armor. I’ll have to consider whether to house-rule Profession back in.

The skill write-ups are brief, but pretty decent for the most part. Diplomacy, though, gets a mere two paragraphs, without even a table of sample DCs. That could have been handled a little better. I’m pretty sure the Dungeon Master’s Guide will offer more information about it, though.

Feats get about 20 pages. There are a lot of them, but they’re written up in terse stat blocks, without a lot of flavor text or lengthy descriptions — just the name, prerequisites, and effect of each feat. There are race- and class-based feats along with general feats, and there are feats provided for each of the three tiers.

Heroic feats tend, naturally, to be smaller stuff. A new proficiency, an extra trained skill, a +1 or +2 bonus to a check or roll, a little extra damage with a specific type of attack. Improved Initiative, Power Attack, Mounted Combat, Skill Focus, Toughness. Weapon Focus is here, but it’s now a +1 damage bonus (increasing to +2 at 11th level and +3 at 21st). There’s a decent selection. Many of the feats seem underpowered compared to their 3e counterparts, but it’s also true that a 4e character will get many more feats as they level up than most 3e characters. Also, several of the old 3e feats are now class powers. My gut instinct is that things will balance out.

Paragon feats are a little stronger. The ability to roll twice on certain checks and choose the higher result, for instance, or an extra +1 to AC from a given type of armor, or +2 to a specific defense, or a damage increase, or a +1 square bonus to movement speed. Evasion and Mettle are feats in this tier, as are Uncanny Dodge and Spell Focus. On the whole, these feats look to be about equal to the average 3e feats.

Epic feats are pretty limited. About 1/3 of them are simply Improved Critical with a certain weapon type; other feats allow the character to ignore the extra cost of difficult terrain when moving, to regain use of an encounter power following a critical hit, and to spend an action point to recover use of a daily spell. Blind-Fight is here, too, and quite powerful now — anything adjacent to you doesn’t gain any benefit from concealment or invisibility. There are some nice options; I just wish there were more of them.

The chapter ends with a two-page section dealing with multiclassing, which is achieved through feats in 4e. A character selects one of eight feats (one per class), to which the prerequisite is a score of 13 in that class’s primary attribute. (Exceptions: The ranger feat requires a 13 in either strength or dexterity; the paladin feat requires a 13 in both strength and charisma.) You gain training in one skill, plus the ability to use a specific class feature on either a daily or per-encounter basis. Further feats allow the swapping of known encounter, utility, and daily powers for powers from that class. If you take all four feats, then instead of choosing a paragon path, you can choose to keep gaining powers from your multiclass.

This is not necessarily a bad idea, but there are some flaws. For instance, a multiclass cleric learns the Religion skill and gains a daily use of the cleric’s healing word power. (And also gains the ability to use a holy symbol as an implement, a trait of clerics.) But he can’t Channel Divinity, which means no turning undead, and no choosing most, if not all, of the cleric-specific feats.

Also, the warlock multiclass feat allows pursuing the warlock paragon path, but the multiclass rules seem to disallow choosing a paragon path. On further inspection, it turns out that choosing a multiclass feat allows a character to pursue that class’s paragon path, but it threw me a little at first.  Part of the reason is the “multiclass paragon path” — the ability to keep switching out powers that I mentioned above, instead of taking an actual path.  Initially, I’d read it as forbidding a regular paragon path altogether, which, fortunately, is not the case.

I’ll have to see how this works out in play, but my first impression isn’t favorable. Multiclassing’s always been a little broken in D&D, in one way or another, but I was hoping for something better. It’s possible that just opening up the feats a little, to allow a choice of a class feature from the secondary class instead of a specific one, might work, but without seeing it in play, there’s no way of knowing.

Artwork: The splash page for skills is pretty neat; I laughed because it reminded me of some of the overkill deathtraps I ran into in previous editions. (It’s nothing on the Tomb of Horrors’ sphere of annihilation, though.) There’s a nice half-page piece on page 184, illustrating a diplomatic situation, and one on page 187 that might indicate both Nature and Perception (which are explained on the previous pages). The one on page 189, illustrating Stealth, is too murky for my tastes… but considering the topic, I guess that’s not too surprising. The feats chapter has quite a bit of nice art, from the splash page battle against undead — and I love the way the purple sky looks there, it really gives the scene a dark, eerie feel — to the smaller action scenes scattered throughout the chapter. There’s some nice work here, the kind that makes me want to jump into a game.

PHB chapter 4: Classes

This is a massive chapter. It takes up about half the book. The main reason for this: Everything about a class is located right in the section for that class. All the powers are there — no more flipping to the back of the book for spells.

Except, you know, for rituals. Which has a separate chapter at… the back of the book. I’m not sure I grasp the logic here. Putting the combat abilities in their respective classes’ sections was a good thing; why not put the rituals there, too, even if it’s in a separate section tacked on after the powers? I’m guessing it’s because there’d be some overlap, and they only want to print each one once, and with no “See the cleric ritual of the same name” messages. Still… it’s a bit strange to segregate the rituals this way.

The saving grace is that rituals won’t be used nearly as often as powers, so having them off by themselves in a separate chapter isn’t really too bad.

As to the classes themselves… they’re laid out pretty nicely, really. Each gets a splash page with basic game mechanics info in a shaded box for quick reference. The rest of the page is filled with some flavor text to give a new player an idea of the concept the class embodies. (Sure, “fighter” is pretty clear, but it’s somewhat useful to distinguish between “warlock” and “wizard”, for instance.) There’s a blurb about creating a member of the class, which encapsulates the primary build options (two per class, usually) and the primary characteristics of the class, followed by some deeper inspection of both the build options. Following all of which, the book introduces the class features and leads into the long list of powers.

It’s a convenient layout. Classes seem less flexible than I’d hoped, though. Most classes have only four discretionary at-will powers to choose from, for instance — and it’s almost always two suited to each of the builds. Clerics, for instance, can be battle clerics, focused on smiting the infidel, or devoted clerics, focused on supporting the… fidel. Or at least the rest of their party.

This will no doubt be helpful to new players. The sample builds will offer some guidance as to how the character can develop, and it’s pretty easy to pick powers that are suited to those builds.

It’s not hard to mix-and-match, either, mind you. But the options are limited. You’ll have two of only four possible at-will powers at first level. (Unless you’re a wizard; wizards get five options.) The human’s extra at-will power isn’t a big bonus, in this light — they get three of the four (or five), which offers them one more option, but usually one that’s counterpoint to the focus of their build.

I imagine that new powers will proliferate in sourcebooks, sort of like feats did for 3e/3.5e. It shouldn’t be hard at all for an experienced GM to introduce some more options, but that GM will need to keep an eye on balance.

Which brings up another point: powers that cause significant “bad status” are scarce. Most powers are focused around hit point damage or healing hit point damage. There’s a lot of causing yourself or others to move around the battlefield. There are a couple of sort-of-common effects like immobilize, continuing damage-over-time, or daze. But things like stun, charm, paralysis, petrification, and instant death are very rare. The ones that do exist are mostly in the daily power category.

I’m honestly split on that. Nobody likes “save or die,” at least not when they’re the ones doing the saving. But it seems as though there’s a lot less opportunity to play the manipulative enchanter type, or the pacifist cleric who takes care of enemies using spells like hold person and sanctuary. I’ll reserve judgement until I play it, but the absence makes me a bit wary.

On the plus side, everyone in the party can do cool things now. There won’t be a situation where the fighter says “I swing my sword… again… for the 20th time” while the wizard is calling down fire, summoning a horde of elementals, petrifying the enemy, and so forth. They’re on a much more even keel now. The wizard’s still ahead in pure damage, especially area damage, but the fighter’s got many powers of his own to help shape the battlefield. Long overdue.

I still miss the monk. The eight classes that are represented do cover a lot of bases, though.

The paragon paths for each class are relatively well done.  Each gets three or four paths fleshed out, and I’m certain we’ll be seeing more.  Most of the paths presented are fairly obvious general-use ones, though one might question a few of the choices.  (Did fighters really need both kensai and swordmaster paths, as opposed to, well, something other than “master of X weapon”?)  I have no major issues with them, though.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for epic destinies.  This section reads like a pre-alpha document — there are some cool ideas here, but they’re not well explained, and their implementation seems lacking.  The options presented are less than exciting, too; sure, archmage and demigod are old standbys, but they don’t seem… well, powerful.  The trickster option is a decent one, but it doesn’t seem entirely fleshed-out, either.  And the fourth option, for all you fighter-types, is “guy who’s still searching for his epic destiny.”  I’m not making that up.  As a power, you get the weaker powers of any of the three other paths.  Bleah.  They couldn’t have spent two seconds on “Dynast-king” or “Leader of a Barbarian Horde” or “Grandmaster Basket Weaver”?  (And I’d seriously rather be a grandmaster basket weaver than an also-ran… sorry, “eternal seeker.”)

Basically, I think the epic destinies section just needed more than 3 pages devoted to it.  Hopefully it’ll get some more attention somewhere.  I’ll definitely need to do some work in this area myself, if I plan to run games beyond 20th level.

Artwork: The splash page featuring the party of adventurers against the white dragon is just gorgeous. Makes me want to jump into a game right now. Each class gets a portrait on its own section’s introduction; these range from pretty decent (cleric) to deeply evocative (paladin, ranger). The tiefling warlock doesn’t look silly, either. There are smaller pieces scattered through the powers sections, about one piece per class; these are mostly pretty good, although the spear thrower on page 153 looks distractingly wrong to me.

Looks like the art’s going to continue to follow the more traditional fantasy style, rather than the dungeonpunk look 3.5e boasted. I didn’t mind the art in 3.5, but I prefer the 4e style.