Review: Martial Power
I’d been looking forward to Martial Power, the fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons supplement for martial characters, for some time. Happily, Amazon got it to me a day early, so I’m able to review it. Does it meet expectations? I obviously haven’t been able to play with the new content yet, so this is based on just a reading, but my initial reaction is: Yes, mostly.
Wizards of the Coast, like TSR before them, has a history of putting out player-oriented supplements in large numbers. Generally these are broken down by class “groupings” — so we have the Complete Priest’s Handbook, covering second-edition clerics, specialty priests and druids, or the Complete Arcane, covering third-edition arcane spellcasters, including wizards, sorcerers, and warlocks. Martial Power follows in that tradition. Its content is oriented, not surprisingly, toward the four classes that employ the martial power source: fighters, rangers, rogues, and warlords.
These lines of supplements have one other thing in common: their quality was always variable, and their content best taken by the GM with a grain of salt. While I’d put Martial Power pretty high on the quality scale, at least on first glance, I did take note of a couple of things that might warrant some GM attention.
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Barbarians at the Gates
Wizards of the Coast released the barbarian playtest article in Dragon a couple of days ago. This was originally scheduled for September, then pushed back a month. As of this writing, it’s still free, but it’s scheduled to switch to Insider subscribers only at some undefined time this month, so hurry and grab it if you want it. (Edit: Apparently it’s going to remain free. Good news! It really is a terrific article.)
The class is rather interesting. It’s another striker, this time based on the primal power source — they draw on animal and nature spirits. Purists might not care for that flavor, but I rather like it.
Barbarians are quite tough for strikers — they have as many hit points as fighters, and only one fewer healing surge. However, they’re a little squishy. They have proficiencies in only light armor, and neither Dexterity nor Intelligence is a primary stat for them, meaning their armor class will be relatively low. Mitigating that, many of their abilities grant them temporary hit points, making them even more damage-absorbent.
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Dread: Worst Mechanic Ever?
This one needs a little background. A little over a week ago, while reading d20 Blonde, I came across mention of a horror role-playing game called Dread, which featured a unique mechanic: task resolution by playing Jenga. (Not to be confused with the other horror role-playing game Dread, which uses 2d12, and which was published several years prior to this Dread.) (Edit: Some further digging reveals that, while the other Dread was published first, this Dread seems to have been created and used for convention play first. Not that this matters much, really — just for the sake of accuracy.)
My immediate reaction was not favorable:
A Jenga tower? Really? That’s got to be the worst mechanic I’ve ever heard of. Nothing like killing a character because the player is physically clumsy… or has a nerve-related ailment.
This was, however, apparently a unique reaction. One of the responses put it this way:
The threat of the tower falling (even if you’ve got shaky hands!) is part of what builds the tension in the game… In fact, as the tower grows and become more precarious, you’ll see the players physically scoot back from the table because, even if you accidentally knock the tower reaching for a drink, you’re [sic.] PC bites it.
As the story progresses, the danger of dying increases with each pull… and the atmosphere grows more and more intense. It’s a beautiful thing.
Additionally, I received several admonishments not to judge the game without playing it. Well, fair enough. I decided to see whether my group would be interested in trying a game, using the quickstart rules available on the website. They were.
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Quick Looks: Adventurer’s Vault, Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide
I had the opportunity the other day to look over two new Dungeons & Dragons supplements: The Adventurer’s Vault
The Vault is the easier of the two to discuss: it’s a book filled with almost nothing but tables. Tables of weapons, tables of armor, tables of mounts, and, of course, many, many, many tables of magical items. Some of the items are new, while others are translated from earlier editions.
Alchemy is reintroduced, using a system similar to the ritual system. I rather like it. It allows access to anyone who studies it, makes getting recipes a valued reward, and offers an easy way to break down the power of a given concoction. I was sort of ambivalent about 3e alchemy, but this version feels better to me.
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Review: Dreaming Cities
Dreaming Cities is subtitled Tri-Stat Urban Fantasy Genre. I’m not a Tri-Stat player or gamemaster, but I picked the book up at Gencon because I have a certain interest in the genre and, frankly, the price was right. If the price is low enough, I’ll often pick up older game books, even for games I have no intention of ever running, simply to mine them for ideas. It’s worth taking the chance.
I’ve been looking it over for the last month, so the time seems about right to review it.
The Book
Dreaming Cities is a 272-page hardcover of standard size. It credits five authors (Jason L. Blair, Jamais Cascio, Phil Masters, Jo Ramsay, and Liz Rich) and was published by the now-defunct Guardians of Order in 2005. It seems very solidly put together, with a nice, heavy cover. It’s a complete game book, containing rules for the Tri-Stat system along with the urban fantasy elements. Its pages are quite packed; there’s very little interior art (and most, if not all, of that in two-page “splashes”, not interspersed with the text). Additionally, the text is printed in a small font size. Tables are reasonably frequent, helping to break up some of the text.
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