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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Forgotten Realms preview

Wizards of the Coast is offering a preview of the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide, which is slated for release in September.  The Living Forgotten Realms campaign is set to kick off at Gencon.  (Thanks to Critical Hits for bringing the link to my attention.)

The preview includes PC drow and genasi races, a peek at the swordmage class, and lists of regional benefits.

Drow are identical to their writeup in the Monster Manual, except that they explicitly count as fey creatures now, whereas before Fey Origin was implicit.  There’s some flavor text and a couple of minor changes in wording to the powers, but no real differences.  They’re going to make scary rogues; either one of their encounter powers gives them combat advantage free for a turn.  (Well, the faerie fire — I mean Darkfire, because everyone knows “dark” is cool — has to hit.  But it gets a nice big bonus, and it gives advantage to the drow’s allies, too.)  It’s probably not a big deal in the end, because rogues can generally set up their sneak attack fairly easily if they try.  But it will definitely help fill in in those situations in which the rogue otherwise might not be able to.  And the Cloud of Darkness power has other applications.

Genasi count as elemental creatures, and they get to choose one of five elemental associations.  (Yes, five.  Fire, water, earth, air, and lightning.  Why lightning?  Beats me.)  Each one offers an encounter power, plus an additional benefit, like water breathing, a bonus to a defense, or an elemental resistance.

There’s apparently going to be a racial feat to allow an extra element to be taken, too, so the genasi can have multiple benefits.  Including multiple encounter powers, as far as I can tell, which worries me a bit.  Some of these powers are quite good.  The water power, for instance, is a move action that lets the character shift their speed, move through enemies, ignore difficult terrain, ignore penalties for squeezing through a tight space, and ignore any damage if they move across something that would normally damage them (like a lava pit).  A lot of that is situational, yes, but the “shift your speed” alone is a pretty amazing encounter power.

Genasi get +2 Strength and +2 Intellect, a pretty weak combination for anything other than the new Swordmage class (but very good for that).  They also get +2 bonuses to Endurance and Nature.  Endurance is a pretty nice bonus to have, with its role in fighting off disease, and the knowledge is a knowledge.  Nice, but situational; maybe very useful in a given campaign, maybe not much more than a nifty parlor trick.

Speaking of the new Swordmage class:  it’s an arcane defender.  I was not expecting that.  The “fighter/wizard” of older games was typically a blasty, striker-ish sort, with the smarter ones being controller-like “save or die” specialists.  (Of course, the really smart ones were straight wizards…)

Their powers so far seem to lean toward the controller, much like paladins lean toward leader and fighters to striker.  They’ve got quite a few area-effects in those early levels, including an at-will that’s a close burst 1.  Their damage seems very respectable.  As for their defending, when they mark something that attacks someone else, they can (depending on which build option they chose) either teleport next to their mark and take a basic attack, or they can reduce the damage the mark inflicts.  That could be an interesting mechanic.

Only the first three levels of powers are in the document, and most of those only offer two powers per level.  Those who choose to create swordmages for the Living campaign will be allowed a free “respec” once the book is officially released, to help compensate.  Any drow or genasi also get one, to allow for taking racial feats that aren’t released yet, and such.

Oh, those regional benefits?  They’re not feats this time around.  You just get to pick one.  Mostly, they add a skill to your class skill list and give you either a small bonus with that skill or a “reroll and take the second roll, even if it’s worse” when using that skill.  A couple go beyond that; there’s one that gives resist 2 to fire, cold, and thunder, for instance (which increases to 3, then to 5 at paragon and epic tiers, respectively).

I could take or leave most of this, but I’m kind of looking forward to the swordmage now.  It looks as if it’ll be a different take on the sword-swinging spell-slinger concept.

Monster Manual

I finally got a chance to look over the third core rulebook for 4e, the Monster Manual.

On the whole, I like it.  At first glance, there seem to be fewer creatures here than in the 3e version, but an actual count shows the numbers are pretty close to even.  And whereas a lot of the 3e creatures were things like normal animals or rarely-used (in most campaigns) aquatic monsters, the 4e book for the most part doesn’t include these.  It also doesn’t include a bunch of templates (those are in the Dungeon Master’s Guide).

What does it include?  Well, most of the iconic monsters I could think of off the bat, from aboleth to zombie.  Beholders, drow, mind flayers, displacer beasts, demons and devils, the Tarrasque and Orcus.  There are a lot of monsters in here that could see wide use in a lot of campaigns.  Less chaff, more substance.

That’s not to say that everything’s here.  There’s no nymph (although there’s a dryad), no centaur, no bullywug, no mephit, no blink dog, no couatl.  There are angels, but nothing that looks like the solar.  There are hill giants and fire giants and storm giants, but no cloud giants or stone giants.  There are dragons, but only the five evil chromatic varieties.  (Although the dragon entry mentions at least twenty-five varieties in five separate families — chromatic, metallic, catastrophic, planar, and scourge.  The catastrophic dragons seem to be the Oriental Adventures sorts, based on earthquakes and typhoons and other natural disasters.  Planar dragons cover the extraplanar equivalents, like shadow, Abyssal, and fey dragons.  And scourge dragons are the linnorms from earlier editions.)

I’ve heard that the designers chose to focus on monsters that were likely to be enemies for the players.  Since the game presumes the players will be generally good-aligned, most of the monsters are evil ones.  This might hold some weight; with the exception of those angels, the only really “good” creature is the unicorn, which is, in 4e, an unaligned fey creature, and whose inclusion might also be explained by the fact that it’s a mount.  (Along the same lines, the riding horse made it in — but oddly, the pegasus didn’t.)

There’s a pretty small number of real animals included.  Riding and warhorses are here, and a couple of animals the party might fight:  a cave bear, a crocodile, and a wolf.  There are some magical, giant, or dire versions around, too:  the above, plus boars and panthers, spiders and scorpions, beetles and the inevitable dire rats.  On the whole, I approve of the decision to use the space for more fantastic threats, but I would have liked at least one or two more:  either a lion or a tiger, and a guard dog.  I can make do with modifying the fey panther for the large cat and the gray wolf for the guard dog, though.

Almost every creature entry offers at least two stat blocks.  The boar entry, for instance, includes a level 6 dire boar and a level 15 thunderfury boar.  This seems helpful.  Many of the humanoids include several different types all around the same level, which is less helpful, but still okay.  There’s no more than one entry to a page, which makes things easy, at the expense of having some wasted space.  The book mostly does a good job of filling this space with artwork, but it does become obvious in places.

Along with the old standbys, the book offers up a couple of new or obscure old creatures.  Things like the boneclaw, the grick, the kruthik, and the shadar-kai.  I find these hit-or-miss.  I’d have preferred some of those things I mentioned above that were left out, honestly, but I suppose I can’t fault Wizards of the Coast for slipping a couple of these in.  It’s still at least as good as the 3e version in my estimation, and far better than the 2e Monstrous Compendium.

There’s an appendix at the end that gives a couple of monster race writeups in a similar vein as the PHB.  There’s also a note that they were balanced as monsters, not as player characters.  And that “[they] can be used as guidelines for creating [PC] versions of these creatures, within reason.”  I do have to recommend that any DM intending to offer them as PCs look things over and make some changes; in particular, the drow darkness ability becomes pretty broken when the drow is a rogue, and any creature with Oversized, which can wield weapons a size larger (which get bigger damage dice, just like in 3e) as though they were its size, has potential issues, especially as a two-weapon ranger.  A bugbear with +2 Strength and +2 Dexterity, dual-wielding 1d12 bastard swords, is pretty scary even without its once-per-encounter Sneak Attack-like racial power.

There’s a glossary.  And there was much rejoicing.

Finally, there’s a 4-page list of monsters by level and by monster role, which should make creating encounters very easy.  Unfortunately, since it has page numbers, the designers seem to have decided that it also serves as an index, which is only true to an extent.

The entries themselves are very lean.  There’s only a little bit of descriptive fluff — certainly no more essays about a creature’s society and culture.  On one hand, I sometimes enjoyed reading that stuff; on the other hand, I usually ignored it when it was time to build a world, and put my own monster societies in place anyway.  So it doesn’t really affect me, in the end, and it gives more space for those stat blocks.  I can live with that.

The artwork is on the whole really good.  I think all monsters are depicted; some have multiple pictures.  There’s not exactly a lot of splash-page action-scene art, but it gets the job done.

Overall, I think this’ll prove to be a very useful verion of the MM.  I’m not sure yet whether it’ll be the best version, but it’s a pretty high quality as a whole.  4e has really impressed me in that regard, despite some of its problems.

Dungeon Master’s Guide

When I first opened my 4e Dungeon Master’s Guide, I was astonished at what I found: Actual advice on running a game.

This seems counterintuitive, I know. But it’s true that such advice is hard to come by in the gamemaster manuals of most of the bigger systems. These books tend to give a little overview of running a game and a GM’s role, and then dive into the mechanics, dwelling on statistics for things like traps, surviving in extreme environments, the speed of various forms of transportation, the ease of finding an NPC of a given profession (and the cost of hiring one), and so on.

Lots of numbers, in other words. Numbers that do help in running a game. But that’s all on a practical level. Most of these books — including the 1e, 2e, and 3e DMGs — say little about the theory of gamemastering.

The 4e DMG has two entire chapters, right in the front, dedicated to theory. How to prepare for a session. What players might be looking for in the game — to bring a character to life, to explore the fantasy world, to watch the story come together, to kill monsters — and how to cater to those desires. Narration, pacing, improvisation. How to handle problem players. Advice on teaching the game to someone new.

This is as compact as the PHB. It’s 30 pages or so, but they manage to fit a lot into it. There’s not a lot of wasted space or rambling text. And it’s as good an encapsulation of gamemastering as I’ve ever seen in a mainstream RPG. Could there be more? Sure, entire books could be written. But this is a great, great thing. Good enough that I’d recommend this book even to someone who wasn’t running 4e.

The quality stays high. The book covers combat encounters and how to build them, noncombat encounters — including a system of “skill challenges” to formally delineate the sort of encounter that used to have to be entirely ad-hoc — and traps, puzzles, and terrain. It tells how to use published adventures and, inspirationally, how to adapt them to suit your custom campaign. There’s an incredible chapter on campaigns that covers themes, stories, how to begin, and how to start out at a higher level than 1st. There’s a chapter on “the D&D World” that details the assumptions the game is built around — high fantasy, monsters are everywhere, PCs are exceptional, and so forth. There’s a chapter on creating new monsters, applying templates, creating NPCs, and creating house rules. And the whole thing ends with a sample setting, the town of Fallcrest in the Nentir Vale, complete with a short sample dungeon.

The book is only about 220 pages long, and it uses the same larger-than-3e typeface that the PHB uses. But it’s packed full of things that are actually useful to running a game.

I was still a bit ambivalent about 4e after reading the PHB, although my opinion was leaning toward favorable. After reading the DMG, I’m definitely a fan. This is the best RPG book I’ve read since Nobilis. I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow’s Skybreaker session.

(Edited for tag update, 8/29/08)

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.