Review: Arcane Power

Arcane Power

Following my positive experiences with Martial Power, I decided to pre-order Arcane Power, the new fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons supplement that deals with additional options for the arcane classes:  bard, sorcerer, swordmage, warlock, and wizard.  Based on my initial reading, I feel pretty confident about saying that the Power line continues to display a pretty high standard of quality.  Class-based supplements have been pretty ubiquitous in D&D since the second edition, and their quality has varied, but like Martial Power, this book seems to fall toward the top of the heap.

Arcane Power is a 160-page book, and there’s a lot crammed into it; it felt a little longer than Martial Power to me, although it’s the same page count.  Physically, it seems similar to other fourth-edition hardcovers; its layout, binding, and so forth all seem decent.  Some people have reported problems with ink smudging in their 4e books; I’ve never experienced any such issues, but if you have, the ink and paper seem about the same to me, too, so that might be something to watch for.

Content is split up into five chapters by class, each of which covers new powers, builds, class features, and paragon paths for its respective class, and a sixth chapter including new feats, familiars, epic destinies, rituals, and a handful of magic items (tomes, for the new wizard build).

Continue reading »

Review: Player’s Handbook 2

The Player’s Handbook 2 has been out for a week or so now, with sneak previews running about a week before that in several roleplaying blogs, but I’ve got some musings about where it takes the game.  Before that, though, I offer my brief review:  It’s partly silly and mostly good.  Here’s a more specific rundown:

It’s got 5 new races, 8 new classes, and a bunch of new feats, magic items, rituals, and epic destinies.  (It’s also got a couple pages of errata, notably the new Stealth rules, but that’s not really the focus here.)  The classes include two divine, two arcane, and four primal, and, at least at first read, seem to compare reasonably to those in the first PHB, being neither too much stronger nor too much weaker in general.  The races are a mixed bag.  The content as a whole is a mix of new material and updated versions of old favorites.

Continue reading »

Review: Manual of the Planes

Back in my first-edition days, I really loved the Manual of the Planes.  I’m not entirely sure why, because I rarely staged any interplanar adventures at the time.  The odd trip to the Abyss, sure, but nothing I really needed that book for.  And it was a book stuffed full of small print detailing such regions as the Quasi- and Para-Elemental Planes of Dust or Vacuum.  I’m not sure I’ve ever spoken to anyone who used the Plane of Vacuum in a game.  But something about that book fascinated me.

Now the fourth-edition Manual of the Planes is out.  I’d planned to take a wait-and-see approach, but somehow I found myself ordering this one, too.  I’m still not sure how much of it I’ll use — I already had my own take on the 4e cosmology worked out for my game.  Yet I enjoyed reading it.

It’s pretty perverse, I guess.  Anyway, the review.

Manual of the Planes is a 160-page book, like Martial Power.  It feels too short — it could probably have used twice as many pages and hardly touched on everything, though.  With a subject this vast, with this many possibilities, it’s almost bound to feel too short, so I’ll try not to hold that against it too much.  Production values seem pretty good as far as I can tell, and its layout, font, and so forth are still hewing close to that of the core books.  I would like to commend whoever chose its cover, which is clearly a nod to the cover of that first-edition Manual I knew and loved.

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »