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 and the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide.  This won’t be an in-depth review, like I did for Dreaming Cities, because I don’t yet own either book, but I did have a few comments to make about them.

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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News roundup

A couple of shorter topics that wouldn’t make for good single posts (at least by my wordy standards).

First, a quick update on my fourth-edition monk replacement class.  I made a number of minor changes a couple of days ago, and it’s looking good so far — at least at lower levels.  I still haven’t had a lot of opportunity to test it at high levels.  I have my eye on a couple of things that seem as though they might be overpowered right now (World Breaker’s Hand and the epic destiny “encounter-power-as-at-will-power” trait being the two biggest).

All told, balancing a class in 4e is a tricky process.  If any of you are actually using this class (or a variant) in play, I’d appreciate any feedback; it’ll help me get it to work.

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Incoming Barbarians

Wizards of the Coast has published a table of contents for this month’s issue ofDragon.  The articles aren’t up yet, but there look to be some interesting things in this one.

Most attractive:  a playtest article for next year’s Player’s Handbook II barbarian class.  This is the second playtest article, following the artificier — a leader class from the Eberron setting, in which I had no interest.  Barbarians, though, are another matter.  I look forward to seeing the article.  Expect a review of the class once it’s up (provided Dragon is still free by that time — I don’t intend to subscribe to D&D Insider just yet).

Other promising-looking articles:

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Gleemax’s Failure and other thoughts

At this point, it’s pretty old news that Wizard of the Coast‘s Gleemax is dead.  (My excuse?  I don’t do news; I do commentary.)  At least, Gleemax will be dead in September, presuming one can consider it “alive” now.  And Wizards’ publishing arm is going to be pulling back to focus on its Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons brands after the end of 2008.

There’s a lot of discussion about what exactly this means.  Randy Buehler’s post (which I thank Critical Hits for referring me to) reads, in part:

Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site in order to focus on other aspects of our digital initiatives, especially Magic Online and Dungeons & Dragons Insider. We continue to believe that fostering online community is an important part of taking care of our customers, but until we have our games up and running at a quality level we can be proud of, it will be the games themselves that receive the lion’s share of our attention and resources. (emphasis added)

Chatty DM finds this an encouraging sign.  His is the guardedly optimistic approach:  that WotC has realized it’s overextended itself, trying to offer too much too soon, and is scaling back to concentrate on their key properties.  And, moreover, that this signifies a change in their… corporate policy, I suppose.  A redefinition of their scope of operations.  Working on doing a couple of things well, rather than a lot of things piecemeal.

I’d like to believe that.  Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I remember WotC’s earlier foray into the internet with the third-edition E-Tools.  In particular, I remember that grand promises were made, and that in the end the tools were delivered past deadline and missing promised features.  And that what features there were were not necessarily user-friendly.

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