Anyone here currently playing D&D 4th Edition?

I've played through DAO so many times now that I've tried out all the various mage schools and various non-mage forms of tactics that I could come up with- it's surprising the number of different combinations that work well. Even found a new spell combo I didn't know about- One of the hexes (maybe death hex) with a death cloud thrown on top of it- devastating to the recipient of the love.

Anyway, I've got that combat system wired by now. I can go in with two or three characters of any class and a decent build and simply lay waste in any area of the game up to and including nightmare. It helps that modders have put out some custom dungeons that are orders of frickin' magnitude harder than the vanilla game- I had to ratchet my game up to a whole new level for 'tombs of the undead.' Jesus, that was a HARD dungeon but probably the best user-made module I've ever played in ANY game.

Back to Essentials: I sat in Barnes for a couple hours this morning and read through portions of the new player handbooks- I can't recite the titles but they are the ones used for character generation and builds.

Damn, I like this system waaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than core 4E, but the beauty of it is that it's really the same system simply reworked/re-written slightly- the two are completely and 100% compatible with one another. I think WOTC learned their lesson on the whole 3.0--->3.5 fiasco.

The new monster format with the tactics included is tits also. I was looking over the monster stats presented in the new boxed edition, and they are something a DM can just pull and use on the spot, even for a random encounter. I kind of like the idea of minions as well- fodder that goes down automatically with one hit and does limited damage when they hit.

I was surprised to see generic orcs as 3rd level monsters. I guess it serves to keep them as relevant bad guys a little further along into the game, and leaves room for the goblins and kobolds to inhabit the lower humanoid tiers. Still, the thought that a 1st Level Slayer might not be able to take down an orc sort of seems wrong.

The fixed treasure system I would lay waste to immediately: I'm also a huge proponent of the 'silver standard' in medieval gaming. Your local townies and serfs aren't dealing in silver and gold- they are dealing in brass, copper, and a bit of silver on the upper end. You won't see large amounts of gold in an economy like that until you are dealing with the upper nobility, which to me always bespeaks the beginning of the paragon tier. You can't convince me that in medieval fantasy land, a length of rope is worth ten or fifteen ounces of silver. No how, no way.

More on my proposed money system below:

I have two monetary systems: a simple and an advanced.

Simple money (the silver standard):

100 Coppers = 1 Silver Piece
100 Silvers = 1 Gold Piece
10 Golds = 1 Platinum Piece
100 Platinums = a 1 ounce-weight of pure Mithril

50 Silvers = 1 Electrum Piece
2 Electrums = 1 Gold Piece

Here are some example prices:

Commonor Clothing: 2 SP
Thieves tools: 70 SP
Common Meal: 3 CP
Common Room overnight at the Inn: 20 CP
Private room: 1 SP
Standard Longsword: 20 SP
Masterwork Longsword: 3 GP

a "100 GP gem" would be worth about 2 GP in my system. So for example, with two such gemstones you could barter a masterwork longsword (suitable for enchanting) and get 50 silvers in change.

Remember, medieval economies involve a lot of barter and NOT a lot of coin. Of course, D&D is a fantasy world so using gold is fine, I suppose.

Advanced Silver Standard (for the hardcore):

10 Iron Drabs = 1 Brass Bit (Both coins are the size of nickels)
10 Brass Bits = 1 Copper Common (Copper common is the size of a US quarter)
10 Copper Commons = 1 Silver Penny (Silver penny is the size of a US dime)
10 Silver Pennies = 1 Silver Noble (Silver noble is the size of a US fifty cent coin)
20 Silver Nobles = 1 Electrum Lucky (Electrum coin is the same size as a noble)
5 Electrum Luckies = 1 Gold Sovereign (same size as a noble)
10 Gold Sovereigns = 1 Platinum Plate (A plate is a square, one ounce platinum coin)
100 Platinum plates = a 1 ounce Mithril bar

The prices would be the same as the simple system, just there would be a slightly different breakdown of coins to deal with. Adventurers at 1-4th level would be seeing their treasure and coin almost exclusively in silver, with some electrum and cheap gems thrown in. Mid-heroic tier they'd start seeing some gold, with gold not becoming prevalent in their lives until they were much farther along. Of course, prices would be notched down accordingly so that they would still be getting amply rewarded for their efforts. I have other ways of keeping adventurers poor and hungry... I don't really like the 'treasure parcels' of 4E. I know it's an attempt to maintain game balance, but it isn't a computer game. A human DM can keep it balanced without being told exactly how much treasure to dole out. Makes it less repetitive and boring, too.

One thing missing from what I've read so far is some of the awesome spells from earlier editions of D&D.

Where is Evard's Black Tentacles? Melf's Acid Arrow? Tenser's Floating Disk? And so on? Seems in their efforts to shoehorn spells into At will, Encounter, Daily, and so on, they've done away with a lot of the stuff that wasn't necessarily combat related. One thing I do like in Essentials though is the return of magic schools. Good stuff.

Man, this stuff really makes me want to play again.

I am glad you made post #243. Being a DM and reading through the prices for various items in 3.5e, it was obviously screwed from the beginning. There was no way something like, say, a pig was worth less than a simple knife. Examples like that are rife through the book. The only thing that made sense was for me to go through everything and change it to something more realistic.

The silver standard you have set in your redo is great. The only time silver was extremely common was during King David of Israel's reign, and shortly after, with King Solomon. Some preacher said in one of his sermons that at that time, silver was nearly worthless, and most people only dealt in gold.

I't really too bad we can't get a game going online. It would be a riot to play with some of the people here.

Yeah, the folks who write the game books know a lot about game systems and rules and such, but I don't think they twig to what living in a medieval setting was like. These days a pig IS worth more than a knife- because we mass manufacture knives. In the day, pigs were all over and knives had to be hand-forged by a smith. Rope, cloth, and food were all made in abundance, but metalworked items and rare crafts were the work of specialists, and in a rural, pre-industrial economy there are necessarily very few specialists of any sort- people are too busy producing and preserving enough food to pay their taxes and get through the winter.

I mean, the PHB and DMG throw out prices in the hundreds of thousands of GP for advanced magic items, etc. Most people can't wrap their heads around what a pile of half a million gold coins would look like, or how much it would weigh, to say nothing of how it would be transported, stored, etc when you wanted to use it to buy a magic staff +6. Look what happened with Smaug's hoard from under the Lonely Mountain! It just doesn't make sense as presented.

I also like treasure to take the form of mundane things (sometimes). At lower level, a fine suit of armor has to be transported from the dungeon to town, but once you get it there it might actually be worth as much as five or ten gold sovereigns. But's it's doubtful in a small town there is that much gold to be had, so there is trade, barter, credit, etc... That in itself can create adventure hooks. Sometimes success can test the mettle of the hardiest warriors...

Of course, there is the matter of game balance and fun. You don't want to make 'inventory management' a drag.

Yeah, that's another thing the PHB or DMG doesn't take into account - how many of each specialist is in each town. Of course, I think that is up to the DM to decide, but that would affect the price of items greatly. If the town was next to an iron mine and had three different blacksmiths working there, the price of a simple kitchen knife would be much lower than the price of a single pig. Instead, the PHB just throws out prices willy-nilly. Then a player would say "oh, that's ridiculous item A costs this much. PHB says it should cost X instead." They could probably benefit from having the book proofed by an economist. Game economies are a whole other topic that could be discusses ad-nauseum.

Speaking of making inventory management a drag, another thing I sort of find a drag is to keep track of the food/water etc. Especially when PCs are travelling with a bunch of NPCs. I just now assume they brought enough to eat and drink on their own. When I first began, I kept asking the players "what do ou guys eat and drink?" This ended up becoming tedious, since they had to remember every time to buy something for themselves and their NPC friends. I decided to scrap it after the players didn't seem to respond well to it. It's like asking the spellcasters what or where are the spell components they used to cast a spell. It's just easier to assume they were smart enough to, once in awhile, buy it while in town.

Another thing which was a piss off to one of my players about 4e was the absence of bards in the PHB. I think this was eventually corrected in one of the Essentials books.

Pretty easy to manage- make the players fork out for a pack horse and simply charge them X amount of coin/goods per person in between adventures for their 'upkeep'. Then the assumption is that they are dealing with it. If you have players who prefer the finer things, role play that bit and charge them accordingly.

I think that someone who wants to play a bard should be able to sing and play an instrument in real life. A huge double standard, I know, but they always seem like tits on a bull in a D&D campaign. But if you're gonna role play a bard then you should be creating ballads and singing them, eh?

That actually sounds pretty reasonable. Charge a couple gold for the party, and if we want to indulge, we roleplay it instead. We've kinda done that anyway with my character's rampant alcoholism whenever we stay in an inn, but we've never really fed our characters, just assumed it happened. I would say it's reasonable to assume basic stuff was bought and paid for, and anything beyond that is roleplayed.

Yeah, and at the inn you can include the price of standard pub grub in with your lodgings. Sort of the medieval version of 'charge it to the room.' Unless of course your character is swilling a whole cask of ale at a time. The role-playing part of it comes when you start delivering the S.M. Stirlingesque decriptions of all the delicious, home-made food your party is chowing down...

Does your character drink wild turkey or heavier stuff?

Actually, Marso has it right...my character actually drinks a cask of ale at a time There were a couple occasions where, after an evening at the bar, my character was near on useless when the pirates attacked at dawn. You'd think that much alcohol would make a halfling's liver explode, but Melnor is a hardy fellow

Scorp, you couldn't've sent that over Facebook or something? Makes it at least relevant to the conversation when I start gloating about the Canucks whooping the Flames despite being completely outplayed. Just saying

I've never played 4th edition, I only played 3rd edition like twice before I decided it was lame, but I loved both 2nd and 1st editions and still have my books up in the attic some where. The biggest complaint I've heard about 4th edition is they tried to make it as close to WoW as possible without breaking any copy right laws but if I wanted to play WoW then I'd play WoW.

The advanced silver standard system uses the exact same names Gary Gygax used in his Greyhawk setting. Gygax's Gord the Rogue series was also pretty good until the very end when you could tell he was pissed off at TSR for giving him the boot.

Yeah, didn't he wind up destroying Greyhawk completely in the last book as Gord skipped off with his Drow love to the outer planes or some such?

Actually, the names of the coins in my advanced system are taken from Gygax's, although he called GP 'orbs' in Greyhawk. I'm not sure if the denominations match up exactly the same but they are close. The Living Greyhawk gazeteer also has names for the various coinages used all over the Flannaess.

Speaking of Gary Gygax, there is one guy who regularly corresponded with Gary, before D&D got big. He apparently has letters and even drawings of monsters Gary did back then. The guy plays in a different group on Friday night at the hobby store, but get this, he asked last week if he could join our group :!: Shit, I'm gonna potentially be DMing for a guy who's been playing this since even before D&D was published! Talk about intimidating!

Yeah, he destroyed it completely. The reason was after he got fired as TSR's CEO he claimed that most of the stuff in D&D was his intellectual material so he sued TSR to get the official copy right back (that's why he kept publishing Greyhawk stuff even after he left TSR). Unfortunately for him the court ruled that he had been working for TSR when he had come up with Greyhawk and the rest so that all of his work was actually TSR's and he'd have to stop using it without permission. That's why he tried to kill off Greyhawk because he was so pissed off that he didn't own it any more.

I found out all of this in an interview in the mid to late 90's when he spoke about his history, how he and friends created RPGs, how he founded TSR, and what happened during the time when he was forced out as TSR's CEO and the lawsuits that followed. By all accounts Gary was a terrible CEO (even keeping pencils and paper locked up so that employees had to ask him personally for one after which he would walk down and get it himself just to make sure it wasn't stolen or wasted) and Gary had a hard time delegating tasks because he kept trying to do everything himself which meant he was often closed to other ideas even if they were really good. Gygax was a great but flawed person in the history of RPGs.

Edit: I forgot about the gold orbs. I know I've heard of gold nobles before some where though.

The guy at the hobby store told me Gary was a really creative individual, but had no idea how copyright or intellectual property worked, and could almost say he was very naive about all that stuff when he started. One of his favorite franchises was Conan the Barbarian, and he would just write a novel or game system about the world of Conan. And then he'd show people, people would love it, and he'd go ahead and photocopy more for them, taking money from it. Of course, this would piss off the people who owned Conan, and after the inevitable cease and desist order came, he'd be forced to stop. The guy said he still, to this day, has a book about Conan with the name Gary Gygax on the front cover.

I'm gonna ask him to bring all his notes one day, and hopefully he won't mind sharing some of the stuff he's collected over the years.

Edit: @ Oerdin
Yes, it would be worth a lot of money now, but back then, the guy didn't know this would become such a huge deal, so he'd draw, doodle, and make his own notes over the letters Gary sent.

Wasnt there a woman who was also a higher upper who everyone hated at tsr?

Too bad it all had to go down like that because Greyhawk remains one of the most popular D&D settings out there. The whole dustup with Gygax really screwed that setting- hopefully WOTC will bring it back at some time in the future for 4E.

Back when I actually played AD&D (early teens until about 17) we all pretty much played Greyhawk exclusively as it was the official AD&D setting back then. Sure, we had odd games in our own worlds and even some in Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms but Greyhawk was the main one which everything happened in. I really loved it as both a player and DM because it had just enough detail to give the place flavor but Gygax deliberately left a lot of stuff vague just so each DM could individualize things to his own flavor. Plus there were a ton of great modules set in Greyhawk. It's still my all time favorite AD&D setting.

Mine too, easily.

We played one campaign based in the DragonLance setting back while we were reading the books, it was okay but no great shakes. Part of the problem with some of the book-milieus runs counter what you mentioned above with Gygax and Greyhawk: Greyhawk could easily be made your own, while authors like Ed Greenwood and such were always trying to shoehorn their own characters and history into places like the Forgotten Realms. Part of the problem with DL was setting a campaign against the stuff we accepted was happening in the larger world. WRT Greyhawk, I remember spells being named after Gygax's original Greyhawk characters, but that's about it. (Other than later references to the Circle of Eight). I remember loving the original Rogues Gallery (I still have it!) because it actually gave some of the backstory and stats on those famous names. Lassiveren, Valerius, Bigby, the guy who was reincarnated as a Centaur, etc.

We also played a real good mini-campaign in Ravenloft, where we matched our wits against Vlad. But those characters came to that setting FROM Greyhawk and returned to it when we defeated the vampire. It was merely an arc in a larger Greyhawk campaign.

Marso, I haven't played D&D in almost 15 years but I have noticed there are several Greyhawk web forums still around including some which kept most of the living Greyhawk material posted online. Since that is RPGA stuff instead of official cannon it's unlikely most players will know those modules so a DM could run it without much fear that the players would cheat by reading up on the modules.

Hell, I have a whole closet full of crap set in Greyhawk (some official, some my own) that could be adapted for 4E and most younger players would find it completely new.

I have found an online dice roller here:

http://invisiblecastle.com/roller/

Hmm... intriguing...

You say that like it's something cool. I remember making something similar in VB6 back in high school. Instead of doing my assignments I decided to program a game instead. Had the character generator and half the first level of the maze programmed in a Wizardry-style RPG. I'm sure if I got it far enough along my teacher would've given me extra credit on it, but I never bothered to show it to her. She just got pissed that I was learning to do shit she didn't even know how to do herself, so I kinda just kept it to myself

If you like programming, I should give you a copy of Adobe Flash. It's suppose to be easy to pick up if you have a programming-type of brain. And believe me, not everybody does. There are few people where it comes naturally to them.

And Flash can be put on the internet easily, so showing your friends wouldn't be much of a problem.

I have a dice roller for the iPod

I HAVE DICE.