D&D 4?

[Mr. Analog]

From what I've been reading/hearing the flow of play is much less impeded by game mechanics in fact, from the sounds of things other than some suspension of (fantasy) disbelief, the game mechanics assist players in adventuring.

If I wasn't so heavily invested in 3e right now I'd take a look, but I want to get my current group at least to level 10 before even thinking about migration.

Also, good to see you posting again man.

[Thorin]

I've played three sessions now, and one thing's for sure - the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure is action-packed!  Every combat, someone almost dies.  But then, healing back to full is much easier and much less costly in party treasure than before.

There has been much to-do about being able to create your own style of Wizard/Paladin/Rogue/whatever, but from what I've seen there's actually only a couple of good choices for the at-will powers.

3.x allowed for much more character customization, although trying to customize a character in a non-optimal way would make your character almost useless when compared to an optimized character.

4.0 allows for much less character customization, but even if you make a couple bad choices your character doesn't fall too far behind in ability.

That's the big difference for me.

An' yeah, there'll be a PHB2 by June of next year, if you can believe the rumours.

[TheDruid]

An' yeah, there'll be a PHB2 by June of next year, if you can believe the rumours.

Yeah, this makes me throw up a little inside and swallow it 

WOTC has made it no secret that they want to pump you for as much $$$ as possible. Thank god for pirated PDFs, actually I've been making it a habit to bring my laptop to gamming sessions. I find having the PDF up on the screen with a bunch of bookmarks is a much quicker way of finding material than thumbing through a book. Don’t get me wrong, i still like having a hard copy of the PHB to take on the Bus and what not, but for playing i prefer the PDF.

And with WOTC planning on releasing new books every year, the only way folks can keep up is to get the PDF's.

I understand your woes with 3e Mr. A, it really is a treadmill. Although it sounds like you have nothing to lose by hanging back for a bit. A) Expect 3e stuff to get even cheaper, and B) Jump into 4e after they had a few round of PHBs, let them work out the bugs and skip the money sink of early incomplete books.

[Mr. Analog]

I have pretty much all the books I need to finish my campaign, now it's just finding the time

[Thorin]

I've been making it a habit to bring my laptop to gamming sessions.

The group I got asked to join to play 4th edition with, one of the players brought a laptop to the table.  The problem was that he started chatting and then facebooking and then downloading half-naked pictures of some girl he's dating.  Not at all conducive to playing D&D with your friends!

Anyway, I've found that I haven't put a lot of thought or background into my 4th edition character, but whether that's because of the group of people I'm playing with or the obvious focus on combat of the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure, I'm not sure.

Frickin' kobolds and their "Shifty" reaction power, where as soon as you shift (used to be called 5-foot step) away from them they get to shift with you.  Makes it hard for the Wizard to get away and uses ranged magic.

[TheDruid]

Frickin' kobolds and their "Shifty" reaction power, where as soon as you shift (used to be called 5-foot step) away from them they get to shift with you.  Makes it hard for the Wizard to get away and uses ranged magic.

That new high elf race has that racial teleport ability. Basically that was my plan for a char, go Eladrin Wizard with the Fey Step power.

To bad about buddy abusing his privileges with the laptop. I hope the DM put a stop to it right away. If used constructively i found a laptop excellent for PDF access. Using OneNote to take adventure notes and keep power snip-its handy, and excel spreadsheets to assist with calculations.

[Thorin]

Yeah, pretty much anyone who wants to be a Wizard chooses Eladrin as their race.  It's the only one that lets you boost your Int, except for Human.  But Human isn't as good as they make it out to be...  Only one stat gets a bonus, you get an extra at-will power (but you can still only do one thing per round!), you get a bonus to all three saving throws.  But Eladrin gets a bonus to both Int and Dex, gets that wicked per-encounter Fey Step teleport, and still gets a bonus to one of their saves.

Honestly, if one was trying to make the best Wizard, one would always pick Eladrin.

Me, I made a Halfling Paladin, not at all the best race for the class.  But I wanted to be different.

[Thorin]

So from my short stint with 4th edition (seven sessions, I think?), I can honestly say that I do like the ruleset.  Simple, pretty balanced, hard to break.  As the DM said, "It's a game of inches".  Without house rules it's _really_ hard to make characters that are significantly better or worse than each other.

In fact, if I were to start a new campaign I might actually suggest using the 4th edition rules!