2008-07-16 Opaque, arbitrary, inconsistent, unimaginative and uninspiring

Sometimes you read a book that stuns you. Not often, as after 28 years of role playing you have pretty much seen it all, but sometimes.

With this, the 3rd core rule book for Dungeons and dragons v.4.0 the apotheosis of DnD from a role playing game to a table top, product dependent (miniatures and rule supplements), combat 'system', is complete.

First the good stuff. There are a wide variety of monsters (many of the old favourites, however,are missing) and most have multiple variations to reflect the 'role' the monsters fill (such as skirmisher, minion, brute, solo, etc) in 'Encounter groups'. Encounter Groups are predefined lists of between 1 and a dozen or so creatures that you simply select as a whole and drop in to your adventure. Everything is worked out for you. You, the DM, don't have to worry about hit points, XP, weapons, powers, feats... It is fast, easy, simple.

This is the 'WOW'factor, it really is useful.

After this, it all goes wrong. The 'system' ceases to make any sense whatsoever.

Is a Drow priest a cleric to Lolth? If it is, why doesn't it have the same number and variety of powers (such as utility powers) as a cleric? Why would it's hit points change when it's role changes when a clerics do not?

Are cyclops a race with the racial power 'Evil Eye', is Evil Eye one power or 6 (there are 6 different versions of Evil Eye, all different), a feat, racial ability, or what?

Why do Hydras and Chimeras, both multi-headed monsters have different and somewhat cheesy named 'powers' to describe the same basic action of attacking with all heads?

Why are Carrion Crawler tentacles treated differently to those of a displacer beasts and both differently to a Grell?

Talking of Grells, why does a level 11 elite controller Grell lose the venomous bite that a level 7 elite soldier Grell possess?

Can a lich cast arcane rituals?

These and many, many, many, many other questions will NOT be answered in this book.

Moving on...

The monster descriptions are brief. There is 'lore' that give players bare bones information and a few words for the DM. Each monster/role combination has a short paragraph on tactics. The monster stats block is itself crowded and squashed, and clearly do not cover everything. Racial traits are off in a section by themselves, not in the text describing the monsters.

It's brief. it's enough to run a combat, and that is it. If you want something deeper go look at a car park puddle.

Combat itself should be mentioned. It's incredibly positional and a lot of monsters powers push, slide, pull, shift, teleport or burst one or more targets. To be fair the players get the same, but all in all you need miniatures to track what is going on. Who makes those miniatures...

So, to be frank. What you have here are rigidly (but opaquely) defined creatures, with access to large (but unpublished) lists of powers, rife with internal (and inexplicable) inconsistencies, and all reduced to a set of condensed statistics and a tactics block. Oh, and the creatures 'enjoy' different systems for such things as recharging powers, healing surges, numbers of powers, etc, skewing the encounters heavily against them.

There is a lot wrong with this.The DM cannot easily reverse engineer the creatures and it is not clear that substituting one power/weapon/whatever for another will lead to predictable results. There is no mechanism for creating monsters and applying feats (indeed racial traits come in the form of feats in this 'system', so without all the racial traits being published the DM is stuffed and has to make arbitrary rule calls). The lack of a clear mechanism leads to greater dependency on more monster manuals and officially published books.

When the DM and players start to wonder about the inconsistencies there is no way to work out what should happen and what has happened. When the inevitable happens and the players and the DM decide fair play should exist in the game (that is, NPCs, monsters and player characters are all governed by the same rules) a lot of reworking will need to be done to the system, reworking that the rule books are incapable of supporting.

This, therefore is an extraordinary book. Utterly stunning. Opaque, arbitrary, inconsistent, unimaginative and uninspiring.

It's needed if you are going to play DnD 4.0, but it's still a turkey. One star.