Timothy Mallory's page

Actually, I was rather disappointed with this article. Granted, its Roll vs Role, so the format and purpose is fairly limited. But it seems to me that if you are going to spend the time showing a pretty interesting alternative use for a monster, that some kind of effort should be spent on the details and implications.

This is just a mini encounter.. Skill Challenge to get into town, combat to solve the problem...

I'd much rather have had the time spent on detailing how this place might work as a long term issue in the campaign, not a single evening monster mop up....

Troll art definitely nice, though.

I just think its hilarious that apparently you aren't allowed to be interested in or discuss a topic unless you are in favor of it around here. There's a lot of good ideas in 4e. There's also, imho, a lot of bad ideas. However, if you start discussing what you think are bad ideas in this forum, you basically get told to shut up by Antioch and others because whatever opinion you have is obviously a worthless minority one and you are a 4e hater anyway.

Sure, Razz and the other posters like him aren't worth even the effort to read their names (why isn't there an /ignore function here?), but I just skip their posts (and the equally worthless responses to their posts).

I don't understand why discussing the good and bad of 4e is different than discussing the good and bad of 3e, which has a long and storied history. But apparently it is and its to the point where there's not much point to even coming here. I know I can just house rule things. I don't care if 3e sucks just as bad or worse. I especially don't care if an as yet untested "majority" disagrees with my opinion on something. All three of those comments are not counterpoints, they are dismissals. But that is the majority of the replies to any less than positive critique of a design decision related to 4e.

Since I'm not particularly interested in Pathfinder and I'm not a good enough fan of 4e to have "valid" contributions (since I'm leaning on the not a fan side of the fence), its become apparent to me that even coming here is a waste of time. I'll look elsewhere for discussion of the game.

If it doesn't sell well, they're not going to just change it back. They may stop publishing Realms products.

They aren't going to publish FR stuff anyway.. the new plan is 3 products per campaign world and done. Campaign Sourcebook, Player's Guide, some sort of adventure thingie and on to the next. I don't really see what the point in gloating about the destruction of something other folks enjoyed quite a lot.

The 4e FR are very clearly radically different and unnecessarily so. I don't like the FR...I especially disliked the clone zones like Maztica and Mulhorand. But I'm not going to start buying it because they got rid of those things and I doubt many other non FR folks are either. But a lot of folks who are already buying the FR are livid about the changes.

That's just dumb. And if they continue in that vein when they do Greyhawk, Planescape, Mystara, Dark Sun, or whatever else that'll be even more folks pissed off for no particular gain.

Quests and quest xp are a good thing. The first discussion about quest cards and doing things like giving the player a quest to find the door when they found a key was very offputting however. As was the implication that the quest card was like a contract.. "do this for this person and get that". THe DM needs the flexibility to have the occassional NPC be lying or whatever.

Notes about what's going are necessary for the game generally, so its not a big deal whether the DM or the player records them initially. But the characters should have a reason to know its a quest before they get the card or whatever. In the old example, I wouldn't have given the players a quest for the key just because they found it... even if it is an important thing. I might have given them a card of "this is the junk you found" and the key would be listed on that so they don't forget. But pointing out the key is important when you find it is pretty silly. This isn't an MMO where its important to flag the funnel the players are allowed to follow.

I could dig out the quotes, but I'm not going to bother. You and Shroomy both were complaining that Paizo wasn't supporting 4e with designer involvement in various threads. That's expecting them to do something. That's not talking about things you'd like them to make if they happen to make 4e products at some point. Which, btw, they said would be done through Necromancer Games.

And the restaurant analogy works as well as any analogy does. You have a preference related to the company's type of product (food/RPGs). The company is not interested in making the particular product you do want (mexican/4e). The smart company realizes it can't be all things to all people and concentrates on what they can do well (make italian food/write 3e products) even if some market exists for mexican food/4e products. Its not that it doesn't want your business, it knows that making mediocre mexican food would not please you and would detract from its success as an italian eatery.

James also said all three of the things I mentioned. He said he didn't particularly like 4e as he's seen it so far, he said Paizo didn't have the staff to put effort into 4e, and he said that without the rules and GSL they couldn't begin to talk about 4e stuff meaningfully. Lisa then came and reiterated all that a page later (except the not liking 4e part).

And anyone who thinks the changes between 3e and 4e aren't radical is, frankly, not looking at them. WotC's own marketing has said so numerous times.

Actually, has anyone in this thread made any serious suggestions about the products that they'd like to see from Paizo that isn't a breach of the GSL? (namely, the no cross branding clause)?

Anyway, Lisa has explained their position just fine so we can leave it there as far as I'm concerned.

Well, no. My home campaign is what I make of it. D&D is what WotC makes of it. And we are discussing what WotC made of angels.

Let's get the producer-customer relationship correct here. If I choose to buy a product other than yours, I'm not alienating you, I'm simply choosing a different product. If you indicate to me that you don't really want my business, THAT is alienating me as a customer. It really doesn't work the other way around. It is the job of the seller to entice a buyer, not a buyer to entice a seller.

And if you walk into an italian restaurant and demand to know what they are going to do about the fact that you like mexican food better, what are they supposed to do? They aren't going to suddenly add mexican dishes, I can tell you that.

James told you what he thinks. Namely, that supporting 4e isn't important to Paizo at the moment because 1) it doesn't appeal to many of the staff (and its not just James who has said so) 2) It isn't even released yet 3) there is a lot of legal uncertainty about what they could do.

He's not trying to drive you away, but if you come here and say "hey, we don't like the stuff you are making, why don't you make something else?" and then get offended because he said "no" that's on you.

Wizards is the one splitting the community with its radical game change and its legal maneuverings. You can't reasonably expect Paizo to do anything about 4e when they don't have the rules and don't know what their legal situation with it is.

Personally, I think its pretty bizarre to ask for support in converting products to a game system that isn't released yet. Leaving aside the fact that WotC and Paizo are more like competitors than collaborators now, the simple fact is that no one at Paizo has seen the rules (except perhaps as a playtester under an NDA) or is in any way in a position to comment on whether any of the suggested conversions make sense.

Now, if in a couple months when the game is out you are still seeing nothing whatsoever in terms of conversion help then maybe you can have a semi legitimate beef.

Its also funny that you want the staff to comment, but then get upset when they don't agree with you. That's a nice no win situation for them.

Gods were, indeed, an unified pantheon before the war against the Primordials from the Elemental Chaos. It was during the war that deity portfolios began to take shape, as the Gods realized that specialization was the key to defeat the Primordials.

If they actually present the gods as a pantheon with a common theology and worldview, I'll start believing they mean what they said. That would, indeed, be a radical departure from past editions and (like the Shadowfell/Feywilde) a clear improvement.

Personally, I expect that it'll be the same old story once it gets down to actual published material and the backstory will just so much trivia. However, if its not then most of my objection to how they did angels specifically (separate from some issues I have with their monster design theory in general) would be muted.

BECMI D&D didn't have the Great Wheel, eladrin, solars, etc etc but it was still D&D.

And your point is? Is someone in this thread saying 4e isn't D&D? AFAICT, we are discussing the implementation of angels. Which, imho, has generally been bad in all editions of D&D and 4e didn't fix. Rather, they spread the blah around to the neutral and evil deities as well.

/QUOTE]

Maybe it's my personal opinion, but I don't think that the new angels are "bland". Real-world polytheistic religions had "generic servants", like the Einherjar for the Norse pantheon.

Remember that on 4E mythos, the Gods were once an unified force that fought against the Primordials. The Gods carried their armies of angels against the Primordials and their armies of titans, in an epic war obviously inspired by Norse mithos' Ragnarok.

I actually feel that 3E angels more bland
Epic level PCs will not only fight "divine minions", but also abominations, horrible aberrations from the Far Realms, plus fey and elemental lords. It would be obviously impossible (and undesirable) to put individual minions for each deity all in the first MM.

Of course its your personal opinion, just like my posts are my opinion. There isn't any "fact" here, particularly. Which is why the appeals to majority rule and the 'go off and change in the privacy of your own home' comments are so off topic.

That said.... some real world pantheons had "generic" servants, but generally they did not. The Einherjar served Odin (and to a lesser extent Freyja). The other gods had other minions (or didn't bother with minions). Regardless... yes, if they do put some effort in the myth and the unity of the gods then a common pool of servants gets more validity. If Bahamut, Bane, and Pelor are all on the same team the way Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades are then that's fine. Those gods all support essentially the same ideology, they aren't rival religions at all.

But D&D has generally presented its gods as if they were poly-monotheisms. Bane has his church and Pelor has a different church and never the twain shall meet except with bloodshed (or whatever).

D&D has always generally sucked at making celestials. The Solar/Planetar/Deva stuff is pretty meh, as you said. The Archon/Eladrin set weren't bad, but guardinals were a clear cut/paste job rather than anything interesting.

It has traditionally made a better fist of its infernals. But 4e has pretty much split all the existing infernals off into their own groups (not a bad idea, actually) and just spread the meh celestials around to all the gods (Something I dislike).

Most of that seems reasonable enough. I'm not fond of the racial feats that modify the rest of the party. This game already seems to have a lot of niggling situational modifiers applying all over the place given how many class powers seem to grant buffs and debuffs on top of doing damage.

I'd really rather that the elf racial feats/features actually focused on the elf instead of those near them.

Well, that works pretty well for the Forgotten Realms, that actually has a lot of material in existance. There's a lot of campaign worlds where there is little or no supplement material to be "duplicating". Or its so old that finding it is really hard (pdf publishing is helping with that, admittedly).

I wonder how easy it will be to pick and chose stuff off of DDI. I could buy Dungeon or Dragon on the rare instances they published something I wanted to read. Supposedly, you'll be able to do that for DDI also but that depends on whether you actually find out about the material if you aren't living on Gleemax. I certainly don't.

Yeah, it does sound that way. But there is no information on /how/ you get them. Do I need to spend a feat to pick up sneak attack once I spent the feat to multiclass as a rogue? Or do I just get it? Does it level with me or do I need another feat to get Paragon Sneak attack?

Regardless, I'm quite sure this will work at least as well as 3e for the martial types. I'm still having a hard time seeing how it'll work out for the spellcasters. It sounds like you'd have to spend a lot of your feats on power swaps. Without an exemplar, what I'm visualizing from this is closer to a cleric with some good arcane spells from their domains more than an cleric/wizard. You'd have all your lvl 15 cleric casting power, just with the option to spend feats to replace some cleric spells with wizard ones.

I'd really like to see these feats and talent trees so I can tell how much a character with the arcanist multiclass feat will feel like a wizard as opposed to a Fighter or Cleric with an odd ability or two.

I do think you're wrong re: all powers being balanced vs other powers. All classes are supposed to be balanced, and while that does take into account the powers they get, I'd think that not all powers will be equal, and certainly not in all situations.

Sure you have to lose a Fighter power, but if it is one you didn't like much, and you are replacing it with a Wizard power that seems extremely useful well ...

Well, its not literally possible to have all the powers balanced against each other precisely. If you can give up your paladin's Remove Disease ability for a Rogue's Sneak Attack that's a no brainer. :P But the idea in 4e seems to be they are pretty close, especially the attacks.

Also, aren't you supposed to have a pretty wide range of choices each time you get a new power? Hopefully you won't hate all your level 12 choices..

I just wonder if a Fighter(wizard) is going to feel like a fighter with an odd power or two or actually feel like a fighter-mage.

There is a lot of stuff that is in all the settings. That's pretty much inherent in the fact that they are all D&D settings. The strategy they are using isn't a bad one per se. What is sounds like is that WotC is getting out of the fluff business. Or, at least, limiting that to the equivalent of Dragon Magazine articles (ie DDI now).

There isn't any threat of them having Shifter artificers in an adventure in Waterdeep because they aren't going to publish any adventures set in Waterdeep. Every adventure and book (other than the Campaign Setting itself) is going to be written the same way Batman and Superman comics were.. They were set in "Metropolis" and "Gotham City" not New York City. So the DM can decide if "Metropolis" is Waterdeep, or Sharn, or Greyhawk City, or whatever the homebrew equivalent is.

So the DM will be responsible for adding the local flavor to the adventure rather than the module writer. This should be pretty easy for Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, or Mystara. Rather a lot harder for Ebberon and Darksun since they have a far more divergent set of starting assumptions.

Right. I don't think multiclassing is useless in 4e or anything of the sort. But I don't see how (other than using your paragon path on it) that its going to be anything like an earlier edition multiclass in terms of your effectiveness in the 2nd class. But we need to see more information to really tell. I don't think this particular excerpt is as useful or comprehensive as some of the others.

There's a lot of things we don't know. Is a Fighter (wizard) better at using magical rituals than a Fighter (assuming they both take the ritual feat)? How expensive is spending the feats on power swaps in terms of lost abilities? Overall, feats sound a lot weaker but more plentiful in 4e so it may be cost effective. But it still sounds to get more wizard stuff than the base multiclass gives you, you have to give up a "free" fighter power AND a feat for each wizard power. Since the whole idea is that powers across the classes are pretty equal in power, you definitely need to get some good synergy out of it to justify the cost of a feat.

How many class specific feats are there? Do items still have class based restrictions? That would be a huge benefit to multiclassing, if so. A wizard or cleric multiclass feat would (in 3e) open up a huge range of wands and the like, as well as some scrolls.

This multiclassing system seems to have some potential, but its a lot more limited than 3e and I'm not seeing how its better for the cleric/wizards than the old. It seems to me to be a lot closer to Fighter9/Wizard 1 in effect than Fighter5/Wizard5.

But like I said, this excerpt isn't detailed enough to tell; there is too much left to guesswork at this point. So we'll have to wait and see.

So basically our fighter-wizard is a fighter with a spell or maybe a couple spells if he gives up some of his attack powers? That was the impression I got from reading the post, but the way folks were talking about how great this was, I figured I was missing something.

Its probably pretty balanced, but I guess I'm gonna need to see the full range of options before I could say its actually interesting. Book of Nine Swords fighters could get melee attacks that did elemental AoEs or let them fly, so if the fighter powers in 4e include such things it may be less useful than it appears.

Can you change out your chosen regular class powers the way you can your multiclassed ones? Because that seems to be the main benefit so far. Otherwise, it sounds like we are talking about a fighter with a little flavor rather than a proper fighter-wizard. It doesn't sound like he could even pretend to fill the wizard's role in the party the way a multiclassed character can (and yes, I know a F5/W5 is a lot better at subbing for the F10 than the W10, but you could...)

But what would it actually do that Ranger/Ranger 2WF PP/shadowy epic destiny didn't do? Get to place a mark 1/encounter?

Can we please stop with the personal attacks? I don't think what the guy wants to do can be done.. the setting differences are real and matter and should deviate from the core (or why have multiple settings at all?). But that doesn't mean its cool to rip on him personally. Its also a violation of the forum posting rules...

You obviously don't spend very much time on Canonfire. The edition specific forums are little used and are specifically for game mechanics issues. The function of the site is in the articles and the general discussion. The bulk of the content there is not edition specific because there has never been a need for it to be.

Planewalker isn't edition specific either. It doesn't deal with game mechanics. It deals with "fluff". You could get good information there regardless of what edition you played, because that material was still valid.

Anyway, there isn't much point in talking to you since you insist on denigrating the views of anyone who doesn't agree with you and your supposed majority.

Actually, it seems to me that they were pretty clear you can only take a 2nd class.

Quote #1:

There are two restrictions on your choice of a class-specific multiclass feat. First, you can’t take a multiclass feat for your own class. Second, once you take a multiclass feat, you can’t take a class-specific feat for a different class. You can dabble in a second class but not a third.

Quote #2:

At 11th level, you can choose to forgo your paragon path in order to further specialize in a second class.

That sounds like you only get one class plus a single multiclass option. You can then forego your "prestige class" aka Paragon path to get even more 2nd regular class abilities. Not that you can somehow get a third class.

Anyway, I guess I am just dense. I can't tell what my character would be able to do as a Lvl 10 Fighter with the Arcanist multiclassing feat that the fighter alone can't. Apparently I get Arcana as a skill and get 1 spell? And the option to spend feats to get more spells instead of fighter attack powers?

What am I missing that everyone is raving about? Like I said in my earlier post, I can't tell how wizardy a Fighter (wizard) actually is...

Well, campaign setting books are certainly less profitable and that's what they are hoping to avoid.

It seems to me that the only reason to publish different campaign worlds is because they are actually different. Ebberon, Darksun, Forgotten Realms, and Dragonlance are all quite distinctive on their face. Greyhawk and Mystara are also pretty distinctive, though it takes more digging.

I just don't see how you can make each world unique and still expect everything to be one size fits all. Its not impossible to make something that fits Ebberon and Darksun, but its pretty hard... I'm also interested in seeing how they do planescape after they nuked most of the critters that were intriguing against each other.

The elves of Greyhawk (and Dragonlance, IIRC) could easily fit the 4e mold. The FR elves not as easily. The Ebberon elves would be a tough fit. And the Darksun elves are completely different. Considering that this plethora of elves was exactly what they were objecting to in redesigning the elves in the first place, is that element of 'uniqueness' going to go away?

Campaign setting books are usually pretty broad brush. It sounds like you won't be getting a Waterdeep, Sharn, or Greyhawk City detail unless you are a DDI subscriber.

]

Assuming that you were writing something for prior D&D editions, and the material happened to overlap, you could just as easily distinguish it by citing the relevant edition somewhere in the article's title, subtitle, or somewhere near the top.

You are missing the point. Sites like Canonfire are not edition specific and never needed to be. You could write for a particular edition if you wanted to, but that only mattered for stat blocks and maybe a bit for the BECMI crowd. Now discussions there and other similar places are going to need to think about it. If a post comes in asking about eladrin, the first response is going to have to be: "uhh, do you mean the eladrin as celestials or the eladrin as faeries?" And you are gonna have folks who only play 1, 2, or 3 posting information that conflicts with what the only plays 4e guy is saying. And you'll have the same problem when someone asks about Pelor.. do you mean the GH Pelor? The 3e PHB Pelor? The 4e PHB Pelor? Because they aren't the same.

That could have been easily avoided but they didn't bother. They even said it was essentially laziness in the case of the gods' names/design.

Oh, and I pointed out that the in your face aspect was unintentional. But there are still a lot of folks who reacted just like that. WotC may not give a rat's behind because quite a few are the sorts who probably wouldn't be going 4e anyway. But you really think its not going to cause needless problems for the people who run and post at Planewalker.com, for instance?

Second, "customized divine minions" are likely to exist on 4E.

The only significant deviation from previous editions is that "angels" are now "generic divine servants" rather than "generic good-aligned divine servants".

I think you are confusing me for someone who is saying D&D was doing it right before.... There's a reason my 3e MM is almost completely untouched. Its pretty useless. Also, you are acting as if I think every design decision they are making is bad. I don't. I think *this* decision (and some others) are bad. They are blowing a great opportunity to fix a long standing issue. An issue they actually identified and said "We want to fix this". And then they do something lame. Its not more lame than 3e, where they didn't even try. 4e can say they tried, they just fumbled.

You feel that the customization should be in supplementary books. There is some truth in that. The problem is.. those books don't sell as well as the MM. And, perhaps more importantly, they come out years later. So plenty of campaigns will already be started using the bland MM examples..

The 4e designers are right... 3e angels aren't used much and evil deities don't have any servants of their own. Their solution? Take the little used and rather bland angels and stick everyone with them... Woot? No. Not IMHO at any rate. They should have done better. They did tons better with the Shadowfell and the Feywilde.

Antioch,

The only problem with them recycling the names is that you are creating a generation gap in communication. Maybe you only talk to folks playing the latest edition, but there are lots of places where folks playing a variety of editions of D&D mingle. The fact that eladrin used to be celestials and now are faeries... or that archons used to be angels and now are elementals... is that every time I want to talk about archons or eladrin in a post or article, I now have to specify what I'm talking about. That's never been an issue before. Writing edition free fan articles is now much more difficult than it was before. Until 4e comes out, I can write a 'fluff' article and post it on canonfire and it'll be equally useful to a 1e, 2e, or 3e guy. In the future, I'll have to add a bunch of verbiage to cover 4e as well. That's annoying. They could have stopped using the old stuff and come up with new stuff and that wouldn't have been a problem. Now you can argue that WotC shouldn't care about that and you might be right. But its just a needless 'in your face', intentional or not, that is going to be a constant annoyance going forward.

Since the rest of your comments seem to be variations on "you don't have the right opinion, so stop expressing it" I'll just skip on responding to them.

Frankly, I can't tell what a character would look like under this system... I guess I'll need a sample character to examine before I can decide if this is any good or not.

Oh, flavor text is pretty poor for most creatures in general throughout D&D's history. I'm not sure where you got the idea I thought 4e was starting something there. I said it was going even further down the wrong road than in the past. For me, at least, looking at monsters with diverse powers.. some combat and some non combat... would make me think of reasons why they would need such powers or when they might use them.

Not every high level monster needs to be able to teleport or anything else. Not every high level monster could, either.

The Shadowfell and Feywilde are great concepts. Its about time D&D finally started actually using Faerie in a half way decent fashion. On the other hand, I find retelling the Fall of Lucifer with D&D's devils to be pretty weak. I think comments like "we merged succubi and erinyes together because we couldn't be bothered to figure out how to differentiate them" to be extremely weak. That's a situation begging for RP guidance (a great example on this topic being available on Planewalker.com, IIRC). But instead it was dropped.

This thread is about angels, though. Not about everything 4e. And I think they are really dropping the ball on this one. No one is going to be fighting good angels in the future either.. there's nothing provided to give a basis for that. So, essentially, all they are doing is saying "we don't feel like providing stats for the good guys since you won't fight them, we'll just make them the same as the bad guys you will fight but give them white hats instead of black ones". I think that's a terrible idea. If there is anywhere where customization is a no brainer, it should be with gods and their minions.

IMHO, the game designer needs to be setting the example. Veteran DMs can easily add flesh to bare bones. I doubt the 4e MM will see any more use than my 3e one (ie hardly any). But inexperienced DMs (and especially totally new ones) won't have that experience. So they'll see the bare bones and think that's what they should be replicating when they do their homebrew worlds. The same guys who come up with the Shadowfell and reimagine Fomorians the way they did can't come up with a better example than Bane's 'angels of valor' duking it out with Bahamut's 'angels of valor'? Bah.

Most of those changes between older editions were mechanics. Mechanics changes are not a problem. And yes, I would have preferred that they didn't turn eladrin into a type of elf and archons into a type of elemental and so on. If they were similar things with different mechanics it would have been better.

And it may well prove that they have all this cool non combat stuff hidden away. I just find it very odd that after all this time and all these revelations, next to none of it has made an appearance anywhere. That strikes me as speaking volumes about what they think is important.

I'm well aware that most people prefer to play D&D as a combat intensive game. Its one of the reasons that I hardly ever buy D&D modules and don't subscribe to Dungeon magazine.

However, I think you have no basis for saying that "most" people seem to like the changes. Neither of us knows what the majority of folks think about that. Most of the folks still posting on this forum after the pathfinder announcement maybe... Not really sure what your point is.. I should shut up because you claim to have majority support? What else is there to express about fluff except opinion?

Antioch,

HOw is your argument not just "make it all up yourself"? And if it is, why do I even need to buy the new book? Obviously, an experienced DM knows how to change stats or make things up to use monsters in different situations. But where is there any evidence that the game is supporting new DMs in doing that or providing examples?

If the game only stats out combat for the monsters and only shows examples of using monsters in combat, don't you think that most folks not already familiar with a broader playstyle are going do end up with a combat intensive campaign?

They can make up new background and story if they want. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with them recycling names and using them for fundamentally different concepts, because that's going to lead to confusion in conversation between players of different editions (something that's not been an issue before). In 1/2/3e Eladrin and Archon mean one thing; in 4e they mean something substantially different.

I do wish that they spent more effort on being creative in their new stuff instead of going down the path of least resistance.. like using gods from existing campaign worlds, making all angels generic, and so on. Some of the stuff they are doing is great, like the Feywild and the Shadowfell (though I'm not sold on the names, especially). A lot of stuff isn't.

And no matter how many times you tell me that I don't need to use the new material that still won't become a valid rebuttal to criticism of the new material's quality.

My sense tells me that what they are doing is catering to the majority of D&D players, seeing as they have access to surveys, message boards, email messages, letters, and personal discussions with D&D players, and thus are a pretty good authority figure on what the mainstream likes and dislikes of D&D are.

That is probably true. I am quite aware that I'm far from the mainstream of gamers. I'm a bit bothered that they are making 4e so focused on that mainstream that it no longer really suits my needs.. or at least suits them substantially less than alternatives (like 3e or non D&D games). But then, I don't have to buy the game either and probably won't.

Eh, Tekumel doesnt seem to be a sandbox RPG, but a game that uses a pre-established world, so it makes sense that they can cram in more background. D&D usually has group-specific settings, so its not really worthwhile to go into finer detail on those sorts...

Tekumel was originally published as a gameworld for D&D, more or less. A long time ago. Not really relevant to my point though. I was referring to the world, not the game system (Which came later). TSR/WotC game worlds all drop the ball on religion pretty much and just go with 'the list of gods' strategy. Ebberon does a better job than most, but its still not that good. I agree that material on the gods, religion, servitors, etc should be in the campaign settings. But it never is with D&D. It always defaults to 'use the MM'. And the MM uses Genericus Angelus.

Having a rationale for why all the gods use Genericus Angelus as servitors doesn't make it less lame. :P

And yes, I do think that servitors of Bane should deal retribution differently than servitors of Bahamut. And not just different in the speech they give before they smite you.

Similarly, if you need a creature to be able to do X and X takes place off-screen, are you actually going to say to yourself, "nope, can't use this creature because it can't do X".

I very well might if its a known creature the players have reason to be familiar with. At the very least, I'll have determined how they are doing X if its not innate. But the reverse is also true... if a creature isn't listed as able to do X, how much less likely are you to think of even using X at all? The more arbitrary and inconsistent you are as a DM with regards to 'how things work', the less the players will bother to think through possibilities on their own. This isn't such a big deal in delves, but if you run lots of intrigue and large scale adventures you need to be very careful with it or the players just stop trying to figure things out and default to "ask the DM to tell us" in various forms.

The players shouldn't be looking under the hood (and for 1e/2e, this was how it ALWAYS was. THe idea that what a monster does off-screen has to be shown in their entire splatbook is a 3E invention. Certainly wasn't true in how Gygax envisioned encounter/monster)

Frankly, I have no idea what you are talking about here. If anything, 3e is less 'look under the hood' because there are a bazillion ways to add capabilities to mobs. In 1e (skipped 2e, personally) there were tons of players who would say "oh, that's an ogre mage it does X, Y, and Z". In 3e, you can never be sure its not an advanced fiendish ogre mage warlock.

The whole convention for giving high end mobs tons of combat and non combat capabilities came from the 1e MM and modules.

Anyway, players not looking under the hood is best solved by the DM during gameplay, not by making the default monster write ups overly stripped down.

Sure, the DM can make up anything he wants. Heck, I can't even recall the last time I used a predesigned monster out of a book. I've been DMing for 25 years, so designing my own stuff is second nature. But the game still needs to be setting up the baseline for new players and DMs. If there are no examples of the stuff we are expected to 'handwave' then do you really thing any of it will ever appear in those peoples' games? Over the years I've seen lots of DMs of the "this is what the monster does according to the book" sort.

Unless there is a lot of information in the DMG or somewhere else in the MM to guide folks in expanding the monsters or using them in non combat ways, I think its going to have an adverse affect on gameplay in the long run. Beyond some vague comments, they aren't giving us much reason to believe the game is designed for anything beyond 'delves'.

Anyway, the "DM can always add his own stuff" or "Just change it as a houserule" arguments don't hold any water in the discussion on the merits of any particular topic. Its obviously true and it obviously is irrelevant. A decision is not okay because you can replace it with a different decision if you want. To be okay, it needs to be a decision that benefits the most number of players or otherwise betters the game.

It may be that drab, simplistic monsters the DM needs to dress up to actually take out to a party are the best way to make the game. But I think they are taking it way too far, particularly with powerful entities like the pit fiends and higher end angels.

If the /only/ consideration is what the monster will do in combat against the PCs, I suppose there is nothing wrong with just setting them up to be knocked down without a lot of wasted space. But that's not the only use for "monsters", particularly high level ones like angels and demons. Monsters also can be used multiple times and in a wide variety of situations. Obviously, the 4e solution is to create different monsters for each of these situations instead of creating monsters flexible enough to be used different ways.

If your encounters are sufficiently unbalanced that its all or nothing in the fashion described, that's a flaw in the design of either the game or the encounter. Its not a problem I have much, but then I am a pretty conservative DM as far as leveling, treasure, and use of rules supplements go.

So, to answer your question I'd rather have mobs that are fun to read and that I then effectively pare down when deciding on their strategy for the encounter I have in mind. I can see how some folks might think just making different monsters or different variants of the same monster is an easier version of the same thing. But I don't find these highly focused mobs nearly as inspirational (or non combat useful)as the older style.

The full write ups in the MM may help, but I don't get the impression those are going to be substantially different than the excerpts.

Having unwavering servants is not lame. Having generic servants for all the gods is pretty lame.

If all the gods are closely related and essentially on the same team, then they would likely have some similarity in their servants. But if the gods are distinct in origin, opposed to each other (or divided into some number of opposing teams), the idea that they have the same servants is extremely boring.

Bane and Bahamut ought not both have the same sort of 'angels of retribution' for punishing wrongdoers. Its uninteresting and makes them less distinctive. Arguably, an Inevitable and a Retriever both do the same thing: go deal with someone who has offended a god (or principle) of the relevant alignment. But there is substantial flavor added by them not both being functionally identical (except possibly for personality, if that comes up).

But D&D generally botches religion anyway and 4e is striving to go further down the flavorless path. But that probably works for them, since quite likely the majority of players couldn't care less about anything actually religious and just want a name of a god to shout in battle. Worlds like Glorantha and Tekumel, where they actually put some thought into the religion as opposed to lists of gods, are few and far between. And don't have particularly interesting market shares.

Overall, the new monster stats are bland because the core idea is to make every monster simplistic. After all, a monster typically just needs to do "five cool things before it dies" according to WotC's game play research.

The 4e idea is that rather than having interesting, well rounded monsters you have encounters composed of an interesting assortment of unidimensional monsters. Rather than several devas each capable of a variety of things, you fight a melee deva and a ranged attack deva and a debuffing deva (or whatever).

The devil vs evil angel thing isn't actually a problem. As mentioned above, evil angels are loyal to their god while devils are deicides.

Regarding demon lords vs gods, the original 1e rule was that demonlords were traditionally also lesser gods. Lolth, Yeenoghu, and Orcus were explicitly mentioned as such, while it was just referenced for the rest. Later it was decided that this was a problem and didn't sufficiently distinquish demonlords from actual gods. Thus you ended up with convoluted workarounds where Erythnul supposedly granted spells to clerics of Yeenoghu for unspecified reasons... Frankly, that didn't make a lot of sense to me.

In the planescape setting, the planes had their own innate servitor races which may or may not associate with the gods who happened to dwell on those planes. Eladrin didn't exist as servitors of chaotic good goods, they existed as servitors of Chaotic Good. That might include helping CG gods or might not.

Fluff wise, everyone has angels is pretty lame but its a lot easier for the game designers in a setting neutral situation. The reality is that unique servitors ought to be developed for each god or group of closely related gods. But you can't do that except in the context of a Campaign Setting book and its probably not considered a good use of space in such anyway.

Alright, so this is basically a semantics deal? Evil servitors that aren't demons or devils are a fine addition to the game, but I don't know that there is anything especially noteworthy in calling them "angels". At least, not unless its going to result in all the gods having fundamentally similar servants, which seems unlikely to be a good idea.

Anyway, I can't say that I buy the core concept that "if the players don't fight it, its a waste of space" which seems to behind this name game.

I was of the understanding that the planes were gone, but the gods' homes were now 'astral domains'. So there's nothing like Bytopia, there's just the realms of the gods who used to dwell there. But I guess we'll see when the actual game comes out.

As for different fluff, in my experience most of the PrCs that involved organizations or guilds were either A) never taken or B) taken but with the guild completely ignored. Just IME though.

Yeah, that's my experience with how other people used PrCs. In my campaign, they were all tied to organizations or other RP specific situations (except for the "I want to multiclass a spell caster and not suck PrCs.. warpriest, mystic theurge, arcane trickster, and eldritch knight). But as far as I know, that's a definite rarity.

Frankly, I'm pleased about that. I disliked the way they kept changing her around to suit the flavor of the month in D&D publishing. In fact, I'm pleased they stopped using the GH pantheon in general, given the way they did the same with a lot of other gods (Heironeous, St. Cuthbert, and Wee Jas were just the worst affected).

The core concept of Planescape was that there were all kinds of gods and they weren't that big a deal, because it was the planes themselves... the forces of the different alignments... that ultimately mattered. The intrigue was all about the plethora of different factions in Sigil interacting with the nature of the planes and their denizens.

Almost all of those planes are just gone.. so are most of their denizens. The Bloodwar is gone. The Great Modron March makes no sense. The distinctions between demons and daemons is gone. Devils are rather different. I suppose there is something replacing archons and eladrin, but I'm not sure about Slaad.

As I said, I would have assumed they'd leave the setting in the dustbin. I can't see any Planescape setting coming out that has much of anything to do with the original, beyond the city of Sigil itself. That's why I was surprised to see it mentioned in the OP's list.

I'd be stunned if they released a Planescape setting that used anything other than Sigil from the old. They'll redo it with the new cosmology, I'd bet money on it.

How they are going to do that.. without a Bloodwar, fewer types of fiends, no alignments, etc I don't know. Its the last campaign setting I would have expected them to try to do. But I'll be stunned if they go back to the 'old fluff' in doing it.

Yeah, that's the big worry. Planescape without the great wheel? Could be well done, but its definitely scary. And Dark Sun's whole motif is different. Shouldn't be hard to do right, but if they feel they need to add the feywild and everything else it'll be ugly.

But we'll see when they get to Ebberon, I think. The new fluff is alien to that campaign world, too. If they change the halflings/elves/drow of Ebberon to match 4e instead of making 4e variants to match Ebberon, we'll know which way the wind is blowing well in advance.

Paragon paths seem extremely easy to design: make a perk for using an Action Point, make a power for 11th-level, and make a power for 16th-level. Thats about it. Prestige classes are much, MUCH more complicated to design, and thus more prone to abuse.

As for the Stormwarden, since nothing about the paragon path seems to require the existence of the Stormwarden organization (or even an organization at all), you could just as easily have the character NOT belong to any organization and just take it if they want to be better at using two weapons.
Thats an easy enough to fix to the perceived problem of "story enforcement".

Actually, its 3 features and three powers. But yes they are easier to design than prestige classes. It doesn't mean that they will remain reasonable once there hundreds and hundreds of them in existance. PrCs started out pretty straightforward, too. Wizards doesn't have a good track record with this sort of thing. It would be nice if they have learned their lesson, but we'll have to wait and see.

I suppose you can just ditch the rationales behind the paragon paths, too. Or replace them with something else. You could do that with prestige classes...in fact, I get the impression most folks ditched the RP considerations of the classes anyway. I just was curious as to how much the paragon paths and epic destinies were going to be predicated on elements of the new fluff. I'm sure if you play in Greyhawk or Ebberon, you can find a different reason why your ranger suddenly started giving off sparks at lvl 11. Its no big deal when its a few; it would be more tedious if it turns out to be 20+ paragon paths and most of the epic destinies.

Uhh, he meant 'core' in the sense of SRD only, not "everything that WotC has published itself". So all those splatbooks and other piles of garbage aren't an issue, since you don't have to use them.

I just wonder what's keeping the paragon paths from going down the same road. Prestige classes started out pretty interesting. They ended up a nightmare.

Anyway, I do hope they have an option for rangers who don't want to turn into some sort of super agent or whatever. I hope that there is a paragon path for 'more of the same'.

Its also going to be interesting to see how 'fluff determining' these paragon paths are. One of the ranger paths is a "stormwarden of the feywild". Which means the DM has to use the Feywild and probably have some sort of organization called Stormwardens unless they want to rewrite or disallow one of the ranger's three or four options.

Dragonraid is amusing, if you ignore the fact that a lot of the 'monsters' are probably your RL buddy who doesn't go to church in exaggerated form. Its not as vile as Racial Holy War, but the thought process behind monsters and encounters doesn't come from the nicer side of faith...

It does have the all time best skill ever, though. "Righteously Mingle with Evil". There is just no better skill in any game, ever.

Well, that's true. You can write a "generic module" that happens to have stats compatible with any game you want, at least within some limits. But you could not publish it as "runequest" module and or even say "compatible with Runequest" without their permission.

That's why all those 1e era generic modules said things like "compatible with major Roleplaying games" and similar things. They weren't allowed to say they worked with D&D.

I think that WotC is making a mistake in doing this, but its not an industry I work in so perhaps they know something I don't. I can clearly understand why they want their license to prevent things like Castles and Crusades, Hackmaster, Pathfinder, True20, etc being developed for 4e. That's competition, not cooperation. Wizards wants 3rd party companies to write products that build on rather than replace the PHB.

I just don't think that forcing 3rd party companies to chose is necessarily going to benefit them. It seems likely to strengthen the support for OGL games rather than weaken it. A lot of OGL publishers have substantial investments in those OGL game lines that they can ill afford to give up.

Its rather wierd. Most other truly independent (ie non d20) game systems have had as many or more editions in less time than D&D, but they haven't gone out of their way to gut pre existing material like this. Ars Magica, my personal favorite, is in its 5th edition (and 3rd publisher, IIRC). It doesn't spit on the 2/3/4e product line. Atlas games just doesn't make anything for them anymore.

Well, depends on your definition of include. That whole discussion of core again. A lot of people don't buy scads and scads of rules supplements. Granted, those folks are also not very likely to be hanging around game company message boards, but they do exist in large quantity. Personally, I play 3e with just the PBH/DMG/MM and my own creativity. So the 4e model essentially means I have to either commit a lot more money to the game, do with less, or invent more stuff from scratch.

Since I've been playing D&D for 30 years, my campaign worlds have generally had druids, bards, half orcs (my personal favorite race to play), gnomes, etc. Or they have an entirely home brew selection of races. Either way, the 4e model doesn't serve my particular interests that well.

Well, that presupposes that you have friends who are going to buy the game. I'm the DM in my group. No one else is going to buy anything unless I've said I'm going to use it. That's just the way they are. Other friends primarily play Ars Magica or some other game besides D&D or only play sporadically these days..

There are 15 FRPG gamers in my circle of friends. Only three of them are paying any attention at all to 4e. That's me and two college buddies who work for WotC (in IT). And those two mainly play computer games these days, so I'm not even really sure they'll be playing 4e. I don't know if they actually play any p&p D&D outside of our semi annual gaming get togethers (where they play whatever the heck the other DM and I choose to run). When the game comes out, I'll certainly drop them an email and see what they say, if anything.

But in a sense, you are right. No one is going to be talking about the incompetent marketing once the game is out. It'll be water under the bridge. But I bet there are plenty of people who look at what's been said and don't feel like they'll make a special trip down to the FLGS to peruse the rules. And that'll be from marketing.