And now, the long-awaited D&D4.0 REVIEW!

For me, this is how my plans for the the webcomic’s new year officially start. We’ll be focusing on the RPG element, and the “Back to basics” part of the title means exactly that. It’s a return to what I feel was the essence of COMMISSIONED from the very beginning, a part of it that was set aside during 2009 so that I could try out a bit of storytelling and character development.

Observant people might notice is that the book we’ve got there for playing is not a Dungeons & Dragons book. I suppose some brand purists might gasp at the concept, but then again I’d assume that RPG mechanics purists should be nodding their heads in agreement. What happened was simply that after much reading, review and consideration, I finally decided that while D&D4.0 definitely looks like a good game, fun and dynamic; if you’ve been playing D&D for years as we (and so many of you) have, you’ll find that the new system takes away a lot of the gaming aspects we loved about it and addresses issues we simply didn’t need them to fix. Sure enough, the classes were unbalanced, fights could take forever and you could’ve easily built an entire 4-year college course on how to play the game. But for those of us that already played it none of this mattered, because the way a character moved throughout a campaign was role-played, and not rolled. So even if one was much more powerful or another was incredibly weak, it didn’t matter. With their wits, imaginations and a good DM, the characters came to life, and just like real people they were not all the same and yeah, some had advantages over others.

The rules and procedures could be a bit overwhelming for newcomers, but any experienced group could play around with the rules, sometimes even discarding them completely. The DM was expected to make decisions using his own judgement and I personally even rewarded my group with experience every time they put me (as a DM) in situations were the rules didn’t apply. This meant that they were actually in the action, and that they were being creative.

But I feel that with this new version, they’ve forgotten that D&D is not supposed to be a game; it’s an adventure. And that’s exactly what 4.0 feels like: just a game. With the ever-growing emphasis on miniatures and tiles, it feels like you’re playing a board game at times. Sure, the book clearly says that these things are optional, but if you look at the game mechanics objectively, you’ll see that they’re really not optional at all. Either you and your players manage to get exactly the same tile layout in your mind’s eye or you use a board. Otherwise, there’s gonna be a whole lot of misunderstandings.

Of course, a lot of people like playing with miniatures and tiles – but we don’t. To me, every single time I have to bend over and look at a board I’m sucked out of the game and brought back to reality. And that’s precisely the opposite of what D&D is about for us.

I’ll agree that the new rules make the game much more dynamic and streamlined, but that only makes it feel more like a video game and less like something that’s only limited by your imagination. I like video games, of course. Actually, Ilove video games. But there’s always a feeling of limited possibilities in them. Playing with my new PS3, I’m always amazed at the awesomeness of how real it all feels, how tangible. But with this approach to reality also comes the constant reminder that it isn’t real. The magnificent way in which the scenery is shown in Uncharted 2 constantly makes me stop and admire its beauty – but on the other hand it also has me constantly trying to grab or climb stuff that just isn’t available for interaction. More than once I’ve found myself being killed and wondering why he didn’t just throw a brick at them, or why such a tough guy can’t just kick down such a flimsy-looking door. More than once I just wanted to pinch Chloe’s butt cheeks.

Before anybody points it out – the D&D4.0 gaming system, of course, doesn’t limit you in any way. Just like any other RPG, the players can push the events in any direction eventually forcing the DM to think outside of the rules. And I will grant them that the new rules for fighting make the whole thing go a lot more smoothly. But this comes at a cost, and it’s that the rules feel a lot less prepared to deal with unexpected occurrences – like a video game. And eventually you’ll find yourself wondering why you needed these new rules at all since you constantly see yourself forced to forget about them and make judgement calls. This applies to all other aspects of the game as well, be it character creation, skill management or even NPC generation.

Again, don’t get me wrong: for newcomers D&D4.0 is great. It’s easy to get into, enjoyable and lots of fun. it’s not really limited when you think about it – it’s just not limitless. If you’ve been playing WoW for years and suddenly felt the urge to explore the vast territories of pen and paper RPGs then Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 is the game for you. But if like me, you don’t play WoW precisely because you don’t like how limited and constrained it makes you feel, then D&D4.0 will make you feel like maybe you should give MMOs a try.

So doing my research I came upon Pathfinder, a game loudly promoted as the actual continuation of D&D3.5, even to the point of calling it D&D3.75. Somehow, I had overlooked this gem and now I feel like I’ve been missing out. I just started checking it out a couple of days ago, but already I see that it’s all I really needed in the newest version of D&D. They actually just took the old 3.5 rules, fixed what wasn’t working and expanded were expansion was required. Even the artwork (which I felt was a step taken backwards in the D&D4.0 books) looks amazing!

Of course, I haven’t gone through all of it, so I won’t be telling you all that Pathfinder is our new promised land, but I will go as far as saying that it definitely looks promising. I’ll be trying it out, and I’ll let you know how it goes. So I guess that’s it for now – no doubt a long rant and a heavy read, but not so long if you consider that I’ve been holding my judgment on D&D4.0 for 2 years. If you skipped through it all and just want the conclusion, here goes:

-If you’re into video games, MMOs or simply new to pen and paper RPGs, then D&D4.0 is the game for you.

-If unlike most people, you’ve never felt that D&D was too complicated, and you were loving the third editions just fine, then maybe you should stick with them or try Pathfinder.

. . .

Before I go, another thing observant people will notice several different things about the comic strips, and perhaps the most important one as the storyline advances will be the format, the size of the comic.  Up until now the comic’s size was variable, shifting and changing in order to suit my needs. In this manner you’d sometimes get comics that were huge, using the advantages of Scott McCloud’s “Infinite Canvas”. But this year, I guess you could say that my feelings towards these ideas have changed a bit, and now I feel that the challenge in comic strip storytelling is not just limited to telling the story, but also in using your space wisely. As an artist, I’ve always drawn the comic with no consideration for the way the panels were distributed. Eventually I observed that most of the panels were simply becoming independent drawings and the comic had simply become a horizontal comic strip laid out vertically.

While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as a designer I’ve always felt that much more can be done with the panels in a comic strip – layouts that play with the depth and distribution making it possible to tell things in a different manner, offering different possibilities for storytelling. Just posting one panel after the  other feels like the audience is limited to one fixed position while a dynamic panel layout feels like the audience is moving around, viewing the action from different angles.

So I decided to standardize the comic’s format so that I could actually play around with the layout more in this manner, but that’s not the only reason. Several other reasons aside, perhaps the one most worthy of noticing is that I feel as if after 5 years of publishing COMMISSIONED comics, it’s about time I made a book out of it. But take a moment and stop to think about the task of placing the comic strips up until now into a book: there’s a designer’s nightmare if there ever was one. With the constant variation of comic sizes, I would need to manually re-edit each and every comic so that they could fit into a book (some would take less than a page, some would take many) – a task made even worse by the fact that we’re taking about a quantity of comics that easily goes into the three-thousands.

With a fixed format (i.e. the size of today’s comic) kept constant throughout the storyline, I can easily edit this RPG adventure into a book after it’s finished. Then all I’d have to focus on would be adding extra stuff, commentaries, exclusive artwork and all sorts of goodies. It’s something COMMISSIONED has never done before, but I figure it’s about time.

Good hunting;
O

NOTE: My review on D&D4.0 is based on my own opinions. I’ve played D&D for something around 20 years, so I’m not new to the game – but it’s still just my opinion and so you don’t necessarily have to agree. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t mind reading your opinions as well. I’m not entirely against changing my mind.