The Ease of Essentials

Designing a class or sub-class with pre-specified class features and/or powers, aka “Essentials-style”, is easier than one without because there are often fewer choices to make throughout your career.

For example a fighter gets to pick at least four exploits at 1st-level, one at 2nd, and so on and so forth all the way to 30th-level. The only point where new class features are gained is at levels 11, 16, 21, 24, and 30, which depends on the paragon path and epic destiny you choose. Conversely a class like the slayer chooses two at-will stances…and that is it. Your features are preset for you; +1 to attack with weapons, power strike as an encounter exploit, and you add your Dex mod to damage rolls. At levels where a fighter gets to choose utility exploits you get to as well, but a good chunk of level up will have you picking from a handful of class features or just taking what you get, like another usage of power strike.

This difference in complexity has lead some to believe that the designers at Wizards of the Coast are lazy, incompetent, pressed for time, lack the staff to properly design/playtest material, or a combination of all of the above. I think a major thing that the Essential-haters fail to realize is that there are plenty of gamers out there actually prefer these classes, or at least enjoy both, perhaps even at different times or for different game types. They seem to think that despite “everyone hating Essentials” or Essentials being a “failed product”, WotC is simply trying to shovel out subpar content (that anyone could do) because they either have no other option, or just do not give a fuck.

Thankfully Trevor piped in to clear things up by page three, stating that no Essentials was not the result of lazy design or trying to get product out the door, but to provide an alternate entry point (as they have said), and because, yeah, there are gamers that want them, even if they are veterans. He even provides clarification on the vampire; it was designed to evoke the idea of a vampire in the D&D world, something that it does very well despite the limited options and thirty levels. Does a member of the WotC staff coming forward to clarify stuff and address concerns actually help? Eh…not really, which makes it no surprise that they so rarely do so in the first place.

One poster claimed that knights or slayers could have just been fighters, but with most of the choices made for them already. In other words, a pre-generated character that you could choose stuff for if you really wanted to. I…cannot see how this would make anyone happier, as you literally would be buying shit you already paid for. I look at it that the subclasses fill a desired niche. If you want to play a slayer–which plays somewhat differently from a knight or fighter mind you–then you can. If you want more complexity, then play a fighter. Different classes for different needs.

Another poster mentioned that the mage and warpriest are very close to the class design of the original classes, which demonstrates that if the designers think that a class needs to use the original progression to evoke a concept they will, as opposed to needlessly limiting themselves. 

Dragon 400’s Table of Contents

June’s issue of Dragon looks densely packed; scoundrel, hybrid, and multiclass playtests, shadow themes, shadow-themed Bazaar of the Bizarre, an article on the Iron Wolf barbarians (with their own theme), Strength-based cleric options, and a bunch of articles from past issues of Dragon, such as Dragonchess, kobolds, and the jester. Personally I’m looking forward to the article on the Iron Wolves, as I’d like to see WotC flesh out the implied setting some more to provide a better foundation for homebrew campaigns, though I’m curious if and how they are going to change up the past articles (namely the limb-loss table and jester).

Apparently in Dungeon they are going to start the arduous process of updating old monster from Monster Manual and “giving them the Monster Manual 3 treatment“, starting with wights and ghosts. There’s also a few Shadowfell adventures, Creature Incarnations, and a Dark Sun article that I hope will be relevant to my homebrew. On the topic of homebrews, I’m actually anxious for the Eye on Eberron article feating Zarash’ak, as that’s where I left off my last campaign that I’ll probably just start over with a new group.

Surprisingly people on the forums seem to be almost universally pleased by this, including posters that were just yesterday deriding the staff as–to put it kindly–stupid, willfully ignorant, and making changes just to “leave their mark on the game”. I take an ironic sort of comfort in that they aren’t apologizing for their hostility, and find it funny that some people apparently just assumed that the staff over at WotC either isn’t listening, doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, or makes changes just to piss people off.

4th Edition and Customization

Perusing the Wizards.com forums for topics of worth, I found a thread concerning D&D and customization. The OP is apparently upset because he thinks there is a lack of versatility in the game, and gives us an opening example of an evil cleric: if you play an evil cleric in D&D, you are mechanically no different than a good one. There are no ‘evil” divine feats or anything like that.

My thoughts on this issue are that first of all, we didnt get divine feats right out of the gate. I think the earliest we got divine feats was in Complete Warrior, published three years after 3rd Edition was released. Three years. Of course, we got all manner of evil stuff in Book of Vile Darkness, but that didnt hit until the second year of the game.
The other thing that occured to me is that he’s not even complaining about the cleric in general, but that he specifically wants to play an evil cleric and have it make a mechanical impact.

See, in 3E if you were evil you had the ability to spontaneously channel negative energy and cause undead to just stand there and gawk at you. From a team perspective, this was often bad because clerics were basically the best healings in 3E. Playing an evil cleric meant that you had to start prepping healing spells instead of just converting them on the fly, and rebuke undead was only nifty if you got a really good roll so that you could command them: generally it was better to just make them run away or back the fuck off until you finished the threats that werent going to turn tail.

His example is extremely specific and brings to mind people complaining about the inability to play an unarmored or light-armored fighter in 3E: you cant jump to the conclusion that the game has no versatility just because an extremely specific concept doesnt exist in the offical rules. Likewise, its also not grounds to declare the game as unfinished or non-functional.

The poster moves on to cite how wizards arent as flexible because of fewer feats and spells. Now, there werent a lot of good feats in 3E, either. Sure, there were a slew of Metamagic feats, but a lot of them took a long time to get around to using since they increased the effective spell’s level, or sucked. I dont consider a crapton of feats to be a good thing when people arent going to use most of them. To me thats just text padding in disguise.

Officially, you can play an evil cleric. On the upside, you arent screwing over the rest of the party in doing so, since clerics can always heal their allies, now. I dont see this is a problem since, as others have said, if an evil cleric is hanging around in a group he probably wants them alive for some reason. That I do not expect to change. As for commanding undead, thats an option I could see in an issue of Dragon or Divine Power. Of course, you could take a pro-active step and try to create a variant class feature yourself. On the other hand, rebuke undead basically made them stand there, and thats what turn undead does now so if you just describe it differently you have the same result, but whatever.

As for the rest of it, you can argue that if you want to play an evil cleric and have it make a mechanical impact that he could houserule energy keywords, change names and descriptions, and maybe create a few simple houserules, but I think the real solution is to just be patient. Make houserules if you want, but stop pretending that the game has no flexibility because it doesnt contain the specific rules you want, especially rules that we didnt see for years in a previous game edition. 3rd Edition had a lot of problems with rules bloat, power creep, and useless crunch.

Customization (along with accessibility and playability) is one of 4E’s strong points. You can take any race and attach it to any class end up with a functional character, which I certainly couldnt say for 3E. Fighters can use many more weapons and not suck, there are less newbie-trap feats, and I havent found a power that sucked. I think I’ve said before here that you would have to go out of your way to make a crippled character, but that doesnt mean you have cookie cutter characters, either.
In Red Jason’s Scions on Punjar, Josh is playing a halfling fighter that dual-wield kukris. Try achieving a similar concept without a lot of min/maxing and likely rogue multiclassing and its a recipie for disaster. He didnt have to fret about any of that, simply placing his Strength at 16, taking Weapon Proficiency, and then worrying about the personality and background.