I’ve been ravenously devouring every scrap of information I can get my hands on regarding 4th Edition. Wizards’ official site updates three times a week, which hardly seems like often enough. I have, however, managed to catch hold of some inspiring scraps, and I have some suppositions based on others. In no particular order:

• Paladins no longer have to be Lawful Good. It never made sense to me that only the good-aligned deities got divine champions. Wouldn’t a deity like the Mockery or Bane see the sense in having a living conduit of serious beat-down, and imbue someone thus? Now they can.
• I have a hunch that attacks of opportunity are being replaced by immediate actions, which allow you to react to certain stimuli in a variety of ways. I hope to see a number of feats and class abilities that grant you a great deal of flexibility in how you use your immediate actions and what triggers them. I have heard mention of rogues being able to wait for an opening and launch a counter-attack, a maneuver that was, mechanically, difficult to pull of in 3.x.
• Clerics can now heal while they do other things. Huzzah!
• The old, Vancian spell slot system of magic is (mostly) gone apparently, replaced by something that is presumably more balanced for an individual encounter rather than a full day. Also, you can have 25th-level spells (though I’m unclear as to why spell levels don’t go all the way up to 30, like class levels). Further, fighter/mage hybrid characters will apparently be far more viable at lower levels.
• Along those lines, the multiclassing system is evidently seeing a bit of a re-haul.
• Iterative attacks are, I believe, being eliminated or, at the very least, minimized in a Saga-esque way, which should speed up combat, particularly at higher levels.
• Fighters are weapon specialists now, and rogues are skill specialists. Fighters can do more with weapons than other classes can, and rogues can do more with skills.
• The designers are trying to design the classes such that everyone always has something interesting to do. By extension, this implies more options for the fighter (rather than merely, “I attack the orc.”) and less “Crap, I’m out of spells” for the wizard/cleric/sorcerer.

That’s all I can think of right now. The geeky part of my brain has been set a-tingling.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 11:07 am and is filed under 4th Edition, Geeking Out, Links, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.