Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Review

The Rampant Coyote gives us his take on Wizards of the Coast’s recently released 4th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

If it didn’t say, “Dungeons & Dragons” on the cover, I would think it was a well-produced third-party fantasy role-playing game. I’d also ask if they sold cards to go with character actions, as the character abilities are defined very carefully in color-coded strips that resemble deed cards in Monopoly. They scream out for playing as part of an “action deck”, with some cards that return to your hand immediately after being played, others that are played only once per combat, and others that are played once per day. I imagine we’ll see those once the launch mania is over.

When I got to reading up on the Wizard class – which bears pretty much zero resemblance to the Dungeons & Dragons magic-user / wizard and has a lot more in common with the sorceress in the arcade game Gauntlet (or the late-3.5-era Warlock class – I realized that this was not Dungeons & Dragons. It is a game that could potentially co-exist with Dungeons & Dragons if the publisher didn’t have a vested interest in burying the older games where they might never be found again. But there is a bigger gulf between this game and D&D than between the old and new incarnations of Battlestar Galactica.