Hi guys. Wow, the forums look different now. It's been a while I guess.
Went over the thread just for fun and I thought I'd post on the off-chance that it'll keep Stacer from having to agonize unnecessarily. If you haven't yet and have any interest in 4th edition, I'd recommend checking out the new D&D site at
www.wizards.com/dnd --- especially the Design and Development articles after 8/16/2007. The website looks imposing at first glance, but it turns out that if you have a wizards.com login already, you can use the same one without having to register
again.
Personally, I'm liking (almost) everything I see. The article on classes was great as it gave a peek at what the 4.0 Fighter might look like. It's a class that's needed fleshing out ever since the game was made, and it looks like it's getting something more than bonus feats finally. They also renamed the article on 'class roles' to 'power sources' which is what it's about anyway.
The article that impressed me the most was the sample fight with an ancient dragon. Throw out your own little internal rulebook when you read it, because the dragon breaks through rules barriers regularly. It takes two standard actions & a move action plus a few free action attack abilities on its own turn just for starters, and uses its breath weapon as an immediate action based on a certain trigger---the fact that it went below half health, I think. Keeping in mind that the dragon is an ancient dragon, however, I can't gripe at it's power. Ancient dragons should be
that cool, and they're finally getting a way to deal with the fact that they only get to go once before 4-6 PCs go. In any event, the dragon in the sample fight gets to be far more involved than our typical 3.5 dragon. In 3.5, the dragon would probably either take a full attack or fly/breath weapon, which is pretty dull in comparison.
I'd also note the lack of any attack of opportunity reference (almost - there's one thing that could be an AoO but might not be). There isn't a reference to full attacks either, although that might be incidental...only the dragon ever had an opportunity to make one. The Cleric in the example fight also gets to do some healing
while they fight, something that I'd like to see a lot more of.
I probably sound like a huge fan...maybe I am, but I like to think that I'm just waiting until 4th edition releases before I make a decision. The changes being made sound like a lot more than just the version upgrade we saw from 3.0 to 3.5 though, and from what I've seen so far it looks like they may be worth the pain of version update. Books are spendy, and it'll take an awfully big improvement for me to re-invest, but this might be enough. I'll find out as we go.