Out of all of the supplements I’ve read, seen, or heard about so far, Manual of the Planes is the one that excites me the most overall. Here’s why.

If you’ve read my last few posts, then you could probably hazard a guess: although I didn’t discover it until 3rd Edition had already come out, Planescape is my favorite of the 2nd Edition settings. (Dark Sun runs a close second, which I guess means I happen to be in tune with the readership of Critical Hits.) And now I see that Sigil gets a treatment in the table of contents for the Manual of the Planes. Dang. Now, I have no illusion that it’s going to be as much as I’d like, but I’ll take what I can freaking get.

Another reason? Ideas. In general I like setting-oriented books because they give me lots of ideas. Story seeds along the lines of what’s in the Mercykillers article are exactly the kinds of things that I like. Even if I don’t use them as written, they provide helpful examples for developing my own story hooks and scenarios.

I’m really curious as to what the multiverse looks like under a 4th Edition regime. It looks like they’ve made provisions for many of the classic settings, including Spelljammer, Ravenloft, and (obviously) Planescape. I think that’s pretty classy. Yet it’s hard to top Planescape, and while I’m aware of this intellectually, I also recognize that there will undoubtedly be changes that I dislike or parts of the new multiverse that I find less interesting.  

On the other hand, the setting folks made some good points in Worlds and Monsters. The Elemental Chaos is much more practical, for lack of a better word, than each of the old elemental planes. The Feywild and Shadowfell are quite clearly the analogues to the Positive and Negative Energy Planes, and each strikes me as quite a bit more playable than its predecessor. You could send heroic tier characters to the Shadowfell or the Feywild for a stint and they won’t explode into radiance or get level drained into oblivion.

I have mixed feelings on ths nixing of the law/chaos continuum. It was neat to see the variety of planes and how each one evoked an alignment. The concept was appealing but some of them weren’t implemented all that well. As much as I like the idea of demons vs. devils— which is of course a concept still present in 4th Edition— I’m not really sure I find the concept of a neutral good or neutral evil plane all that compelling.

Also, all else being equal, I think these kinds of things matter less when it comes to fluff or setting. I’m much less worried about eliminating a plane or altering the cosmology in some way than I am about trying to tweak the accuracy at-wills or the archer ranger class features, to name a couple of my mechanical pain points.

Lastly, this kind of book inspires a feeling of what I’d almost call relief. It’s a DM-oriented book, as far as I can tell, and that makes me happier than a player oriented book that could introduce all kinds of broken powers, builds, or combinations.

Quick thoughts!

In mechanical terms, it’s flavor + paragon path. For DMs, it has some adventure seeds and whatnot.

Looks like they wiped out some/all of the Factions in Sigil. That’s a bummer, unless they exist in some modified form, which is also possible.

It’s neat to see them do some work with Planescape. I was going to read something into this except that they did something on Dark Sun, too.

Summary

The short and sweet is that they’re a controller who can trend striker or leader. They’re Wisdom based, with Dex or Con as a secondary, and the secondary stat looks like it will drive which encounter powers you go with. They’re light armor guys, and lose some of their class feature benefits if they wear heavy armor.

They still have a shapeshifting thing going on. It’s modal: if you’re in beast form, you gain access to beast form powers and lose access to your other powers. One thing worth mentioning is that druids get three at-will attacks, and at least one but at most two of which must be beast form attacks. All the beast attacks are basic attacks in some sense, with one of the three only usable as part of a charge.

Powers

The at-wills are all really quite good. While looking over these last night, one of my friends remarked that they were more interesting controllers than wizards. Although I’m not sure I agree when it comes to everything wizards can do— druid effects are powerful, sure, but almost all of their powers are a single target or burst/blast 1— I have to agree with this assessment when it comes to at-wills. The druid looks like it will deliver on the potential inherent to the new push, pull, and slide mechanics, much more than the wizard or perhaps any other class.

For instance, Chill Wind is much like Scorching Burst, but instead of adding your Wis modifier to damage, you can instead slide the target one square. Flame Seed is very similar to Cloud of Daggers, except you forfeit the Wis modifier damage bonus in exchange for dealing damage to enemies around the target. Obviously this is only playtest, but both druid powers are much more, well, controlling.

The beast form at-wills are all quite good, too. They’re all d8, and include a slow effect or sliding the target. There’s a Daily utility that lets you add your Dex modifier to your speed for the encounter, which, um. Let’s say it here because it’s obvious: elf druid with the druid class feature that grants +1 to speed. That’s 8 speed, base, which is up to 11 with this power. Throw in some boots of speed or Fleet of Foot and you’re probably up to 12 or 13. Yikes.

Speaking of dailies: guess which druid power made it as a daily? Faerie Fire! The irony is amusing: as a multi-stage debuff  that includes slow, combat advantage (!), and some damage, it’s quite badass. They’ve got another daily that does some damage with a minor healing effect, which seems to be the only power in this preview that is leader-like.

Final comments

In practice, I’d say that I’d enjoy playing the controller aspect up the most. Their capacity for sheer destruction is much less than a wizard’s since they deal less damage and over a smaller area, but in exchange it seems like they have more interesting choices to make when it comes to choosing and using their powers. I suppose Arcane Power will make some difference in this regard, which is good and bad.

So, yeah, I’m a fan. This is one class I’ve always enjoyed in theory more than in practice. I consistently made fun of the bard in 3rd Edition, and the 4th Edition version was pretty cool, so it was hard to worry about the viability of this class. It might be a little too good by this point, but that’s what the playtest is for, right?

It wasn’t until Jonathan Drain’s latest round of links popped up on my feed reader that I dug deeper. (Aaaaand I just noticed that this update happened to include me. Wow. Thx, Jonathan!)

I’ve never been as into D&D as I have since 4th Edition since, when it comes down to it, I’m more of a White Wolf guy. It’s for that reason I’ve not really been familiar with a lot of the big names on the WotC side. But when I saw Dave Noonan’s name on the list, I was shocked. I felt like I’d lost a friend. Why’s that? 

It’s quite simple: the D&D podcast. It’s amazing what a difference hearing someone’s voice really makes. I didn’t start listening to the podcast until well after 4th Edition had been announced, so when I did start, there was plenty of back material to go through.

I figured the podcast would be informational but not entertainment, if that makes sense. Gamers aren’t known for their social skills, and I assumed that it would, at times, stray into rambling or arguments of minutiae. When I did listen, I was struck by how interesting these guys were to listen to.

Dave Noonan defied my expectations most of all, mainly because he talked like, well, a regular person. He was relaxed and seemed to be enjoying himself. It was infectious. The podcast became for me what I imagine radio shows are for some other people— you don’t really know these guys, but despite that, you do kinda feel like they’re friends.

I have no idea if they’re going to can the podcast. I sure hope it continues, as I enjoyed listening to folks like James Wyatt, Chris Perkins, Mike Mearls, and I look forward to hearing them again. But it sure as hell won’t be the same for me. I’ll miss Dave. Hopefully that he can find some kind of safe harbor.

I do have one final thought, which is that there are other people on the list, and it’s kind of amazing to me that they’d lay off a bunch of those people like this. Where I come from, experienced, smart people like these are your greatest assets. Of course you need to bring in and nurture new talent, but who do you think provides that kind of mentoring? It’s not management. It’s not HR. It’s the people they work with, people who can impart shit that’d take years of trial and error to figure out. The mind boggles. I can only wonder about the future of the hobby when a leader like this consistently nukes their own talent.

And I guess that’s all I’ve got to say about that.

For the most part, I think this is a great supplement. But I think I’m already running into supplement fatigue.

It’s pretty good!

There are some mechanical hiccups. For instance, there are some abilities that just didn’t make sense to me. One of the level 3 ranger attacks seems worse off, generally, than anything else. It’s also hard to make a convincing case for taking the ranged build of the ranger anymore— take beastmaster and use a flying beast in order to quarry whatever you want— which is disappointing. 

That said, there are a lot of paragon paths that are both interesting and have some cool abilities. The epic destinies are interesting as long as you ignore the ones from the PHB. (I’ve rapidly reached the conclusion that the epic destinies in the PHB not very good in terms of flavor, and the Trickster path is objectively better than the remaining ones. And as they said in the podcast, Demigod sucks a lot of air out of the room.)

The new builds for various classes are evocative and interesting. The rogue who uses a mace to pummel people is fun, as are the optics of the aerialist. Despite the fact that it completely outshines the ranged ranger build in terms of flexibility and options, it’s still very neat. I also like the new warlord options, especially the one where someone gets free hits on you.

A big stack o’ books

But I said something about supplement fatigue.

I’ve got only three of the supplements: the Adventurer’s Vault;  Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide; and now Martial Power. Between the last two, there’s a lot in the way of additional feats, powers, and classes. That’s a lot of material to sift through, when creating a character or when deciding whether or not something is overpowered.

Mostly, I find wearying the thought of flipping through a pile of books in order to build a character, in order to find the least terrible option. The character creator will fix one symptom (browseable lists of powers), but not the other (power creep). I also find it wearying trying to mentally vet the sheer variety of combinations the book affords.

A big factor is that I thought the PHB was pretty solid overall. There are problems here and there but by and large it’s a fun game, and you can make a lot of different race/class/build combinations work. It feels a lot less bloated than 3rd Edition was, in terms of providing meaningful choices with fewer objectively good or bad routes. It was— dare I say it? — elegant, in many ways.

No, 4th Edition is not so bad yet. It’s only a few books, and as a DM I can handle powers on a case-by-case basis (though the beastmaster ranger thing is somewhat frustrating, especially considering I play that type of ranger in my friend’s game.

Perhaps this is just my naivete rearing its ugly head. The games I’ve been heavily into until now have skewed away from supplements with a lot of crunch. D&D is the opposite, by and large, and I was clearly not prepared what that entails, at least on some level.