You should sharply limit the amount of gear and treasure they can bring to the village (as you will understand when you read the adventure). If your group of players has had exceptional luck, simply engineer a minor encounter or two along the way—light-fingered leprechauns, a thief or two, or perhaps some brigands—to rid them of a few of those cumbersome gems, coins, and magical items.

Good times, eh?

As much as I love some of the old D&D stuff, this sort of thing reminds me of how far we’ve come (despite the overall decline of the industry, perceived or otherwise). The relationship between rules, the DM, and the players have evolved quite a bit since then, and this is one example.

All right, so what should you do instead? I don’t want to get too much into this. I’m guessing this scenario is somewhat less likely these days, though perhaps this reveals something about the assumed style of play. These days, I would probably create a new character, but my impression is that people tended to stick with their character. It makes a certain amount of sense, and I’ve thought a bit about a similar structure of play. More on that later, perhaps!

So, assuming someone wants to bring an existing, over-leveled character with them, instead of taking stuff away, I would probably just ask them to play something else and try to relate this person to their character somehow. Maybe they’re a relative or acquaintance. Alternatively, they could power down their PC and play this like it’s in the PC’s past (though most likely without whatever accumulated wealth and magic items the over-leveled character had).

Right off the bat, let me say that there’s a lot that goes into whether a race/class combination is any good. Attributes are one factor. Racial feats, traits, and powers are another. For instance, Dragonborn are viable for most if not all melee classes, whereas dwarves have considerably fewer builds for which they’re viable. Nevertheless, Dwarven Weapon Training and Dwarven Resilience make dwarves an excellent choice for some builds where they might otherwise have been average (e.g. tempest fighter, two-weapon ranger). It’s something to keep in mind.

Despite that, attributes are a decent predictor of whether or not a race/class combo is viable. Ain’t nothing wrong with having a 20 in your primary, and when it comes to classes like the warlock or artful dodger rogue, high Intelligence or Charisma render a lot of good abilities even more powerful.

Background & Terms

First, I’m assuming a few common blocks before racial modifiers, with one special case. 18/14 (with racial mods: 20/16) and 16/16 (18/16 or 18/18) are the best you can get or a primary and secondary. The special case I mentioned is 17/15 when you’re near level 4 or a similar level (17/15 -> 19/17 -> 20/18).

These imply fairly uniform and specialized characters.  There might be crazier stuff you could do with combinations of feats, builds, and powers. I’m ignoring that because it’s simpler.

I’m also following the recommended primary and secondary for the most part. I changed Wisdom to the secondary for paladin and ranger; it seemed more accurate to me since their encounter attacks and utility powers tend to key off of Wisdom.

What I call a top tier combination is where a race’s bonus attributes map directly to a class’ primary and secondary. A halfling artful rogue is one example, which would give you Dex 20, Cha 16 at level 1 (e.g. +9 to hit with daggers, and AC ~21 vs. OAs with leather). 18/18 is an alternative as well. With the special case above, you can get 20/18 (e.g. a level 4 warlord with nice to-hit, granting 6 hp to allies who spend an action point) .

A second tier combo is one where a race has one attribute that maps to a primary or secondary. That’s an 18/16 or (if you don’t care about your secondary) 20/14. With 17/15, you can get 20/16 or 18/18 by level 4. In my opinion, second tier is the minimum required to be viable. Obviously that will change depending on the group’s style of play, and often creating non-viable characters to play against type is the most fun.

When a race has no attributes, or only a tertiary attribute, it’s third tier. This would be a non-optimized build, and this can get hazy. Dexterity is tertiary for fighters, but the aforementioned eladrin fighter is not as poorly off as a tiefling fighter, for example. I’m ignoring this case right now, though it may be that there are similar situations.

I’ve included the preview/playtest classes (bard, barbarian, druid, invoker, and warden), Martial Power,  and the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide. This does tend to skew results in a couple of ways, as I’ve already hinted. One class-specific note about the resourceful warlord is that Charisma OR Intelligence can be secondary. I created two builds, to represent each, which pads out the number of viable Strength-related classes.

Finally, I wrote this code and input the data by hand, so it’s possible that I’ve got flaws in my data input or extraction. Caveat lector!

Analysis

For a melee character, Strength is king! If you have Strength, you can swing at least second tier in 9 classes and 30 builds. As you might expect, almost all of those builds are melee. Charisma is the runner-up, meaning that dragonborn happen to have 6 top-tier builds in three classes and viability in 30 builds. Genasi obviously benefit from this, as well, with viability in 28 builds.

There’s no race that’s a clear loser, though I might nominate eladrin. They have the fewest classes and builds (10 and 18). A more comprehensive set of data might include a fighter build that includes light armor. The trouble is that while they can leverage Dexterity or Intelligence for one or another kind of light armor melee build, they can typically only leverage one or the other. They do have at least one top tier build (war wizard with wand).

Half-elves and dwarves have zero top tier classes as of this writing; typically, other races have at least one, but the dwarf and half-elf won’t until the warden, bard, druid, and invoker arrive. That said, taking the dwarf racial features into account along with Martial Power, Adventurer’s Vault, and the PHB2 classes released so far, though, puts them well outside the loser column.

Further Questions & Final Word

So after doing all this I’m thinking about ways I could improve my methodology. For example, many races have weapon-related feats (drow, dwarf, eladrin, elf) which should count for classes that favor specific categories or types of weapons (rogue, melee classes, fighters and warlords, archer ranger).

As well, a more organic notion of builds might help. A fighter who goes for Dexterity as a secondary might be viable enough to consider adding that as a possible build. The staff wizard uses Constitution, which isn’t taken into account here.

However, in the end, it might not be worth it. For instance, drow make artful dodgers not just because of stats, but also because of their darkness power (sneak attack!) and their hand crossbow-related feat. Dwarves can leverage their Constitution to wear heavier armor without sacrificing mobility.

The point is that this is useful to know and look at, but you should consider this only one component of what makes a race/class combination any good.

Thanks for bearing with me as I satisfied my curiosity!

4e is about six months out now, and I’ve had a few thoughts about things that don’t work for me with or bother me about 4th Edition.

Conditions

Conditions an abstraction for various conditions that the system wouldn’t otherwise model very well, if at all, and I’d say they do a good job overall. Being dazed, slowed, or on fire changes the dynamic of a fight in interesting ways.

However, conditions that shut PCs down, possibly for many turns, are a recipe for frustration. The most obvious offender is Stunned (“OK you have to stop participating”). You can run into trouble if you go overboard with Immobilized, Blinded, or Restrained, as these can quickly shut down a melee character, leaving them with nothing to do but make basic ranged attacks instead of using attack powers.

One way to avoid this is to be attentive when choosing monsters, particularly when it comes to status effects. There are some combinations that could be too nasty if you don’t have a party that doesn’t have a quick way of dealing with status effects, like some of the ettercap and spider encounters.

Still, no matter how seldom it happens, when it might be 15 – 20 minutes before someone’s turn comes up (depending on the speed of play), I’m not sure there’s any way around the fundamental uncoolness of losing your turn.

Optimized vs. Non-optimized

Some races are particularly well-suited for some classes. I think of it almost as a tiered system, where the top tier race/class combinations get you 20/16 or 18/18, second tier can get you 18/16 or 20/14. The bottom tier? I suppose you can always have an 18/14.

You can make a lot more combinations work if you settle for a 16 in your primary. Melee characters can afford to do this with high-accuracy weapons. For casters, this isn’t a very good idea; outside of magical items, they don’t really have a way to trade up to better items.

The bottom line here is that if you show up with a non-optimized character in a group with 20s and 18s, you’re asking for trouble. The DM has to make monsters that challenge the majority of the group. You can end up completely ineffective or dead.

Also, as a side note, there are some races that are just inherently more versatile than others. Chiefly, any class with Strength as a primary is hugely versatile primarily because Strength is a primary stat for most if not all melee classes (at least one build in ~6 classes!). And, while I think it’ll become less of a problem as more classes with more builds come out over time, there are also some race/class combinations that are objectively better, as some classes have more clearly defined needs for one or two stats.

Level 1 is a corner case

Level 1 is way, way, way more viable than it used to be. Nevertheless, I’m of the opinion that it’s still pretty rough when it comes to hitting things. For one, nobody has any magic items yet. While it’s true that AC for monsters is ~2 higher than the other defenses, melee characters have the option of picking a more accurate weapon or, more importantly, exploiting combat advantage. Casters just don’t have that luxury.

The other problem is that you don’t have much room for varying difficulty on a per-monster basis; your monsters are either giving you approximately even odds (i.e., level 1) or they’re harder (i.e., level 2+). I think the optimized vs. non-optimized problem is even more pronounced as a result, at least for casters.

Hand-tweaking monsters, handing out magic items early on, leveling your PCs up a level or two quickly, or simply starting them off higher are all easy solutions, but it’s a shame that you have to micro-manage this issue. On the other hand, it is only for one level.

Too many books?

It’s inevitable: more books coming out means more options. Martial Power adds a boatload of new powers and feats for each martial class. Adventurer’s Vault added some much needed variety to the list of magic items. The Manual of the Planes, while light on crunch overall, still has a number of paragon paths and magic items. While the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide featured only one new class and a couple of races, it had plenty of new feats. In August, Adventurer’s Vault 2 will hit the shelves. PHBII comes out in March, followed by Arcane Power in April.

For me, choice fatigue isn’t purely theoretical, either— despite the relative newness of 4th Edition, there was plenty of book-passing during character creation for my friend Avi’s game, as people flipped through the Adventurer’s Vault, PHB, and the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide. My ranger reached level 3 recently, and I had to spend some amount of time going through the two books already available.

Admittedly, a character creator would actually go a long way towards making this less painful. Games like Neverwinter Nights have a ridiculous number of options, and yet it’s not terribly painful to look through them because it’s all in a list on a screen rather than a half-dozen books spread out on the table. The character creator looks pretty good so far, in the sense that it gets the job done.

There’ll probably be more

There are a couple of other problems I have that are germinating in my head. Despite those as well as the above issues, I’d say that I still think that 4th Edition is the best edition so far. I haven’t been into D&D for such a sustained period of time since 2nd Edition. I’m far less inclined to attach a theory vs. practice sort of qualifier to my thoughts on the game, as well.

As I explained in my previous post, Planescape is my favorite of the old settings, with Dark Sun as a runner up. I was (am?) a huge fan of Mage: the Ascension.  For me, Mage: the Ascension : old World of Darkness :: Planescape : Dungeons and Dragons.

I talked about the changes to D&D cosmology in my previous post and none of that was particularly new if you’ve read the DMG. So what’s in the Manual of the Planes that’s not in the DMG?

What’s old is new again

There’s one thing I have to get out of the way: the Manual of the Planes makes explicit a few things that might’ve been implied before, which is that there’s room for many of the old 2nd Edition settings in the 4th Edition cosomology.

As I mentioned before, Sigil, the City of Doors gets a write-up. It consists of about four and a half pages, which includes a run-down of the various wards, a bit about portals, and some key characters. There’s next to nothing on the factions or anything like that; it’s more of a thumbnail sketch of Sigil. If you have access to the old Planescape stuff, this isn’t going to offer you much that’s new. Personally, while I’m sad that there isn’t more, in the end I’m just pleased to see it get a treatment. Apparently, there’ll be a more detailed write-up of Sigil in the DMG2 (DDI sub req.).

Two other classic settings get a nod. Ravenloft lives in on in Domains of Dread the Shadowfell. They’re essentially pocket dimensions within the realm, meaning you can run all kinds of messed up Ravenloft stuff should you so desire. They don’t have any specific ones; they just mention ‘em and give a sketch of roughly how they work. Also included are vehicle rules for Astral Skiffs and, er, Spelljammers, designed for sailing the Astral Sea.

Manuel de los Planos

That said, I’m sort of at a loss how to describe the book, if only because you can get a pretty good idea of what’s in it by looking at the table of contents. I’ll see what I can do, though. Each chapter in the book pretty much follows a pattern: a page or two on physics and exploration; a few pages on various denizens and why they’re there; and eight or so pages’ worth of notable features.

Two exceptions are the first and last couple of chapters. The first chapter is an overview. It explains the concept of planes (incl. things like planar physics), the ins and outs of planar travel, some basic dynamics for how you can involve the planes in your game, and so on. It’s worth pointing out that they provide a one page or so rundown of the Great Wheel, which is nice to see.

The last two chapters are more crunchy than the rest, as you might guess from the TOC. I haven’t read either of them in much depth except for the big name monsters like Grazzt, Dispater, and Baphomet. I will say that the monster chapter has a slight bias towards the paragon and epic tiers, which should come as no surprise.

The Shadowfell and the Feywild each get their own chapter, which includes a rundown of the denizens and a few notable features (e.g. a city) for each. () If you plan on using either of them at all, these sections will give you some ideas on how to use and populate each realm for your campaigns as well as providing enough flavor for you to create your own features.

After reading these sections, I am much more inclined to give them a whirl in any future campaigns. These are the planes that heroic tier characters are most plausibly able to handle. At low levels, when it’s unlikely they’ll have means of getting there on their own, you can simply provide a static portal or a number of other phenomena to get your players there. It seems like they scale pretty well to paragon tier, too, when you take into account the various nasties that live in the deeper reaches of either place.

A number of the old planes have made it into the Astral Sea, and they get a write-up in that chapter. There’s typically a page or so for each, though of course the Nine Hells each get a half a page or so worth of text. Typically these are broad strokes, with extra wordcount for particularly notable features (e.g. the city of Dis). Of all the sections in the book, I’d say I find these the most interesting: they’re bite-sized, enough for inspiration, and each one is fairly distinct. Most planes have some interesting feature or denizen or another, so it shouldn’t be too hard to come up with a reason to involve any of these planes, especially if you’re used to Planescape.

The Elemental Chaos has a similar treatment, with some notable features and a more lengthy write-up for the Abyss. I don’t have much to say except that I think the Elemental Chaos is much cooler than the old Elemental planes, from a conceptual standpoint. The elemental planes were too workmanlike, in the sense that they’re just sort of there, you expect them to be there, but there’s not a whole lot you can do with most of them. You can get the same flavor with the Elemental Chaos, with the added coolness that comes with it essentially being a forge of creation.

Final word

On a personal note, I think this is my favorite supplement so far. The majority of Manual of the Planes is devoted to fluff and setting, which means it’s a much more engaging read than lists of powers or magic items both from a player’s and DM’s perspective. Each section has enough specific places to give you ideas for all sorts of planar exploits, but has a light enough touch that there’s plenty for any Dungeon Master to fill in. The cosmology is also much more useful in a practical sense. You should be able to come up with a reason for a campaign that involves any plane.

Perhaps the only criticism I could really offer is that the amount of material here pales in comparison to the totality of the old Planescape setting. If you have access to all of that old stuff, I would argue that this is still useful, if only because it gives you a 4th Edition lens through which you can view the old stuff. In other words, you might want to look at this as a supplement to all of the old stuff rather than the other away around.