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Dungeons & Dragons D&D Roleplaying RPG Player's Handbook 4th Edition ADM Heroes
 
Manufacturer: Wizards of the Coast
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Product Description
Players Handbook HC Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Role Playing Game RPG by Wizards of the Coast

Players Handbook HC Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Role Playing Game RPG by Wizards of the Coast

The Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game has defined the medieval fantasy genre and the tabletop RPG industry for more than 30 years. In the D&D game, players create characters that band together to explore dungeons, slay monsters, and find treasure. The 4th Edition D&D rules offer the best possible play experience by presenting exciting character options, an elegant and robust rules system, and handy storytelling tools for the Dungeon Master.

The Players Handbook presents the official Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game rules as well as everything a player needs to create D&D characters worthy of song and legend: new character races, base classes, paragon paths, epic destinies, powers, magic items, weapons, armor, and much more.

Core Rulebook The Players Handbook is the first of three core rulebooks required to play the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game.

Quick and easy play, The improved page layout and presentation enables new and established players to understand and learn the 4th Edition D&D rules quickly.

Product Details
  • Brand new in original factory-sealed packaging!
  • By Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, James Wyatt - Wizards of the Coast (2008) - Hardback - 317 pages - ISB

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Customer Reviews
AD&D 4E suffers from excess useless banter
 
Review Date: May 19, 2010
Reviewer: Michael Diehl,
Let's be clear, it's game system, not a toy, and its chief value (looking on this a father whose son has found an interest in the game) continues to be that it foster's a child's imagination IF they're into it at all. The whole idea of RPGs as experiences that stimulate the imagination, encourage reading and creativity, and foster cooperation (among kids as Player-Characters cooperating in an adventure) works really well. Bravo for keeping D&D available and fresh for new generations.

Now to the critical portion.

The 4th Edition lacks certain qualities that were well-represented in the First Edition that I discovered and played as a child and as a young man. First and foremost, the 4th Edition volumes are poorly written and poorly indexed. My complaints are reducable to two general observations.

1. The manuals are poorly written because the game mechanics are not clearly illustrated.

AD&D always had two components. Role playing and combat action. The 4th Edition game has placed a much stronger emphasis on combat, by giving every player "Feats" that you may think of as "cinematically flashy moves" that make combat feel more like a slow-motion action film. Given how important Feats are to combat, with concomitant "At Will," "Encounter" and "Daily" characteristics that limit their use, there volumes suffer from a glaring lack of good combat examples. Even though I was familiar with D&D in general from experiences two decades ago, I had to work pretty hard to find the information that I needed merely to walk through the basic combat actions that any Player Character might want to attempt in a combat encounter.

Hey Wizards of the Coast: if you want new players to understand this product, you need to make it easier to figure out the basic game mechanics.

2. The volumes waste alot of space on useless banter.

There is a great amount of prose of the "how to win friends and run a good game" kind that is utterly wasted. Children know how to run games. And if they're adults, they already know all about RPGs -- they're either playing them and good at it or tried them out and decided that RPGs weren't worth the bother. So five pages of tips on how a party should be composed of a striker, and why monsters should not attack downed PCs, is a waste of space that could have been better used presenting Thievery tables, or more weapons data, or more feats or spells, or a comprehensive price list that includes, among ridable beasts, a horse; reading the manuals you can figure out how much it costs to purchase a ridable dragon, but the price of a pack mule or a war horse aren't discussed. You can find out the gold piece equivalent price of a magic item, but a meal in a good tavern, or a bed at an inn, aren't discussed. You can figure out what the purse-cutting skills of a thief might be, but there's no Theive's table to give DMs a general sense of outcomes for city adventures where Rogues attempt to ply one of their basic trades.

Of course, the cynic in me notes, if you fill up what used to be three manuals (the Player's Guide, Monster Manual, and DM Guide) with lots of banal gibberish, then you'd have to put essential information that used to be contained in one volume into multiple other volumes, such as a Monster Manual 2, a Player's Guide 2, and a DM Manual 2, just so that you could increase your product line and sales volume. Boo on Wizards if that was the idea.

My advice: Hold on to your earlier edition manuals. If you're playing 4E, you will want to use many of the tables from previous editions, rather than wasting money on MM24E, PG24E, and DMG24E (Dungeon Master's Guide Volume 2 4th edition).



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