Good luck and peace,

I look forward to hacking everything to bits and breaking rules

I’ve heard the video-game garbage regurgitated so many times and I still don’t understand the comparison. From what I can see, the biggest concepts that 4e borrowed from Wow is the idea of a balanced play experience regardless of Race/Class. That doesn’t mean that there are fewer options when creating a character (Trained VS Skill Ranks is very welcome imo), it means that EVERY character can contribute in every situation – combat or non-combat. I also like the balancing of magic items so no one character dominates combat, or a magical item replace all the skills and abilities of the party.

If the video-game comparison is coming from the tactical nature of combat, I don’t really see how that’s any different than 3.5 in terms of emphasis, besides the fact that they seem to have fixed every broken and annoying thing about 3.5 combat.

4E is *still* a roleplaying game. Just because you played that crappy pre-gen, doesn’t mean everything sucks.

I love 4E. It’s fixed everything I hated about 3.5. (Read: They made combat not boring, and not everyone of a x class is 90% the same character.)
You have *much* more freedom of choice when it come’s to your character’s now.
Combat revolves around teamwork, not everyone pumping out as much damage as possible.
The only thing I *don’t* like is the silly Terminoligy changes.

In short, D&D game day, (As always) was a poor representation of a fine product.

And if liking it makes me a lazy untalented idiot who can’t grasp the trup concept of a RPG…

Well, the above poster can learn a small term called “Personal Prereference,” and bite my ass.

The class additions to saves appear to also be based on SWSE (paladins have jedi bonuses frex).

That damage seems ridiculously low! I’m sure they’ll give melee special attacks or something.

_But_, it is cool to see an official character sheet!

The negative hit point range for dying characters is -10 or half your hit points, whichever (absolute) value is greater. (Thus a PC with 50 HP dies of HP damage at -25.) However, rather than losing 1 HP per turn until you die, a “dying” character must make a saving throw each round. On a success, nothing happens. However, when a character has failed three saves (not necessarily in a row), he dies, whether he’s at 0 HP or -100. (Anything that heals a PC, by the way, heals them from 0 HP — there’s no “dying tax” on healing powers.) These rules don’t apply to NPCs and monsters – they go down at 0 HP. Also note that 0 HP is “dying” for a PC; WotC has wisely gotten rid of the “disabled” special case. These saves notwithstanding, should the PC take further damage while dying that drops them below their negative HP limit, they’re dead regardless of saving throws.

Wizards has made it clear that there are NONE of the previous editions’ single-shot “save-or-die” effects like the Destruction spell, although from some monster previews it looks like there may be some two-stage save-or-die powers (i.e. a PC is weakened on the first hit, dies on the next hit.)

I should point out that I’m very much in favor of these rules. At high levels of play in 3.x, the -1 to -10 range is very small given the amounts of damage monsters and NPCs can do. Should someone drop to negative hit points but not die, however, there’s all the time in the world to heal them – the safest place a hurt fighter can be is on the ground with -1 HP, since it gives the cleric nine rounds to finish the fight and heal them up. This system provides more urgency to get someone back on their feet while scaling nicely with level.