Dungeons and Dragons Core Rulebook Gift Set, 4th Edition

I used to play D&D back in the day but haven't been able to get back into it recently partially due to the complexity of the 3.x editions. 4e is a good version of the game. Sorry to see Druids and Monks eliminated. <br /> <br />Noticed that the DMG is pretty fluffy. If you are on a budget, the players handbook is really what you need to figure out how 4e works. It's the best combat system of all the versions imo.

THE GOOD: While many will lampoon WotC's efforts as an attempt to mimic MMORPGs, if you keep an open mind it is probably the best balanced version of D&D ever made... and with some in-house tweaking, the funnest. Things that always annoyed me (like how a fighter's AC never improved as his level went up unless his gear improved) have been mostly addressed in a rather concise fashion and the game is clearly designed so that combat is faster-paced and everyone has a distinct combat style. The hit/miss resolution for skills and attacks is better than previous versions IMHO. Just about all skills/powers have an entry that says something like Dexterity vs. AC or Constitution vs. Will... <br /> <br />THE BAD: For those that were used to the customizability of your character in 3E, a lot of it is gone. For example, you can't attack with 2 weapons unless you have a skill/feat that allows you to. There are many compromises like that where rules are simpler to make the game easier on DMs and more fast-paced. The biggest thing that annoys me is the power-tier system. Powers fall into 3 categories: at-will, encounter, and daily. At-will can generally be used every round. Encounter can be used once per encounter and daily is used roughly once or twice per day. Most of the skills you acquire will fall into daily or encounter (at level 18, your AT-WILL/ENCOUNTER/DAILY powers learned is 2/4/3). But some battles last a pretty long time. For example, a level 18 mordrant hydra has 880hp according to the 4th edition MM. While it's certainly probable that a balanced party of 5 lvl18 characters will defeat it if it's alone, it could easily be 2 dozen rounds before that thing goes down. So that's 1 round you use your encounter power, 1 for your daily (if you have it) and then you spam one of 2 at-will powers for the remainder of the battle. Granted, back in the old days, most classes except the mage and cleric only had one option each round anyway but why penalize the casters to balance the non-casters? (There are utility powers and rituals as well and they don't typically count against those quotas.) That was fairly easy to fix. Also, unless I read the rules wrong, only high crit weapons got to roll extra dice for natural 20s. Everyone else simply maxed out the damage they could normally roll. Changed that, too. <br /> <br />THE UGLY: The "healing surge" rules took some getting used to. Once you understand that healing scales very well in this version (a level 20 fighter gets SUBSTANTIALLY more HP from being the recipient of "Lay On Hands" than a level 2 fighter - even from the same paladin) and that without a hard limit on healing most characters would be unstoppable if a healing spell happened to be an AtWill power, it starts to make sense. The combat is much more tactical and even semi-large battles are not easy to play without a graphical representation. Especially when you have a half-dozen armored types knocking each other around. You don't necessarily need miniatures; coins, tokens and grid paper should be enough. <br /> <br />BOTTOM LINE: Aside from long battles where you might be using 1 at-will power ad nauseum and critical hits not scaling for weapons that weren't "High crit", I thought it was a pretty solid edition. A couple "house rules" to patch up the deficiencies and you should have a blast.

I was hesitant at first to buy the Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition set because I've heard a lot of negative things about it. That it's much simpler and ruins the feel of D&D for veterans of the game. This couldn't be further from the truth. This game still feels completely like D&D and they fix many of the problems that 3.5 had while streamlining the game to make it move faster and involve a lot less math. <br /> <br />An example of which is their doing away with Level Adjustments for playing certain races, such as the Tieflings. Everything has instead been balanced out almost perfectly. <br /> <br />I highly recommend this to anyone who has 3.5, once you play a game with this system you'll want to sell all your 3.5 books.