Jenna

So, the group I play D&D with every week tested the demo for 4th edition tonight. At the gaming store we play at, we are the only regular D&D group, thus they wanted to test it out on us. I played a female dwarven fighter. And the other pre-made characters we had were a halfling rogue, dragonborn paladin, human wizard and an elven cleric.

Anyone else tried it?

I'm pretty indifferent about it. At first level, I was already up to 31 HP. But, we fought a mob of first level kobolds, minions with a massive 1 HP, with the superiors up to 36 HP. That was pretty crazy. Oh, and no more feet measurement, it's all in "squares" which I think is pretty ridiculous.

I had some insane "at-will" melee attacks, including reaping strike, and cleave. Otherwise, the fighter was pretty basic, nothing too out of the ordinary. They deal a lot of damage.

The cleric is pretty different however, because everyone has the possibility to heal, called surging, which is pretty helpful. We found that the cleric was pretty complicated, probably the most complicated of the classes we played. The cleric is now the "leader" of the group, while the defenders are now the paladin and fighter.

Some things, like the attacks, have been seriously complicated, but the skills have been simplified, much like 2nd edition. We all felt as though we were playing a video game, rather than role-playing, kind of like WOW. I feel it's based more on roll-playing vs. role-playing, but I could be wrong, it was just a demo.

Our group will probably stick to 3.5 for now, I think we've all agreed on that.