This will be a series of posts where I read the Dungeons & Dragons 4e boxed set, for the first time, in 2022. My intention is to go book by book and write up a sort of live or hot take as I go through the books. We shall see if this approach survives contact with the texts. Notes:

I have a physical copy of the 2008 Gift Set. It appears to be a first printing. I am just going to use the actual books and not look things up.
Very rapidly while doing this reading, I started comparing the 4e PHB to the 5e PHB and the PF2e CRB. These are the systems I know best, so they seem like useful comparisons, and I think there will be a lot of thoughts on how those newer systems were influenced by or rejected many parts of what 4e put out into the ether.
As part of the above, I have a lot of formatting and style comments.

Let’s get started with the Player’s Handbook!

Chapter 1

Marketing

First things first, this book markets a ton of product at you before we even get to how to make a character. Well done, WotC. So far I have beeb directly or indirectly told about:

Every player needs a PHB (no sharing!)
D&D Branded minis
D&D Dungeon Tiles
D&D Insider.com

The Core Mechanic and Basic Rules

I like how the roll d20 > add modifiers > compare to target number is in a colored box. I also like how the three basic rules say everything in the game is basically breaking a general rule. I don’t think this is new or groundbreaking, but all of this is on a single page.

Other Initial Thoughts

So far (and this may change soon), I think the 4e PHB is visually cleaner and easier to read that the 5e PBH. Headings and call out boxes are clear and contrast with the page. The upper right margin calls out the chapter you are in and the section. The page numbers are actually legible. It doesn’t have the styyyyyyyle factor the 5e book style has, but I can very quickly read the pages easily. The font is also big enough that I can read it from about 2 feet, which I can’t do for the 5e books.

Chapter 2

First formatting failure: The Character Race paragraphs are a mess. Why didn’t they use the exact same format as the classes on the facing page?

We get a clear explanation of classes and then we get class roles defined and mapped to the classes. There are four roles:

controller
defender
leader
striker

But we also immediately have a problem maybe. Only one class can be a controller. If you don’t like the wizard, you will not be a controller ever, I guess?

And now we get into the numbers. The editors start giving page number cross references in the text. I love this. We start getting some tables, the only thing I want to point out about these is they follow the trend of being high contrast.

Alignment

Alignment starts to get interesting. 4e has, if I trust the PHB, four of the nine traditional alignment and unaligned. I think I see what they were going for here. We get Good, Lawful Good, Evil, and Chaotic Evil. But I think, as someone who actually like alignment, this is actually less helpful that just giving a chart of all nine and saying “PCs are expected to be of these alignments.” But then they actually provide Chaotic Evil as a PC alignment option which is maybe the worst call I can think of if you are going to cherry pick? If you are going to ditch the traditional 3x3 chart, just make up new terms and define them anew. I am willing to bet this set many neckbeards aflame in 2008.

We DO get a callout box to talk about alignment v personality, so a point there.

Pantheon

The Pantheon for 4e at first seems like nice tight group of starting gods, but no mention is made of what the setting is yet. And the good and unaligned gods get full symbols and bullets, but the evil and chaotic evil deities get one or two sentences. Why? If we can have fully described evil and chaotic evil PCs, should we get commensurate info on the E/CE deities?

Moving on, we get some section for Attack Rolls, Skill Checks and Ability checks. These all get nice callouts that are… the exact same thing. I think this could have been half a page!

I am also starting to notice that the headings and subheadings are kind of mess, or at least I keep flipping back and forth to make sure I haven’t missed something… Maybe this just me but I am really not grokking why some things are full headings and some are subheadings.

Progression Chart

And now we get the first thing that really made me stop. It’s on page 26, the big chart for level progression. Pathfinder 2e’s feat system progresses a hell of a lot like the 4e Powers system. The details are different, but the overall design intention of constant upgrades to the PC is there. Also 30 levels, damn son. This is so utterly different from 5e, and very much more in line with what I like as a player in PC progression. The devil is always in the details though… so we shall see how I feel about the actual classes when we get there. Regarding the AEDU system in general, I am going to hold off on that until I have read most of the PHB at least I think.

Chapter 3 - Races

I am not going to review every race. I am instead going to talk about some other things, one mechanical, one about the art styling, and one about the formatting of the races section. All of this is mostly subjective. My preference for consistent formatting in a book is going to start showing here. I also started comparing the 4e, 5e, and pf2e books at this point because I am starting to feel like PF2e is really a spiritual successor to both 3.5 and 4e, and 5e took a very different path in almost every way.

Movement

Movement is in squares. This gets a lot of people very cross. I don’t care. In 5e or PF1/2 movement has a 5 foot unit. Calling it five feet or a square doesn’t really matter to me, it is the same thing. The best argument against the square terminology I can think of is it is not immersive in the same way. But I am fairly certain most of the world uses meters most of the time anyway. I bet if we switched to meters that would piss off a lot of people too.

Art

The 4e PHB gives a vertical half page art spot to each race, showing each gender clearly. Each one is distinct and humans are the only ones who do not get a background. I think these art stylings are pretty decent. They don’t have the same house styyyyyyle as 5e or PF, and… I think that works nicely. We are also starting to see a real stylistic difference in 5e; the use of huge spreads of random background splashes that just fill page space and force weird inconsistent layouts, which brings me to the next point.

Format

I really like how each race gets the same amount of page space, and formats things exactly the same. It makes navigating the section easy. The PF2e CRB almost does the same thing except for humans who have a lot more going one due to half-ancestries. The 5e PHB section is, by comparison, kind of a hot mess. The headings in 5e are flavor headings, not reference headings, by and large. I also appreciate front loading the abilities in the 4e book. The PF2e books has a whole other thing going on where most of the abilities are feats, so it is a little harder to compare the formatting.

Chapter 4 - Classes

Paths and Powers

We get some preamble that explains the three tiers of Heroic (1-10), Paragon (11-20) and Destiny (21-30), and tells you upfront this is a thing to be aware of. That’s neat. Then we get a whole section that gets into the types of Powers, Keywords, Actions, Range, Targets, etc. That’s nice. We do get my first layout gripe. Healing Surge, a way to get health back, is mentioned a few times, but is actually defined on page 293. I haven’t read that far yet, but I might have put Chapter 9 - Combat, where a lot of this stuff gets defined, a bit earlier in the book. I suspect I am going to feel like I am missing a lot of information that would be useful in the Classes chapter. This is a big chapter starting on page 50 and I have to get to page 175. Looking at the table of contents, I won’t start getting mechanics until chapter 8, on page 256.

I think I may actually go start on Chapter 8 and come back to the intervening chapters once I read all the mechanics all the powers actually manipulate.