I had a look inside the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 last night. I didn’t have the money to buy it, but I wanted to get my hands on a copy and page through it the night it came out.

Monster Themes

…are way better than templates. Essentially, they’re a way of marking whole disparate groups of monsters as being allies/minions/denizens of a particular power/plane/group/what-have-you. There are a bunch of them included, mostly corresponding to several of the more obvious “villain groups” in D&D lore. Basically, what you get is a list of extra attack powers and a list of extra utility powers and you pick one from each for every relevant monster in a group/encounter/adventure to tie things together. Sometimes this represents an obviously supernatural element, and other times it’s simply a matter of giving the “tactic” power from a group of monsters to their allies. It’s easy to use and it’s flexible.

The thing that left me scratching my head for about half a minute was the fact that I couldn’t find any instruction about what this does to the experience value of the altered monster. It seems that unlike templates, it’s not intended to change it at all. Like a lot of things in 4E, a little thought revealed the logic. “Theming” a monster gives it different capabilities, not necessarily better ones. Giving them a different way they could attack isn’t the same thing as giving them extra attacks. In a lot of cases the themed abilities will work well with other monsters under the same theme but they won’t necessarily have synergy with the monster’s existing abilities.

This is a mechanical complement to “reskinning” a monster, in other words.

Boons and Grandmaster Training

The “alternative rewards”… i.e., itemless magic items.

Boons work almost exactly the same as magic items, except that they’re tied to worthy deeds. They either “expire” or level up after five levels… the same timeframe during which a magic item would grow obsolete. They are generally slightly weaker than a magic item in that they never give enhancement bonuses (there’s no “boon +1, boon +2″); the bonuses they do give are frequently typed as “item bonuses”, though, so as not to stack with each other and with side bonuses given by other items. When they include a Daily Power, it counts as an item power. Under the default rules, they cannot be bought or “crafted” and they take the place of a found magic item.

Grandmaster Training is similar to Boons, except as the name suggests it represents techniques that you learn from a teacher. Again, they function as “notional items”.

So, once again, Wizards’ designers have added a nifty dimension to the game without drastically altering the balance. This tendency of allowing players to “sub out” normal parts of their character’s advancement for other options is an interesting approach, but one that’s shown some pretty awesome possibilities so far.

Throwing Boons, Grandmaster Training, and magic items together into one campaign helps increase variety and let you stick to your character concept. If you don’t see your character as much of a “tool user” or someone who would rely on magic, you’ve now got ways to keep up at higher levels.

And if your campaign world just doesn’t mesh with the assumptions of frequent magic items, you can ditch them entirely and use Boons and Grandmaster Training.

The idea of existing items spontaneously gaining/revealing magical properties instead of new magic items being found is also revisited briefly in this section.

I had a moment right before I opened the book where I thought to myself, “Isn’t it a little bit weird that they’d put these in a DMG when magic items are all in player content books now?” Then I opened it and found that rather than giving exhaustive lists, there were simply some sample ones and discussion of how to make new ones and how to work them into your campaign. I expect that now that the concept has been introduced, we will be seeing Boons and Grandmaster Trainings showing up as appropriate in packaged adventures (they do work really well as story-specific things) and also that this will probably be a key feature of the next Adventurer’s Vault.

The samples did include one level three divine boon for each generic non-evil deity, which might just be the most portable player crunch to show up in a DM’s book in the new edition yet. I plan on making those ones available as standard options to characters in my campaigns… it’s like a delicious cherry on top of everything in Divine Power.

Advanced combat stuff.

A lot of the advice on running combats is the same stuff that seemed obvious and intuitive to me, including things like breaking big combats up into waves and granting what I’ll term “mini-milestones” at certain points in the midst of them. I’ve been doing that in my tabletop games since I started DMing, since I like big combats.

They also have come out with the idea of “terrain powers”, which basically amounts to formalizing the more interesting possibilities of stunts players could come up with from the terrain in a given fight and writing up a power card for it so you don’t have to stop and adjudicate it on the fly. They have generic examples: dropping chandeliers, swinging vines/ropes, triggerable avalanches/wall collapses, etc.

Companion Characters

The part of this that sounded the most intriguing from the preview… the mention of “picking a feature” to add to the character… turned out to be remarkably straightforward. Basically, you just decide if you’re turning the monster into a PC-style Defender, Controller, Leader, or Striker, and then they get a generic version of the basic class feature (healing surge trigger twice per encounter for Leader, extra damage on combat advantage for Striker, etc.) It sounded like there was going to be a list. Oh, well. It’s not like it would be hard to take the Rogue-style Striker feature and change it to something more Ranger-style if that’s what I wanted to do.

Actually, that’s a side point, but compared to previous releases, there seems to be a lot more “we trust you to fill in the blanks” in this book. Not that the previous books didn’t actively encourage DM customization and experimentation, but I think that between this book’s focus on mid-tier play and the fact that there are so many published examples of everything by this point, they expect DMs to be comfortable and confident with it.

Skill Challenges

The section on Skill Challenges is so… damned… good. The potential that was obviously there in the first DMG is fully developed. Things that were only implied or else not really fully fleshed out are explained in detail. There’s a lot of really good advice in it, basically.

Campaign Stuff

I’m going to echo at least one review I read somewhere and say I would have had more detail in the campaign section in place of the hurried write-up on Sigil: The City of Doors and accompanying adventure. They deal with different types of campaigns that are of an appropriate scope for Paragon-level characters: political, planar, etc., but they deal with it in passing.

There is a sense that they’re trusting that DMs who take on Paragon level play to understand this stuff which is kind of nice, but I think they should have tried to find a middle ground behind the hand-holding of the first DMG and this hands-off approach.

Anyway, that’s just an overview, based on a quick read-through. There’s more stuff in the book than that, including more practical things (loads of traps and interesting terrain stats, trap building, monster building 2.0, etc.), stuff on collaborative storytelling (they take it to extremes I wouldn’t be comfortable with in a game I run, but I approve of the theory), interesting sidebars, etc.

It’s definitely going to be a good buy, when money allows.

So, the Assassin is being released as a Dragon Magazine exclusive, which means we don’t have to wait for a future Player’s Handbook release to get the full power set… just two more weeks, as they’re doing one tier a week in the current Dragon. The Heroic Tier stuff is up right now… interesting stuff.

Shadow Powers are apparently being called “Hexes”, which seems like a good term. Here it helps emphasize the fact that Assassin-As-Class is specifically a shadow magic using “True Assassin”, as opposed to someone who simply is a hired killer.

The Assassin’s “Striker Power” is a shadowy shroud they can overlay on a target once per turn, piling them up to four deep. They can be cashed in for an extra 1d6 damage per attack but they must be declared before the attack is made, unlike Hunter’s Quarry or other similar abilities… they also do damage on a miss, with a “one shroud” penalty. Either way, they’re expended when used. So, it’s a similar benefit to most Strikers, but with different considerations involved.

The “Striker Mobility” power is impressive: Shadow Step. It’s an at-will teleport power that lets the Assassin move from a square adjacent to one creature to a square adjacent to another, up to three squares away. In keeping with 4E’s philosophy of easy adjudication, the description is that the Assassin is using the metaphysical shadow, the connection all beings have to the Shadowfell, to travel rather than stepping through a literal physical shadow.

I imagine a lot of people are going to be inclined to view a character with an at-will teleport even with those limitations as being an example of power creep, but in combat the action economy takes care of most of the concerns: the Assassin is still spending a move action to do this. Having one member of the party who can blip up to 15 feet with two other living beings to bridge the gap might simplify some chasm-crossing logistics, but only slightly.

Their Encounter Power class feature, Shade Form, will probably actually see more use as an out-of-combat utility power, as it allows the Assassin to essentially take advantage of the pre-errata Stealth rules (where you only needed basic cover or concealment to hide, and allies grant cover) and it can be sustained as long as the Assassin doesn’t attack. Essentially it allows the Assassin to flit around the edges of combat until the moment is right to strike… especially if combined with a feat that lets the Assassin lay shrouds without the target’s awareness as long as there’s cover.

The ki focuses work as previously described… not terribly surprising, given that the character is being released now and not in a long-distant book publication. Since I’m a fan of ki focuses, there’s no complaints here. The one thing I don’t think I touched on when I wrote about the Assassin before is their other implement possibility: any weapon in which the character is proficient… not just the fairly versatile list the class is proficient with to begin with. I think this is an awesome approach for two reasons. One is that it ties into the same idea as the ki focus: if you’re an Assassin, you can use anything to deadly effect. The other is that if there’s a particular weapon you want to use as a signature, a simple Weapon Proficiency or Weapon Mastery Feat is enough to let you channel your implement powers through it.

The last Dungeon Master 2 excerpt is up today, as well… the article on Paragon level campaigns. I predicted that if strongholds came up, this would be where it would be. To judge by the excerpt, the topic is dealt with only glancingly. Paragon Tier is where the designers assume that PCs will start dealing with castles and armies and politics, but they’re far more concerned with how that will affect adventure opportunities, potential quests, and roleplaying than they are with calculating the cost of a tower with crenelated battlements. I wholeheartedly approve of this tack.

With the last excerpt posted for DMG2 and the book coming out on Tuesday, this means that we’ll soon be seeing excerpts from Primal Power… once again I have to commend WOTC on their marketing model. With a steady release of new features on DDI and a steady stream of new books that have useful and interesting content, they’ve got a pretty good assurance of a continued income stream. I’d say I have concerns about how long they can keep it up, but the fact is that the books they come out with keep getting better speaks well for the immediate future.

4E at launch was a better designed game than 3E, and the things that needed fixing (Skill Challenges and Stealth rules) were patched pretty quickly… since then, they’ve focused not just on coming up with new and more powerful things for characters to do within the game system but on extending the system and making it better. The result is they’ve got a lot of really fertile ground left to explore.

…but even when they aren’t, they’re still pretty good.

The latest excerpt for DMG 2 to come out is on the monster customizing section. There’s the promising promise of updated guidelines for working with minions, solos, and elites… the original DMG’s rules were mainly focused on working with standard monsters, with rules for fudging them into solos or elites. Taking an existing monster and turning it into a higher level minion version… a useful way of keeping up with monsters that PCs have upgraded and one that was embraced by the Monster Manual in spots… was left up to DMs to puzzle out. So hopefully that will be better.

That’s a highlight among the highlights, but it’s in the “would be considered an omission if not included” category. The potential wow factor is themes:

Each monster theme provides a suite of powers you can draw upon to add to existing monsters or use when you create new monsters. You then create thematic links across encounters, even when using monsters that might not normally be associated with each other. The section also details nine themes drawn from D&D lore.

It would have been really cool if they’d included one such theme as the actual content sample… that would give us all some idea what to expect. Instead, they simply revisit templates, mentioning that templates can be tied into themes, and give us a new one: Beast of Demogorgon.

Now, I care even less about the default D&D pantheons of demons and devils than I do about the default gods… the default gods are convenient because they tie into player tools, but by the time PCs are fighting epic level threats there’s little excuse for using off-the-shelf stuff if you aren’t utterly wowed by the selection, and I’ve never been wowed by their “named villains”.

But still, when you cut the fluff, “Beast of Demogorgon” is a very useful template, as it lets you take any beast and make a rage-filled two-headed version of it. No, it doesn’t actually take all that much work to copy and paste a “double attack” power and also give the standard multiheaded resistance to stun… well, they’ve actually done less than that. The double bite power basically just says, “Make two standard bite attacks off one action.” and fills in a generic bite attack for those templates that don’t have one. There is nothing more to reflect the practical side-effects of having two brains… which is sad, in that a standard template that lets a beast shake off a stun would be another way of underlining out the holes in the “orbizards own” theory.

So all in all, tantalizing but underwhelming. The book comes out in a couple of weeks and I’m sure by now they figure that everybody who’s going to get it is has already made up their mind and they’re probably right. I’m sure that at some level they’ve got the formula down of making sure that there are enough tantalizing things mentioned in passing to give the customers a sense of urgency about the purchase.

I was already really looking forward to the PHB 3 on the basis of the full publication version of the Hybrid rules alone. I could have been blah about any of the classes and races in it (and in fact, I kind of am, at least on the announced ones… I want the Monk to be full canon just because of the richness that an unarmed fighting class could add with the Hybrid and Multiclass rules) and still think it would be a great buy for those alone.

But now the first new Dragon article of the month is out, and it’s a doozy.

Skill Powers.

At each utility power level, you can now choose instead to gain a power based on using a skill you have in combat/moment-by-moment action circumstances. They have a sampling of three for each skill. I hope that’s just a sampling and there’s more. I’d hope that at every skill would have multiple selections at each utility level, but I doubt it will go that far since you already have the choice between your class utility powers and whatever skill powers there are. Even one skill power for every skill for every utility level would be a good start.

Heck, if it turns out that the three examples they list in this article are actually all that there is, it’ll still be a welcome addition to the game, though it’d be weird that some skills have their powers entirely within the heroic tier and some of them are mid-paragon.

But this is an awesome thing. It allows you to make your skill choices stand out more in how your character plays. It gives you yet another way to make sure your Dragonborn Charisma Paladin is not the same as that other Dragonborn Charisma Paladin over there. It gives you another way to add definition/resolution/shading to your character.

And you folks know I’m all for that.

Some of them are pretty clever, too. While a lot of them build on existing uses for skills… Rapid Escape lets you take Combat Advantage against an enemy you escape from using an Acrobatics check… some of them come up with entirely new ones.

There’s an Arcana Skill Power called “Arcane Mutterings” that lets you substitute an Arcana check for Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate situation… picture an Artificer pointing a rod at a bottle of brandy and telling everyone to stand back because he’s triplicated its flammability.

Along similar cross-skill lines, there’s a Bluff Skill Power… a daily… that lets you cut the cost of any non-item-makey ritual in half and substitute your Bluff skill in place of the ritual’s actual skill. It’s the John Constantine school of wizardry!

The other two listed Bluff powers are also good. One is an entirely predictable feinting power… predictable in the sense that it’s such an obvious choice it would have stood out as a omission if it weren’t included. The other is Confusing Blather, which might as well have been called “Hello, I’m a kender.” Your speech leave your enemies in a close burst 1 too bemused to take opportunity attacks for the turn.

The Heal powers are pretty straightforward, but are a blessed boon to anybody who wants to make their character a trained healer without dipping into a leader class. There’s a designer’s note that if you’re already a leader, you’re likely giving up a choice of a better healing power to take them, but they’re good for anybody else who wants the healing.

The Intimidate powers listed are all pretty much what you’d expect, but there’s one stand out: a 10th level utility that lets you grant an ally a saving throw from a mental state like stun or domination. Is that not a perfect way to round out your “OH, GO WALK IT OFF!”-style Warlord?

There are History powers that let you substitute historical knowledge for Intelligence checks, or use the same to nudge an ally’s knowledge check in a positive direction, as well as an “Ah, this is just like when the General Whom I Didn’t Just Make Up used the Jargonite Maneuver at the Battle of Plot Contrivance” power that lets you respond to an enemy’s tactical movement by repositioning an ally away from them and granting a defense bonus.

There’s a Nature Daily level 2 encounter power that lets you substitute a Nature check for an Initiative roll when in a suitable setting, and gives everybody a defense bonus for one round. Another one is used for mounting and dismounting quickly… I really hope there are more dealing with animals. Man, I hadn’t even thought of it until I got this far in the article, but this… this is just what the game needed for me, for Rangers. More ways to connect a Ranger character back to nature.

Heh… forward observer type Perception skill that lets you direct an ally’s attack to target Reflex instead of AC, as well as a Far Sight one that lets you ignore range penalties and regular concealment and cover for one turn. Dang… that’s the same level as the Nature Sense power. Choices, choices!

Oh, yes, yes, yes… I just got to Religion (I made it halfway through the article before I started writing this post, so my responses from Intimidation onward are kind of live blogging) and they are all minor prayers. The Arcana Skill Powers presented are more practical demonstrations of arcane knowledge rather than actual magical stuff, which is fine… Wizardy types can already do plenty of magic in this edition. But these are sorely needed. Ways to invoke the gods without using up a Channel Divinity. Faith Healing goes under the heading of “not as good a healing power as a Leader could have), as it simply lets one creature you touch spend a surge, but any healing surge in a storm. Conviction lets you grant yourself a +5 to save as a minor action… very nice.

Hee, there’s a Stealth encounter that lets you grab cover from a ranged attack by using adjacent enemies. If the attack misses you, the attacker has to reroll the attack against a covering enemy.

There’s a note that Streetwise was the hardest skill to write powers for because it’s not conducive to combat uses. Looking at the powers, I think it’s clear they solved the problem by watching Disney’s Aladdin. The first one is even called “City Rat”.

First Thievery power is an at-will that lets you do an item manipulation as a free action once per round. There are a lot of items that let you draw specific items quickly, but this is more general use power. Damn. I’m going to end up with a character whose Utility slots are all full of level 2 Skill Powers. Well, I think that’s a sign of good design… since you never outgrow your utility powers, even level 2 ones should be useful at level 30.

Overall reactions:

There are no prerequisites for these powers except valid skill training, and every character has like between three and a million of those at level one. You don’t have to take the Skill Training Multiclass Feat to get these. I think this is a step in the right direction, as a lot of the previous ways they’ve added of diversifying/specializing a character had a double cost: spend a feat and trade in a class power. But the cost of having a Skill Power is simply not having something else.

These elements serve a lot of the same purposes that my Maneuvers idea did, though they do it by slotting into the existing power structure rather than adding it, which means that the game balance should remain about the same. I’m going to call that a plus. While my system would have altered the balance, it would be sloppy for a core game product to do so. They’re showing what can be done within the existing system.

Along those lines, I have to say that PHB3 is really going to be when the full potential of D&D 4E is shown. PHB3 is going to mark the “3.5″ moment of 4E in some ways… 4E in 2010 will be the same basic game as we had in 2008, but soooooo much better. And since 4E wasn’t broken to begin with, just missing some possibilities, it should be an incredible experience.

While Utility Powers are all formulated with the idea that they will be usable and useful in combat, many of them carry out-of-combat utility and even hints of characterization and character specialization that players and DMs alike could pick up on. A character with the Nature Sense power (the outdoor initiative one) could be expected to act more in tune with nature than someone who had the same Wisdom modifier and Nature training… and it wouldn’t be entirely out of the question for the DM to occasionally reflect that specialization in small ways. The Fast Hands Thievery power just changes what action type certain things are in combat, but out of combat, I think a character that has it would be justified attempting feats of legerdemain that would otherwise be impossible. The hand is quicker than the eye, indeed. The Snap Out Of It Intimidate power… well, I have only three words to say about that, and the first and last one are the same: SIR, YES, SIR!

I’ll no doubt find ideas to mine for A Wilder World here, even though a lot of what they’ve done overlaps with my own ideas. Also, because I like these, I might at some point try running a 4E campaign with the following houserule: At each level below a Utility Power level, you pick a Skill Power of up to the next highest level (so at level one, you get one.) At the normal Utility Power levels, you can either pick a class utility power or a skill power.