Dark Dungeons X vs. Dark Dungeon 4th Edition

[archolewa]

Dark Dungeons 4th Edition Thoughts.

So, it looks like the guy behind Dark Dungeons X has removed all older versions
of their game and replaced it with a 4th Edition. He claims it's to remove all
the colonialist and racist tropes in his older editions. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product ... th-edition.
Seeing as how apparently the author is so ashamed of their past work that they don't
want to distribute it anymore (no judgement here. It's his work, he can do what he wants with it),
I figured I'd take a look and see what kind of changes they made.

Addressing the elephant in the room straightaway, his goals are laudable. I am well aware that Dungeons
and Dragons has all sorts of unfortunate implications, from the race-as-class we
see in DDX to the whole gold-for-experience thing (Gold, God and Glory indeed).

I spent quite a bit of brainpower on building the world of the Kinslayer to explain
why dwarves and halflings don't have clerics or arcane users in ways other than
"Durr they dumb" or "They're godless heathens." I also spent a lot of time building a world
where you know, it's ok to take the orc's stuff, because he took it from your ancestors.
Also he's a demonic corruption crated by an insane God.

So, I get the awkwardness there. I get the cognitive dissonance. And in future games, I'd
probably try to replace the races with additional human classes too, for a whole host of
reasons only some of which are Unfortunate Implications.

I'm not convinced you can fully excise those tropes from Dungeons and Dragons and still
have it be Dungeons and Dragons though. This is fundamentally a game of killing things and taking
their stuff. Turns out pretending to kill things and taking their stuff is fun! But I'm
curious to see what he's done.

Plus, you know, if I like the edition, I might use it for future games. A lot easier than
having to hand out PDF's myself, and it allows me to continue to support the author of
a game I adore.

So, here's some rambling thoughts on 4th Edition of Dark Dungeons.

First, this edition calls the DM the "Gameguide." Why? I dunno. Some systems
use a different name for the Dungeon Master (or Game Master outside of DnD
space) to reinforce flavor. But talk about a flavorless name. Why not just use
Dungeon Master? Or Game Master if you're somehow embarrassed by the word
"Dungeon" in a game about dark dungeons? Do you not like "Master?" What's wrong
with the word "Master?" You're literally the master of the world, I see no
reason why it would be inappropriate here. You want to rename the
Master-and-slave architecture in Computer Science? Hell yeah. No reason to
rely on slavery metaphors in engineering. But nothing in the user of "master" here has implications
of slavery. A minor nitpick, but seems unnecessary.

Edit: Thinking about it more, it's probably to avoid any sort of gendered stereotyping.
Master has historically referred to a man after all. I feel like Master has lost
a lot of its gendered implications over the years (you never hear of Jedi Mistresses
after all, female Jedi Masters are still Masters), but its history as referring to
a man is indisputable.

Looking through the class names, I'm already seeing things I don't like. Peeking
ahead at their flavor only makes it worse.

Battlemage

Ugh. What a boring name. Admittedly Magic-User isn't much better, but at least
it doesn't immediately scream "my flavor is the least imaginative imaginable."

I really like the flavor of Magic-User in DDX because it reinforces that magic
is hard for humans. It's hard on your body, it's hard
on your mind. It takes a lot of time and effort to understand. It's very very
hard. And that's one of the reasons why magic-users haven't rendered
pre-gunpowder style warfare obsolete. There just aren't enough of them, and
they're too precious to use except in extreme circumstances (also there's problems
of escalation, like nuclear weapons in our modern world). Sure, most Dungeons
and Dragons games try to tell you that arcane magic is hard, but none of
them really pull it off like DDX in my opinion.

But here they're "humans who practice both magic and warfare." Why? Because
they want to! I guess magic isn't that much harder than learning how to use a
sword after all! Laaaaame.

Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Mountebank, Thief

Exact same as DDX. Their flavor is kind of dull in DDX too (except
Mountebank), but they're oldies-but-goodies. Can't really complain.

My one annoyance here is that they do nothing to improve the Thief class.
Like, seriously. Their skills still start at "LOL!" and said skills still grow so
slowly that by the time a Thief can pick a lock reliably, the Wizard has enough
spell slots to throw off Knock spells all day if they're so inclined.

This is especially grating because they've introduced several changes that
further weaken an already precarious class.

Grenadier

Oh no. Oh no no no no. I don't like guns in my High Fantasy. And the author's
gone and built an entire class around guns.

Look. Guns change things. Weapons that aren't fueled by
muscle power change things. Armor is useless against them. Ranged weapons
suddenly become far more lethal than melee weapons (turns out arrows aren't
actually that lethal https://acoup.blog/2025/05/02/collectio ... lley-fire/)

They're too powerful. You can't have a consistent setting where both guns and
mail are practical. And even swords start becoming rapidly
obsolete. Yes, DDX included guns, but they were incredibly easy to ignore (so
I did). For context, we've had swords since before the Hellenistic World (you
know 323 BC!) They were quite popular (for the wealthier soldiers anyway) for
over a thousand years, and were standard issue for the Roman legions. Guns were
used by the Ottoman Empire as part of their regular infantry in the 15th century.
By the time of the American Revolution (the 18th century) swords were mostly not
a thing outside of cavalry. I'm pretty sure it happened before that, but I'm American
so I have an American-centric view of the world (apologies).
Mail was certainly long gone. In the span of a couple centuries, guns
completely displaced weapons and armor that had been iterated on for at least
a thousand years and introduced a new, far more range-centric style of combat.

Guns change things.

And it becomes a lot harder to ignore guns when you have an entire class
built around them.

And even setting all that aside, the Grenadier is literally a Fighter with a d6
HD instead of a d8 and its one set of spells. *sigh*

Why would I use a Fighter when Grenadier exists?

Mystic

Urgh. Another boring, flavorless name. He literally just erased "Monk" and
wrote in "Mystic." Why not just call them "Monk?" I also have to say, I'm
not really a huge fan of using "It's magic" for everything. Call me old-fashioned
but I prefer magic to stick to "Divine" (up to the gods) and "Arcane" (really
freaking hard, kind of creepy and dangerous). Both are inherently foreign to
humans. Both involve engaging with forces far beyond our power or comprehension.
The mind-over-matter magic of the Mystic is none of that. Really takes away from
the "small people in a big, scary universe" kind of thing.

If I were to replace Lupines with a human? I'd call them Berserkers. They fly
into a battle trance of some kind (typically frothing rage, but it doesn't have to be).
They fight without armor because screw you. They can use whatever weapon, or even rip you apart
with their bare hands because they're just that vicious.
They have scouting abilities, because if you're not going to be wearing armor
anyway, might as well be the guy who does some sneaking around. Also they you
know, have very powerful bodies. Outside of combat they could be perfectly
sane, normal people. But they're able to enter some kind of trance when things
get intense.

Sets them apart from Fighters, invokes a very Western trope (and DDX *is*
exclusively Western fantasy, it's why Lupines exist! The author of DDX didn't
like the "Eastern" flavor of monks in his "Western" fantasy.), explains their
class skills and doesn't fall back on magic. Also brings to my mind at least a
whole bunch of possible characters, whereas Mystic does nothing for me.

Also, Mystic no longer appears to get a to-hit bonus from the Unarmed skill.
I guess if you want to use your fists and those cool rising damage numbers
you get as you level, you have to give up somewhere between +1 and +8 to-hit?

I mean, I guess the mystic can take advantage of the magical bonus to hit and
damage for their weapon, while still using their martial arts damage but...
come on! Magical weapons give nowhere near the benefit that weapon
feats do.

Mind-over-matter am I right?

I lied, Mystics still get the to-hit from Unarmed proficiency. It's specified in the
Weapon section instead of the class description, even though it's a class feature.
Ranger

The name is fine. I'd probably call them Hunters myself, but whatever. These
are basically your Halfling replacement.

Except...oh no. Oh no no no. No! No no no! NO!

They have thief skills. They gain weapon feats as fast as Fighters, they have
a d6 HD, and they have Climb Walls, Move Silently and Hide in Shadows. No! Why?
DDX already has three classes with thief skills! The thief with their crappy
weapon and armor selection and garbage HD is already competing with werewolves
and someone who can use arcane spells. Why on earth would I ever play a thief if
I have three alternatives, two of which are better warriors and one of which can
cast spells?

They also get a bunch of special "archery" powers, because you know. The
ability to keep your distance when 90% of enemies are mostly melee is already not powerful
enough.

And one of them allows them to add their Dexterity score to their damage! No!
Ranged weapons shouldn't be able to do as much damage as melee weapons
in anyone's hands. Characters at range are infinitely safer than the ones in melee.
Plus, Dexterity is already bonkers powerful because it gives you an AC
and initiative bonus. Allowing a class to gain AC, damage and initiative from one
stat, is no. That's one of my least favorite things in 5E, I don't like it here either.
Sure, it doesn't kick in until 11th level, but I don't care.

And they have a +2 bonus to ranged attacks! From level 1! Urgghhhh.
Halflings get a +1 to hit with ranged weapons, but their weapon selection is
vastly more limited, and their ability to hide, while it starts out better, is
also more restrictive. They also can't Move Silently only stay still and
hide.

One nice thing about them is that they're limited to chain mail. So hey! A
reason for chain mail to exist past level 1!

If I were to replace Halflings, I'd just do a straight reskinning, and call
them Hunters. Maybe let them use spears as well, since spears are a classic
hunting weapon. They have such a restrictive weapon selection, because they
aren't warriors, so they haven't received much martial training. They're
Hunters. They mostly hunt game. They're just repurposing their skills
to adventure for some (possibly interesting!) reason or another. I'd probably
roll their Small feature into Nimble. Hunters are good at dodging
charging bears, and evading wyverns (the wilds are dangerous!).

Wizard

Ehhh. Kind of boring. We're back to the "Arcane casters just have to study real hard."
Which is fine, but not interesting.

If I were to replace Elves with a human spellcaster? I'd call them warlocks/witches.
Humans that have formed some kind of magical bond with something. Maybe they
made a deal with Cthulhu. Maybe they have a touch of Fae ancestry if the player is
more interested in blasting things than creating roleplaying hooks (fair!). Whatever
the reason, they have been suffused with magic, but that magic makes
them frail, which is why they can't wear hardly
any armor or use hardly any weapons. Maybe iron even burns them. They
take a shortcut (or a shortcut is foisted on them), but that shortcut may come with a cost
(in the fiction).

Prime Requisites

Gahh! LA*E*F&IEORWEKLRKJEF*SDFFL!

So, in DDX each class has a pair of stats that have certain minimum thresholds.
A fighter needs 14 Strength and 13 Dexterity for example.

The standard stat array is 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 9. So this means that
you effectively have three stats that can be used to fill two prerequisites.
So, maybe you use your 16 and 14, or your 16 and 13, or your 14 and 13.
This means that you have some flexibility to make your character REALLY good
at something other than their class. You want an extremely Charismatic Fighter?
Go for it! 16 Charisma, 14 Strength, 13 Dexterity, we're good. You want a
Dextrous Magic-User? No problem! A highly intelligent Lupine? Sure!

This is especially important, because Statistics really don't matter for your class.
Statistics are more about what you can do outside of combat. So your 16
effectively lets you decide which stat checks you can very reliably succeed at.
You can be the girl with lots of education, or the guy with a rogueish smile or the
guy who balances on rooftops or the girl who busts down the door. You have flexibility
to give your character some capabilities outside their class. Outside even the mold
of their class.

Well, 4th Edition forces you to put your best stat in the class' prime requisite.
You want a 16 Charisma fighter? Screw you! You're a Fighter, so that 16 needs to go into
Strength. Sorry, you don't get to be highly intelligent (just intelligent). You don't get
to be very light on your feet, or very charismatic. You have to be very strong.

Barf.

Minor nitpick. The player gets to choose amongst standard arrays. Sure, whatever. But
the one with 18 still doesn't have any stats below a 9, meaning they don't get
any penalties. I do not like this. 18 is powerful in DDX (just ask Luca).
You're one skill point away from having a +19 (meaning guaranteed success on most
standard checks) in a given skill. You really need some sort of penalty for being
so heavily specialized (and no, having only one +1 rather than two isn't enough).
Now, I'll admit that some statistics (*cough* Intelligence *cough*) don't really
have any downside for that penalty. But that is easily houseruled away (one
less skill point!) if you care. I haven't done that. I've found other ways to make Intelligence
useful, and thus make Luca pay a price for his 8 Intelligence. But still. If you're
going to have an 18 somewhere, you need to be below average somewhere else.

(Note to self: Ignore stat requirements entirely? Would that be a problem? I don't think
so. Most players would probably still end up following the requirement, but might give
folks a bit more flexibility if they care. Worth the overhead of a houserule? Ehh.. maybe not.)

Skill Checks

Ehhh... The author has introduced more codification of the Skill system. I'm really not a huge
fan of lots rules, especially for something as freeflowing as out-of-combat roleplay. It constrains
the GM, and makes it harder for me to incorporate the fiction and player decisions. Good, solid rules
can be very valuable, but you don't need a lot of rules in my opinion. DDX has a good balance for me.

I don't like that they're introducing more.

Helping

Basically, a character can help their ally. They make the check, and if they
succeed, they give their ally a +4 bonus.

Ehhhhh. For an uninteresting, "I hold the bandages" sort of thing, I prefer
just to let the other character contribute their skill bonus. A minor, but
guaranteed bonus.

For things where someone is doing something creative, I'd much rather let the
benefits be determined on a case by case basis, depending on what the helper is
doing and the state of the fiction. For one thing, when my players know that
the size of the bonus depends on what they're attempting (or might even circumvent
the problem entirely!), they're more likely to get into the fiction and come up
with creative solutions! When it's just a fixed bonus regardless of what you
do, players get lazy. At least, this happened in a DnD 5E game I played. We'd
just "Help." We wouldn't bother trying to come up with a way to help we'd just
"Help." It was always advantage on the roller's roll, no matter what you did,
so why bother thinking about it? Just "Help."

No thanks.

Group Rolls

These are fine. Handling group rolls is a thorny problem. I don't think
those have really come up much in my game so far. None of the
solutions make me excited or anything, but they're not unreasonable.

My preferred approach to group rolls? The target number is group-size * 20.
Have everyone roll and you sum up their results. Conceptually, this is similar
to "everyone needs to succeed" but overkill from one player can help make up for
the low roll of another player.

According to anydice.com, if you were doing a roll involving four PC's, where
one has 1d20+16, one has 1d20+9, one has 1d20+14 and one has 1d20+12 (not
unreasonable), you're looking at a 85% chance of rolling higher than an 80.
That strikes me as being in line with the probabilities of a standard statistic
check in DDX. The characters will usually succeed (as they should, because
most characters are reasonably good at the attempt), but there's still a decent
chance of failure.

Thief Skills vs. Other Skills

Looks like 4th Edition couldn't help but introduce standard skills that overlap
with thief skills (whereas DDX keeps them fully separate). I understand the temptation.
The thief skills are souped up versions (Locate Traps gives you more information than
a Spot check), and someone with the skill can roll both. This isn't terrible
But it further weakens the Thief. Why not just take a Ranger, if a Ranger with
high Wisdom can give me almost as much information as the Thief (in particular the
all-important "is there a trap here"), almost as reliably, and has a d6 HD
and can use better weapons and armor and has better weapon feat gain and and and...

I vastly prefer my approach. First, give Thieves better starting values and
skill gains because come on!

Second, there's overlap? The character with a thief skill adds that to the
statistic check as well. There isn't overlap? Well, the thief gets to attempt
it at least, whereas nobody else does. When is there overlap? Up to me.
Does this mean they are guaranteed to succeed at things that overlap with their
thief skills? Yup (well, not contested checks, but they sure have a huge
advantage there). Does this mean they provide a valuable bonus to group checks?
Yup. Suddenly, the Thief's very complete list of thief skills is looking like
it might just be worth the limited weapons, armor and low HP. Guaranteed
success is a hell of a drug.

There's some of this, but it's a on skill-by-skill basis, and the really
valuable ones (Trap checking) make you roll both skills rather than just
auto-succeed when a non-Thief could attempt it.

Weapons

Ughhh...

They added a whole bunch of additional complexity to what is already the most
complicated part of the game. Why???

Weapons now have "Base" and "Advanced" traits, and "Proficiency Groups."
Spending weapon feats on a weapon in a Proficiency Group gives you a weaker
proficiency in weapons in the same group. So becoming "Skilled" in Bastard Sword
makes you "Proficient" in Sword. That's...pointless in my opinion. I guess it
helps if the GM is rolling up weapon loot randomly, but come on! What DM is going
to look at the vast array of (cool) abilities that characters get as they get
more proficient in a chosen weapon and decide "Welp, I refuse to hand place weapons
for my characters. If they never roll a Halberd? Then I guess they're using a
mundane Halberd the entire adventure because a Pike+1 is vastly inferior."
If you're the kind of DM to do that, don't run this ruleset. It's not for you.
If you have no problem handplacing weapons, then...why bother with all
this?

I can understand the desire to encourage more versatility in players, but I'd
much rather see Weapon Feats handed out more frequently, but with restrictions like
"can't go past Skilled until you're at least level 9" or whatever. Then
players can spend their extra feats to "spread out." This approach just strikes me as
pointless complexity.

And I guess the traits are an attempt to better organize weapon features but
it's far worse than DDX.

See, all the weapon traits are listed on *one* table at the very beginning, and
the weapon's damage and (just!) the advanced traits are listed in a *different* table later.
Did you know the Dagger is Offhand from the beginning? You would, but only
if you looked at the first table! It's not listed in the second table anywhere. You
know, the one that lists the Dagger's damage?

This means that you have to flip back and forth between two tables if you want
a complete view of a weapon's capabilities. Oh, and unlike in DDX, none of the
weapon's features are explained near the weapon. They're *all* at the
very back. No saying "Oh, the Halberd can trip! What does that mean? Oh look,
it's explained half a page lower. No instead, you peer at one tiny
table, then at another tiny table, then flip to the trait explanations at the
end.

Oh, and the tables are so cramped. In a digital world, where page count isn't
that big of a deal.

Also, class restrictions are based on these traits, rather than being a nice
table of "Y's." So instead of saying "What weapons can my wizard use?" and then
just looking down a nicely spaced column for the "Y's," you have to remember
that wizards can use "simple" weapons and look for the simple trait. A trait
that is mushed up with a bunch of other traits, making it far more difficult to
skim.

And woe betide to the poor GM who has to look up an unfamiliar weapon's properties
for this or that monster.

Gold for XP

The game still keeps Gold for XP. Again, I'm all for trying to avoid gamifying
our horrifyingly exploitive past, but isn't that like the most colonialist part
of the game? Whatever. I like gold-for-XP as a game mechanic, even if it
leads to Unfortunate Implications, especially if the GM isn't careful about their world building.
I'm just being cranky at this point.

Weapons and Armor

The random table for weapons is still woefully incomplete. So, you know. That
whole proficiency group thing to presumably allow DM's to let the dice dictate
what magic weapons show up... and you still can't use it if your characters
pick any but like a third of the weapons.

Saves

Saves were renamed. That's fine. `Doom` is a great name for a save by the way.
"Roll your Doom Save" is very unnerving.

Dragons

*Sigh.* Once again, they made things more boring. Gone is the fun and
fascinating dichotomy between male Dragons and Dragon Queens. Gone is the
question of "Why are Dragons this way? How can I incorporate that into my world
building?" Instead, Dragons are all identical, and they mate for life like
proper people should. No raging berserker males and crafty, intelligent Queens.
But we're ok with all Dragons being greedy bastards who amass huge hoards of
treasure I guess.


Overall

1/10 - The saving throw names are nice.

Really, the thing that annoys me is how much more poorly organized this version is.
I really like DDX's organization. There are a few things (like finding movement speed
is harder than it should be), but on the whole everything I need to know about a weapon
is all in one place, everything I need to know about a class is all in one place. That's
not the case anymore.

WHY CAN'T I GIVE THIS GUY MONEY TO GET THE BETTER VERSION IN PHYSICAL COPY
ANYMORE?

I guess I'll be distributing my PDF copies of DDX to people when running the game from
now on.

[archolewa]

Just ready your summary, sounds like they've taken the fun out of it, removed what made it different.

I will download a copy after work later and take a look. It's a shame the old versions are no longer available on drive thru, good job I've got my digital copies backed up in various places.

EDIT: A quick look in my library in drive thru still shows the old version for me. I see the new one as a free PDF, so I guess I can buy that and it'll be separate in my library.

Yeah, fortunately removing something from drivethrurpg doesn't remove it from people's library (which makes sense, some of those things I paid for!). But it does mean I'll need to make sure to download the PDF for DDX to various computers and my google drive to make sure I have it.

[shaidar]

Yeah, I've got backups on an external SSD as well as in the cloud.

[shaidar]

Just took a quick peek.

Have I missed something, where are the demi humans?

[archolewa]

Just took a quick peek.

Have I missed something, where are the demi humans?

One of the big changes the author made is to remove the race-as-class concept. Now, your race (or ancestry as the 4th edition calls it) is purely flavor. I'd just drop ancestries completely at that point and have the game take place in a world with just humans, but reducing it to just flavor is effectively dropping it so shrug.

This is a change that I don't really have a problem with. The idea that "all dwarves are fighters" and "all elves are frail spellcasters" is rather reductive on its face, and some thought needs to be put to the world building on why that is the case. In my game, the demi-humans had all their gods die, which is why they don't have clerics. Elves can't touch iron because it burns them, which is why they can never be warriors. Dwarves and halflings are inherently resistant to magic (their high saving throws!), which makes using arcane magic impossible. Lupines aren't human enough to receive spells from the Seer anymore, and being infused with the Kinslayer's corruptive magic can't tap into arcane magic without really, really bad things happening.

Part of the reason I was so intrigued by the new edition was because I have thought about what I would do if I wanted to ditch race-as-class and run a game where all PC's are humans, and I was curious about what the author did.

[shaidar]

I only quickly looked through the first few chapters and wondered is all. I don't have a problem with losing race-as-class in itself.

As a white guy in his fifties my thoughts are going to be framed against a backdrop of 1E/2E AD&D.

[shaidar]

What I really don't like is reducing elves to just being humans with pointy ears and dwarves being short humans with beards.

[Edeldhur]

I like race as class a lot, so that is another negative for me.
I feel it is part of the BX and BECMI core 'feel' and should not be touched.
That is why there is an Advanced game

[shaidar]

I get that. Races are archetypes IMO, and race-as-class reinforces that.

[shaidar]

So the only downside to the battlemage vs wizard is the increased XP requirement. Unlike the mountebank they don't get their casting spell level nerfed. Doesn't seem fair to me.

The ranger feels like it's just trying to be the 2E AD&D ranger, which is sort of what I feel this version is trying to do generally, align itself more with standard D&D which I think is a shame.

[archolewa]

What I really don't like is reducing elves to just being humans with pointy ears and dwarves being short humans with beards.

Yeah, I largely feel the same way. If I'm going to have non-humans in my game, I want them to somehow be fundamentally different from humans. Shadowrun gets a pass here, because "elves are just humans with pointy ears" is the entire fragging point. They builta very interesting dynamic around that fact, and humanity's general inability to look past the pointy ears.

But in a standard fantasy setting, where elves and dwarves are meant to somehow be ethereal and mystical and beyond the norm, race-as-class is the only approach I've seen so far that comes close to capturing that dynamic in a way that feels good to play (assuming you can accept the fictional limitations). In say OSRIC, level limits plus big bonuses from the beginning introduces a really unpleasant dichotomy depending on how high level you expect the game to go. Low level games you really want to be a demi-human. High level games, you really want to be human. And of course, nobody ever plays a human thief, because Demi-Humans are Just Better. From a worldbuilding perspective, level limits are just as artificial as race-as-class, and needs careful worldbuilding thought if you want to have some in-world explanation for why they plateau so hard.

But then you get into say 5E, and the tweaks from race are so minor that it feels kind of pointless. At that point, you really are into the "humans with pointy ears" territory and you wonder why even bother.

It's a thorny problem. I'm coming around more and more to the idea that races work best as "not a thing for players" in the quasi-swords-and-sorcery style game that DnD excels at.

So the only downside to the battlemage vs wizard is the increased XP requirement. Unlike the mountebank they don't get their casting spell level nerfed. Doesn't seem fair to me.

Wow you're right. They ditched a lot of the elven bonuses like evasion, infravision and better saving throws. Now literally the only thing that wizards get is higher level spells a little bit earlier (say level 3 spells at 20K XP rather tan 32K). That's not nothing, but it's not a lot either. It also makes Wizards a lot more frail than elves.

The ranger feels like it's just trying to be the 2E AD&D ranger, which is sort of what I feel this version is trying to do generally, align itself more with standard D&D which I think is a shame.

Yeah, that's the vibe I'm getting too. I mean, halfling is like 90% of the way there to "non-spellcasting wilderness warrior" so I can see replacing them with something like that. I just think the approach they took is very boring. That's kind of the entire vibe I get from 4th Edition. It's just...boring. Very vanilla, very mainstream. Nothing quirky or intriguing. Nothing to get me thinking about what kind of world these rules model.

I mean, just renaming "Halfling" to "Hunter" fills me with all sorts of ideas. A game hunter who has somehow found themselves adventuring. Maybe a poacher, or Robin Hood style bandit. Ranger does nothing for me. And it's yet another class that clashes with the gold-for-XP. Druid already suffers from this (I mean, the flavor for Druid literally says "they don't generally use money" in a game where they're expected to get half their XP from giant piles of money), and introducing Ranger only makes it worse.

[archolewa]

I'm feeling a lot less salty now. Not because 4th Edition has warmed up to me (it hasn't). But because I looked through the copyright notice for DDX and realized that everything except that under the OGL is Public Domain. So, thanks to the generosity of the author, I don't have to worry about violating copyright by sharing my DDX PDF's!

In particular, this means that if I run another game on Unseen Servant, or ever need to/want to bring in new players, I can link to my copy of the ruleset without violating Unseen Servant rules.

Still sad I can't get a new physical copy, but I will endure.

[shaidar]

That's something at least.

If you have the PDF I assume you could have it printed by a 3rd party.