So, increasing my all-consuming interest in Dungeons & Dragons 4e, I picked up the Player’s Handbook 2 today, and spent a good part of the evening paging through it. Despite my renewed enthusiasm for the game (now that I have some playtime on both sides of the screen), I still came at the book with a bit of skepticism — let it be known now, it was mostly unwarranted. What is great, what is good, and what remains, you ask?

Pre-content Thoughts

Normal D&D4e production values in printing and layout. Inside the book, it’s indistinguishable from the relevant sections of the PH1 — same style for races, classes and their powers, paragon paths, so on.

The art is hit and miss. The primary art (chapter opens, races, and the like) are all pretty good to very good, but some of the incidental art and paragon path illustrations could have used another look. Nothing ridiculously wrong like some of the Complete Divine art (which my group liked poking fun at), but occasionally underwhelming. I guess not all of the illustrations can be knockouts.

On the nitpicking anal-retentive side, I’m wondering if every book is going to have a slightly different colored spine — the blue of the book is slightly lighter than that of the Player’s Handbook, and while trying to color code the books is no fun either, I’m wondering if my bookshelf is going to look like a shuffled Crayola box by the end.

Those highly concerned with dollars and cents may feel a bit stiffed in terms of volume — the book runs at the same price as the first Player’s Handbook but comes in at almost 100 pages less, putting it alongside the Dungeon Master’s Guide (a useful book, don’t get me wrong) in page-to-dollar ratio. While the page disparity can be easily explained given the content in PH2, maybe knocking $5 off the retail price would have been in order.

Introduction

The obligatory introduction opens with the standard introduction section, laying out what is to come, and includes a cookie-cutter sidebar prodding players to describe their powers less systematically, and using backgrounds (introduced later) to help facilitate the character’s backstory.

More interestingly, the introduction concludes (thankfully, already) with a page on the primal power source (the new source in PH2. It’s a pretty good write-up, with an honest approach to characters of the wild, essentially stating “while primal characters may not care much about that divine hooey or the growth of civilization, they’re not diametrically opposed — all three sides have common enemies and bigger fish to fry". It doesn’t wax poetic or anything, of course, but it’s a nice framing of the power, and I wish they’d done the same for the powers in the Player’s Handbook.

Character Races

Five races are introduced: devas, servants of the gods being reborn in the common world; gnomes, trickster fey (no surprise there); goliaths, tough, rugged mountain nomads; half-orcs, orc/human hybrids presented as a unique line rather than halfbreeds (interesting); and shifters, bestial humanoids with trace amounts of lycanthrope blood (hence the shifting).

The latter three races tend to bleed together a bit in their focus on the wilderness (but hey, that is to be expected with the introduction of the new power source), but each has its defining qualities. None of the five seem like they were tacked-on, or an afterthought, and the description of each makes them more than caricatures (with the exception of the shifters, maybe). I was pleasantly surprised by the half-orc, which finally sheds its stereotype as a dumb thicky, constantly on the fringes of (both human and orc) civilization.

The second of the chapter presents some racial paragon paths, one for each PH1/PH2 race (with the exception of the half-elf, who gets improved multiclassing via a feat instead). The racial paragon paths take the traits of each race to their obvious pinnacle: shifters become moonstalkers and get hunting-themed abilities, gnomes become fey beguilers and get sneaking and illusion abilities, eladrin ascend to shiere knights and represent the pinnacle of the Feywild, and so on. Nothing appears wrong with the racial paragon paths, but they’re not quite my cup of tea, and they do appear to have slight difficulty in differentiating themselves from class-based paragon paths. But, for those looking to have their character become the adventurer by which all of their race are judged (heh, or stereotyped), these do exactly that. The powers stand out well without going too much one way or the other on the balance scale.

Again, I can see plenty of people being pleased with these, I just personally find the class-based paragon paths more interesting.

Character Classes

The meat and potatoes of the book. Eight new classes:

• the avenger (striker), a divine agent of battle, predisposed to neutrality, dishing out their god’s will, and a pretty interesting class all told;
• the barbarian (striker), the classic “I’m going to rip that one guy to shreds and damn the defenses” warrior;
• the bard (leader), which I’m excited about for some strange reason — a fun-looking party support leader who buffs with a little bit of controller mixed in;
• the druid (controller), the classic nature-based shapeshifter that is all about flexibility, with a litany of powers in and out of their beast form;
• the invoker (controller), an impressive but somewhat derivative conduit for divine will, either protective or wrathful;
• the shaman (leader), a battle guide with a companion spirit to act as another ally (setting up flanks, acting as a healing focal point, etc.);
• the sorcerer (striker), a channeler of raw arcane energy that mixes the striker’s focus with burst and blast attacks;
• and the warden (defender), a primal protector of nature (and of course your party) with a controller-like mass-mark ability and beast or tree forms.

All of the classes have their primary role clearly indicated, and the support text also points out common secondary roles, which is a nice addition, showing the diversity of the classes. Naturally, each class has their entire power list laid out as in the PH1, along with a number of paragon paths. System balance is solid here too; none of the classes or powers appear to be broken, with the exception of a rare higher-level power which will seem to have one too many dice or the like. Definitely not a deal-breaker, though.

What impressed me the most was that, just like with the races, none of the classes feel tacked on or doing something totally antithesis to the standard set by the first book — all of the classes stand up alongside their PH1 kin, acting as part of the overall design while still offering their unique qualities.

The chapter ends with epic destinies, which follow the tradition of being a storytelling mechanism along the lines of “I want my character to be remembered for…". The Harbinger of Doom stands out to me as a great example of that — as interesting features as the other destinies, of course, but framed with a certain foreboding that keeps the destiny mechanic on a whole interesting.

Character Options

An assortment of less significant mechanics fill this chapter. It begins with backgrounds, which serve the immediate purpose of describing your character before level 1 while adding some minor benefits to the character. These, in my experience, work pretty well — I used the regional benefits in the Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide for my game, and the backgrounds section of PH2 claims those as a subset of the overall background concept. A DM who is not interested in the mechanical benefits of the backgrounds may still be interested in presenting them, just to get the gears turning in players’ heads.

Of course, there is the normal collection of feats, feats, and feats (for each tier). At a glance, half of the list is focused on the new classes, with around half of the remaining feats related to new races. The feats, naturally, vary in theme based on the focus of the class or desired action, but, again, everything appears to have been balanced well. One feat of note is the replacement for the half-elf’s missing racial paragon path, a feat that allows the Dilettante racial trait to be used as an at-will power, with essentially limitless multiclassing options for those choosing the paragon multiclassing option. It sounds like a nice feat, and it gives some more love to the oft-disregarded half-elf race.

As would be expected, multiclass feats are included for the book’s new classes.

A more than modest selection of magic items is included, again mostly focused on the wants and needs of the new classes, but a number of the options are definitely useful for the PH1’s classes, including new forms of masterwork armor. The new implements (totems, and weapons as implements) are introduced, as well as musical instrument wondrous items, acting as implements for bards but usable by anyone.

A couple dozen new rituals are added, filling some utility needs introduced by the primal power (standbys such as speak with nature, control weather), introducing utility bardsongs, and throwing in the wildcard or two (reverse portal, for instance).

Appendix: Rule Updates

Seeing this section scared the hell out of me at first. If anything made d20 (3.0 or 3.5) unpalatable, it was its constant revising of the rules, adding new action types based on the miniatures games, or introducing new uses of skills, and the like. The issue, ultimately, with these changes was that no attempt was made to make the established order fit with the additions, leading to a hodge podge of exception cases and, ultimately, imbalance.

That was 3.x, however, and so far 4e has avoided that problem. The appendix serves mainly to rewrite the “how to read a power” section of the PH1, including both new keywords and expanding/re-explaining the terminology introduced in the first book. While this sounds like it could be abysmal, nothing I saw contradicts or breaks the established order, instead items are just clarified. For example, the appendix states that the sequence of “effect” texts in a power is not accidental, and indentations are indeed intended to create conditional hierarchies ("secondary attack” is indented under “hit” because it is only relevant if you hit).

A number of other minor power clarifications show up: a character does not need to have an implement to use implement-keyword powers, they just need the ability to use the relevant implement (the difference between carrying a wand and being able to use a wand), reliable powers go unspent if every target is missed. Nothing here seems earth-shattering to me (some of it, in my opinion, is and always was obvious), but it looks like Wizards sought to answer what must be common questions with this superseding text.

There are “new” stealth rules as well, but they focus on more clarifications: creating a diversion to hide (a usage of Bluff) and Stealth are contested with passive Insight and Perception. How Stealth works in combat is explained and presented a bit better as well. Perception is a bit cheaper now, becoming a minor action (hooray). Finally, a couple terms are added to the glossary.

All in all, these are best described as clarifications and minor bugfixes — if Wizards reprints the Player’s Handbook, I wouldn’t be surprised to see these included along with more standard errata fixes (the text of PH2 even presents them that way, saying what snippets of the book are replaced with the new text).

Conclusion

I’m pretty pleased with this book. I think its success is evident in the feeling I get upon having read much and skimmed the rest — that it is not “the new book for players", but a legitimate expansion of scope. It does nothing to ruin, shatter, or unbalance the year of D&D4e we’ve had so far, and it is not even fair to call it another layer of content; its new content is neither above nor below the Player’s Handbook in value, it simply makes the core player content larger, adding without obsoleting. Which is exactly the point of the book.