Ooh, there’s a paladin character sheet from the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons on the web, and you can see plenty of World of Warcraft influence on it too.

The only thing missing from the character sheet that showed up on Wired is a Crusader enchant on the main weapon.  Oh wait, it’s got Astral Rejuvenation, I’m sure that’s not similar at all:

D&D maker Wizards of the Coast tells us this is the only full character sheet (.jpg) it’s going to release before the new edition of the game comes out June 6. You can see the bare basics of some sample characters in the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure available now, but this sheet is for a higher-level character with more of the math spelled out in actual handwriting. All it needs is a crappy little freehand character sketch and you could practically smell the dice and Bagel Bites.

Bagel Bites? Sounds kind of posh. We always settled for the Taco Bell ten pack and a zillion packets of hot sauce.

Anyway. There’s no mistake the current trend in online gaming, especially with the massive World of Warcraft game, influenced the designers at WotC.  This sheet is a lot simpler than DnD 3.5. Of course, an introductory text on neurosurgery would be a lot simpler than 3.5 too.

It seems like WotC wants to give the Warcraft crowd an easy transition to trying out DnD, on the off chance those players bother logging out of WoW and Vent long enough to roll dice. Don’t get me wrong, I used to love rolling dice, but WoW has two things going for it that pen and paper games don’t: cost and convenience.

To get rolling on DnD 4th ed, you have to shell out for the three core books and probably pick up the Keep on the Shadowfell adventure. According to the Wizards DnD site, that’s retail of $135 for four books.

That’s not counting dice and the miniatures Wizards will be sure to push. Then you need to find time to play. Which is better, once a week with DnD, or a little instance running on WoW whenever you want to do it?