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Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Announced
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Aug 16, 2007 08:42 PM
from the roll-for-initiative dept.
from the roll-for-initiative dept.
bigstrat2003 writes "For the past day, Wizards of the Coast has had a countdown to "4dventure" on their web site. The countdown ran out at 6:30 eastern time today (and the web site promptly crashed), but stories are already appearing on the rest of the web. Wizards also has had their 4th edition forums up for a couple of days."
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D&D 4th Edition Details Released 171 comments
Wired is reporting that some juicy details of Wizards of the Coast's new 4th edition for Dungeons and Dragons are being leaked on to the web from the D&D Experience in Arlington, VA this week. "Wizards of the Coast, the current custodians of the D&D universe, have been talking about the upcoming fourth edition of the game for months, but they've been fairly cagey about hard details, preferring to tell us more about how elves love footraces than how much damage a fireball does. They're running actual 4e games at D&D Experience, though, and thanks to people with scanners, you can too!"
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Why did the site crash? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why did the site crash? (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Insightful)
First they cancel the popular and successful Dungeon and Dragon magazines by not renewing the subscription with Paizo, and next they pull a stunt like this? I don't believe I'm the only one to find the DRM-laden "Digital Initiative" to be potentially a very poor substitute for the magazines, and this blunder will only compound the ill will directed against them.
This move will only alienate their consumer base. The fact that 3.5 is working, and in no need of overhaul, exposes the fact that they are doing this under the motivation of short-sighted greed. I shudder to think what sort of backlash (as before with Dungeon and Dragon were canceled) is taking place on the forum.
I'm literally in shock right now. I thought Wizards of the Coast understood its consumer base better and was comprised of people more concerned about the integrity of the game and more competent about long-term business strategies.
Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
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Bah, Easy I say! (Score:5, Funny)
Why, When I played D&D, there were no dragons yet, and they hadn't even invented magic. To us the game was sci-fi!
NOW GIT OFF MAH LAWN!
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
Now send me your address so I can mail *you* these memories and kill your desire for sex for the next ten years.
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Anti-Succubus (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking of sex, I always wondered why there were no Upper Plane equivalent of Succubus. I mean, flirty fishing works and would be a perfect fit for Chaotic Good outsiders, so why don't they go about seducing blackguards away from evil or something ? A wink, kiss and some bedroom gymnastics could easily stop entire evil armies in their tracks.
In fact I'd say that the Balance requires such beings, unless of course sex is inherently evil in the DnD universe. I guess WotC is just too prudish to add them...
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
Memories? BAH! Back in my day, we didn't even have memories. Nothing had happened yet. The universe was still cooling off from the Big Bang, which was all anyone could talk about, since there were no stone tablets yet for us to carve the news in. We had to assemble everything from gluons and bosons and mesons with our bare hands, and we liked it that way. None of those pre-fabricated nucleons with their fancy positive and negative electrical charges.
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading rules, looking at monsters in the monster manual, discussing adventures and planning and planning and planning all those great games you are going to play.
The actual game experience never lives up to the imagination. They sell content that inspires dreams of games.
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I haven't played a lot of pen & paper D&D, there have been quite a few video games based on fairly loose rules that you use in the right way to really come up with a great character.
For instance: In Guild Wars, someone figured out that you could purposefully use runes to reduce your health to about 10% of what other people had... And use the game's rules to keep yourself healed and deal major damage to a whole group of enemies all at once. This is obviously WAY beyond what the game designers had thought of, and shows how flexible the system is. To this day, people are still finding new combinations of classes and skills that seem to be way overpowered. Most of them COULD have been created on day 1, but were just finally imagined.
I see D&D's rules and arguments about the rules in the same way. All those arguments come from people interpreting the rules or the rules' interactions differently and coming up with new strategies. So for those who just want to play mindlessly, it's a pointless argument. For those that care, it's pretty much a basic part of the fun.
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are rules and systems in place for a lot of these creations that GMs make. People have created tons of player generated content for various RPGs, which other people will in turn adopt. I have seen where an entirely new game was created within the rules of a larger system, like White Wolf's World of Darkness. You are truly only confined by the rules of these systems if you let yourself be that way.
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D&D vs Roleplaying (Score:4, Informative)
Each gaming system has certain strengths and weaknesses, and D20's strength lies in its appeal to munchkins, rules lawyers, etc. Now, I'll also admit that there are some systems which manage to out munchking D20, Rifts comes to mind.
But I think the original poster's point stands: If you want to play something more than a hack and slash type game, you are vastly better off with a different system. For pure kick in the door type monster slaughters D20 isn't bad at all, you want a more nuanced gaming experience and you'll find that the rules begin to hold you back. I'll take GURPS, thanks. Now if only SJ games would do something like the OGL I'd be truly happy, and I think GURPS would benefit.
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
I hope you're near a hospital. Do you want me to call 911 for you?
Or perhaps find a dictionary so you can look up "literally"?
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:That's called 'Bad GMing' (Score:4, Insightful)
D&D, on the other hand, is played by small groups of people, rather than in tournaments. There's nothing they could do to stop house rules if they tried. Similarly, there's nothing they could do to stop house rules in Magic if they tried, as long as you're not talking about a sanctioned tournament.
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Unrealistic! (Score:5, Funny)
1) Intelligent enough to win a D&D tournament
2) Lucky enough with the dice to win a D&D tournament
3) Big and strong enough to literally bash through a wall
Then, yes, the one, single, supa-hot D&D honey will be all-up-ons. And lordy, lordy, will she ever be into cosplay, with more vinyl and leather than you can conceive of... super bonus round for fetish-addled roleplay freaks. Hot chicks love a fat geek, so long as he can kill a jock with his bare hands and understands the difference between her Sailor Moon costume and her Sailor Mars costume.
The rest of you will die alone.
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Re:I'm not buying any more WoTC products... (Score:4, Funny)
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Well at least the "news for nerds" part is back (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well at least the "news for nerds" part is back (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Well at least the "news for nerds" part is back (Score:4, Funny)
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That probably signifies the end of new books (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that the system is fairly hashed out, I don't see much reason to change.
old news (Score:4, Insightful)
A year or two after the new edition was out, they all usually break down and buy the new edition, sell off their old books to collectors or hobby stores, and move on.
Or you can be one of those old foggies who swears by the old edition, never upgrades, and then runs out of people to play with. But then, if you honestly bought every single 3.5 source book (seriously, why the hell would you possibly need all of those?), I imagine you have bigger problems than finding people to play with.
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Website Down (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
-20,000 xp since the DM didn't want you to kill it this early in the campaign, it was supposed to return for an epic battle around the time of 4.5, then a final confrontation when 5 came out. Now the DM's stuck trying to figure out a new arch-villain for the rest of the campain.
Re:Website Down (Score:5, Funny)
Or use the classic:
Nephilium
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Re:Website Down (Score:5, Funny)
My character is standing watch one night while the rest of the party is sleeping. A lone goblin approaches.
Me: I toss a marshmallow to the goblin
*DM looks at we strangely for a moment*: the goblin pokes the marshmallow with his spear and then sticks it into his mouth
Me: I cast enlarge on the marshmallow.
*everyone falls out of their chairs*
(sometimes I think the DM just wanted to see what the heck I was going to pull next)
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Re:Website Down (Score:5, Funny)
Climate/Terrain: Windows
Frequency: Common
Organization: Solitary or cluster
Activity Cycle: Any
Diet: RAM
Intelligence: Non- (0)
Treasure: Nil
Alignment: Chaotic evil
No. Appearing: 1-1,000,000
Armor Class: 9
Movement: 1
Hit Dice: 2
THACO: 20
No. of Attacks: 1
Damage/Attack: 1-4
Special Attacks: Crashing
Special Defenses: Nil
Magic Resistance: Nil
Size: L
Morale: Unreliable (2)
XP Value: 12
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First edition forever! (Score:5, Insightful)
I had to try 3e when it came out... I figured it was really cool that my favorite RPG was getting a facelift, as I was never really satisfied with the 2nd edition rules. But alas, after trying it out and playing it for a few weeks I concluded that it was a big mistake to have sold all my 2e stuff to finance the purchasing of 3rd edition material. 3rd edition D&D was not a role playing game as I understood it... it was basically just a pen-and-paper version of a computer game, requiring a ridiculous amount of number crunching and bean counting. Suddenly every single thing that a character was supposedly able to do was governed by a skill associated with a number... taking away a vital element of creativity that in my opinion is a vital core of any real RPG. Rather than trying to reacquire the 2nd edition stuff I formerly had, however, I decided instead to go all the way back to the beginning (well, almost) and go with first edition AD&D, because the number of books published for it was small enough that it wouldn't completely break my pocketbook to get them all. I spent a couple of weeks hunting for bargains on ebay and eventually got all the hardcover rulebooks for the game. I bought pdf's of modules through rpgnow, and I was good to go. I have now have a group of 4 players, and we play weekly.
Fans of 1st edition AD&D, check out the Dragonsfoot web site [dragonsfoot.org]. 2nd edition is well received there too.
Please God! Let it kill DDO. (Score:4, Insightful)
Predictions:
1) reductions in all rules requiring any DM adjudication
2) more caster nerfing to "balance" the classes across all levels
3) a new campaign world
4) idiotic marketing
Wizards doesn't seem to get the idea that it doesn't have enough momentum to carry the MMORPG market.
Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and the (incredible) Planescape:Torment put them on perfect footing to make a huge splash in the MMORPG arena, but they chose to hack their dong off by setting Dungeons and Dragons Online in Eberron, their new PnP setting.
Mind you DDO launched well after WoW.
They actually decided, I can only assume, to set their 1st mainstream attempt at an MMORPG in a completely foreign world to most of their customers in order to drive book sales.
Books.
Pulp.
Magazines. (now sadly gone)
That's how out of touch they were.
Wizards is still trapped in a world where metal must hit paper to make money, to their loss.
Remember... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, man, have to spend more money (Score:5, Funny)
The Saga Continues (Score:5, Informative)
In 3ed or 3.5ed D&D, if you want to play a fighter (and you're optimizing your character), you play a spellcaster, and use spells to make yourself more human than the human.
At the San Diego Comicon this year I was a WOTC volunteer who was basically the 'Star Wars Saga Edition Guy' who got to explain the rules of Saga Edition to maybe 50 tables of people, running half hour games each time. Since Saga Edition is supposed to be real close to 4th edition, I'm probably as familiar as anyone with the hypothetical rules right now. Saga edition, in a nutshell... is okay. It removes your armor class and saving throws. Instead you have a joint AC/Save thing called Fort Defense, Reflex Defense and Will Defense, and the attacker makes all dice rolls (with the defense numbers normally 10 points higher than your old save, so a +5 reflex save would be a 15 reflex defense in the new system) so if I were to, say, fireball the party as a DM, I'd roll one d20 with my 10d6 fireball damage. If I got a 15 on the d20 'attack' roll, it would do full damage to everyone with a Reflex Defense of 15 or lower, and half damage to everyone higher. So you don't have to wait for 6 people to break out their dice, figure out their saving throw bonuses, etc. You just pitch the dice together, announce the result, and move on. A nice touch, though I'm a bit leery of running spells like Wail of the Banshee that way, as it will greatly increase the chance of TPKs -- we'll see if they keep one save for the party with that.
AC is now your Reflex Defense.
They have something called a condition track which runs concurrently with your hit points (you still have hit points -- Saga Edition is 90% the same as D20 rules). Any time you take more than your 'damage threshold' in damage (it's usually somewhere around a number between 15 to 20), you get a point of impairment, which adds a cumulative penalty to all your D20 rolls (-1, -2, -5, -10 KO), until you get knocked out at 5 points of impairment. So even if you have 200 hit points, if you take 20 damage 5 times in a combat, you'll be KOed, because they were bigger hits to you than 10 10 point hits.
The main thing that annoys me about the new system is that it is a little too generic. There's very little difference in the classes, with saves being almost totally revamped so that everyone's saves will be within 2 points of each other (your class save bonus only applies once, and you get the best of all classes that you multiclass in, and then progresses the same for everyone). Likewise, everyone gets a bonus to damage equal to half their class level. So a 20th level noble does the same damage with a blaster as a 20th level Jedi (3d6+10). The only difference in the classes are their 'special ability' talent trees, which work like in World of Warcraft. Essentially, every other level you get a new 'talent', many of which have prerequisites of other talents. So if you want the ability to reroll an attack roll once per day (a rogue ability) you might need the talent to reroll a skil
New disclaimer on the cover too (Score:5, Funny)
Great Potential, Worrisome Indications (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as people complaining about having to buy another version I sympathize but you don't have to buy the new version and WoTC shouldn't be forced not to fix the system just because some of us bought the previous version. I don't know if I will buy the new one (I have 3.5) but the next generation of gamers shouldn't be stuck with the imperfections of the system we played.
On the other hand I'm a bit worried about the online subscription part. The publication of feats and other rule changes in dragon was bad enough but an online subscription has even more of an official air about it and will give WoTC a very strong incentive to put overpowerful feats in the subscription. Hopefully, they will mostly just include story/background material and the occasional fix but we will have to wait and see.
Did they fix the stupid combat system yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Every character has and "armor class" (defense) and "THAC0 = To Hit Armor Class Zero" (offense). The "THAC0" is used to determine whether or not you make contact with your opponent. Then your strength and other factors determine the amount of damage..
Why in the hell would wearing really good armor make you less likely to be hit??
Like its hard to hit a guy wearing full plate mail?
If anything, wearing heavy armor should make you easier to hit.
The armor should absorb damage, not make you less likely to be hit...
Re:Did they fix the stupid combat system yet? (Score:4, Informative)
That is why certain armor types were better against certain weapon types.
Piercing weapons had a bonus to hit plate type armor, but a penalty to chain type armors.
slashing weapons had the opposite.
Bludgeoning weapons would have a penalty for leather, and an even worse penalty for padded armor types. etc...
It was all covered in the first edition rulebook, and that was only like 80 pages long.
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Re:Oh okay, realistic combat (Score:5, Informative)
People who play role playing games (and write rules for them) routinely overestimate both the weight and encumbrance of armour. The heaviest combat armour from any period (i.e. ancient Greeks to late mediaeval) weighed around 40-50lbs, which is about half a modern military field pack, and unlike said pack, much of the weight was distributed around the body instead of being a heavy lump at the back. There are mediaeval woodcuts of men in full plate armour doing cartwheels, hand-stands, and running and jumping, and Joan of Arc routinely wore it despite being a peasant girl who wasn't trained as a warrior, so it was nothing like as restrictive and heavy as RPG rules (with the notable exception of Chivalry and Sorcery) routinely make it.
NB: many of the myths about mediaeval armour in particular come from the Victorian English, who failed to distinguish between late mediaeval jousting plate and war / combat armour. Jousting plate was massively reinforced on the left-hand side (the lance was couched in the right-hand, pointing to the left, so the left side took the impact), and restricted arm movement to what was necessary for aiming the lance and moving a shield up and down by about a foot, so people wearing it were unable to mount their horses without assistance. Jousting saddles were also specially designed to have low backs so that whoever got hit by a lance slid off instead of arching backwards, which experience had shown was an excellent way to end up as a paraplegic.
"What, you were already wearing? For the entire 6 hour journey through the old forest?"
I suggest you read some history, because people have been wearing armour of all types for periods of far longer than six hours for thousands of years, in climates ranging from winter ice to hot deserts and steamy, humid jungles. The reason for this was logistical: armour had to be transported by some means during campaigns, and wearing it was an excellent means of doing so that left valuable baggage train space free for food, water, missile weapon ammunition, siege artillery parts, and all the other sundry items that an army in the field requires.
"Okay you are entering combat finally, start the counter at 1. What counter you ask? Your exhaustion counter. You do not think you are going to last forever with a ton of steel hanging from your body do you? Ten rounds, that is your max before you are starting to loose it."
The main fatigue factor in pre-firearms battles came from the fact that swinging manual weapons of 2lbs+ around is a lot like chopping down trees with an axe, a notably exhausting activity despite the fact that it isn't usually done while wearing armour. Fatigue might be slightly increased by adding between 20 and 40 lbs of extra weight, but the effect would be minimal due to the fact that most of the warrior class (i.e. D&D fighters) had been training to fight in it since they were seven years old. A far bigger problem once helms with full face protection became common was limited visibility, which made it difficult to deal with threats that weren't directly in front of the armour wearer, thereby rendering them vulnerable to attacks from the side and rear.
"Also heavy armour tends to be very rigid, metals of the age just ain't the flexible, start counter3 to see when it will simply shatter."
The plates that were used in both platemail and full plate were hammer-forged, not cast, so they deformed when struck with sufficient force (i.e. they sustained dents) rather than shattering. There is no documented, or for that matter even mythical account of armour shattering, and there are no existing examples of even the cheapest munition plate (i.e. the stuff that was handed out to foot soldiers, and collected up again for storage) that shows any sign of shattering or cracking, although there are many which either exhibit dents and holes, or signs of dents / holes that ha
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Re:You ever been in the army? (Score:4, Insightful)
That was my point. A military field pack is around twice the weight of a typical suit of armour, and it's all concentrated in one place instead of being spread around the body, yet trained soldiers carry them over extremely long distances, and then fight battles. An excellent example of this was British paras and commandos, who fought after marching significant distances over extremely rugged terrain in the 1982 Falklands War carrying not only their own field packs and weapons, but also a variety of heavier armaments such as mortars and the ammunition for them (this was variously termed "yomping" and "tabbing", depending on whether one is talking to a marine or para).
"Sure a trained soldier/warrior will be able to do it, BUT not without a stat hit."
Romans routinely marched 50 miles a day on their roads wearing chainmail or lorica and a metal helmet while carrying a large shield, pilum, short sword, and a pack containing a water / wine skin, food, eating and cooking utensils, weapon maintenance equipment, and various digging and cutting tools. At the end of each day's march, they would use their axes to cut down enough trees to act as supports for earth palisades around the entire army, and then use their digging tools to bank the earth, and excavate a deep ditch around this fortified camp. Remains of such "marching camps" indicate that they were often of considerable size, e.g. the one at Raedykes in Scotland that covers 114 acres.
A true historical incident serves to show how different people who spent every day from the moment they could walk doing hard manual labour were from 21st. century Western blobs of grease. King Harald Godwinson force-marched 1500 men from London to Tadcaster, York (185 miles) in 4 days, where they defeated Harald Hadrada's Viking invaders in a day-long battle so convincingly that only 24 of the original 200 invading ships managed to escape. Then, he heard that William The Bastard had invaded in the south, so he force-marched his army back to London in another 4 days, where they stopped only to gather reinforcements, then marched 105 miles to Hastings, and fought another day-long battle against the fresh Norman troops, who were unable to break their shield wall despite having cavalry. Harald's Saxons still had enough energy to pursue fleeing Breton, Flemish, and Norman forces who routed, and although this pursuit led to Harald's eventual defeat, it is an excellent indicator of how hardy pre-industrial people were, especially when one considers that those forced marches weren't on what either we or the Romans would describe as "roads".
"Remember we are after realism, and if you think someone who has just marched through a forest for the day wearing a full combat outfit is as fresh as a person who hasn't, you must be superman."
Historical accounts from periods ranging from early classical to late mediaeval seem to indicate that there was little effective difference in freshness between armoured and unarmoured troops that was actually caused by its weight rather than other factors such as its tendency to trap heat on hot days, and radiate it on cold ones. However, the fact that people from very hot climates such as Greek hoplites and Persians clibanarii wore it, as well as those from cold ones such as Vikings is an excellent indicator of the fact that the advantages it conferred on its wearer far outweighed any discomfort that they endured.
"If you believe that soldiers wore their full equipment all the time because of ease of transportation I suggest you read up on tactics. You can do this, IF you want your soldiers exhausted when they reach wherever they are going."
Copious historical examples show that this is not the case. If tactical sources diverge from historical fact, then those tactical sources should be revised.
"This is known from roman times with accounts from soldiers on the difference between their march
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still playing 2nd edition... (Score:5, Insightful)
What for? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, the GM could lessen that effect, but still, what remained was that "character growth" was reduced to killing mobs left and right and looting. If you played actually by the rules, there was no room for "good role play" as something that could be rewarded sensibly.
Then 3.5 came out and, frankly, I hardly looked at it because after the 3.0 desaster, I didn't even want to take a closer look. It looks much like they heard the outcry, but I stick with AD&D.
Now, after everyone bought the books, we're hitting 4.0. So what now? Buy all those books yet again? Thanks, no. There simply is no need to. I can see that you have to stay current with games where you want to play tournaments and compete with people outside your group of friends, like in tabletop games or card games, but for role play? I choose the people I play with carefully. I don't need to compete with anyone outside of my group.
Re:I knew if I waited long enough... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I knew if I waited long enough... (Score:5, Funny)
GYGAX
Greetings! It's a
to meet you!
http://www.imsdb.com/transcripts/Futurama-Anthlog
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Re:I knew if I waited long enough... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I knew if I waited long enough... (Score:5, Funny)
*shakes his fist at the gods of moderation*
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