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D&D Fourth Edition Books To Be Released in June
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Oct 19, 2007 04:19 PM
from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
from the now-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
Bill Slavicsek, R&D director on Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, has announced via his personal column that the three core books for Fourth Edition will all be coming out in the same month. When the new game version was announced at Gen Con this year, the initial idea was that the books would be staggered over a three month period. "After conferring with our various trade partners, the Sales Team here at Wizards came back with word that they'd rather have the three core rulebooks release in the same month than over three consecutive months. As that's how we originally wanted to release them, Brand and R&D got together with our Production Team to see if we could accommodate the request. The answer is YES! The new release schedule looks like this: May: H1: Keep on the Shadowfell 4th Edition D&D adventure with Quick-Start Rules. June 6: 4th Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual." As a note, the article is trapped behind an inane login for the Dungeons and Dragons Insider site. Hey WotC? It's really hard to talk up your new toys when you make it hard to read your content. Why not loosen up a bit?
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D&D Fourth Edition Books To Be Released in June
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Buy our printed material! (Score:2, Interesting)
Yay for printed material that becomes obsolete every few years. Can't wait for D&D 5th Edition, coming next Christmas.
Re:Buy our printed material! (Score:5, Informative)
In the case of AD&D 2nd edition, 1.1 decades (1989-2000), with a substantial revision (though it didn't get an official new version like 3.5) of the core books in 1995.
And 1st Edition AD&D was 1977-1988, also 1.1 decades,
Really, 3rd Edition lasting from 2000-2008 with a revision in 2003 isn't all that much shorter than either of the previous editions.
Yes, their business model is to make people want to buy the products they are producing.
That's pretty much every business model.
Sticking to the core 3 (Score:3, Interesting)
Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue as I see it, relates to choices. I noticed that people like to play mages because there is a perception that magic can do neat an interesting things, and a beginning player can spend time thinking about various choices of spells they can get. Whereas, the other classes seem to be more focused on just increasing a stat such as to hit something, or do more damage in a particular situation.
Well, one of the benefits of role playing is adjusting the rules to suit a particular style. I just wish they incorporated more interesting choices for low levels, or even an optional playing style.
From the few comments and reviews I have read, it appears that they are spending more time incorporating ideas from MMORPG, such as having tanks that draw aggro, and talent points to customize each class. It will be interesting to see how these work to give a player more choices in making a character. I have my doubts. It is not as though MMORPG are a great bastion of role playing. Seems most people just want points, powers, and trinkets.
Re:Choices (Score:4, Insightful)
I think they're very much doing this. Late in the 3.5 product cycle they released "Book of the Nine Swords", which detailed an add-on system of "maneuvers" that provided the same kind of options that wizards and clerics had through spells. Apparently they're working from that to develop a system that provides more options for martial types in 4th edition.
I heard on a podcast one of the developers say that most 3e players came to feel that levels 7-13 or so were the most fun, in terms of having a lot of options and not feeling gimped but also not having so many different complicated effects that the game drags down. It's their hope in 4th to "expand" that balance of play through the whole range of levels. We'll see, I guess.
From the few comments and reviews I have read, it appears that they are spending more time incorporating ideas from MMORPG, such as having tanks that draw aggro, and talent points to customize each class.
They already have this stuff, don't you think? Aggro in MMO games is just a way to represent the monster's intelligence and ability to be goaded or bluffed into hitting the tough guys and leaving the softies alone. DMs do the same thing when they run monsters; they reward good player tactics and good roleplaying by having monsters hit those who are best prepared to take it. It wouldn't be realistic for every Ogre with an Int of 6 to realize that the guy with the staff and robes is a much bigger threat than the guy in the shining plate armor with the huge greatsword, right?
It'll be impossible, I assure you, for Wizards to somehow take the DM's intelligence out of the equation. Monsters at the tabletop aren't being run by computer algorithms, they're being run by a person taking on that role.
Talent points? Tell me, honestly, what's the difference between getting a feat or a class feature (or a choice of features) every level and getting a "talent point" every level to redeem for one of a couple choices? The concept is already in the game, it always has been. MMO's represent that game feature in one way; D&D 4th will surely represent it in some way, it's just a way of scaling advancement of characters.
Seems most people just want points, powers, and trinkets.
Well, it is Dungeons and Dragons. If 4th Edition turns out to be "Dungeon: The Dragoning" where nearly all rewards are story-based and not mechanic based, I'll be super-disappointed. If I wanted only role-playing, my friends and I could write a book together. The game you don't like is actually one that a lot of people do. Nothing against you, of course, but might I suggest that you either continue to do what you've been doing - adapting the rules to serve your needs - or investigate a different game altogether rather than hope that the game I've been enjoying as-is becomes something totally different?
Ahem (Score:2)
I know, I should give up... (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
No.
"D&D Fourth Edition Books To Be Released in June"? Yes.
Registration? What registration? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dramp/20071019&authentic=true&pf=true [wizards.com]
Enjoy.
Giving up on D20... went to Mythic (Score:2)
D&D has too much focus on tactical combat and encourages dice-festing. Maybe Mike Mearls can turn it around - I liked some of his work in Iron Heroes - but if a player has to have an intricate knowledge of the rules AND spend an hour making a first level character to play 4th edition, then I can't see myself spending money on it. Last game I ran, involving 5 players, 3 had no knowledge of the rules, and it took us 3 hours to make characters.
Re:Giving up on D20... went to Mythic (Score:4, Insightful)
Backwards compatible? (Score:3, Interesting)
The prime goal of D&D (Score:2)
It's probably painful to you who enjoyed 2nd and 3rd edition rules, but they are not comparable to 1ed rules, or even to the original paperback books of the 1970s. Back then, and if you read early issues of the Dragon you can feel this, there was intense interest in applying human imagination to the gameplay. The GM was encouraged by the rules to make up expedients to arbitrate particular situations, and to write their own adventures. The concept of a 'module' was invented largely as a cash flow device by the management of TSR.
2ed and 3ed are a lot of hand holding and substituting hard and fast rules for what used to be the domain of the GM/DM to decide. Associated with this is an increase in game complexity (which produces more books!). The game suffered, frankly, and it's no wonder that it attracts fewer rather than more players as time goes on.
This 4ed release (explain to me who exactly is 'excited' about this, according to TFA?) unquestionably will hasten the process with inclusion of crappy MMORPG concepts, if the other posters here are right. Aggro? Please.
Find some circa 1ed material, GM it as the rulebooks will suggest (they are small by today's standards) and see if it isn't a better game when reduced to its basics.
D&D/gaming paraphanalia inverse relativity the (Score:2, Interesting)
I was considered a weirdo, being a GIRL, they even made me roll vs pregnancy in the first few games I played, like my character could catch it from walking around in dungeons, but what did they know, they were adolescent boys.
We grew tired of the system mechanics TSR employed and adopted our own percentile system loosely based on twilight 2000 early on in the 'old school' days, and based our own worlds on it.
We had brief spells of Shadowrun, more book buying, more dissatisfaction with the limitations of the system, more making up our own rules loosely based on the best of the different hand picked ones we had grabbed from different books,. Then TSR fumbled and the guys at Wizards of the Coast picked up the ball, and the D20 system lured us back. More book buying, more dissatisfaction on learning the limitations of the system.... are we seeing the trend here? I am assuming a lot more people had the same experiences, and put a lot of money into the coffers of TSR/wizards/etc. trying to find their 'ideal' gaming system.
But enough about me, on to the theory:
My Gaming friends and I came up with this inverse theory of relativity:
The percentage of gaming books you own is inversely relative to the amount of dates you go out on. regardless of gender.
I still game occasionally, but I make do with the rules we have tuned over the years knowing now that they are going to be better than any the guys on the corporate side are shelling for 50 bux a pop.
1st Ed AD&D Old School (Score:2)
You aways remember your first... (Score:5, Informative)
Way too many game books, a couple system shifts into FASA, White Wolf and other game companies, and nearly a couple decades later I finally found that something I had always been missing in games. I've been having a blast playing since. The volume's been cranked way up.
I'm not really interested in tactics and cool powers and advancing in skills and such. What I am interested in is cool stories. I like to get together with people and put together a collaborative story. So now I buy games that help me do that.
Most of these games are single book games. One book, and that's it. No unending stream of supplements, just a good game that's fun to play. These games aren't ones that you have to tweak the rules for constantly either, with everyone playing the rules a different way. These games haven't just been thrown together. They're play tested hard, and they do what they're supposed to do. The rules work. These games are usually very accessible to casual gamers as well as outsiders to RPGs.
The latest game I picked up like this is Dirty Secrets. It's a game of the hardboiled detective genre. You play an investigator and solve crimes. The location? Your home town. The time? Last week. And there's crime and murder in the air. It's a one shot story game, taking approximately 3-9 hours, depending on the type of game you pick (short story, novella, novel). Much more fun than Monopoly or Risk that many might play instead. High replay value too, since of course every story would be different.
Sorcerer is another one I like. I've been running this game weekly for the past year. We're almost done with the first campaign, and it's been a blast. Arrogant mortals taming the dark powers and creatures from beyond our reality and forcing them to their will? Faustian deals gone awry? If you ever wanted to play a character like John Constatine, this is the game for it.
Dogs in the Vineyard makes a great old west game. Personally I don't care for the setting, but the game system is fantastic. It works well in certain other settings as well, so that is what I use it for. For the old west style standoff, I've yet to see a better system.
Love great TV, and always wanted to do a series? This game structures your stories as if they are TV episodes in a series. SF, fantasy, western, crime drama, spy drama... all are possible. The game system does really well at modeling what's important to a TV series, and resolving the problems that result for the conflicts you introduce. Shows like Firefly, Buffy, Gilmore Girls, Heroes, and the new Battlestar Gallactica are all good examples of the type of shows this game models well.
If you want a Tolkien-esque FRPG, and like a good bit of rules crunch in your games, I would suggest you try out Burning Wheel instead of D&D. It has a great story based character creation, not just number crunching with maybe adding on some story as a side note.
If you instead want a game focusing on combat tactics and advancement of powers, and where story control is in the hands of one player while the other players are along for the ride (if there is even a story there at all), then this new D&D might be for you. It's not a bad game, it's just not suitable for all types of gamers.
What they need is to change focus (Score:2)
A big part of the problem is letting players see their stats. Honestly, let the player decide what class he/she wants, and let the DM create the character based on the rules. Let it be random, but make the player really be clueless about their exact stats. If there will be a system to increase stats, or level up in another class, or pick up non-class skills, make the player say it in advance, and make it obvious that the character is now being judged by their actions toward the desired increase. Or make the different class abilities be skill based, and make it so the system is a skill-based system where people need to use a skill to advance in that skill(training will take care of a lot of this).
If a player doesn't know what the character stats are, then all that matters is the fun of playing through whatever stories the DM runs them through. Letting the player know roughly how much health the character has means more than saying just how many hit points the character has as well. If someone plays an arcane caster and charges in to fight in melee, and then dies because the character only has six hit points, that just isn't playing the character properly, so why encourage playing the game system rather than playing the game?