D&D Fourth Edition Books To Be Released in June 59
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?
Re:Buy our printed material! (Score:2, Informative)
3.5 (point release for books?!?) and 4E are from a Wizards of the Coast owned and directed by Hasbro, a completely different beast.
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.
Registration? What registration? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/dramp/20071019&authentic=true&pf=true [wizards.com]
Enjoy.
Re:Buy our printed material! (Score:1, Informative)
The best way to make a promise of profits look good, in this (and I hate to use the word) industry is to promise the brass a new edition. New systems demand new expansions, and new realm books are easy enough to justify as well. Sure, the old stuff is obsoleted (that's rather the point), and sure there's a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the part of gamers, but few people do anything beyond that. You might lose a few of the old school players, but you stand to gain a lot more newbies.
While the cycle of new editions is speeding up, it has nothing on Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu. First Edition had about fifteen years, Second had roughly ten, and Third has between five and eight, depending on whether you consider 3.5 a new edition or not.
The big gamble here is their attempt to leverage the Internet. For-pay web extensions and 'virtual gaming tables' are a ballsy move, but probably conceived as much to make Marketing happy as anything else.
Re:Backwards compatible? (Score:3, Informative)
Therefore, it's available for free on the internet, and it basically consists of all the rules from the 3.0 and 3.5 PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual. There's no art, it's plain text, and all references to WotC specific characters have been removed (eg Mordenkainen's Lucubration renamed to Mage's Lucubration, no stats a handful of monsters like beholders and illithids) and doesn't cover any of the expansions. But, it's more than enough to run a pretty good game.
WotC have said that OGL is continuing for 4th Ed, so hey, there ought to be a 4th Ed SRD as well! With that and your 3.x library, you shouldn't *need* to buy any 4th ed books if you're willing to do conversion yourself. If you want the official conversions, of course, maybe WotC has a product for you after all.
Anyway, here's a link to a nicely HTML-ified copy of the 3.x SRD [d20srd.org].
The primary goal of your rant (Score:3, Informative)
You bitch about DnD attracting fewer people over the years and base that complaint on how 2nd/3rd editions have become more complex and have more books, and blah blah blah. I can tell you, my biggest turn off to the game is rants like the one you've posted. I have as much fun playing 3.5 as I ever have Basic, 1st, 2nd, and 3.0. I have never played the 1974 rules so I have no opinion on them. But, when I look at a game to see if I want to play, if the game is using 1st Ed. rules, I am far less likely to play in it than if it were running any of the other rule sets.
You also complain about DM decisions being replaced by hard and fast rules. This is not the case. As mentioned above, I house rule just as much in my 3.5 game as my buddy does in his 1st Ed. game. No matter how you look at it, it's a game and it's meant to be fun. You are always free to and encouraged to house rule things for the fun factor/realism/whatever floats your boat, regardless of edition. This will hold true in 4th edition as well.
GM the game as the 1st Ed. rules suggest? It will be more fun?! Are you high? A combat round lasts one minute? A trained and experienced fighter (15th level for instance) gets two chances in an entire minute of combat to hit someone with a sword?! Of course, while this is going on, the 1st level magic-user gets 3 chances in the same time period to hit someone with save-or-die poisoned darts?! That's pure stupidity! The rules in 1st Ed are just as wonky and in need of changing as the rules in other editions. I don't care about the strategy wargaming history behind the development of 1st Ed. rules. This is not a strategy mini wargame. This is one-on-one combat and the rules translations are incomplete in 1st and 2nd Ed.
It sounds like you're on a very common rant which is really all about not liking change or maybe more about liking the 'original'. Original in this case is the first version you played, not the true 'original'. While it's OK to dislike change and voice your opinion about it, stop disguising it and just call it what it is. You've got a hard on for retro DnD. That's cool. I have the same for computing as seen by reading my handle. But give it a rest already. Let people have their fun without someone like you trying to troll them.
Re:I know, I should give up... (Score:3, Informative)
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.