Ask the Designers of D&D Fourth Edition

This past August, big news dropped in the tabletop gaming community: 2008 would see the release of a fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Since then the official D&D Insider site, and communities like the excellent ENWorld, have been doing their best to keep us up to date on the ins and outs of the newest way to dungeon-delve. With the release just five months away, we've been given a chance to put some questions to the team developing the game. One question per post, if you would, and we'll make sure to pass the best questions on to the designers. Don't forget to ask about the online version of the D&D tools as well! We'll get their answers back to you as soon as we get them, so fire away.

Compatability

[Anonymous Coward]

Will the 4.0 version of D&D be compatible with the 25 or so 3.5 edition books I currently own? I would hate to think hate eberron would be out of date already.

Miniatures

[pryoplasm]

Will 4th edition use the same or similar systems for miniatures? Will a medium creature still fit in a 5' x 5' square? A friend of mine has a large collection of minatures and a decent sized third party map, and I am just hoping we do not have to move onto something else in order to satisfy the new rules...

A question of rules.

[Kaffien]

Will d&d 4th, require a person to confirm critical hits, or will a mace
in the face be a mace in the face? (that is will a 20 be a critical hit)

Thank you, now stop

[techpawn]

First off, thank you for no more Gnomes as a basic race (or so is the rumor)

What exactly is happening to the wizard class? It sounds like it's becoming more like the Warlock and gaining spell casting like the CHA based casters or spell like abilities based on memorized spells? Are you able to expand on this or give us more information yet?

D&D and WOW

[halivar]

It appears (to me, at least), that many of the new rules-changes mirror popular MMO's like WOW. How much influence do the designers derive from video games; and, to the extent that D&D 4th resembles WOW, is this a conscious effort to reach the MMO-generation of gamers with table-top role-play?

The balance between easy and good

[Mongoose Disciple]

How do you feel you've struck a balance between a desire to simplify/streamline rules to speed play and make the game more accessible, and a desire to preserve the strategy and general goodness of the game as it exists today? Details about proposed changes that were a tough call either way would be interesting.

What I would like to know more than anything

[Steeltalon]

Why is there a need for a 4th edition? 3.5 wasn't released all that long ago (and the books were just as expensive as the 3.0 versions), so why do we need a 4.0? Is there a compelling reason or is this just a symptom of Hasbro casting "Animate Dead" on TSR's corpse?

Why do we need a whole new rules system?

[flaming-opus]

It seems to me that the fun of table-top Role Playing Games is the storytelling. It's the plots, and the character development, and the mythical settings that make RPGs so exciting. Do we really need to further refine the game rules, or is this a simple cash grab for the publisher, when all the gamers out there update to the new rules?

New content for old Settings?

[andphi]

I know that some of the old settings (Ravenloft, Spelljammers, Dark Sun, Planescape) have been transitioned to other companies or have been quietly kept alive by their fans with knowledge bases and efforts at rules translations between old rulesets and 3.5. Will any of these old, orphaned settings being making a comeback in 4.0? (Planescape. Please, Planescape!) If not, are the 4.0 rules being written to make these on-going translation efforts easier?

Negative Press

[eldavojohn]

Short intro, I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. Play a lot of computer games. Enjoy reading up on lore and the like.

But I never got into D&D. I had friends that played it but I was never into it. I tried playing it a few times and had some fun experiences. But there's always been a sort of negative stigma associated with it among ... well, the general populace. What are you doing to break free of this? Or do you embrace it? What are your thoughts & opinions on this strange negative publicity that popular movies push onto D&D players? Do you ever try to break free of that?

Class homogenization?

[Mongoose Disciple]

It sounds like, in an effort to balance classes better, they've all become a lot more alike. That is, a wizard and a warrior will have a very different list of abilities, but they'll all have X abilities to use at will, X abilities to use once an encounter, and so on. Do you feel this is a fair assessment? If so, is there any concern that in making the classes more alike you'll have essentially created one well-balanced class that no one wants to play? In 3E, a lot of the classes require very different kinds of strategy and in my experience all players have different favorites for reasons that seem to be going away.

Open Gaming License

[egg_green]

With D&D 3rd Edition, we were introduced to the D20 System and the Open Gaming License, which allowed third party publishers to produce supplements for the game. Will there be something akin to this for 4th Edition? What form will it take, and will it be more or less restrictive?

Complexity vs. other gaming systems

[Mechagodzilla]

Has there been any thoughts or discussions on reducing the amount of books needed to play? Donating a bookshelf to every new edition is getting a little ridiculous for the casual gamer. I have 40+ books from first and second edition. I bought the Player's Handbook from the third edition, read the first thirty pages and went "bleh".

To reference another gaming system, I can generate a character in GURPS (Steve Jackson Games) in under an hour, have a little better feel for advantages and disadvantages, arm and clothe the character, and do it all from one book. Now there are other books available, but not necessary. Also, their magic system seems a lot more reasonable than memorizing spells. I always thought of spells more like skills than chunks of memory.

I know it goes against the business model, but can you actually make a game that can be played with less than four books?

Re:MOD UP!

[An ominous Cow art]

I'm feeling pretty cynical about their reasons for doing this, too. The things I read about the new rules, up until I finally stopped reading in disgust, all seemed like a dumbening of the rules to appeal to attention span-challenged video gamers.

Will combat be more streamlined?

[DeafDumbBlind]

Currently, at higher levels, a fight between the party and a group of enemies can easily last a couple of hours.
How has combat been streamlined?

Magic Item Requirement

[Blackeagle_Falcon]

One of the things I dislike about 3rd edition is that at medium and high levels magic items are such a big part of a character's power. A PC has to be decorated like a Christmas tree with various magical doodads in order to be effective. Running a campaign in a world where magic items are rare or nonexistant required a lot of house rules and adjustment on the part of the DM. Will it be easier to run a low or no magic item campaign in 4e?

Re:Compatability

[shadowcabbit]

A better question is, how easily will the transition between 3/3.5 to 4 be handled for an average DM? I remember looking at the conversion guide produced when 2nd to 3rd was going on, and it was largely an incomprehensible mess (relative to straight 2nd or 3rd, that is). Will it be a matter of transcribing stats with some fudge factor from one sheet to another, or will it be excessively involved with complicated formulas and lookup tables?

Question: Iron Heroes

[h4rm0ny]

Actually, I have a formal question for the developers: Have you ever read Monte Cook's Iron Heroes supplement and are there any similarities?

Non-combat design

[mchevallier]

I am slightly concerned by the rendering of monsters into simply combat stats. Please take this opportunity to allay my fears, as much of what I hear, I approve of. Will there be more to monsters than combat? Obviously, that's their most important role, but an understanding of their capabilities outside of combat (rituals they can cast, things they know - stuff that they WON'T use in a fight against PCs) is important to give a monster an ecology, purpose, traction - to use a popular word. Please explain to me how 4e takes account of this, or if it doesn't, explain why you have designed it thusly. (Oh, and thanks for your time and effort. It can't be easy redesigning D&D, what with the internet and all.)

Character sheets like

[coppro]

We know that you are providing a tool for editing character sheets on your computer, although you have not specified anything else. An editable PDF sheet seems likely. However, there have been many popular tools (e.g. PCGen) that can update many aspects of data automatically based on game events, rather than numbers. Example: You are the target of eagle's grace (assuming it still exists and has the same function). You have a +2 cloak of Charisma (once again making assumptions). You simply enter the fact that you are affected by that spell and tool automatically increases your Charisma score by 2, and also makes all relevant modifications elsewhere (save DCs, skill modifiers, etc.) Will the suite of digital tools released with 4th Edition include a tool that can maintain a character sheet that can be updated based on effects and modifications, rather than simple numeric input? If so, will it be extensible with published supplements/user-provided data?

Arcane/Divine Balance?

[Rydia]

In 3.5 and even basic 3d ed, Priests were far and away more useful than wizards and sorcers. They had damage spells, could use better weapons out of the box and had a serious of buffs, combined with their armor, that made them powerful and extremely difficult to kill. At very high levels, a powerful wizard can deal great damage with delayed blast fireball and whatnot, but at that point a good cleric can throw down greater aspect of the diety, divine power and a load of other spells and turn themselves into a combat machine, plus the ability to heal and a few good damage spells.

How are you going to balance the two main spellcasting types in 4th ed? Or are you going to leave things generally as they are?

HP versus damage saving throws

[fudgefactor7]

One of the things that always seemed out of place for me was the use of Hit Points. As any humanoid became higher level (i.e.: gained power) somehow they received a commensurate increase in physical ability to withstand a blow from something like a longsword. This issue was resolved in Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds where the whole idea of HP was replaced with a saving throw against damage. Did the D&D4 designers consider this as an option to replace the age-old (and some say broken) mechanic that is HP? And if so, why did they choose to remain with HP over the M&M mechanic?

Re:A question of rules.

[Anonymous Coward]

That has already been answered[1]. 20 is always a crit (no confirmation needed), but it won't double the damage any more.

[1] http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20080104&pf=true [wizards.com]

Compatability and Customer Base

[BadMrMojo]

In a related vein, I'm still not sure who the target audience may be.

I'm haven't been a regular D&D player for a few decades but I am involved in a RPG community [gelatinousdudes.com] which is largely centered around 3.5 and DDM. The response there has been almost unilaterally one of revulsion.

After much discussion, most reasonable theory that we have come up with is that the current target market is new players - the ever-popular WoW crowd - for whom the purchase of new books is an addition, rather than a replacement with the assumption that a significant percentage of regulars will fall in line, despite their grumbling, out of a desire to stay "official." The video ad campaigns seem to reinforce this belief with the persistent, nagging mockery of the existing player base. The developer's comments are consistently spun to point out the many failings of 3rd Edition as well.

So, with that being said, are you relying primarily upon the 3E crowd to swallow their pride and accept that you've convinced them to pay for and playtest your inferior system in order to pave the way for your new, vastly superior revision again? What, if any, steps are being taken to address isolation and resentment amongst the current customers or is the primary focus entirely upon attracting new players and recreating the same level of devotion from scratch?

Casual gaming and social networking

[pisymbol]

I have two questions:

1) I played and ran second edition about 10 years ago with a bunch of high school friends. I started to play third edition but school took over and I gradually loss interest. My friends however did not. They started to become more involved with the D&D community via live-action, joining several official player organizations, playing in sanctioned games, cross-country adventures to the mecca that is GENCON, as well as buying a plethora of 3rd edition material. Given the complexities (depth) of 3rd edition (as noted by several posts), I feel a little overwhelmed and that I don't have the "background" to really engage with them when 4th edition comes out. I was wondering how will you make 4th edition more accessible to casual and/or new gamers? Will I be able to pick up just the core books and generate a player-character that is on the level with experienced 3rd edition players? Will I need to go back and read 3rd edition supplements to better understand the world of 4th edition?

2) I was wondering if the D&D Tools leverage social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace (OpenSocial)? I have always thought that the real popularity behind D&D (maybe all classical RPGs) is that a game session becomes a loosely structured social event for friends to communicate, share ideas, and just well, catch up (with a wee bit of hacking and slashing). More to the point, the number of online gamers and D&D fans probably constitutes a gigantic social network in itself. Do you guys intend to create some of the social networking dynamics of online sites like Facebook or something entirely different?

Flexibility/creativity vs. accessibility?

[Entropius]

My first module as a player, and then as a DM, was Monte Cook's excellent Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. The thing is huge and complicated, with an enormous volcanic crater mapped out and populated by lots of NPC's who are -- sort of -- cooperating. Rather than giving detailed descriptions of what these NPC's will do, whether out of combat or in, the module simply gives their statistics and explains their personalities, and lets the DM figure out what they do. There were very few notes about combat tactics other than those that relate to personality ("Imix enjoys whacking things with his greatsword and makes little use of his spell-like abilities"), since it's assumed that the DM is smart enough to come up with tactics on his own.

While NPC's are given locations, there's a note: "The placement of NPC's in, and the description of, the mines is just a snapshot at one point in time. They move around, do stuff, raid each other, etc., as time passes, and it's important to keep the place dynamic." The module encourages a huge amount of flexibility.

This was wonderful to DM, and the players enjoyed the feeling of being in such an active environment.

Now, look at a more recent module, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. The setting is wonderful, the maps are wonderful, but all the encounters are ... almost pre-scripted. There's a separate section of the book for encounters, in which separate maps are given just of the "encounter area", with all the NPC's placed on it and combat tactics given for them. So you get "Encounter K42: Wight ambush", with a separate map with a bunch of wights on it. I've not run this module, but it seems like DM'ing it is more of an exercise in executing a pre-written script rather than being creative. There's not much room in there for flexibility, either -- it'd require a bunch of rewriting just to get the NPC information in a format conducive to being flexible with it.

In short: Wonderful setting (not written anew, swiped from 1e), uninspired writing. Writing is targeted to the lowest common denominator of DM's who can't figure out how to run NPC's/set up encounters on their own.

I hear Expedition to the Demonweb Pits is supposed to be pretty good, but haven't heard anything good about any of the other modern writing.

My question is this: Are the modules written for 4e, and the overall design generally, going to lean more on the side of accessibility to less creative players/DM's or the side of giving more experienced players/DM's more flexibility?

What's with all the evil?

[destine]

I always wanted to play games that were heroic. We've always had a standing rule in our campaigns of no evil characters. So I have to wonder, what's with all of the devil and demon based races and power sources and where are all of the good angelic based power sources? It seems as if the 4th edition rules have been swallowed by the "Evil is Cool" paradigm, which I have to say is incredibly sad to me(this was a big pet peeve of mine in Unearthed Arcana where there was a Tiefling but no Aasimar paragon class). In 3.5 all of the base classes and races were relatively neutral with a bit of a flavor for good. Why suddenly move to the "Evil is Cool" route in a game that historically and for the most part has been about epic struggles of good and neutral against an encompassing evil?

the PHB's spell list vs. the DM's World

[cappadocius]

ne of the key issues I have had with previous editions of D&D is that even with all the customizing options, all the magic using characters are still very defined by the list of spells in the player's handbook. Since magic is such a defining part of a world, that means that the PHB spellbook is often a very intrusive influence on the character of the world.

Will 4th edition have a good system for customizing magic to the DM's world, or will DMs still essentially have to adapt their world to the magic system?

legacies & sacred cows

[ed.han]

when WOTC created 3rd edition, they killed a number of sacred cows--and that's a great thing, if you ask me.

as a fan of the star wars saga game, i certainly see much there that very clearly looks like it's gonna be part of D&D4, such as the second wind mechanic, the d20 modern-inspired alternating feat/talent slots at each level. but what i found most mechanically intriguing in the saga game was the usage of the use the force skill. as an amateur rules tinkerer myself, i was actually working on a variant of the first d20 SW game that would have done the same, but upon learning that you were going in this direction, figured there was no point on continuing.

so the question i have: does the force mechanic as presented in SW saga relate in any meaningful way to the way magic will work in D&D4? there's been what looks like signs of dissatisfaction with the vancian model that arneson & gygax first introduced in comments i've seen here or there for a while.

ed

better spell system

[CarpetShark]

I'd really like to see a better spell system, which allows much more flexibility, within certain rules.

I mean, the current magic system in most table-top RPGs is basically a set of pre-set actions: "lightning ball, 30' radius", "light candle without taking match from pocket". Might as well have a DM's story telling system that has options like "tell your players they've entered a "big room'" "tell your player to stop bitchslapping the orc".

What we really need is a system more like "you have 30 mana points" You know how to: "commanding stone; requires 5 points per kilogram per second" "apply the move command: takes 15 points per second" "apply the levitation command: 40 points per second" "apply dazzling special effects to your spell: 10 points per second, per cubic metre".

Then, you could be creative and say, "OK, then I'm going to dazzle this crowd by moving that ancient statue through the air to here..."

Of course, the DM would then reply "with no, sorry, you're not powerful enough", whereupon you'd get your ass kicked by the crowd.

Playtesting

[SirGarlon]

I followed the development of D&D 3.0 and there was a very extensive playtest process that involved many groups all over the country (perhaps the world) over a period of many months. The list of playtester credits in the back of the 3.0 Players' Handbook is huge (and I have friends whose names appear there).

Is the playtesting for 4E being done on a comparable scale and if not, how can we as players be confident the new edition will have the same or better quality?

This has been done: It's called "Hackmaster"

[Dr. Spork]

My history with D&D only goes back to the Gary Gygax days, and though there are parts of his system that needed improvement, I agree that the spirit of the game should not have been messed with. It's the spirit that was so awesome about AD&D. What made me want to vomit on 3E books was the obvious goal to appeal to 12-year-old munchkins who can't stand to be told "no, you can't do that."

Luckily, WotC were nice enough to license 1E rules to Kenzerco, who amped up that 1E spirit in their outstanding game system Hackmaster. It's what I play now. Hackmaster even preserves the 1E aesthetics, instead of making everything look awesome-to-12-year-olds. (Interestingly, I've found that players who didn't play 1E and went straight to Hackmaster tend to undervalue the roleplaying and overdo the "hack" stuff - but for you, it might be just the right thing.)

dungeon crawl limitation

[nicholasborror]

While playing MMORPG's, I find nothing is as good as a well oiled group where you spend hours slashing and casting through waves of enemies, and during "med breaks" we get to recover our health and spell casting capabilities.

As a DM, I find myself constantly limiting my modules (self created) so to make sure the players will not run out of spells or run so low on hit points that they decide to camp for the night (and thus end the adventure early). This puts a burden on a lot of DM's, where we have to carefully watch our CR and maybe even fib (I admit to it) on the hit points remaining on some monsters (or remove the monsters entirely) because we see that we have either overwhelmed the players or they are saving their "good" spells for the boss at the end or just in case. I would love to be able to let them fight their way to the boss only to discover that after they defeat the boss, they have to now fight their way back out, or maybe the boss runs when low on health and the players must then fight their way to another location to face him again. Currently the only way to do this is to camp "real quick like", but that destroys the reality of the world as whole would actually camp in the middle of a haunted gnoll cave, when gnolls are just behind the next door? Plus, no real time passes, so the overall reality is lost even more!

How about allowing players to either have a recast timer or I might even suggest to get as drastic as giving them a "mana pool" to cast from which can regenerate over time while resting or some other way. I would love my players to have animate rope handy ready when we happen to be using rope, but nobody brings it to the adventures because the other spells are just too valuable. In reality, limiting spell selection does add strategy, but at the cost of adventure and paths that will not be taken because they do not have that "worthless" spell ready to go (yes, my players call many spells worthless because they never know whether to bring them, so they all load up on healing and damage spells because they know they will need them. In addition, all my players save up their spells, sometimes not even using them because of the one and done reality of the game. If they knew they could get it back and maybe cast it again, they might be a bit more willing to let the magic fly when based with a smaller foe. Sure, make it a penalty, either in a device which costs gold or with having to wait X about of minutes in real time. You could even only allow some spells to be recast, but not all (two classes of spells, reusable and rest based) Yes, it will unbalance the classes, but a fighter can keep swinging until he has no more hit points left; a mage may be done after 6 spell casts. I doubt any melee class will complain about extra heals and more adventure.

Something similar was tried in DnD Online, but who is going to put rest stones in the middle of a dungeon? You have this nice little opportunity to make the adventures epic and furious with an increased pace and lets face it, but we are growing impatient these days...we want to get to the good part.

Keep the action going I say, we all crave more adventure.....give it to us. Which brings me to my question: Will any of the above be solved in the 4th Edition and if not, why not?

Mass combat

[Hierarch]

Will 4th Ed finally have an integral mass combat system for wars? If so, could you tell us a little bit about it?

Re:better spell system

[An ominous Cow art]

Here is an ancient Usenet post I saved. It details a magic system as a programming language of sorts. I posted it to my journal, since it's pretty lengthy.

http://slashdot.org/~An+ominous+Cow+art/journal/192430 [slashdot.org]

Digital Tools Platform Independence

[Jekler]

Will the digital tools be available for Linux / Mac users?

My biggest concern is the availability of the digital tools in non-Windows environments. That's about the only thing that could sour the whole deal for me. I'm hoping they're web-based or Java-based so they can run on any operating system.

Probability distributions

[Spyder]

Has there been any discussion about moving from the D20 system and the inherent flat probability distribution of rolls to a multi die system? This aspect of the D20 system has led me to avoid playing D&D after having played in systems (White wolf, ShadowRun, EarthDawn and GURPS) where character capabilities are somewhat more predictable; and bonuses are more effective at the margin than for unlikely rolls.