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[Windjammer]

Originally Posted by ggroy

I suppose with all the bloat produced for 3.5E by WotC's proliferation of their own splatbooks, it made 3.5E D&D more and more into a huge mess. Perhaps in effect they were trying to "destroy" 3.5E, to make way for a 4E.

Here's a more solid way of phrasing a point similar to yours. Basically, for WotC there comes a point when all the money goes to the next edition and then their product standards for current edition standards are compromised or, which sometimes comes to the same thing, current edition products are simply used for testing grounds.

Here's someone making that point in 2006. I imagine posting it here back then would have caused heaps of ridicule ("WotC told us that there is no 4th edition in the works! How dare you insinuate otherwise! That's just flamebait!").

Originally Posted by Frank Trollmann

Pretty much. Like Magic of Incarnum and Tome of Magic, Book of Nine Swords was never intended to be a balanced and playable book. It's just a concept sketch of a different way of doing things born out of the fact that they don't have playtesters any more.

In short, the book is just "Here's some radical ideas, what do y'all think?" And then people pay money for it, take it home, playtest it their own self, and reports get back to the secret masters who will then either fold it into 4th edition or not.

So based on peer review, I would say that Incarnum will probably never be heard from again, Shadow Magic will be used in some radically different (and simpler) form, and Warblade Maneuvers will be the Fighter standard in 4th edition.


It's the 3.5 standard: Balance through obfiscation.

The statement is that maneuvers and stances that provide bonuses and penalties to stuff don't stack unless they say that they do. Does that mean that a morale bonus stacks with a luck bonus? Noone knows!

And that's the point. The point is that the DM has to decide whether a differently named bonus qualifies as being noted as stacking with its mate. And that means that the DM gets to decide whether those bonuses stack. It even lets him change his mind later on in the campaign if a charactr is over or under performing.

But they can't just say "We haven't playtested this, let alone subject it to rigorous statistical analysis, and we have no idea whether this stuff is balanced if you use it all together. So uh... you might have to spot nerf it or something to keep your game from driving to crazy town. Or maybe not, as I said we aint got clue one as to whether there are any game balance land mines hidden in this - we don't even know whether the land mines - if they exist - would err on the side of underperformance or overperformance. You might have to do all kinds of crap to keep these characters from breaking the game and/or sucking." - that would make it sound like they were just charging people money to playtest ideas for 4th edition for them.

Book of 9 Swords, Magic of Incarnum, and Tome of Magic are Alpha Testing. Seriously, that's just the point of the design process where they pitch an idea to focus groups - it's not playable game material. And the game they are focus group testing for is 4th edition D&D.

WotC just happens to have developed a business model where people pay upwards of thirty dollars to be part of the focus group instead of getting a free T-shirt.

-Frank

Source

The accuracy of this prediction - especially the observation for the warblade being the base design for the 4E fighter class - is nothing short of impressive.

In that vein, I recommend reading the same author's observations over there (and especially his two follow-ups here). As he points out time and again, WotC has NOT playtested a single version of skill challenges to date (June 2008-June 2009) and has not released a version that is actually used by the designers in their home games, whether in a core book for which they charged $30 or an similarly pricey online service. Which is disheartening.

Frank's 2006 post seems to suggest "never mind WotC stopping to playtest - it's for 4E", with the clear implication "WotC is directing all its playtesting efforts into 4E (ergo, 4E will be solidly playtested all around)". As it turned out, that was overly optimistic.

Does anyone know if the splats WotC currently releases are solidly playtested? Or are we back at the stage of the 2nd 3.5 Complete Series which was commissioned to be written by freelance writers and had only moderate quality control?