Group Reaction to 4E Marketing

At GenCon 2007 it is announced that Dungeons and Dragons 4E will be released in the first half of 2008.

For the most part, my group meets this news with ambivalence.

I'm excited and hesitant at the same time. I had spent the past year or three putting together the pieces of various rule sets to get to my ultimate version of the D&D game (an Arcana Evolved/D&D hybrid). There was a lot of good 3E stuff out there and I was using it, why should I upgrade? On the other hand, I liked some of the newer things introduced at the tail end of 3E like the alternate class abilities in the PHB II and magic item levels in the MIC and these were sure to be in 4E. Also, it was a pain to convert existing adventures to my hybrid. I don't have the time to make my own adventures which is why I buy them. It was taking a lot of time to convert so it was getting to the point of little return.

Dave was pretty much anti-4E from the start. He loved the modularity of 3E. He could pull rules from source X and source Y to make his ultimate version of D&D.

The marketing didn't help. As far as we were concerned it came across as "all of your D&D before us sucked and you're not having fun." Then there was the overuse of "cool" with nothing really substantial to give us a reason to upgrade.


March 2008 - Got to play two 4E scenarios at ConnCon.

Bob, Dave and I attended ConnCon (in CT, duh) and got to play Scalegloom Hall and Escape from Sembia there. Dave was going to give it a try to he could hate it based on playing it (a joke).

Unfortunately, our DM for Scalegloom Hall was unfamiliar with the rules and reverted back to 3E for things he didn't know. I played the dwarf fighter, Dave the halfling paladin and Bob the half elf cleric. I remember being pretty frustrated with the game because my powers relied on taking down multiple enemies but there was never more than one kobold around by the time I got to them. Bob felt the cleric got nerfed. I tried to explain that casting cause fear once an encounter was much more powerful than once a day, but he focused on the fact that it only lasted one round. No change in Dave's attitude. He did complain that he had like 18 powers at 1st level.

Luckily, our DM for Escape from Sembia had a much better understanding of the rules (we later found out he was a playtester). I took the eladrin ranger, Dave took the half elf cleric and Bob had the dwarf fighter. This session was a lot more enjoyable. Unfortunately, the DM tried to sell us on Skill Challenges by using the "all your D&D before us sucked" marketing. It annoyed me (as skill challenges didn't seem like all that great an innovation. It was something easily done in 3E) and pissed off Dave. There was a point were I was surrounded by a bunch of skeletons and *BAMFed* myself outta there. I have to admit, that was cool.

In the end, I enjoyed 4E more than I thought, Bob seemed anti-4E and Dave remained anti-4E. Although he did like a few 4E ideas and decided he was going to pick up the books.


April 2008 - Preview Articles

In April, WotC started releasing a lot of preview articles. I would read the commentary on ENWorld, check out the article itself on WotC's website, and then post a link to the article with a brief summary as well as my thoughts on the preview to our Yahoo group. Generally, for every change I liked (such as the death and dying rules) there was one I didn't like (like epic destinies). I pretty much got no reaction to these. I figured no one was really paying attention but I would later find out I was wrong.


Late May / Early June 2008

At this point, I was fully expecting us to continue playing 3E, HackMaster and d20 future.

I was getting the 4E books as a gift for my birthday from my wife. Even if my group wasn't going to play 4E, I was going to steal ideas from it. My brother decided to use a gift certificate he got to buy the books as well. We knew Dave was buying them as well.

Since three of us were getting the book anyway, I began pushing for our group at least play one session of 4E so we can judge the game on its play. Surprisingly, everyone agreed.

I was planning on using Necomancer Games's Winter's Tomb freebie as our introduction. To be honest, Clark's enthusiasm for 4E and his planned 4E products were the only things that had me paying attention to 4E for a long time. Unfortunately, the GSL had pushed out that release but I was willing to wait.

In the meantime, Bob had picked up the PHB and Keep on the Shadowfell. Since all of our current running campaigns were at a good stopping point, we decided to give 4E a try. We had heard that the module wasn't all that great but it was supposed to be designed to make us want to convert to 4E. We decided to use it to get a feel for the new rules. We figured we could roleplay with any version.