Tharian said:
But how many people would be willing to pay $14.95 (plus any and all taxes) for a 16-page product?
It does come with four large battlemaps.
We're actually closely watching reactions to the battlemaps. It's funny, because they're a product that seems to really have caught on here in the office. Whenever I pass an in-house playtest, or a random gaming group after hours, I consistently see the maps in use. I played in a game a week ago that used the maps from Hellspike Prison. The battles were a lot more interesting - we had tons of room to move around, lots of places for monsters to hide and attack us from unexpected directions, and lots of interesting developments from that.
The thing is, I'm not sure that people see that yet, or maybe the product as it is right now just doesn't connect with gamers. I think it's really interesting that Tharian didn't mention the maps - that tells me that maybe we haven't sold people on the concept yet, or we need to revisit how we present and package them.
I've been thinking about maps a lot lately, and a comment made at lunch by a co-worker on the Magic side of things crystallized a train of thought I've been mulling over.
3e's move to tactical combat is a radical departure from 2e, and I think that our "DM tech" hasn't quite caught up yet. In 1e and 2e, especially if you didn't use minis, battles were really abstract. They didn't necessarily require lots of interesting set pieces and terrain, nor did the rules encourage them (unless you wanted to house rule/roll your own).
Here's an example straight from one of my own games - I am totally trained to fit one dungeon level (or building, or adventure site - whatever I need to map out) on one piece of graph paper. Yet, if I try to squeeze 10 or so encounter areas on one sheet, I'm stuck with lots of small rooms that, frankly, aren't interesting. I only really noticed that lately, after I designed the maps for a Fantastic Locations product, which bugs me, because it explained a lot of issues I had with my own DMing style and adventures.
To test myself, I've practiced filling a sheet of graph paper with no more than 4 or 5 encounter areas. My dungeons are coming out tons better. For example, I sketched out the tomb of an famous orc war leader. The entry area was a large temple where orc chieftains would come to speak to an orcish oracle who lives in the tomb. Huge tapestries hung everywhere in the temple - some covered walls, but others blocked off areas where guards lurked, while others had traps hidden immediately on the other side of them. There were also lots of side passages for the guards to use.
In another area, a pressure plate rests at the bottom of a long, sloped passage. When the PCs step on it, a secret door at the top of the slope opens to reveal a war engine crewed by undead orcs who push the war machine down the slope at the PCs and ride it into battle. Meanwhile, orc archers hide behind pillars in the room and fire at the PCs. If the PCs don't set off the traps, the orc archers do it.
In essence, every time I drew a dungeon room, I forced myself to triple or quadruple it in size, then add terrain and other features to justify that size (the butcher has dozens of corpses hanging from hooks in his gruesome kitchen; the yuan-ti "lounge" has water pools and think steam rising from a hot spring, etc.)
Anyway, I think the point of this ramble is that I've worked with 3e for 5 years and I still learn new stuff about it. I think that this is something that makes the game more interesting, and I think that the maps represent our effort to spread that idea. I don't even think it's a divide between tactical and story gamers - the story is much cooler (IMO) if the evil overlord fights you in a really cool, vivid environment, even if you don't use minis.
