D&D 3E/3.5 4e Crunch, 3e Flavor

[JoeGKushner]

For me, it's not 3e flavor, it's D&D flavor. D&D had many excellent books that fleshed out many old entities like St. Cuthbert and Bocob the Uncaring, reamining, in my opinion, fairly true to the roots of the game's in history build up.

4e... well, that's not what they're going for. (Doesn't mean I have to like it mind you but I recognize it.)

 

[Elemmakil]

Well, Necromancer is doing the MM you want, but the planes are WotC IP, so you're out of luck there.

Planescape has a fair number of fansm so WotC may produce a planescape book, although I doubt that we will see it as an officially supported campaign setting with it's own supplements again. Failing that, someone may get a planescape license. It has enough of a fan base to make it interesting to publishers.

 

[Orryn Emrys]

Interestingly enough, with what we've heard about the changes in planar cosmology, the inclusion of standard races not typically considered iconic D&D/classic fantasy races, the mishmash of deities they intend to incorporate into the core ruleset, and the "points of light" world design that seems to defy many of the popular, politically well-organized setting elements that populate both the official settings and many homebrew worlds... I've really been planning to use the 4th Edition "crunch" with a lot of the "feel" of the game I already love. That being said, I intend to wait and see how I like the feel of the game they give me before making any final decisions, of course.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

I think that we'll be seeing a lot of the stuff that's been 'dropped' from the PHB in the PHB2 that they've been talking about - so, a year on from the original release.

But yeah, I'm sure some other companies will bring out some stuff in between with their own versions.

And I'd love to see what an up-to-date Planescape setting would look like - I can't help but think that some of the Planescape crowd could come up with some excellent ideas about why certains planes have vanished entirely!

 

[delericho]

1) An OGL version of the PHB with gnomes instead of eladrins and tieflings; druids instead of warlocks and warlords; and a return of the spells that get dropped in 4e?

I very much doubt it. I suspect that anyone who might do such a product would instead go the whole way and develop a PHB-replacement that feels more like a whole new game, a la Arcana Evolved.

2) An OGL version of the DMG that brings back the Elemental Planes, the Ethereal Plane, and any magic items that get the boot?

I doubt that we'd see a DMG-replacement, but we might see a third-party book of planes that cover the missing planes. The Inner planes, it seems, are all in the SRD, so there doesn't seem to be any block on doing this. Most of the rest can be rebuilt from the original source mythology. So, it's only some of the Planescape-isms that are off-limits.

3) An OGL version of the MM that just recreates the 3.5 MM with 4e stat blocks, ignoring all of the 4e changes made to the appearance and fluff of the monsters?

Probably. Necromancer are definately doing a new Tome of Horrors. Anything else that's missing will no doubt be converted and posted on one of the message boards.

 

[kenmarable]

In reading the hints designers are dropping regarding 4e, I'm noticing that they have been making some rather substantial changes not just to the rules of the game, but to the story elements of the game: races and classes are being reshuffled or dropped altogether; old planes of existence are being dropped or consolidated; monsters are being re-imagined.

There are plenty of other threads discussing the pros and cons of these various changes, so I don't want to debate that here. Instead, I want to ask the following.

Are third party publishers likely to publish any of the following products:

1) An OGL version of the PHB with gnomes instead of eladrins and tieflings; druids instead of warlocks and warlords; and a return of the spells that get dropped in 4e?

2) An OGL version of the DMG that brings back the Elemental Planes, the Ethereal Plane, and any magic items that get the boot?

3) An OGL version of the MM that just recreates the 3.5 MM with 4e stat blocks, ignoring all of the 4e changes made to the appearance and fluff of the monsters?

Personally, I have a hunch that all of the above are inevitable (though, as others have pointed out, they will be minor compared to systems that are to 4e what Arcana Unearthed and Iron Heroes are to 3e). What does the rest of the ENWorld community think?

I can almost guarantee that what will be things left out of the 4e core rules will be released by other companies. However, I can also almost guarantee that they will not take the form of OGL versions of the PHB, DMG, and MM. Why do you need to print a whole new PHB to bring back gnomes, druids, and some spells, for example? A far better bet would for a publisher to release Druid and Gnome splatbooks rather than burning money on an alternate PHB.

 

[see]

It's actually amazing how much of the traditional AD&D planar structure you can construct merely by applying logical extrapolation to the information presented in entirely open game content sources. (The Copyright Notice section of the OGL gets a bit unwieldy, but that's Necromancer Games's fault, thanks to the Tome of Horrors.)

 

[Scholar & Brutalman]

I can almost guarantee that what will be things left out of the 4e core rules will be released by other companies. However, I can also almost guarantee that they will not take the form of OGL versions of the PHB, DMG, and MM. Why do you need to print a whole new PHB to bring back gnomes, druids, and some spells, for example? A far better bet would for a publisher to release Druid and Gnome splatbooks rather than burning money on an alternate PHB.

Especially since Wizards have said that they'll eventually be releasing every base class in the 3rd ed PHB for 4th ed; though I don't know if they've said they'll do a full PC version of the gnome there are PC notes in the 4e MM gnome writeup. I'm guessing that there will be Wizards versions of the Gnome and Druid by at latest the PHB2 in 2009.

How much effort should a third party publisher into producing an OGL PHB when they know it will be competing with a Wizards version in at most 12 months?