Any news out of PAX East?

[Estlor]

Is anyone who participated in the PAX East playtest willing or able to divulge when the NDA they signed expires?

IIRC, the DDXP NDAs are set to expire in May. It would be interesting to see if the time frame is still the same, as that would be telling in regard to an expected open playtest release date.

 

[Piratecat]

Is anyone who participated in the PAX East playtest willing or able to divulge when the NDA they signed expires?

Someone mentioned that they lasted for 3 years, releasable by WotC early. That's hearsay, though.

 

[infax]

As I see it, an OGL-style license could be invaluable to a D&D edition that aims to cater to players of all previous editions. I doubt Wizards has experts in all previous editions of the game. As much as Mike Mearls GMs the original edition once a week at Wizards headquarters, his experiences are certainly tainted by the first edition of D&D he played, by his personal tastes with regards to D&D editions and, certainly, by the fact that he worked on 3.X (a little) and 4e (a lot). The same goes for Monte.

Third party publishers, on the other hand, can gather a couple of experts for any given edition (even obscure variants) and get those people focused on adapting their experience to the new rules. It is easier to publish products with very different feels and catering to a more varied audience this way.

That could also help Wizards determine what modules of optional rules to launch next at any given time. Observing the market and what publishers are more popular. Even incorporating rules from 3rd party (which, surprisingly, they rarely did in 3.x).

Should the 5e project be a success, the market will be large and diversified and I really see this as a winning approach.

 

[Hangfire]

. . . As for the disappointment that there is no date announced for the open play test to begin, I'd be surprised if anything else were the case. Who really wants them to rush this? Why would you want them to chuck any old slop at us and say: test that. That would guarantee failure. They want to come up with something they are happy with and that they believe meets their goals. When it's ready they will open up the public playtest. We'll bash it to bits and with any luck at the end of it, we'll have a pretty cool game. Meanwhile, there are still plenty of cool games to play.

If the public playtest was going to take months to roll out then don't announce it. Don't get me all hyped up to play the next version of D&D and then have me wait for months to do it. When I heard about the playtest for Pathfinder I went to their site and downloaded the rules and started playing. Now I doubt I was fist in line to do that, but by the time the word got around to me I could actually go and see the game. It would have been nice if WotC had done the same thing. If it's not ready for public testing, then don't tell us there's going to be public testing. Seems simple enough to me. It's not like they needed the months that have passed to make sure word got out - it was in the NY Times for crying out loud. Get on with it already.....

 

[Morrus]

If the public playtest was going to take months to roll out then don't announce it. Don't get me all hyped up to play the next version of D&D and then have me wait for months to do it. When I heard about the playtest for Pathfinder I went to their site and downloaded the rules and started playing. Now I doubt I was fist in line to do that, but by the time the word got around to me I could actually go and see the game. It would have been nice if WotC had done the same thing. If it's not ready for public testing, then don't tell us there's going to be public testing. Seems simple enough to me. It's not like they needed the months that have passed to make sure word got out - it was in the NY Times for crying out loud. Get on with it already.....

They should go one step further! They shouldn't tell you about the game until it's already out!

Actually, they shouldn't tell you about it at all. You'd have to stumble upon it by accident in a game store.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I still say that if 5e meets its design goals in terms of compatibility, and popularity, and comes out with a decent OGL, then Paizo would be fools not to include translation materials in their Pathfinder modules.

And Paizo are clearly not fools.

 

[Hangfire]

They should go one step further! They shouldn't tell you about the game until it's already out!

Actually, they shouldn't tell you about it at all. You'd have to stumble upon it by accident in a game store.

Yes, because that's the point I was trying to make.

 

[YRUSirius]

If the public playtest was going to take months to roll out then don't announce it. Don't get me all hyped up to play the next version of D&D and then have me wait for months to do it. When I heard about the playtest for Pathfinder I went to their site and downloaded the rules and started playing. Now I doubt I was fist in line to do that, but by the time the word got around to me I could actually go and see the game. It would have been nice if WotC had done the same thing. If it's not ready for public testing, then don't tell us there's going to be public testing. Seems simple enough to me. It's not like they needed the months that have passed to make sure word got out - it was in the NY Times for crying out loud. Get on with it already.....

I want cake!

-YRUSirius

 

[Mercutio01]

If the public playtest was going to take months to roll out then don't announce it.

Once again we get people complaining about "months" in industries where development cycles are typically measured in years.

I also learned of the Pathfinder beta early on, but it was not an entirely new system created from scratch. It was a niche product marketed to a niche market using rules that someone else had already spent years of development time on (twice!) that were simply tweaked to fix perceived problems. Please stop using Pathfinder as some sort of yard stick. It's absurd.

And really, bitching about a period of a little less than 4 months is ridiculous. If we were talking Duke Nukem development time since announcement, you'd have a legitimate complaint. But we aren't, and you don't.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Someone mentioned that they lasted for 3 years, releasable by WotC early. That's hearsay, though.

You don't know? Didn't you sign it?