24 (now 29) products announced so far for 08, what else will we see? (Now with 09!)

[morgul97]

Quick question for The Rouse. I'm not sure if you can answer this or not (might be some sort of company secret) and it might be kind of a stupid and obvious question, but do you guys have a general plan for the entire arc of 4e in terms of products and supplements. In other words, internally have you sat down and said "ok, we think that 4e will be good for about x number of years in current form and over the course of that time we want to cover these topics and have this number of new campaign settings and each of those settings would generally have these books in it, etc etc."

It just seems to me that one problems in recent years with 3E is that the supplements seem kind of tacked on, like they weren't part of some grand plan, but were sort of like "ok, we need to release 12 books this year, lets come up with some stuff." As others have mentioned, I would love to see higher quality products that seem to fit more with a grand road map. It seems 3E had this to start, but kind of fell off after a couple of years.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Whoa... wait a minute, Orcus is on hold? When did this happen?


Why WotC, WHY????

:weeps in anguish:

My guess? All the prototypes are being used by WotC, Necromancer and Paizo staff for in-house games or private shrines.

 

[TerraDave]

The Rouse has gone quiet.

 

[MaelStorm]

Our plan has been to release slow and steady all along to spread out the material over the course of the edition instead of front loading the awesome as we did in 3e.

front loading would have been fun for some of us

 

[TerraDave]

29 products isn't enough?

 

[MaelStorm]

29 products isn't enough?

Well it's not a question of quantity but much more of front loading the content. Too spread content release for classes as an example.

 

[Zinovia]

Front-loading benefits people who want to start a long-term campaign as soon as possible, provided they have the cash to buy all the books. That gives them access to all the classes and options right from the get-go. Some folks are irked that iconic classes such as the druid are being held until sometime down the road; some to the point where they are not going to switch to 4E until the bard (or other favorite class) is released. I'm expecting to wait until I can somehow get my hands on the swordmage rules before starting a long-term campaign, as that is the class one of our players is most interested in. And no, I'm not buying Forgotten Realms, no matter what. We don't use that setting and have zero interest in it.

OTOH, front-loading doesn't leave as much for WotC to publish in future splatbooks. If the good stuff all comes out in the first 6 months, what are they going to put in future books that will make people want to buy them? Staggering out the information might make some amount of financial sense. New base classes are a nice juicy tidbit to include that may persuade people to buy the books. If the best stuff comes out right away, then future supplements will elicit nothing more than a "meh" response from payers...err I mean players.

One thing to keep in mind is that if the new classes come out too late, they may never see play in a given campaign. Given the length of time that our current campaign has run (from shortly before 3.5 came out), any base class contained in splat-books published after that date had virtually no chance of being played. We have only had one permanent character death in all that time, and replaced a couple of players. We don't own most of the splatbooks and never saw the need for them, so the new people chose classes out of the core rules just like the original group did. Warlocks, reserve spells, Eberron; all of that jazz came out after our campaign was well underway, so we never bought any of it. Perhaps that is atypical though.

Options published in 3.5 splatbooks ranged widely in quality and balance. They required heavy adjudication from the DM in order to determine whether they should be allowed in the game. Prestige classes: weird campaign specific fluff or game-breaking munchkinism - you decide! They were a waste of paper for the most part and their inclusion in books discouraged me from buying them.

With 4E I plan to buy H1 and the 3 core books. I think things like the Draconomicon make nice Christmas presents but they are not typically things that we will purchase otherwise. Unless the new splats (or PHB2, etc) are chock-full of really good info, I'm not sure we'll buy them. If our campaign is going to run for several years, we probably won't have the chance to make use of newly published classes.

 

[MaelStorm]

Products announced so far that I will buy:
- Core Book Set
- FR (I don't want to buy it, but there is core rule content not released in the Core Book)
- GM Screen
- Martial Powers
- Tome of Treasures
- Manual of the Planes

There's not enough content to start a campaign, so I won't start a campaign, what I want is a feywild/primal celtic/viking high fantasy one. So I'll start this campaign somewhere in 2009-2010 I guess. FR, meh! Eberron sound fun, and I might start a mini campaign, before a receive enough core and supplement to start my main campaign.


Books I'm still waiting for:
- Arcane Powers
- Divine Powers
- Eberron Campaign Setting
- Player's Handbook II
- Monster Manual II
- Primal Powers
- Draconomicon II: Metallic Dragons
- Unearthed Arcana (I'm dreaming!)

 

[TerraDave]

I have added Open Grave: Secrets of the Undead to the list.

Amazon info here:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_g...s=Open+Grave:+Secrets+of+the+Undead&x=15&y=18

So we are getting dragons, undead and (from the Manual of the Planes) outsiders/imortals pretty early on. Not that I am complaining or anything.

 

[Korgoth]

Scott,

Just to be clear, the idea of the fully fleshed out Forbidden City from 1e module I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City was the absolutely first 4e product mentioned that made me think "I would buy that sight unseen". That would be, IMHO, an utterly fantastic product. Especially with a kick ass poster map.

Also, the blogger didn't say that such a thing would happen (so far as I remember), but that it was an exciting possibility (again, as far as I remember). This was, I believe, one of the WotC design team, early on after 4e was announced. I could probably find the blog again, possibly through the auspices of Google.

It might be http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/drdd/20071005

RC

Hmm. A ruined lost city populated by evil snake people and barbarous froglodytes?

Cha-ching.