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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zinovia" data-source="post: 4116507" data-attributes="member: 57373">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.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />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.</blockquote>

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