3.5 Design Team Personality Spotlight

[Mark]

From the introduction on the WotC site
In this month's exclusive and all-encompassing interview, the entire crew -- designers, developers, managers, and editors -- of the updated Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual discuss the trials and tribulations of making the greatest roleplaying game on earth greater still.

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/ps/20030704a

 

[Mark]

From the interview
...we tested by repeatedly pushing Tordek off the stairs.

 

[Eternalknight]

Thanks Marky Mark, that was an interesting read.

One thing that pricked my ears up, so to speak:

The temptation to overhaul everything was huge, and it had to be fought every step of the way.

Does this mean they thought it needed to be completely overhauled, or am I reading to much into it?

 

[Technik4]

I think it means what they said in the article, that if they could they would just keep refining and tweaking. And at the beginning of the project it was probably easy to get carried away and suggest a massive change, like how many feats a character gets, how spellcasting is acquired, or redoing all of the classes heavily.

3e was a milestone for d&d, the game finally was more intuitive and had a solid theory at its backbone. To think that there will not ever be a 4e is silly. This does not mean that 3e is/was/will be "in need of overhaul" it is just the natural order of things. You refine to a point, then you overhaul and start fresh. With new fresh problems to refine

Technik

 

[Mark]

NP, EeK

3e was a milestone for d&d, the game finally was more intuitive and had a solid theory at its backbone. To think that there will not ever be a 4e is silly. This does not mean that 3e is/was/will be "in need of overhaul" it is just the natural order of things. You refine to a point, then you overhaul and start fresh. With new fresh problems to refine

Well said, Technik4

 

[MerricB]

It's a fascinating interview. I was particularly interested by this:

Andy: The toughest cuts for me were two brand-new systems that I sketched up for addition to the Player's Handbook. One was a new metamagic system, and the second was a new item creation system. But since both of them represented pretty significant changes to those rule subsets, they would have required both more testing than we could provide and would have had a greater ripple effect on other books than we were really comfortable with. Rest assured, though, these systems aren't lost, and more than likely will find their way into publication sooner or later.

What do you think: Unearthed Arcana material?

Cheers!

 

[Knight Otu]

What do you think: Unearthed Arcana material?

Ajup.

Someone should gather scoops for all future WotC products in a single thread. It went well for 3.5, why not afterwards?

 

[Mark]

Someone should gather scoops for all future WotC products in a single thread. It went well for 3.5, why not afterwards?

Perhaps Olgar will see this and do just that...