4e: big change in essentials: no more daily powers!

[ggroy]

Yeah, just like when they repeatedly said they werent working on 4th edition.

*** A UFO landing on the front law of the white house. ***

I repeat, space aliens do not exist!

 

[ExploderWizard]

Why assume that WotC wants to obsolete their old books?

WotC wants to make sure they sell as many books as possible. Making the old ones obsolete would be counterproductive to that goal.

But they won't be obsolete. They will be perfectly useable just like a lot of other things. The new stuff might be better in every way but nothing keeps those old classes from functioning just like they always did. Who cares if other players can do things with encounter powers that you can do with dailies. That just makes you more special.

I gotta say that playtesting is a major concern. If the decision to make these changes was made after getting feedback from PHB 3 then how much playtest could this new system have gotten? This all seems somewhat rushed IMHO.

 

[Kingreaper]

But they won't be obsolete. They will be perfectly useable just like a lot of other things. The new stuff might be better in every way but nothing keeps those old classes from functioning just like they always did. Who cares if other players can do things with encounter powers that you can do with dailies. That just makes you more special.

Again: why would they want to stop people buying the old books?

If they make the essentials classes clearly superior to the old books people will buy one or the other.

If they make them reasonably balanced, people will buy both.

The only way they'll end up being overpowered is incompetence, not malice.

 

[ggroy]

Again: why would they want to stop people buying the old books?

If they make the essentials classes clearly superior to the old books people will buy one or the other.

If they make them reasonably balanced, people will buy both.

The only way they'll end up being overpowered is incompetence, not malice.

At this point in time, wonder how many copies of the older 4E books are still kicking around in WotC's warehouses.

For that matter, there is the possibility they have no intentions of doing any additional print runs of the older 4E books. They could just let them go out of print over the next year or so.

 

[Scribble]

Again: why would they want to stop people buying the old books?

If they make the essentials classes clearly superior to the old books people will buy one or the other.

If they make them reasonably balanced, people will buy both.

The only way they'll end up being overpowered is incompetence, not malice.

I'm hoping/guessing it will be kinda similar to when they added Hybrid classes to the system.

The original multi-class system is still in effect, and people still use it. Hybrid just opened up another set of options to select from when creating a character.

So- with the essentials classes you might have a Dwarven Fighter with Dailies and a Dwarven fighter without Dailies fighting side by side in an adventuring party, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.

I wonder if you'll be able to hybrid an essentials class with a non essentials class...

 

[Kingreaper]

@ggroy if the Essentials is significantly OP, which do you think will happen more often:

A) a group playing normal 4e goes "ooh, uber-overpowered, let's buy that and throw all our old books away"
or
B) a group playing normal 4e goes "ooh, uber-overpowered? *meh* the game works as is, why break it?"

Maybe it's just the people I play with, but I can't imagine any of them going for option A.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Again: why would they want to stop people buying the old books?

If they make the essentials classes clearly superior to the old books people will buy one or the other.

If they make them reasonably balanced, people will buy both.

The only way they'll end up being overpowered is incompetence, not malice.

I never said it was some evil plan. It is simply what happens. The excitement of new ideas and the rush to release them into production can result in more power creep than the most carefully constructed scheme could. Think about it. How long has it been since PHB 3? How much post design playtesting including integration with recently released existing product could there be time for before essentials release?

 

[bagger245]

AD&D 2nd ed + Player Option was never called 2.5, but a lot of us call it so anyway. By the way, was there a significant difference between the Star Wars d20 and the Star Wars Revised edition (not the SAGA edition) ?

 

[Njall]

Yeah, just like when they repeatedly said they werent working on 4th edition.

yes, just like that...

Anyway, it looks like the Essentials line is exactly what BECMI was: a game that uses the same jargon and mechanics as the main line, with some slight variations (while still being far more compatible with 4e than BECMI was with 1e and 2e).
If adding new mechanics to the system means that we have a new half edition, then we've had a whole lot of "half editions" in the 3.5 era: ToM, MoI, ToB, UA, the first books that introduced class sub levels and so on...

 

[mudbunny]

This seems like an opportune time to note the latest response by Mike Mearls on the WotC forums about this:

We're in a bit of a weird space, since we don't really talk about the next year's releases until GenCon. However, I can say that since wrapping up Essentials design we've been busy working on 2011 releases. Perhaps more to the point, I still use my PH 1 as my primary rules reference when working on those books.