D&D 4E 4E tidbits from WotC blogs (Updated:David Noonan on Social Interactions)

[Glyfair]

And you thought it took a while to pick out spells now! I wonder what level wish is?

Just to give more details on the original comment. Monte has said that they considered the 1 spell level per 1 character level idea. They didn't have time to implement it, given it would be a lot of work.

I wouldn't expect more spells (at least not a lot more spells). Part of the idea is to differentiate between different "levels" within a level. Everyone knows magic missile is a very powerful 1st level spell. With Monte's scheme it would be a 2nd level spell and you'd gain access at 2nd level.

 

[SSquirrel]

The news about paladins of all alignments only makes sense to me. One of my friends' favorite Dragon article ever was the 9 Paladins, one for each alignment. I really liked the way the Champion class worked in Arcana Evolved. Of course there was no alignment, but you were the champion of an idea or cause or whatever. If you were a champion of death, which doesn't necc make you an evil person, you get different powers than if you are a Champion of Life. General structure to each variant allows for easier creation of new variants as well as easier balance between the variants.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

Yeah cuz we all know that targeting 95% of the computing world is a bad idea

Let's look at this oft-cited number more seriously.

Who's bringing their corporate work computer to the game table? Let's scratch those out of the target market demographic.

Who's bringing their home desktop tower to the game table? We could scratch all those, but I'm guessing a percentage will be gaming online from their home PC. Still we keep hearing market speak about using these tools on laptops. So . . .

So what's the home user laptop percentage? Apple's share of retail (online and physical stores) notebooks sales is now 13%, and growing 2x faster than the PC market.

Then just the target demographic of college student where Apple now has a 27% share of laptop sales and 14% total sales to college students. That laptop number is significant.

 

[Maggan]

and in a "it makes me ashamed to be a gamer" moment:

Ouch. That was bad, bad, bad.

/M

 

[Baby Samurai]

SOMEONE ASK ABOUT WHEN GNOMES ARE GOING TO BE AVAILABLE!

I think gnomes will be scraped as a core race. I think the core races might be human, dwarf, elf, halfling, and tiefling. And maybe a new one or four.


I also have a strong feeling that alignment will go bye bye as a mechanical aspect of the game (detect evil etc).

 

[Nefrast]

As easy as dual-booting current Macs and Linux OSes are, it's not that huge a deal I don't think.

Well, but then it's also not a huge deal to make their system cross-platform right from the start. You don't use DirectX if you plan to eventually support other platforms anyway. I highly doubt that they have any plans right now to eventually support other platforms (Oh, and I don't count running Windows under a virtual machine under Mac or Linux as 'support').

May be buying a Windows license and agreeing to it's EULA isn't a huge deal for most people (and lets be frank, most people use unlicensed Window installations anyway). But it's also not a huge deal to say "well, then let's just forget about WotC, there many other's to buy stuff from".

Fact is, Wizards of the Coast excludes MILLIONS of people from their digital tabletop. And if you are part of that bunch, and maybe even someone who has spent thousands of dollars for their stuff, than I think some bitter feelings about that are more than understandable.

 

[Li Shenron]

Sounds like they are going with the 1 spell level per character level that was discussed for 3E (he states that wizards will be able to cast 25th level spells).

That's a major change IMO.

I would have understood a 1 spell level / 1 class level ratio more if within a system that only goes up to level 10, or otherwise a 1 / 2 ratio.

I guess that 25/30 may mean that you get 1 new spell level until class level 20, and then it's 1 spell level every 2 class levels...

Well the progression is not so important, but an important fact here is that this is a much more detailed splitting of spells into different levels. I have nothing against it, but it certainly seems to be more difficult to design (except with damage-dealing spells, which are easier). I will expect even more discussions about "this spells is too low/high level, should be bumped/debumped".

One question is: will there be more spells in the PHB compared to previous editions? If the number of spells is roughly the same, and they are merely spread into a larger level range, then this means less choice of spells at every level up compared to before. However it could turn out to be quite equivalent to now anyway...

Perhaps this idea of a wider range came from two things:

1) the "must gain a new ability at every level" mandatory paradigma in 4e
2) an attempt at making metamagic cost less than in 3e in terms of slots used

 

[Li Shenron]

The news about paladins of all alignments only makes sense to me. One of my friends' favorite Dragon article ever was the 9 Paladins, one for each alignment. I really liked the way the Champion class worked in Arcana Evolved. Of course there was no alignment, but you were the champion of an idea or cause or whatever. If you were a champion of death, which doesn't necc make you an evil person, you get different powers than if you are a Champion of Life. General structure to each variant allows for easier creation of new variants as well as easier balance between the variants.

I think that there is no problem in generalizing the paladin to a "champion of something". The original paladin will still be very much one of those options, as will be the archetypical blackguard (without using a completely different class).

Making the code of conduct more open/flexible means less arguments between players. It does not mean that a paladin can have no code but only it can have ANY code, as long as he chooses one and sticks to it.

 

[jeffh]

So based on a single post SHARK made, you think he should drop D&D and start playing Warhammer RPG?

Sorry, but I always find responses like this arrogant. Someone says, "I play D&D this way" and the reply comes back, "Try playing a different game."

Bah.

This would be a halfways reasonable post if the person you were responding to had actually given the slightest little hint of wanting SHARK to drop D&D. But he didn't. That simply isn't there. He made a friendly suggestion of another game he might like without any suggestion that the two couldn't co-exist, and you jumped all over him for it, not for anything he actually said, but for something you essentially made up.

 

[RFisher]

If accurate, that means the current numbers are below 10%.

Yeah. No doubt they've been in a low-ebb recently. But then, they have no one to blame but themselves.

But it was an amazing feat that they once did have 10% of the market. I think Dell was the only other single manufacturer to hold that much of the personal computer market, & their PCs ran Windows.

But that's tangenting on a tangent, so enough about that.

So, you're suggesting that they'd be smart to charge Mac users extra for access to the DI?

Why not? It's been done before. Plunk a Mac surchange on the game table & other tools that aren't web content/PDF. Sure, you'll get some noisy
grumblers, but you'll also get a lot of Mac users who will silently & gladly pay.

Higher loyalty compared to what? Perhaps Mac users are loyal to Apple because they feel set upon by the Windows-dominated marketplace, but implying that Windows users are "disloyal," and that this is somehow a bad thing, and that Mac users possess some kind of general trait of loyalty that goes beyond their attachment to Apple, is kind of odd. You seem to be suggesting that if WotC adds Mac support to DI, it'll mean that the Mac users become loyal to WotC, whatever that might mean.

I'm not suggesting or implying anything. I'm telling you my experience.

So, you're saying that you think that WotC hasn't done any market research relating to the installed base of Macs among gamers and potential gamers, and hasn't done a cost/benefit analysis concerning the potential gains to be made on starting the DI with cross-platform support instead of adding minority operating systems later on? I think that's a funny thing to assume, given how much they've got riding on the success of the DI.

No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that I have the experience from multiple successful products at different companies that cross-platform development isn't so hard & pays off more than I keep hearing people say. Perhaps Wizards has done the due dilligence, perhaps they haven't. Perhaps their analysis was flawed, perhaps it wasn't. I don't know. I merely sharing my experience with you. Take it or leave it, I don't care.

Also, if I were Wizards, I'd be considering this:

Tom: "Hey, let's get the old college group together again via this virtual game table!"
Dick: "They'd be great. Sorry I can't join in though. It isn't worth the hassel to set up dual-boot for that."
Harry: "I'm out too. Ever since we switched to Mac, the wife has baned Windows from our house."
Larry: "Maybe we should just use WebRPG?" (or whatever the popular free tool is these days)
Moe: "Yeah, it's not near as nice as the Wizard's game table, but it is free & cross-platform, so everybody could play."
Curly: "Hey, I don't have Mac or Linux, but free sounds great to me. I wouldn't know what I was missing anyway."