D&D 4E 4E: What we think we know

[Mistwell]

I am really excited by the prospect of 4e. I can't wait! I love the feeling to delving into a new set of rules and figuring out how the system will work.

 

[TerraDave]

Article Promises Big Changes

This update has already spawned two threads.

http://www.wizarduniverse.com/magazine/inquest/005672645.cfm

Highlights:

-some sacred cows, including at least one race and one class, get the boot
-"alternative" spell recovery (or something like that).
-Updated mini-stat cards will be available for more recent sets

THE FOURTH AMENDMENT
Roleplaying granddaddy ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is leveling up, redefining online gaming and bringing huge changes to ‘D&D Minis’
By Thorin McGee

Posted August 16, 2007 2:30 PM

If you thought the advent of d20 was a giant leap for gamer kind, they’re looking to jump Springfield Gorge with this one. 2007 marked Wizards of the Coast’s summer of big ideas: Magic’s getting planeswalkers and two blocks a year, Gleemax.com is spearheading the company’s conquest of the Internet, and at Gen Con, Wizards announced the Fourth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

THE BOOKS
“We think Third Edition is a wonderful platform and we’re building upon that,” said Bill Slavicsek, Wizards of the Coast director of RPG research and development and the man at the wheel for Dungeons & Dragons, d20 and all of Wizards’ roleplaying initiatives. “But we have learned a lot about what’s worked and not worked over the last eight years, and we’re certainly looking to get rid of the slow and bumpy parts and just get to the fun” in Fourth Edition.

This new edition will stick with the d20 system, but the designers see many elements that can be improved. One big emphasis has been on streamlining turns to help the game get around the table a bit quicker; they know there’s nothing the rules can do to keep a party’s mage and barbarian from wasting 15 minutes screaming over tactics at the start of every combat, but at least they can get you out of grappling details a bit faster. And the mage and barbarian might get along a little better thanks to revamped spell recovery rules that won’t do away with the need to rest to replenish spells, but will give players more options to recover spells and in-game incentives to do something other than call nappy-time every two encounters.

In essence, what you’re going to see mechanically is the d20 system evolved: rebuilding the clunky parts, greasing the wheels and polishing the chrome until you can see your character in it. Part of that polishing includes ramping up the coolness factor on some of the less-popular character classes to make sure that every class has a unique and essential role in a well-balanced party; you might see some of the traditional classes fall out of the base book in favor of sexier roles. The same thing will happen to the races covered in the core books, where the half-demon tieflings will claim a place at the expense of an undisclosed race—we’re guessing a half-elf, gnome and halfling were shut up in a dark cave with some paring knives, and no questions were asked of whoever came out…heck, there might even be three new races in the new edition! Not to worry; Slavicsek promises that any beloved races cut from the core books will appear in early Fourth Edition expansions.

Not all of Fourth Edition’s changes will add to the game by subtraction; many rules tweaks they’ve experimented with in books all over Wizards’ RPGs will show up as well. For example, Slavicsek tells us that “The Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords book, which gave fighter-type characters the same types of options spellcasters do by basically giving them spells for fighters,” was received very well. “That idea has been extremely popular, and we’re adopting something similar for Fourth Edition.”

As always, the Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide will be the core of the new edition, and you’ll see them in May, June and July of 2008 respectively, just in time for everyone to get new campaigns up and running for next year’s Gen Con. And yes, Wizards does recommend you begin new campaigns with Fourth Edition. “It’s not going to be as huge a jump,” as from Second Edition to Third Edition, said Slavicsek, “but there’s enough changing in the core system of how we are doing classes and races and characters that we’re not even gonna attempt it—we’re just telling you it’s better to start over.” Conversion went over like a lead balloon with Third Edition anyway.

THE PLASTIC PERIPHERALS
So Fourth Edition will be a new rule set based on d20, but not remotely compatible. What’s that mean for the minis game? Effectively, this is D&D Minis 2.0 as well. Starting with Dungeons of Dread in April of 2008, D&D Minis sets will use Fourth Edition rules. According to Slavicsek, “All your plastic will still be usable, but your stat cards will need to be updated.” However, you’ll be able to get updated stat cards for free on Wizards’ website for Unhallowed and the sets printed since. In addition, there will be a sort of all-star set of updated cards available for download that will include updated stats for the figs getting the most tournament play. And of course, there’s always room for re-releasing popular figs in post-Fourth expansions of the future.

THE NEW ONLINE WORLD
But updated stat cards aren’t the only piece of Fourth’s puzzle being played online. Today, millions of people go online to pretend they’re elves and orcs and goblins on epic quests in various MMOs, sometimes even in the D&D universe with D&D Online. But we can’t help but feel that all those MMOs have just been honing in on D&D’s territory. After all, how many World of Warcraft and EverQuest players started because their D&D group broke up? Wizards aims to find out through an online initiative called D&D Insider.

“If you think of your favorite movie double-DVD set, the movie is the books, and all the specials, that’s D&D Insider,” said Slavicsek about the subscription-based web initiative that will let any D&D player expand their experience on the official website. “It’ll start with your electronic version of Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine,” which Slavicsek is particularly familiar with because he used to be the editor of Dragon. However, because they’re moving the production in-house, all of the content will be official D&D canon, most of it developed by the actual designers. In addition, there will be a suite of DM tools—experience calculators, a dungeon tile mapper, etc.—to help the most overworked players in gaming get their campaigns running in record time, and private pages for the DM to post information on the world for his group to access. On the PC side, an official character generator will let players design the character they want to play, save it and print it out at any organized play event, which will make organizing such events a lot easier and may—hopefully—spur a resurgence of organized RPG play. Players will also be able to create an exact representation of their character’s look through the character generator much like you might in an MMO, and then use a custom-tailored “virtual mini” of that character on D&D Insider’s most exciting offering, the virtual game table.

“The D&D game table is basically the place where you can play D&D 24/7. It’s the kitchen table on the internet,” explained Slavicsek. “It lets you do everything you can do on the kitchen table—roll the dice, lay out your battle map, lay out your dry erase marker map, lay out your dungeon tiles, lay out your virtual miniatures,” and it will let players use voice chat through the company Vivox to communicate directly through the game table just like if they were all in the same room.

“What we really like about this is that with a lot of groups, after college the group breaks up, never to see each other again. Well now you can call each other and log into D&D Insider and play on the D&D game table. And suddenly your groups that have been gone for 10 years can get back together and play with each other.” According to Slavicsek, all of this will be free to D&D Insider subscribers, but also available to nonsubscribers for a nominal fee.

Will that be enough to draw D&D nation out of their Third Edition d20 campaigns and into 4.0? Will it be cool enough to convince some of the MMO-playing mob to try a completely different online experience? Sounds to us like it might. After all, anything that helps college gaming groups reconnect in the real world can’t be all bad.

 

[Tewligan]

I mean no disrespect, but do you actually believe that WotC won't try to turn their customers into a money machine?

Oh, that's silly, Devyn! Why, if that were their goal, they would probably do something like pull the license to their magazines, move that content online, charge MORE for it than the cost of the magazines, claim the rights to anything people post on their...

Oh.

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

I see how my statement can be misinterpreted. I meant "Money Making Machine" like how WoW or other MMORPG where players get hooked into a game, and have to continue to pay $15/month in order to play. If you stop paying $15/month, you lose all previous investment in the game, which is a strong incentive to keep paying. Whereas D&D will continue to have books and other hardcopy materials that cannot be lost if one were to stop paying the monthly fee.

While WotC will try to turn a profit, they are not going to go out of their way to extort money from their customers through excessive monthly charges. There are other successful RPG companies out there. If WotC were to extort money out of thier customer base, people will just move on to something else.

If I wanted to turn D&D into a money making machine I would do the following:
1) Get rid of the ODL and SRD. Everyone must use my D&D products.
2) Link all physical materials through an online "Book-License Key". Books can no longer be shared, traded, pirated etc. since they are useless if the License key is registered online.
3) The physical copies of books only contain about 1/2 of the useful material. the other half is online. One is useless without the other.
4) The online system provides a lot of content weekly, but you have to unlock content by buying books. e.g. You cannot roll a mage character unless you buy the "Total Mage" book.
5) The online system has a high monthly fee, say e.g. $15/month.

With the above system, I've got my players locked in. They need to keep buying books to get the "good" content, but have to keep paying a monthly fee in order to be able to use it.

It is certainly possible to provide great online content that suppliments the books without locking players in, and I think WotC is going to do exactly that.

You deserve this:

 

[Eldragon]

Aw man, you know what I just realized?

No magazine to get monthly countdown previews to the new edition.

Hopefully they'll do some kind of article on the web besides just leaving us the two preview books in December/January.

Crud you are right!

What we need is a mole. Someone who gets hired to work for WotC as a webmaster and secretly feeds us with inside info. I'd do it, but its a cross-class skill and I have a negative -1 charisma modifier.

 

[Shawn_Kehoe]

So it sounds like the D&D game table will be made available at a lesser expense for those who don't want full insider privileges. That's good news.

 

[Bacris]

A $1000 or $2000 will eliminate competition, and has no bearing on quality what-so-ever. There have been plenty of instances where "big time publishers" have released total crap. In fairness though, it would certainly eliminate all those small publisher who release one or two total crap products then disappear.

Less competition means more money for the players who can afford the fee. Good for the publishers involved, but not so good for customers since they have less choice.

I'm not the only one thinking it, so don't hold my comments against me.

`Le

You may not be the only one thinking it, but you're definitely for it, while I'm definitely against it - both as a 3rd party publisher and as a gamer. If a company had to pay that type of licensing fee, you can bet the cost would then be transferred to the price of products, resulting in higher cost to gamers. Especially for the smaller companies.

I know that I don't want to pay more for the same just because someone decided to place an arbitrarily high price on an "official" license.

If it were an opt-in like the current OGL / d20 licenses, then they can do it however they want, but if all the 4th Ed Open Content, for example, was only available with a 4+ figure licensing fee, I imagine the cost of quite a few 3rd party products would increase, thereby costing gamers more as well as limiting options.

IMO, that's bad.

 

[bloodydrake]

I see how my statement can be misinterpreted. I meant "Money Making Machine" like how WoW or other MMORPG where players get hooked into a game, and have to continue to pay $15/month in order to play. If you stop paying $15/month, you lose all previous investment in the game, which is a strong incentive to keep paying. Whereas D&D will continue to have books and other hardcopy materials that cannot be lost if one were to stop paying the monthly fee.

While WotC will try to turn a profit, they are not going to go out of their way to extort money from their customers through excessive monthly charges. There are other successful RPG companies out there. If WotC were to extort money out of thier customer base, people will just move on to something else.

If I wanted to turn D&D into a money making machine I would do the following:
1) Get rid of the ODL and SRD. Everyone must use my D&D products.
2) Link all physical materials through an online "Book-License Key". Books can no longer be shared, traded, pirated etc. since they are useless if the License key is registered online.
3) The physical copies of books only contain about 1/2 of the useful material. the other half is online. One is useless without the other.
4) The online system provides a lot of content weekly, but you have to unlock content by buying books. e.g. You cannot roll a mage character unless you buy the "Total Mage" book.
5) The online system has a high monthly fee, say e.g. $15/month.

With the above system, I've got my players locked in. They need to keep buying books to get the "good" content, but have to keep paying a monthly fee in order to be able to use it.

It is certainly possible to provide great online content that suppliments the books without locking players in, and I think WotC is going to do exactly that.

See I disagree I think this is exactly what they want to do. Historically Dnd has so many users, say for fun 100,000 people play dnd,..but guess what? the majority of money spent on this hobby is by the dm's not the players which is probably 25%. Thats a bitch for the "Company"
I can see all the beancounters looking at games like wow services like XboxLive and thinking we need a way to propell our product into the digital age and start to get more revenue from the players not just the Dm's..(microtransactions say HI!).
Monthy service charges are how you do it. You still sell the hardcopies to the Dm's and the players all start paying their fees to play instead of just bringing the beer or snacks.
The balance is how to make it attractive to the users for what you get for the service and to make it fit in the acceptable monthy fee charges all these people have come to expect thanks to eq,UO,and wow ect.
Just the digital subscriptions that programs like napsters have you reap the most reward for subscriptions that allow access to these resources but don['t allow the user to actually purchase them.
The BIG issue is convincing the playerbase that "Its worth it" give enough to make it paleteable. your ideas on how to turn it into a money making machine are really ideas on how to "send Dnd to die."

 

[Vigilance]

It also eliminates small publishers who release one or two total gems and then disappear.

Exactly. I love the assumption that the littlest guys are the worst. A lot of bad products have been made by big companies too. I should know, I bought some.

 

[johnnype]

I'm calling it now. They are eliminating Gnomes and Bards from the PHB.

And as far as this new resource management/power source tease we've been given I think it has to do with the limitations of psionics in the game. The psionics rules are awesome but the one problem we have with them is that a party half way through the days adventure is bound to get their clock cleaned by a new and fresh psionic wielding monster (too many power points to expend on a single encounter and no reason to hold back). My guess is that these new power source and resource management rules will be designed to solve this problem. I couldn't be happier.