Zinovia said:
• The Dungeon Master - He's big on improvisation and short on planning, but given that he won the improvisational and extemporaneous categories on his college speech and debate team, he's *very* good at it. In fact the other players usually think he has a plan. I'm married to him, so I know better. Telling him how much easier it is for the DM to prep encounters in 4E might be a good selling point, but he spends maybe 5 minutes doing prep while the rest of us are opening the tray of vegetables and dip, so cutting his prep time in half won't exactly amount to a lot. I might be able to sell him on the chance to play a character himself for the first time in 4 years. I'm interested in DM'ing for 4E, and plan to run the playtest myself, if I can convince the others to participate.
Sell points:
1) Monsters and NPCs don't have to follow the same creation rules as characters.
2) System is designed from the ground up for multiple monsters per-encounter, even at low levels.
3) CR system is gone. Replaced with a power gauge that involves less guesswork and smoother math when building encounters.
4) While prepping is easier, so is improvising. The fact that almost every character attribute has half level as a base means that figuring out attacks, skills, AC, other defenses, etc, becomes much faster and more accurate. On top of that, magic items don't add enhancement bonuses to stats, which makes improvising NPCs with magic items MUCH easier. His improv will be faster, and more accurate, especially when dealing with high level NPCs.
5) You're married to him. If he's still unwilling to be open minded, I'm sure there's some sort of "leverage" you could use to make him more willing, if ya know what I mean *nudge nudge*.
• The Druid - She's a latecomer to our group and not an experienced gamer. She's looking forward to the end of our current campaign so she can start a character at first level. Easy sell. I think she'll be happy with whatever system we choose.
Druids probably won't be in the PHB, but when they are released, they'll be much more fun to play. More wildshape, a lot more.
• The Bard - New to paper and pencil RPG's with the beginning of our interminable campaign, this character is the only one she has ever played. It's a stunningly beautiful half-elven bard with insanely high charisma. She likes roleplaying, dislikes dungeon crawls and combat (bards = boring combat), and makes us watch her while she roleplays shopping trips to the city for 2 hours. If we complain that we're bored, she makes comments about how we don't like roleplaying. She doesn't want the current game to come to an end, and is reluctant to make a new character, much less start a new system of rules.
Sell points:
1) 4e combat encounters progress more quickly as a result of smoother combat mechanics. That means more time for roleplaying.
2) 4e has enough emphasis on roleplaying to actually make game mechanics that go beyond "roll diplomacy...you win the argument".
3) Bards will probably not be in PHB, but the Warlord fills the same role as face of the party, while being MUCH more useful in combat encounters.
4) 4th edition has much less emphasis on magic items, and much more emphasis on the character itself. Less emphasis on loot (a decidedly NOT WoW feature) means players won't feel as though they're losing out by not being in combat all the time. More emphasis on the character means characters are far more customizable. You can represent more of your character's personality and story with actual game mechanics, meaning that those aspects of your character can have greater impact on the game.
• The Wizard - Well, we haven't had one since he attacked a hapless city guard with a maximized acid arrow, slaying him instantly. He fled the city, and we never did see him again. That player made a new psionic warrior character, who wound up getting killed but declined the rez we scraped up the money for. His third character was a fighter who used a longsword/shortsword combo but his habit of shouting "Bring it on!" to dragons, opening doors before I could check for traps, leaping into the sack with anyone who seemed amenable, and other impulsive behavior made him not fit into our old stodgy (and slow) group. We waved farewell when he went off to grad school.
Guessing that you don't really have one of these, but anyway, the selling point for wizards is obviously that you don't run out of magic after 1 or 2 encounters.
• The Paladin - An experienced gamer, more in online games and MUDs rather than P&P games. He's completely unwilling to hear a positive word about 4E. I can't talk about streamlined rules without him saying they are dumbing down the game. More combat options for melee classes? That's turning it into WoW. Raising play up to level 30? That's also making it like an MMO - and why bother since we've been playing for years and are only half that level anyway. If 4E came packaged with a free t-shirt he'd complain that they are just doing that to suck people into spending more money, and that it was the wrong size anyway.
This guy sounds like a typical "D&D elitist". This is the same type that got mad when they removed THAC0 after 2nd edition. His reasons for not liking 4th edition without even playing it mostly boil down to "I have years of experience with the current version, and I like the feeling of superiority that I get when I understand overly complicated rules that newer players don't. I also like knowing that these rules increase my game's exclusivity. I don't want to start over with new rules that don't give me a sense of superiority." You'll have a hard time selling 4th edition to this guy until you just start playing a game and he tries it because he doesn't want to be left out.
Sell points:
1) First of all, WoW is a medieval fantasy RPG, it's based on D&D, not the other way around. WoW is the way it is because if it were exactly like 3.5, nobody would ever play a non spell casting character. WoTC realizes this too, and thus they have also brought non spell casters more inline with spell casters. That improvement should not be exclusive to MMOs just because WoW came out before 4th edition. Characters with more options are more fun, period.
2) The level progression goes up to 30 because they wanted to include epic level play in the core rules. In 3.5, epic level play is separate from the core rules, and frankly, the epic level rules suck. There's a reason why a lot of campaigns just stop at 20th level. The only reason D&D has always been 20 levels is because a long time ago, Gary Gygax decided 20 was a nice round number. That's it - there's no mathematical reason to stop at 20 - it's just a number somebody picked one day for no particular reason at all.
3) If you'd been playing 4th edition for years, you'd probably be epic level by now. When you got to epic level, you'd have had nicely integrated rules for that level of play, instead of rules in a supplement book that arbitrarily change a number of fundamental game systems, and turn spell casters into demigods.
Hope that helps. Realistically though, you're probably just gonna have to buy the books and run a game to get them to accept 4th edition. If you can't wait that long, and your group has any interest in Star Wars, you could always pick up the Star Wars Saga Edition book and run a game of that. It's as close to 4th edition as you can get right now in terms of rules and how the game plays.
I've got H1 on order already with Amazon, and once I'm familiar with the mission briefing, we can implement the strike. I have the Spring Attack feat, so I can jump in, give them their pre-gens, and duck behind the GM screen before they can react. Ambushing them with food is a good plan; a cherry pie is a sure way to a gamer's heart. Just *try* it, you might like it! I've had practice saying that to my own kids, so a reluctant paladin should prove no obstacle. (I hope!)
