D&D 4.0 - What the?

[Herremann the Wise]

Hello everyone,

I noticed on a different site someone commenting about the possibility of a not too far away 4th edition and thought whoa boy; not that many people have even ventured to 3.5 yet. I'm sure some people here would view the whole idea as preposterous and yet another grab by hasbro for the almighty dollar.

Anyway, I got thinking about what would need to change in the next edition and what should stay and thought it might make an interesting thing to talk about.

Personally, I think the biggest anomaly in the game at the moment is the whole concept of hit points. Mixing toughness with luck and expertise produces many spastications when you then try to reverse that damage by healing. In addition, the thought that someone fights as effectively at full hit points as at one is ridiculous. I worked out a really neat system to get around this... but I digress.

What if anything do you think needs to be looked at in a new edition? Am I stupid for even contemplating 4th Ed.?

Best Regards
Herremann the Wise

 

[Brother Shatterstone]

Classless levels like M&M.

 

[Mercule]

Classless levels like M&M.

IMHO, classes and levels are the ultimate sacred cow of what makes D&D, D&D. If it ever evolves to a classless/levelless system, I'm outta here. Time to return to Hero or Aria.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Classless levels like M&M.

Nah. It wouldn't really be D&D anymore in this case.

I don't think levels, classes, and hit points are appropriate for all genres and settings. But they are an integral part of the D&D experience, and removing them from the game would be a very bad idea.

If you want more realism (or something at least appearing to be realism most of the time), look for other game systems. There are lots of them out there, and many are very, very good. That's probably a better idea than trying to change D&D into something it was never meant to be.

 

[Telperion]

Personally I'm quite happy with 3.5, but they will publish 4.0 sooner rather than later. I hope it won't happen too many years before 2010, but that's hoping for too much.

Figure a year of brain-storming (they are doing it already, no doubt about it) and another year of figuring out the best way to get our money. Plus a bit of time to commercialize, so I would hazard a guess at August/September 2006.

I'm guessing they will grab stuff from Mage: The Ascension and do a whole new spell casting system. They'll drown the importance of classes with a plethora of "new and improved" choises. Probably something ripped out of Role Master.

I don't think they have the guts to drop the D20. I mean that's been their way of diceding the fate of PC's since the dawn of D&D, but then again...they did it to the Damage Reduction system, so anythings possible I suppose...

In the end it will be a hybrid of so many other games that none will recognize it as D&D.

Personally I think they are in a whole lot of trouble is they must push for 4.0 too quickly. I could see a new generation of interested roleplayers hitting the shops around 2008 - 2010, before that is just too soon. I mean they have been refining D&D since 1.0, and it still has problems. The same deal over and over again, with "new and improved" ways of solving situations. The 3.5 isn't a bad product, so will a simple update be enough? I think not. So, someone has to come up with something really special / different.

The question is of course: will 4.0 sell? I think they'll spend a whole year thinking about that one question before they release it .

 

[Bloodstone Mage]

I expect that sometime within the next ten years, the phrase "Fourth Edition" will become a common one.

I don't expect the concepts of hit points and classes will change much. I wouldn't be surprised if they made races into templates or by making skills and feats more interactive.

I have no doubt that psionics will be changed yet again. Perhaps it will become a core class...? Who knows? I expect epic levels will be altered as well.

It's hard to predict the future...I guess we can just hope that if and/or when a 4th Edition comes out, the D&D community will be prepared for anything Wizards (or whoever owns it by then) decides to throw at us.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Personally I'm quite happy with 3.5, but they will publish 4.0 sooner rather than later.

No offense, but you seem to have some inside information the rest of us don't. You speak with such certainty and conviction that I would like to know what other insights you have about Hasbro's grand schemes involving D&D.

 

[RangerWickett]

Bah, what I'd like is simple.

• A concept of background skills, so that people can know some useful skills just to flesh out their characters. Maybe just 2 skillpoints per decade of life, used on a list limited by race. This gives players a better way to get a handle on their character's background, and it makes it easier for them to have a life outside of adventuring. Even if your games don't shift out of the heroic mode very often, these skills add depth and uniqueness.
• Hit point/Wound point. HP heals at a rate of 1 per level per hour, WP heals at a rate of 1/day. You are fine as long as you have HP, once you run out, you take WP damage and suffer penalties like you're disabled. You have WP equal to your Con. Keep clerics as the primary healers, and give them ability to cure both HP and WP. Let wizards cure WP, but not HP. This reduces the reliance on healing, making party composition more malleable.
• Keep the PHB classes generic, but provide a few sample setting-tweaked classes in the DMG. For goodness's sake, let there be a Fighter-esque class that isn't assumed to wear full plate. This is just a personal desire, not particularly geared to making the game more fun.
• Reduce the amount of magic items required to adventure. Make a belt of giant strength really mean something because of how powerful it is. Make it so it's unlikely any character would have more than 7 magic items at all. Put the focus on the character's skills, whatever level he's at, not the gear he possesses.

 

[Dark Jezter]

I believe that we'll be seeing D&D 4e sometime before 2010. While I can't think of anything major I'd change about D&D, here is a list of things that I feel are too much a part of the D&D expirience to remove:

• Classes
• Levels
• Alignment
• Hit points
• Armor Class
• Vancian Magic
• Saving Throws
• Expirience points
• The six ability scores (Str, Dex, Con, Int, Wis, Cha)

As Rich Baker once said in an interview, if any of these were missing, it just wouldn't feel like D&D anymore.

 

[kenjib]

Classes, levels, hit points, armor class, spell slots, as well as signature spells and monsters - these things are all core identity for D&D that I suspect would be similar to how they have always been, even if they end up slightly tweaked (wounds/vitality, ac & dr, etc. being minor permutations in my opinion). I expect some kind of meta-mechanics to appear, such as action points. Having XP awarded based on character motivation or goal accomplishment and completely decoupling it from monster slaying I think would be a good thing but I really don't think they would do it because it makes it harder to integrate a tie-in miniature game and also might not be as simple to adjudicate. An overhaul of the CR/ECL system so that it is not so closely tied to a baseline of magic level would be nice too.

Successful and/or popular 3rd party d20 innovations will be brought into the fold, possibly including such things as racial classes, spell templates, variable level spells, ritual magic of some sort, a shaman class, and others.

The system is already pretty modular to sell & plug in new a constant stream of new content so the only profit-oriented marketing changes I can see would be to possibly make cross-marketing different products more easy to do, although that's covered pretty well now too. They've applied the MtG model somewhat to D&D but I still think there's room for it to go further. I don't like the idea but I think it's a possibility.