[forked thread] What constitutes an edition war?

[pawsplay]

I purchased both W&M and R&C and in do way did I feel conned or suckered into doing so. WotC was upfront about what these books were -- preview material that contained fluff and designer comments but no rules or crunch. I knew that I was paying for, essentially, an advertisement for 4E. I did so because I was interested in the new edition and because I wanted to be able to follow along with the various 4E threads on the various messageboards that I frequent. IMO, they were worth the price.

If Auld Grump or whoever has a beef with the content of the preview books, that's fine. However, I think it is entirely inaccurate to call them a con.

If you liked some of the early peeks of 4e, I think it could conceivably be a worthwhile purchase. However, even in that case, there is a fair amount that changed, IIRC, between the preview books and the final version.

 

[pemerton]

I knew that I was paying for, essentially, an advertisement for 4E.

<snip>

IMO, they were worth the price.

I flipped through both books in my local game store. I didn't buy R&C as did seem to me to be primarily an ad for 4e - a preview of how the races and classes would be rebuilt. That was something that I was happy to wait to learn from the PHB.

W&M, on the other hand, had a lot of interesting discussions about the rebuild of the fictional elements of the game, the rationale behind it, and how the designers envisaged the new elements being used. This looked good to me - and some of the ideas seemed useful even for the RM game I was GMing at that stage - and so I bought it. It cost me $20 - not nothing, but about the amount I might spend on lunch and a coffee if I eat with colleagues rather than just pick up something to take back to my office.

WotC was upfront about what these books were -- preview material that contained fluff and designer comments but no rules or crunch.

And those designer comments are what I paid for. I find it useful, as a GM, to know how the designers envisaged the various fictional elements in the game being used.

In what way was it not intended as an advertisement?

<snip>

A paid preview is an advertisement, and one paid for by the consumer in this case.

Isn't all advertising paid for by consumers?

In any event, I can't comment on WotC's intentions, only on content and the use to which I've put it. W&M discusses various categories of monsters - dragons, giants, fey, mind flayers, undead, devils, demons etc. It also discusses other fictional elements - gods, settlements, the wilderness etc. In each case it explains why the designers have chosen various ficitonal elements to be as they are - including explaining departures from previous iterations of those elements - and what role those elements are envisaged as usefully serving in encounter, scenario and campaign design.

Whether or not that counts as advertising - and it's not clear to me that it is, in any but the most generic sense of being advice on how to make use of a product that the company is selling (much like many pages of any DMG) - that's not why I think it was worth buying. It's the scenario and campaign design ideas that I paid for, and have used.

And the book is not just preview. One of the reasons I bought it was that I had a feeling that the actual rule books and DMG wouldn't be so candid in their discussion of the non-tactical metagame on the GM's side, and I was right (the discussion of languages in the DMG being the one exception I can think of). D&D rulebooks have a history of timidity in frankly engaging the GM at the metagame level (elements of Gygax's DMG are a notable exception, and modules occasionally have some metagame advice peculiar to their own content).

On the other hand, it was fairly clear from the previews on the WotC website that the 4e PHB would engage players in quite a metagamey fashion. Which is one reason why I didn't buy R&C.

Much of the advice was recycled from Idiot's Guide to DMing

That may be so, although I don't recall reading that that book had much detailed discussion, from the metagame perspective, of the various fictional elements of D&D.

In any event, that's a book that I've flipped through once in a bookstore before concluding that it wasn't worth buying. (And I'm pretty sure it would have cost me more than $20.)

Had this been a series of articles in Dragon it might not have irked so much, but, if I recall correctly, they had already ended the print edition of Dragon

Well, the only recent copies of Dragon I have are the 3E launch one, #300, and the four (or so) free digital ones from the 4e launch period. So W&M suited me far better as something I could buy as a discrete publication, than as a series in a journal to which I have never subscribed, and which I wouldn't have bought just for these articles.

there is a fair amount that changed, IIRC, between the preview books and the final version.

In the case of the various fictional elements discussed in W&M, WotC has mostly followed through as foreshadowed. One matter on which I recall there is a difference (and I think the confusion over this might persist into 4e books themselves) is whether the gods made the angels, or whether the angels emerged spontaneously from the astral sea.