Give me a competent arguement that WotC is "changing rules for the sake of change"

[jdrakeh]

Gnomes were the 'trickster' race, as indicated by their love of practical jokes and their focus on illusion.

Well, I'm not certain that 'being anoying' is a role (and if it is, I'm not so certain that it's one which needs to exist). That said, anecdotally, I have never seen anybody play a Gnome.

 

[The Little Raven]

Tieflings and Warforged as races in the PHB1. But I am not necessarily the only person WoTC is marketing 4e to and I understand that.

Warforged is going to be in the MM1, probably with a racial writeup in the Appendix (according to Andy Collins), not the PHB1.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter what is in the PHB1 or II, III or IV. I decide what races and classes exist in my setting and my campaign. Only those who play in the ambiguous 'Points of Light' setting (which isn't really a setting of course) have to concern themselves with being true to RAW or canon assumptions for their own games.

A DM after my own heart. I've never had a problem with being the DM that will vary being saying "Why should I let you play that?" to "No. Pick something else." in order to keep things thematically appropriate for my game.

What DM, outside of one completely new to the hobby, is going to toss Thor, Vecna, Asmodeus and Zeus around into their pantheon without rhyme or reason?

<looks at the Forgotten Realms deities taken haphazardly from real-world mythology> Ummm... Ed Greenwood?

(I kid!)

Suddenly, Planescape had invaded your D&D.

This already happened with the tanar'ri/baatezu nonsense.

Access to the Outer Planes is not difficult, and people go around breeding with demons with some frequency.

If the default assumption is a campaign of points of light in a sea of darkness, then that ever-present darkness is more likely to produce things like tieflings. Whose to say there wasn't some mad sorcerous tyrant who summoned succubi as his concubines, and bred himself a dynasty of tiefling descendants? It's all a matter of how your approach it with your story.

Sure, I can not use tieflings. But it's significant to me to say, "Okay, we're playing D&D. Since we're playing something other than Forgotten Realms, I should warn you one of the core races is not available. And gnomes are NPC only since we have only limited stats for them, so leave all those AD&D and D&D 3e gnome minis at home."

Well, as gnome racial stats will be in the MM1, I don't see how playing them will be a problem.

 

[The Little Raven]

I still haven't heard a reasonable argument for the "smart" and "magically inclined" elves being renamed Eladrin. First the name Eladrin has no common mythology or cultural refrence that a new player will recognize. The closest I could see is something like this...

For the same reason that dark elves are called drow: a distinct cultural name that immediately tells you what type of creature it is.

Player1: "What's an Eladrin?"
DM: "Well..uhm..it's like Galadriel in LotR."
Player1: "So it's an elf?"
DM: "No, it's an Eladrin, an elf is like Legolas."
Player1: "So there are no elves like Galadriel?"
DM: "No...I mean yeah, but there called Eladrin."
Player1: "why?"
DM: "Because it makes it more accessible to new players."

Not so confusing as the wood/wild distinction, not the gray/high distinction, nor does it explain why they specifically call a subrace "drow" in 95% of all instances, instead of dark elves, which is what they are.

Personally never saw the High elf/ Wood elf distinction as all that confusing and much easier to explain than what an Eladrin is to a new player.

How is it difficult to say "There are three kinds of elves. Regular elves, eladrin, and drow. Elves are woodsy, eladrin are wizardly, and drow are eeeeeeevil."?

There are no examples of this race outside of D&D.

Drow are a distinctly D&D-only race. The only other media that have drow have it because they ripped it off. There's no examples of a whole lot of things that will remain in the core books that have no examples outside of D&D, because while D&D draws on a lot of sources, it still leave it's own distinct touch.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

How is it difficult to say "There are three kinds of elves. Regular elves, eladrin, and drow. Elves are woodsy, eladrin are wizardly, and drow are eeeeeeevil."?

It's not. Just sounds weird...three kinds of elves, but only one is CALLED "elves". I like the approach, but I'd prefer a distinct name for "wood elves" too, in that case.

Oh, and by the way, I find the chance to create "light elves" or seelie, and "dark elves" or unseelie with Eladrin and Drow pretty interesting.

 

[The Little Raven]

It's not. Just sounds weird...three kinds of elves, but only one is CALLED "elves". I like the approach, but I'd prefer a distinct name for "wood elves" too, in that case.

Well, maybe they aren't calling them "elf subraces." Maybe they come from some ancient racial root that diverged into three distinct races at one point (cousins to eachother in the way that dwarves and gnomes have been referred to as cousins in the past).

 

[delericho]

Well, I'm not certain that 'being anoying' is a role (and if it is, I'm not so certain that it's one which needs to exist).

Trickster doesn't necessarily equate to "being annoying", although too often it is portrayed that way.

There are enough tricksters in fantasy stories and myth cycles to suggest that it is a role. Whether it is one that should exist in D&D is a very different question, of course. Since I'm not particularly bothered by the loss of gnomes (I would have cut them myself), I'm not really inclined to argue that point either way.

That said, anecdotally, I have never seen anybody play a Gnome.

As of Tuesday, there's a Gnome Wizard in my campaign. Since I'm not going to convert the campaign in mid-stride, I wasn't concerned about possible conversion woes.

 

[KarinsDad]

Drow are a distinctly D&D-only race. The only other media that have drow have it because they ripped it off. There's no examples of a whole lot of things that will remain in the core books that have no examples outside of D&D, because while D&D draws on a lot of sources, it still leave it's own distinct touch.

Ripped it off? Drow come from a real world cultural reference:

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1970) states: "Drow, n., [scot.] A tiny elf which lived in caves and forged magical metal work."


Eladrin is a celestial in DND 3E/3.5, not an elf. Turning them into elves is a mistake IMO. If they need a new name for High Elves, they should make one up, not rip off a name from a different creature in the MM.

 

[Garnfellow]

Ripped it off? Drow come from a real world cultural reference

Now, come on, that's incredibly misleading. Sure, the name was taken from Scottish folklore. And there are "dark elves" scattered all through Scanadanian folklore. But those characters more closely resemble AD&D dwarves.

Nothing -- absolutely freaking nothing -- about the AD&D drow comes close to resembling anything in folklore from Scotland or anywhere else. Evil, demon-worshiping matriarchal elven offshoots with dark complexions and a thing for spiders and bondage wear are a pure, 100% Gygax product. Any resemblance to something out of Katherine Briggs's dictionary of Faeries is purely coincidental.

 

[Rechan]

Trickster doesn't necessarily equate to "being annoying", although too often it is portrayed that way.

Oddly, aside from a Nuwisha in a game I played in, I've never seen someone play an adequate "Trickster". Even monsters that are "tricksters", I've never seen them used that way.

 

[Christian]

Where you asked?

Did you get a poll Email from WotC?

Have you seen a poll link on the WotC site?

I absolutely assume that WotC has had small polls and/or surveys in RPGA events, even though I am not an RPGA member. I do not know this for a fact, but it just makes sense.

However, RPGA is a small subset of DND players. They have this massive Email database, they have this web page, why no polls with them? Why no surveys?

This really isn't how large companies with enormous customer bases do marketing surveys. Any mass-emailing will be fiendishly difficult to process the responses from, and a web survey will have inherent sampling biases that render the results suspect.

I have no idea what they did for a marketing survey.

I did note however that they seemed to imply that there would be faster leveling, and a poll at EnWorld showed that only 20% of the audience here favored that, and more than 40% disapproved.

Good example--thanks, Celebrim! This is a poll with a sample biased towards regular posters at this particular ENWorld board who care enough about this particular issue to answer a poll about it. I guarantee you that the WOTC marketing department has no interest whatsoever in the results. (The designers might be interested in reading the thread where people discuss the pros and cons, but as a marketing tool it's useless.) The polls done by WOTC are sent to a few hundred or thousand randomly selected people. This is a small fraction of their customer base, so odds are that any given customer has never received an invitation; but that's a large enough group to provide statistically significant information to drive their marketing decisions.