Has Monte Cook made 4th ed Unnecessary?

[Harkun]

If Monte Cook is an 800lb Gorilla then WotC is the Cloverfield Monster. Sure, both are capable of bursting into our house and turning our lives upside down, but only one is going to change the face of the entire countryside. Like any other third party publisher, Monte Cook is going to wait a while to ensure that 4th Edition is a popular success and then he's going to shift over to publishing items for use with the Edition that receives the most popularity.

Of course, that's assuming the Gorilla doesn't just put on a pair of glasses and resign himself to writing novels. (Which will also be 4th Edition novels).

I was not refering to Monte as the Gorilla, the Gorilla is the SRD and the fact that anyone can take it and modify it into anything, including a virtual 4th ed that is free rather then 40 bucks.

 

[Tzarevitch]

To any of you who have gotten to see Monte Cooks book of expermental might, I ask you; is 4th ed even nessessary at this point. For the cost of 9 bucks, you can incorperate most of the talked about 4th edition elements into your 3.5 campaign right now and you don't have to change your whole campaign.

At this point I think WOTC might be trying to ignore the 800 pound gorillia but the fact is that 3.5 is still covered with the OGL and they have already said they can't change that. 4th will be different in that there will be restrictions in what can and can not be published under the new 4th ed GSL.

So what I'm asking is will the community support this or will they take something like Monte's book and incorperate them into a sort of 3.75 that will still exist as a free and open source game?

The community will support it as always. There will always be grognards but the community will support 4e regardless for one simple reason: market share. As has been posted before, Monte may be the 500lb gorilla but WotC is the Cloverfield monster. . . on steroids with a planet-destroying laser and a hyperdrive. So long as 4e solves many of the problems of 3.xe and is reliably supported by WotC, the market will follow them. Monte simply is not going to be able to produce sufficient material even if he wanted to. It isn't worth buying one-off rules then having to convert everything when WotC produces everything to their new rule set requiring minimal conversion. That is the fact of it.

Monte has produced some good stuff but he has also produced some duds. Contrary to popular belief, he does not walk on water, and nd I have yet to see him turn water to wine. His stuff is by and large pretty decent but it does not fix the underlying problems in the 3e system any more than any other publisher including WotC itself. Lastly after you have patched 3e so much is it really even 3e anymore? At some point you've developed a significant enough change that it really is a new system. . . a la a different form of 4e.

No offense intended, but thinking Monte will hold back the tide is wishful thinking. I don't think he intends to do that and he couldn't if he wanted to.

Tzarevitch

 

[Harkun]

I purchased BOXM and I'm looking forward to implementing those rules in my current 3.5 campaign.

I had the opportunity to preview 4E at DDXP, and while I had fun, it rather lowered my enthusiasm for 4E.

So, in the end, these two things combined have made 4E unnecessary for me for the time being.

Well, it looks like you are not the only one. If you see today's story on the d20 News page, it looks like Living Arcanis is tossing 4th ed away and leaving the D+D camp. Funny thing is that this is AFTER they got a chance to not only see 4th in action but also after they saw the new SRDs.

I'm becoming more and more convinced that the industry and fans need a free and Open Source SRD, gaming is simply becoming too expensive. Rebuilding a game library every 5 to 10 years is just getting out of hand.

 

[Steely Dan]

Rebuilding a game library every 5 to 10 years is just getting out of hand.

Why do you need to rebuild – I've just been building my library for the past 21 years or so.

I have migrated to each new edition, but I still love looking at my older edition's material for a variety of reasons – why must it be so extreme with people?

 

[Harkun]

why must it be so extreme with people?

MONEY!

'nuff said

 

[Steely Dan]

MONEY!

I don't buy into the money bit; sorry for the terrible pun, I mean, next to almost any other hobby (comics, cars, art, wine, women etc) D&D/RPGs are on the cheap side.