D&D 3E/3.5 How does the rollout of 4e teasers compare to 3e?

[Riley]

I had a general impression that we knew a lot about 3e nearly a year before its release, so I wanted to figure out if it's true. I couldn't find the information on ENWorld, but I found an archive of Eric Noah's news items on the Wayback Machine.

Here's a link to a Wayback Machine archive of the 2002 ENWorld archive of 1999-2000 news posts from 'Eric Noah's Unofficial Dungeons & Dragons 3e News Page' (whew!).

So how are we doing? There are a couple of benchmarks for comparison.

If we compare October 1999 with October 2007, we are doing okay. The information was still very piecemeal back then, and certainly a lot less detailed than I remembered.

But D&D 3e was released in August 2000, not May. If we look at time-from-release and compare the information available today, 7 months prior to the release of 4e, with what was available in January 2000, 7 months prior to 3e's release, we're way behind the curve.

Now that's some detailed knowledge of the soon-to-be-published game. It's got saving throw tables, Domain spell lists, the XP/Leveling-up table (with feats and ability score advancement), stats for familiars, and on and on and on.

But all of that came out at Winter Fantasy, where people got to try out 3e for the first time. The information available in December 1999, prior to Winter Fantasy, was much less specific. Better than today, but not that detailed.

So we'll get our real previews in the December teaser books, and the details of the 4e system will be leaked from those attending D&D Experience, aka Winter Fantasy. It seems like the only real difference will be the timing of the actual book release - in May rather than August, done to facilitate things at Gen Con. And that is a good thing. The worst part of the 3e rollout was the spring of 2000, when we pretty much knew what the rules were like, but we couldn't quite play yet.

All in all, though I started this expecting to find the current teasers very far behind the curve, at the end of it I'm willing to cut WOTC a little more slack, and be a bit more patient with the 4e teasers.

 

[Lackhand]

Also consider that we know a LOT more about how the game is going to look because of implicit teasers, which we can't really state as "leaks", per se.

There weren't too many rules tidbits inherited from, say, Alternity, into 3rd edition D&D.

I'm not certain that that's true here, with respect to later 3rd edition products and Saga. We don't know which rules will bridge the gap, but the lists of developers are pretty similar, and we've been told that those are good places to look for previews.
What's in versus what's out is fuzzy, but there's a well-defined debate space, because we have actual concrete rules implementations to study for some of these wacky 'new' concepts.

Also certain is that while there will be some small mechanical changes with enormous paradigm-cracking results, the overall *engine* is remaining pretty similar. We didn't really have that, the last time around.

So I feel like I know *more* about what 4th edition is going to look like than I did last time around, with 3rd.

 

[mhensley]

We used to have all those great preview articles about 3e in Dragon.

 

[Wormwood]

We used to have all those great preview articles about 3e in Dragon.

And I'm fairly sure that's going to happen again---it's kinda happening now, actually.

 

[Rechan]

We used to have all those great preview articles about 3e in Dragon.

Except we had to pay for those.

All I know is, WotC needs to post the Design and Development article for this week.

 

[EricNoah]

It could be many factors: 1) playtesters are less willing to break their NDAs today, 2) broad external playtesting may not be underway or very far along, 3) WotC is steadily feeding certain types of information through their blogs and website and thus potential scoopers don't see the need to scoop quite as much, 4) potential scoopers don't know how to submit a scoop. Just some possibilities. Last time around they really had to sell us on some of the core mechanical changes (AC numbering system, the whole DC thing); I'm not sure there are going to be as many of those, so the nature of the information to be gathered is somewhat different.

 

[Riley]

It could be many factors: 1) playtesters are less willing to break their NDAs today, 2) broad external playtesting may not be underway or very far along, 3) WotC is steadily feeding certain types of information through their blogs and website and thus potential scoopers don't see the need to scoop quite as much, 4) potential scoopers don't know how to submit a scoop. Just some possibilities.

I have to admit, I expected that a leaked playtest document would've appeared somewhere on the internet by now.

I guess WOTC has done a very good job in carefully choosing their playtesters. Hopefully, the playtesters aren't so loyal (or narrowly representative) as to simply say "that's great!" to everything, or to primarily push for rules that are better for a particular style of play, rather than those that can best accomodate a wide breadth of D&D styles.

 

[EricNoah]

I'm sure Russ will be careful to judge whether info he receives really should be leaked at all. I'm sure he agrees it's not his mission to distribute playtest documents he may or may not receive. I received all sorts of stuff in my day that I knew would have gone over the line and soured my relationship with WotC. Sometimes I wasn't cautious enough and got my hand slapped. And sometimes it was their fault (anyone remember Skurge?).

 

[Dragonblade]

Based on statements made about playtesting, I don't think playtesters are given the big picture. I think they are given premade characters and monsters, rules that are relevant to what they are testing and that's it.

I think WotC has put the fear of various deities into them by likely telling them that their playtest docs contain unique information that can be traced back to a specific playtest group if it is shows up online.

Thats what I would do if I was WotC. I'm not a playtester so this is pure speculation.

 

[EricNoah]

The best "anonymous" scoops in my day were ones that clarified something that the great mass of people had misinterpreted -- it usually calmed little "teapot tempests" that sprang up now and then. I rarely got huge chunks of playtest materials dropped in my lap, though I had offers now and then.