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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Riley" data-source="post: 3824475" data-attributes="member: 12870">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 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020608004503/www.enworld.org/Eric/archive/index.htm" target="_blank">link to a Wayback Machine archive</a> 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 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020422153847/www.enworld.org/Eric/archive/3eoldnews3.htm" target="_blank">October 1999</a> 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 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020616034522/www.enworld.org/Eric/archive/3eoldnews6.htm" target="_blank">what was available in January 2000</a>, 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 <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20020616033829/www.enworld.org/Eric/archive/3eoldnews5.htm" target="_blank">December 1999, prior to Winter Fantasy</a>, 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.</blockquote>

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