D&D 4E How is the 4e announcement affecting your game groups?

[Protagonist]

Our gaming group has decided on prolonging our current 3.5 campaign until everyone has gotten hold of the 4E books. A friend and I are the DMs in our group and our original idea was to end my campaign by early spring so that he could DM his campaign afterwards (and I get to play). Seeing as we want to switch to 4E asap it wouldn't make much sense to start his campaign pre-4E, so my campaign will go quite a bit longer...which is fun in a way but requires quite a few changes to some of the nodes I had planned.

Apart from that (and the fact that no one buys any new 3.5 books) it's gaming as usual

 

[Papa-DRB]

I am the DM for 6 Players.

We have pretty much decided to not go to 4E for the following reasons: (Top 5 only)

5) We would all have to buy a new PHB
4) I would have to buy a new DMG & MM, and the yearly updates
3) If anyone wanted to play a class in whatever 4E's "complete" series was, they would have to buy 2 of that book since they have to give 1 to me
2) I have enough 3.5E adventure material to last 15 years
and the most important reason
1) We are happy with the system as it is now!

Now, all 7 of us have very good paying jobs so we *could* easily afford to buy the new books, it is we just do not want to.

 

[Jack99]

I have 6 players, two of which are against the idea of change. Not that they know anything about 4e, hell if I hadn't told them, they most likely wouldn't even know it was coming. They are just against change.

I just told them that we will be playing 4e, unless we all agree it sucks after trying a few times. I suspect they will come around fairly quick, once they see the rules (it was the same story with them when we switched from 2e to 3.0.

 

[Belen]

It split one of my groups at first. Some people decided to play 4e and others basically told them to have fun with the game, but that they will form a different group. The compromise was that no one would play 4e and that we'd look at M&M2e instead.

In my other group, we will be sticking with 3.5 and begin modifying it to meet our needs. No one is interested in spending the type of money that Wizards is forcing you to spend for 4e.

 

[StarFyre]

my group...

After the initial announements, and every session (1 or 2x per month - 8 to 14 hours each), we have a quick discussion on rules. Basically, I learned of it first since I check wizards.com and enworld, and since I'm the DM, I brought it up that I am interesting in switching to 4E.

My reasoning was that, it sounded like, due to powers, for players overall, there is alot of good in the new edition.

However, we've already got rid of alignment and use a more 'real life' model. We have lots of house rules for races/classes, etc, and cosmology/the D&D universe, and even spells, critical hits, and gods.

That said, i told the players that I like about 50 to 60% of what I see from 4E; some changes don't affect us since our house rules nullify them, and the rest I don't like so I want to house rule it all to what we use now OR I will do a complete re-write on it. (Wizards will be getting some heavy re-writes most likely, and several classes/races will have to be 'converted' from 3.5E, 3E, and 2E).

My friends' reactions:

Player 1 (male): looking forward to it; knows I house rule anything I see fit, to ensure players are happy, so he is all good. (his char will prob need some)

Player 2 (female, sister of Player 1): looking forward to it as well. Her char will need MAJOR house rules/re-writes (Lillendi Bard, advancing levels in a customized 2E multiclass fashion to represent her as a 'person' growing, at the same time as her class (her job/education) getting better.

Player 3: didn't want to change, but will since I am the DM and he loves playing D&D anyways....even tried to skip out on going to a wedding with his fiancee (another person's wedding) since I set D&D that day a few weeks earlier...he ended up coming for half the session and rushed off to get ready hehe He controls 2 characters in the party (cleric and wild mage....both I will have some house rules for, more for the mage)

Player 4: he complains of everything. this is too weak, this is too powerful, but without any logical reasons why. No one really cares what he thinks...hehe

Player 5: he just wants to kill stuff; but my heavy story/rp/exploration style of campaigns slow stuffdown for him. thankfully, when there is a battle, I make sure they are all truly epic in scope, size, etc....so he's thankful of that and happy. He will need some house rulings for his character (half-orc barbarian)

Player 6: he is looking VERY forward to 4E.

Player 7: he has moved away to Austria. Player 1 controls his character and does a great job RP'ing so that he doesn't just use this character in the same way of his own. Emails to player 7 for his general thoughts and direction he wants to take for major decisions for his character, lead that, hedoesn't care for or against 4E. either way..he'll be fine. (he;s a super hardcore RP style player...so rules mean nothing to him)

I think overall, the group is looking forward to it just cause the player aspect sounds better.

Sanjay

 

[Fifth Element]

Let's see...

One player only started playing D&D 6 months ago, and really has no concept of what a new edition means. No opinion there.

One player runs a game store, so I expect he's relatively excited by the prospect of a new edition, if only for purely financial reasons.

One player has shown his true 3.X grognard colours, railing against this minor thing and that as if the world were coming to an end. He's a definite no.

The rest are generally cautiously optimistic (as am I), and want to see the final product before deciding whether they want to convert or not.

But it really doesn't come up that much - we're busy playing 3.5 right now.

 

[Mr Jack]

No-one I know is currently playing 3.5, I've run a big 3rd campaign, and played in an open 3.5 game and there were a few others kicking around. They've all petered out in favour of other systems.

I'm currently running the Great Pendragon Campaign. It's probably got another 18 months to run, so that will proclude running a weekly game. I'm hopefully about to start playing in a weekly Amber game, and have an intermittent ShadowRun game on the go.

The 4th ed annoucement has garned interest and discussion but no-one's considering kicking in a current game to play it. My current plan is to run a monthly game, starting shortly after it comes out.

 

[Khairn]

Out of 18 players over 3 different games I have 2 who are a definite "yes", for 4E, a couple on the fence, and the rest a solid "Don't see anything that I like so far." We're playing 1 D20 game, nMage, and Artesia.

With that type of indifference towards 4E, we end up talking about it for maybe 10-15 minutes at the start or end of a session, and that's about it.

On the good side, recent sales have allowed a few of the players who hadn't bought certain 3.5 books, to grab a couple at very cheap prices. They were very happy about that.

 

[Desdichado]

Are you finding your groups split like this or solidly in one camp or another?

No. In fact, my group is almost unanimously looking at a position right about here:

The third group of 3 players is also not interested in 4e because of the expense and they just don't see a need to make a change. They feel 3.5 is fine with some minor house rules so why spend the money.

The plan was to have a look at the new SRD, but the latest news means we probably won't be able to do that. For our group, at least, that means for WotC that at best we're a delayed sell; at worst we never bother moving on at all.

 

[FickleGM]

Unfortunately, I'll probably try it out. I'm a sucker like that. Because it isn't going to do for me what True20 does, I will probably not stick with it.