January and Beyond!

[Shroomy]

Technically, they said to pay attention to the product catalog in the near future, but nothing concrete.

 

[Pour]

Congrats, Klaus! Would there be any way you could enlighten us on the process that went into getting Shades and Vryloka from your brain to this book? The pitch, maybe, or some idea of the back-and-forth with WotC, maybe other traits and powers you were considering, I suppose like your own Design & Development.

I'm pretty happy to get new races, and the idea of a race as class has all sorts of fun potential.

 

[Klaus]

I can't share much, but the races were the last things I wrote for the book. The shade's "gray stat box" and first paragraph of flavor text were given to me. I didn't quite like the Encounter racial power, so I came up with One with Shadow (but it did have a minor difference back then). I read about the shades in D&D lore, and I read the 1e MM2 entry, and tried to echo the original shade as much as possible (Magic Resistance? Not happening).

After I had done the shade, Mike (Mearls) told me to come up with a vampire race, but make it distinct. Once again, I read lots of vampire lore and came up with the vryloka (originally the vrykolaka). I can't say much about it until a preview comes up.

 

[shmoo2]

Also appearing in this book is the vampire class, which enables you to play a creature of the night in all its dark glory.

Interesting. This is a new mechanic for 4e - using a class to signify something other than your profession. Reminds me of the B/E/C/M/I boxes (dwarf, elf, etc. classes).

An entire class definitely gives the flexibility and range of power options to represent many vampire archetypes.

After the last preview, some complained of the lack of totally shadow classes in this book (as opposed to shadow builds of existing classes like the necromancer). Seems there is (at least) one.

 

[Ycore Rixle]

Did they say anything about the product schedule shuffle / book cancellations?

WOTC's silence is, in my opinion, a bad sign for D&D at WOTC. We shall see.

 

[Aegeri]

WotC should be sure to only publish material that fits the expectations of your game, then.

I am not the only one who is grinding front line strikers surges into the dust actually - it's just a function of the majorly increased damage since MM3. Six surges is not a lot when you can be taken to bloodied in a single hit now. Especially in the post-nerf to surgeless healing world DnD is now in.

What bothers me is that Klaus posted here to share two races that HE wrote and your immediate response is "that sucks."

This is an incredibly offensive and disingenuous argument to make given that I gave detailed reasons for the problems with the race. Saying "It sucks" is not what I did anywhere: I commented it was extremely underpowered without feats and set a very odd tone for the race by having an actual in built "negative" racial feature with the -1 surge. Especially because as I (and many others I should point out) have noted it doesn't get a single thing back for it.

This has become the stock response here at ENworld to just about every new announcement there is, and it's tiresome.

To be honest with the exception of the Gamma World expansion (expansions?) - let's face it not everyone here even likes or cares for Gamma World - there is not a single thing coming out this year that I really want. I actually don't mind HoS as I've routinely defended the class choices and the decisions to use essential style builds instead of full "traditional" classes. But I'm not going to hold back my opinions when I see something published that is just chronically underpowered. I'd rather see something that has great flavor and is well supported mechanically - something that is a good description of a lot of 4E races.

You don't need to insert "underpowered" into "flavor" anywhere. There are lots of things that are not only mechanically great but they also have excellent flavor in 4E (like many psionic classes post-Psionic Power, which was plain awesome). This is what I want to see and to be honest, the "crunch" they've presented from HoS thus far has been rather... less than convincing (thinking of the shadow hound as well).

As you said yourself, you haven't seen the feat support.

Even with feats they are just going to be taxes to bring the race up to par with others. That's a huge problem unless the actual books race is substantially different than the preview (which could be possible).

And some people will like the flavor more than the mechanics.

I like things that do both personally. I am not trying to be antagonistic here, but I am really sick of chronially underpowered things being published and subsequently left to die. Seeker. Beastmaster Ranger. Changeling. Albeit the changeling is in a better spot, as it's really the lack of support moreso than anything else.

If the worst race in D&D is the changeling, but people still have fun playing them, then how bad can they really be?

The changeling is bad, but the shade from what I've seen is substantially underpowered in comparison. Changeling trick is not spectacular, but it's usable and while the changeling lacks feat support there is nothing wrong mechanically with the base race. The changeling does not have an in built penalty to a valuable statistic. It's also poor design for 4th edition, which was supposed to have done away with this racial penalty aspect from previous editions (and so its inclusion is out of whack with the entire system).

How about we wait and see the shade in play before we revoke its license to practice medicine?

I don't need to play it to tell you a race with a pretty poor racial power, an inbuilt actual negative penalty and nothing that truly compensates it will be poor in play. While I leave a qualification for feats, without feat taxes to improve those powers it's going to be a really poor choice.

 

[Neverfate]

I think the race as some mechanically troubling weaknesses. I doubt I'd ever play this race as a rogue (despite the Dex modifier option) and the "stealth" standard action... thematically it fits, I guess, but I'd rather be far, far away from combat with Cha/Int based powers.

Still, From what I gather, Klaus didn't write the whole book, and despite the mechanical weakness the Shade are cool thematically and let's face it, there's some races now that haven't seen support in years.... so what's one more race with a cool shtick that's not optimized?

If someone could please give Klaus exp for me, thanks. Also I don't disagree with Aegeri's mechanical assesments of the race. He's just pointing out some oversights that come up in his game (many of my players would agree, as my combat is very dangerous).

 

[Pour]

Ah, that makes sense, NDA and all. Looking forward to seeing your contributions! And curious but did you have any influence on the look of the Shade or Vryloka, with your art background and all? I often find when I'm designing for my game I'm sketching and feeling out the look of them to later describe.

And I suppose you also know this well enough already, but I reckon one of the unfortunate denouements of designing is criticism, given with or without any sort of empathy. And come to think, I suppose another unfortunate denouement of working for WotC is there's always a few people out there to boo boo it. Persevere!

 

[Jools]

All this controversy about the shade. Its a cool, flavourful race with abilities useful for a narrow (ish) range of characters. This is a good thing. The shade should be a niche race. Well done OP - can't wait to read more. Very excited about the vampire class too.

 

[caudor]

WOTC's silence is, in my opinion, a bad sign for D&D at WOTC. We shall see.

I don't know if it is a good or bad sign, but I do feel like something is up. Ever since Essentials was released, it feels like WotC is holding back information, perhaps because of some big decision that may impact the release of several previously announced products.

I bet many WotC developers are having to bite their tongue and wait for the green flag to say something. My hunch is that some major shift in WotC roadmap has occured.

I guess we'll see when the next product catalog is released. Speaking of that, does anyone know when the next catalog is expected?