Preview Books - Will they have answers?

[Remathilis]

The preview books will not have all the races and classes listed. These things are still in flux and the preview book is off to print. No way it will have final say. It might list the possibilities that the designers were considering but not a definitive answer.

That's code for "We may have a need to add a second controller class once we found the warlock is really a striker"

 

[Michele Carter]

It's not much of a Preview book if it doesn't preview anything except what has been scrapped.

We were revising the book well into the typesetting stage to keep up with the latest PH changes, so that's definitely not the case.

 

[Scribble]

It's not much of a Preview book if it doesn't preview anything except what has been scrapped.

I'm not saying it's going to read like:

"Hey we didn't do this... and this.. and thins..."

I'm saying it will be along the lines of what they're already doing in the blogs. Stuff like tellings us how and why certain aspects of the game in previous editions didn't work, and what effects this had on their design process.

You won't see a lot of super concrete stuff like: Fighters will have x power usable per encounter that does Y...

You'll see stuff like: Because we knew per day abilities had a tendency to cause 15 minuteb work days, we decided that all characters needed to be relatively effective at any point in the game. Therefore one of our main goals was to design character abilities with the idea that no character could be rendered ineffective after just one or two battles...

My guess is the book is kind of a blog for gamers without internet access, or the ones not really interested in keeping up with Gleemax.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

We were revising the book well into the typesetting stage to keep up with the latest PH changes, so that's definitely not the case.

I'm looking for the big 16 color pages about the glory of gnomes that was added late in the process. Right? ... Right?

 

[Anthtriel]

Well, they don't have to be terribly careful to hide information, because the people who buy the preview books will invariably buy the Core books as well.

If they have confidence in what they have done (and they better do, their job depends on the success of 4E), then they have no reason not to pack it as full as they can. It's nearly impossible to lose money by putting to much worthwhile information in it, but it's quite possible to lose some if people spread the that there is not enough material in it.