Six Blind Men and the Fourth Edition....

[BryonD]

Still owning those Dragons, and having recently looked through them, I conclude that the news was accurate and far more substantive.

RC

I recall a clearer picture as well.

What I don't recall is WotC talking about how that can't tell you *this* because it is connected to *that* and they can't tell us *that* because it is connected to *the other*. If it is all so interlinked and new that they just can't say then fine. I'm fine if they decide to shut up for three months.
But don't show me something and then say I shouldn't have any complaints because I don't know enough. It might be true, but if it is then I also don't know enough to have any praise for it either and so it isn't really a preview.

I agree with the OP.

 

[BryonD]

I have to tell you - and I mean this as no slight to any specific individual, I mean it only in the collective sense - the lack of patience and sense of ... entitlement seen in the players (then and now) puts me off sometimes. It puts me off much more than the sense that WotC is manipulating us.

Did you see this during pre-3E? And if not, what do you think has changed?

 

[JohnSnow]

Still owning those Dragons, and having recently looked through them, I conclude that the news was accurate and far more substantive.

RC

I still own those issues of Dragon as well, and while they were accurate, there were some changes between the previews and the finished product. Moreover, the previews were more accurate the closer we got to release.

Would you care to post the 3e Dragon preview article from 6 months before the release?

 

[Riley]

I find this mode to be fun. I suppose it excites the part of me that likes assembling jigsaw puzzle, in alliance with the part that then likes to speculate along logical lines. Working with the bits we hear is an entertainment in and of itself.

Mind you, I am the sort of person that can play the elephant game, and at the same time hold off final judgement until I see the real thing. I take the elephant game's results with a hefty grain of salt, and don't consider it biding on WotC in any way.

I'm enjoying the game of unraveling the 4e puzzle as well.

With all the pro- and anti- rants that are weighing heavily on so many of the discussions, perhaps we could have a section of the message boards which is dedicated solely to putting together the clues and deciding what the beast actually looks like, quite apart from whether it is good beast or a bad one.

Perhaps it could be the "Six Blind Men" section? Perhaps it could even be done Wiki style?

 

[Riley]

\I was on EN's site, and it isn't like the Dragon stuff didn't come in there, too. I don't recall the news being really any more accurate or substantive.

Here's the kind of stuff that was trickling into Eric Noah's site as of December 1999.

The really good stuff didn't start flowing in until Winter Fantasy in January 2000.

I think we know about as much now as we did then, but you can decide for yourself.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Pretty standard internet marketing, really. A few tidbits, a lot of 'MYSTARY!' to stir up the audience. Couple it with the 'not quite done' factor, and it isn't really surprising or extraordinary, especially when they can dampen any fires with the 'well, you haven't seen the whole system yet' line. Or better yet, let the enthusiasts take on the doubters on their behalf. Cheap, inexpensive marketing.

Yep, it's about the same for, say, StarCraft II.

 

[MerricB]

By the way, here's the original 3e teaser from Dragon long ago:

That's really, really interesting.

And, honestly, few of them actually gave you the rule mechanics of 3e. They gave you a sense of the changes, but not how they'd actually work. The changes to how Strength worked were *nothing* like what is suggested in the article.

Your suggested "how to play 4e now" is far more specific.

I am already using Second Wind (from Saga) in my 3e game, and that's something that will be in 4e.

Cheers!

 

[Hussar]

My memory's a bit fuzzy. Didn't Dragon stop publishing for about a few months in the lead up to 3e or at least the latter days of 2e?

Meh, considering at the time Dragon was selling what, 30k issues a month? They were reaching a tiny, tiny fraction of gamers at the time. Heck, I'm willing to bet that Gleemax sees more eyeballs than Dragon did in 1999.

 

[Li Shenron]

I missed the 3e buzz period because I wasn't interested in RPGing at the time, so I can make no comparison. But I can try to compare it to how it worked with the 3.5 revision, at least how I felt at the time.

I have to say first that I am not bothered by the speed at which teasers are revealed. It's possible that announcing it almost 1 year before is a bit too much, but ok.

Howver, after the 1st announcement (which provided immediately a good bunch of info), IMHO there has been a few months of near-nothingness, where we only got vague info labelled with "it's supercool, but we can't tell you how". Now it's been already 1 month where we got better than that, so hopefully that lame period is over. They could have spared us of those months, but that's all.

When the 3.5 revision came out, the announcement was only a few months before, and IIRC we immediately got concrete previews (of course, because those revisions were already settled and not still under testing). It felt good to me, even if we only got limited info per month, because the overall tone in disclosing the info was serious and trustful, to me it felt like the designers of my favourite game were talking to me openly, without hiding something, without teasing me. It felt like a trustful friendly relationship between "us and them".

With 4e the initial tone was no so. It felt like been treated a bit like children, or "marketing targets". Of course we are indeed marketing target, but I prefer to be treated as an adult person. That more than everything will increase my trust in a company. But, as I said, hopefully such period is over and from now we're going to hear designers speak seriously, and as a matter of fact, I suspect they wanted this since the start, but were harassed by marketing department. Let's keep in mind that marketing doesn't care about what is being sold, they just want to sell it (in fact, marketing experts just move between totally different companies with ease); developers care about WHAT they develop, and only indirectly about how much it sells.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Sometimes I really regret not having been there when 3rd edition was announced first, because I would like to compare the two announcement-to-release times.

I have one speculation:
The information given for 3rd edition was as much as it was given for 4th edition.
But comparing the information now can give us the illusion we knew more, because we know the 3rd edition well now and see how the information "fits" into the game.
Since we haven't seen 4th edition yet, we also don't have a real idea how it fits into the game.

I mean, before you played 3rd edition, did you really understand what impact the concepts of feats or prestige classes would have? How Challenge Ratings and Encounter Levels fit into the adventure building process?