Six Blind Men and the Fourth Edition....

[Plane Sailing]

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.

Thanks for posting those links.

In the context this thread, I thought the following quote from the first thread was eye-catching

Patience, Young Jedi: WotC Game Designer Andy Collins had some good advice for all of us: "Please, folks, be wary of making final decisions (or uninformed comments) about a game that won't be released for 8 months. You're doing yourself, your fellow list readers, and the game itself a disservice. Sure, it's hard to wait. And yes, it's interesting and exciting to guess about how certain rules will work. But it doesn't do any good to make up your minds now. Wait until the game comes out, and *then* you can have informed debates about the ramifications of various rules. Otherwise, you're simply replaying the "three blind men examining an elephant" story over and over and over again." (On DND-L; thanks to George Harris for the scoop)

 

[Simia Saturnalia]

The only thing I've learned here is no-one can even agree how many blind men there are.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Given they're still writing and playtesting the game, I'm happy with the information we have. To be honest, it's entirely up to them.

With the game still being more than six months away, I can see 2008 meaning a LOT more information being given out as they set more rules in stone.

 

[shilsen]

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 was on Eric's boards when 3e was still in the pipeline and your speculation sounds bang-on to me. There was a huge amount of "this sounds interesting but what does it mean?" going on, and a lot of it didn't fit together into a coherent picture until the books were in our hands.

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?

Conceptually - yes, I did. But one really had to get the books before it became completely clear. And even then, as people have posted on other threads, so many of the immediate assumptions that were made with the books in hand ("OMFG! Monks are the msot powerful class!") turned out to be dead wrong.

A lot of the stuff going on here on the 4e boards and elsewhere is amusing for me because I think I'm about as far away from the sense of entitlement that Umbran mentioned as it's possible to get. When I buy a book from WotC, I figure all they owe me is the book I paid for. Product support, all the stuff they put on their site, keeping the particular product line going - that's all a bonus to me. So when it comes to 4e and the previews and anything else they put out about it, I see that as a freebie. If they announced 4e and didn't put out a single piece of additional information about it till the books came out, it wouldn't bother me in the least, since I don't think they owe me that information. It makes sense for them to put it out, of course, just like it makes sense to advertise a product, but am I going to get bent out of shape and think I have a right to it because I've spent hundreds of dollars on earlier books or because I play D&D? Hell, no!

 

[Kahuna Burger]

To be honest, it's entirely up to them.

Why do people keep saying this? I mean seriously, has anyone suggested a class action lawsuit to change marketing strategy? It's like the mirror universe "entitlement mentality" where actually saying how you feel about something is perceived as an attack on the rights of a company.

It never would have occurred to me to say this in my original post, but apparently it's needed :

"I, Kahuna Burger, being of slightly sleep deprived mind and overworked body, do swear that I am not under the impression that WotC or any other company doesn't have the right, both legal and moral, to market a product in whatever way they choose, and my experience of a reaction to marketing strategy or public discussion of that reaction does not constitute a request that said marketing strategy be forcibly changed, perhaps by an act of congress."

Sheesh.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

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?

The latter, yes. Dragon and Dungeon suffered during the collapse of TSR, to the point where they were several months behind on releases of issues. I remember eagerly awaiting issue #247 (the one with the Rakasta article by Bruce Heard) but it being delayed several months for financial reasons- that I wasn't aware of at the time.

The magazine's publication schedules (Dragon's at least, I didn't get Dungeon regularly at the time) were back on track well in time for the advent of 3rd Edition, though. To the extent that they had a year long Countdown to Third Edition series of articles full of lots of crunchy tidbits prior to the release of the new version.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

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

I think that's all pretty substantive stuff, myself- more than we've currently got. Even considering that some of it changed in the interim. YMMV.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

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?

While I see your point in re: context, I will say that the notion of Feats and Prestige Classes really was laid out pretty well before we actually saw all of the mechanics behind them- there were a lot of people, as I recall, who were already using them in their games just based on the tidbits they'd already accumulated (in fact, myself along with several other people on the various sites, had compiled rough 3rd Edition PHBs with which they were using to run pre-3E games).

The CR and EL stuff, no, it's true. I don't really recall seeing too much info on that prior to the DMG release. IIRC, there were just some tidbits but not enough to deduce the XP system around.

So, yes, in some areas there wasn't enough info to judge the context by, but there was plenty of substantive info in other areas (notably Character Generation).

(BTW, much thanks to Riley for finding those links to the Black Pages and- surprisingly- Der Verdammte's old page. Been looking for those for a while, and the links here at ENWorld seem not to be working. Those were my two primary sites for info in the day!)

 

[Agamon]

This is the thing I dislike most about 4E. I was really looking forward to the buildup, the 3E buildup was fun. This is horrible. The information were getting is sparse, disjointed and generalized.

In 3E, we got some info, and we wondered how it would affect the game. Now, we get info, and we need to speculate how it works, if it's actually a game mechanic or fluff, was it a central mechanic to the game, or something unimportant mentioned in passing that the readers are focusing on?

They're being too coy with the info. I don't care what your playtest fighter did during a battle with a dragon, tell me why, or don't tell me anything, please.

 

[Umbran]

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

Note that I was not a moderator pre-3e, so my perspective has changed. But I do recall many complaints. And the Andy Collins message quoted by Plane Sailing backs up my memory. At the time, Andy thought there was a need for that kind of message.