D&D 4E The GenCon UK 4E Announcement

[OakwoodDM]

I like Bruce Cordell a lot, and he's a brilliant adventure writer. He's never struck me as an innate public speaker, though, and that would have been a tough crowd.

That's exactly how I felt. The poor man is obviously very good at his job, or he wouldn't be so high profile within it, but his job isn't public speaker. He did get a couple of nice rounds of applause/cheers for certain things (easier to DM, simplification of grapple being the two that stick in my head) but hadn't been well enough prepared to give the speech, and that showed. (For example, he quoted the monthly fee for DDI as between 6 and 14 dollars, and had to be prompted by Charles Ryan with the party line about "more than a magazine, less than an MMO)

As for the Q&A, I only got to see part of that as I had a game of Call of Cthulhu to play. I'm disappointed it apparently got so hostile after I left, when it could have been an opportunity to wheedle out extra bits of information.

Still, I got a t-shirt I'm not terribly likely to wear out of the house and I got to see the video of the guy with the interesting French/Spanish (we were divided as to which it was) accent on a bigger screen. I just wish it hadn't left my friends feeling so cold towards the new system.

 

[Baby Samurai]

Damn, I live in London and would have gone, but you know, the smell…

 

[Dice4Hire]

I like Bruce Cordell a lot, and he's a brilliant adventure writer. He's never struck me as an innate public speaker, though, and that would have been a tough crowd.

Based on the videos I saw on YouTube, they could have used a semi-competent speaker a lot. They were obviously very nervous, and deliver their laugh lines poorly.

I know they have impressive skills in other areas, but WOTC is big enough to have someone who is an ace at presentations.

Seriously, it reminded me of a conference I went to last summer, where one of the main speakers finished his speech 20 minutes early(out of a total of 50 minutes) It is just not done, and thirty minutes later no one remembered what he said in those 30 minutes, just how he actually stopped 320 minutes early. In this case, everyone listened to the content despite their presentation, but a good presentation could have made 4E sound a lot cooler.