More official answers to 4th Edition questions! I've answered these questions elsewhere, but it seemed like a good idea to collect them (something I've been meaning to do for a few days now).
If I’m the sort of person that tries to minimize the use of miniatures in my game, will 4th edition be right for me?
Although 4th Edition assumes that most players are using miniatures to represent their characters and monsters, 4th Edition doesn’t require the use of miniatures any more than the previous edition does.
One of the biggest announcements was the level cap. Why thirty levels? Why not stick with the traditional 20?
We liked the idea of building “tiers” into the game, so that Dungeon Masters had clear start points and end points for their campaigns. Levels 1–10 is called the heroic tier, levels 11–20 is the paragon tier, and levels 21–30 represents the epic tier. We felt strongly that we wanted to include epic-level play in the core game and make it less of a departure from the core system, rather than tack it on in a later product. Although each tier promises a slightly different play experience based on the capabilities of characters and monsters at these levels, every tier will still feel true to D&D.
Do you feel that players who enjoy the current generation of MMOs and computer RPGs have gotten used to their large level caps with more frequent reward plateaus? How has this impacted the way you’re now breaking up character progression?
We know that players enjoy the experience of “leveling up,” provided it’s not onerous, and so we’ve built a system that allows them to level up more often. We didn’t want players to have to “level up” their characters every session because that WOULD get onerous; doing so every two or three sessions seemed more appropriate and palatable, and that’s how the new system is currently built.
Has the road to the endgame been lengthened, level-wise, or is there a new upper limit to how powerful D&D characters will get? For example, will a level 30 character in 4th Edition be as strong as a level 20 in 3.5, or is a level 20 character in 4th Edition about as strong as an epic-level character in previous editions?
The way character advancement works now, it takes fewer encounters to gain a level, but it takes roughly the same length of time to reach 30 levels in 4th Edition as it takes to reach 20 levels in 3rd Edition. The rate of level advancement is still being playtested, however, so the jury’s still out on whether the final game will work this way.
One of the goals of 4th Edition is to make high-level play as fun, balanced, and manageable as low-level play, and to make high-level characters as easy to create and run as low-level ones. Comparing high-level 4th Edition characters to high-level 3rd Edition characters is not an apples-to-apples comparison because they’re built very differently. However, there isn’t a startling increase in overall power level from a 20th-level 3rd Edition character to a 20th-level 4th Edition character.
Greyhawk has generally been the de facto “starter setting” for Dungeons & Dragons. With the announcement of RPGA’s Living Greyhawk campaign ending and new Living Forgotten Realms campaign starting up, is the incredibly popular Forgotten Realms now the default campaign setting for 4th Edition?
The core rulebooks are not aligned to any specific campaign setting. Dungeon Masters may use any, all, or none of the proper names and locations mentioned in these books when building their own campaigns. For example, in the Dungeon Master’s Guide we’re aiming to include a fully-detailed town or village that DMs can use as the starting point for their 4th Edition campaigns, but they are free to change the details to serve their own needs.
What settings are slated for 4th Edition support? Specifically, will there be 4th Edition sourcebooks for Eberron, Forgotten Realms? Are you planning on bringing back any older settings such as Planescape or Ravenloft, and are there any new settings in the works?
We will continue to support the Forgotten Realms and Eberron campaign settings both in game product and with novel lines. The Forgotten Realms campaign setting will be the first one updated for 4th Edition in print, with a new campaign guide releasing in August 2008. Other classic campaign settings may be revisited in print product as demand warrants, but not as full-blown product lines. Most of the support for these less popular campaign settings will occur on D&D Insider, in the form of articles, wikipedias, and the like.
Do the rules feel video game friendly and ripe for translation to the electronic realm and were they in any way created with that sort of thing in mind?
Fourth Edition was created to be the best tabletop roleplaying game on the market. The staff assigned to build the new game aren’t professional video game designers, but it does seem that the rules could be translated to the “electronic realm” with relative ease.
