WotC Blogs II

[Sammael]

We already knew that.

Really? I've been following 4E news fairly closely and I didn't know it. The last I heard, there was speculation that "trigger" immediate actions are going to replace AoOs.

 

[Ashrem Bayle]

Really? I've been following 4E news fairly closely and I didn't know it. The last I heard, there was speculation that "trigger" immediate actions are going to replace AoOs.

It was mentioned somewhere, but I can't recall the source. It's also in Der Kluge's little preview download.

 

[Glyfair]

Mike Lescault has posted a bit on the launch of 4E with lots of focus on the website.

A bit that's nice to hear:

On the forum side, we fared a bit better. One of my main fears was that people would flood all the existing D&D 3.5 forum with questions, debate, and complaints about 4E. Now, I am a huge fan of 4E and I think it's super exciting to have a miniscule role in it's roll out, but I definitely empathize with the folks currently playing D&D whose opinions are, "Yeah, fine whatever. Tell me when it's out. In the mean time, let me continue to enjoy my existing forums." It wouldn't be fair to all of those folks, many of whom have been Wizard's forum regulars for years and years, to have to deal with lots of madness they may or may not have any interest in.

The solution I wanted to try for this was to have the 4E forums be reply-only; meaning that customers couldn't post new threads but could only reply on existing topics. This had several advantages.

The first was that it helped balance out the signal to noise ratio that often occurs on internet message forums during announcements. I've been posting on forums for longer than I care to admit, and I was one of the biggest, loudest board warriors out there, so I know how that game is played. If I wanted to articulate an important point, I'd launch a sustained posting campaign alluding to that issue, making new posts every day or two on the subject.

Now you can imagine what a forum turns into when you have 6 to 12 board warriors who are very passionately and vehemently trying to articulate their specific concerns on a forum. After a few days, you end up with a ton of threads that are started by a few people, and individual folks who may have equally important points, but neither the time nor the desire to post their comment repeatedly, being drowned out in all the other noise.

Another advantage to this system was that the WotC D&D team could assign individual members to read one or two of the specific threads. Now, I don't know about everyone else out there, but my full-time job is to stay on top of what's going on in our community, and there was just no way I could read every single page of every single 4E thread. This means that the D&D folks who have jobs of their own to take care of, couldn't possibly read it all either. However, they have been able to read every page of one or two threads.

So we worked out a system ahead of time where each thread has multiple people assigned to read and (ideally) respond to the thread when possible. The net result is that every post made on the 4E forums by every member, was guaranteed to be read by at least one person on the D&D team.

Overall, I've been very impressed with how well this plan has worked out so far. Most of the comments on 4E has been positive or cautiously optimistic. The interesting part is that we plan on rolling out all of our 4E forums very soon, which will mean everyone can start creating their own threads.

Peter Schaefer started his blog, but right now it's just an "I'm the new guy and I have to catch up" post. Completely understandable, but boring I'm sure though he'll have some interesting insights as someone coming in and looking at 4E with fresh eyes, as things progress.

 

[TerraDave]

David Noonan did an update that concluded with this:

Mood: When Tordek grapples Lidda, no one wins. Certainly not the witnesses.

I will now apologies to the Mods in advance.

 

[Glyfair]

Rich Baker on devils:

]- Devils are angels who rebelled. They rose up against the deity they served and murdered him. The crime of deicide is unimaginably perverse for angels, and hence devils were cursed and imprisoned in the Nine Hells.
- The Nine Hells are what became of the murdered deity's divine realm after his death. The Hells are the devils' prison, and it is difficult for them to get out without mortal aid.
- We've re-sorted demons and devils a bit, since we want these two categories of monsters to make a little more sense. Devils tend to be more humanoid in form, usually fight with weapons, and often wear armor. Most have horns, wings, and tails. One consequence of this: the erinyes and the succubus were holding down pretty similar territory, so we've decided that they're the same monster, called the succubus, and it's a devil.
- Ice devils don't look like other devils. We've decided that they are actually a demonic/yugoloth race... one that was entrapped by Mephistopheles long ago in an infernal contract. So ice devils hate other devils, retain their insect-like appearance, and have a special loyalty to Mephistopheles. It's one of the reasons why Asmodeus has never chosen to move against Mephistopheles. Asmodeus would of course win if he did, but that would let the ice devils out of their contract.

David Noonan pretty much confirms a class many thought would be gone (no details about where it will appear, though):

Daily Work: Well, catching up on email after two days away from the office. Then a morning meeting on a class that rhymes with "zighter," and an afternoon meeting on a class that rhymes with "zaladin." Oh, and I'll assiduously ignore the sunlight streaming through the windows. No time for play! No outside recess! Must work!

 

[Mercule]

Interesting. I've been poking at the theology/cosmology behind demons and devils IMC, lately. I like their non-alignment-based division, even if it doesn't match what I came up with.

FWIW, my distinction was that all fiends were cast out, to be destroyed utterly at the end of days. Demons have embraced oblivion and now seek only to take as much of the creator's/creators' work as possible with them. Basically, they're a bit nuts and want to burn the good guys on their way out. The devils, on the other hand, seek to tie enough of creation (specifically mortal souls) to them that one of two things will happen. Either the creator(s) will recant and spare the devils in order to spare creation, or the devils will control enough real estate to make their own rules (which includes not going bye-bye). The alignment split happens somewhat organically as a result of their goals.

Hopefully, WotC don't use too big of a hammer with the new cosmology so that I can either take it or leave it.

 

[Glyfair]

Logan Bonner on classes and gnomes

Logan Bonner has posted some small tidbits about classes:

We're in a crunch trying to get classes spiffed up and entered into a database. We need to get our playtest packets together, and we're developing the classes rapidly. I've been in the rogue, ranger, and cleric meetings this week, and I think they're all on pretty solid ground.

One thing a player in Dave Noonan's game mentioned was that he wanted more non-violent options for his cleric. We'd gone pretty military for the cleric, but in the dev meeting, I made sure we put in some options for the other guy. "What would Steve Wolbrecht do" led us to some pretty cool powers that everybody—not just pacifists—will want.

Now I'm spending my days typing in monster numbers. I hadn't worked on monsters much, so it's cool to see what they're doing. I did wolves most recently, and gnomes are up next. (Gnomes ****ing rock, I don't care what anyone says.)

Some sad news from our lunchtime Savage Worlds game: My copy of the Explorer's Edition is missing a whole signature (page numbers skip from 16 to 49). We'd just hit Seasoned level, so it kinda sucked to not have any character advancement stuff in my book.

 

[TerraDave]

Meetings this week: cleric, fighter, paladin, ranger, rogue.

As for the gnome...now they are just messing with us.

 

[Glyfair]

Chris Thomasson started posting to his blog. There are a few bits there.

I figured I'd better get on here before someone else does.

I've been so busy reading submissions the last few days, that when Mike "Gamer_Zero" Lescault told me I had a blog, I think it took a couple days to sink in. In the weeks leading up to Gen Con, something had to drop by the wayside, and the submissions inbox wasn't the only casualty. I'm back in it now, though. D&D gamers clearly need less free time. I think I'm averaging twenty or so proposals a day. Sheesh!

So the playtest document is nearing completion, and many of the folks here in the department are still wrapping up 3.5 campaigns. I'm in Chris Perkins's Wednesday night game, and we're no different. I think we're about two sessions away from completing a four year campaign, the second set in his Arveniar world. I really wish we could publish his world. He has incredible amounts of detailed, amazing work sunk into this setting, and we've only explored one corner of the world. Chris is one of those DMs who seems to know the name of every denizen of his world, and he never forgets a detail. I'm convinced we could teleport a random distance in a random direction, and he'd be able to tell us immediately what we found on our arrival. It's uncanny. I think once the D&D Game Table launches next year, we'll have to offer a Chris Perkins DMed game up as a prize for something or other...

So while we're finishing up this campaign, we're eagerly looking ahead to starting our first 4th Edition campaign. Sure, we've all playtested over the past year or so, but this is the real deal. Last night we started talking about our first characters. I'm torn right now between a paladin (my favorite class) or a rogue. I like the idea of being a face man, and I usually play a divine character. I think being the guy who tries to chat up a bad guy, points over the villain's shoulder while saying "Look, a monkey!" and then shivs him in the kidney when he looks the other way sounds fun. On the other hand, smiting evil is always good fun. Hmmm... more thought required.

So one of the perks of working in an office like this is that a lot of folks make their iTunes music libraries available. I'm sitting here listening to Logan Bonner's music, and I'm impressed. He has better taste than I would have given him credit for, and quite the extensive library. Go Logan!

Okay, back to submissions.

I like the idea of using the Game Table to give "celebrity" run games. It also seems we are getting more clues with the classes in the PHB with both paladins and rangers getting mentions in the last couple of blogs.

 

[Nine Hands]

Man that would be sweet. My son turns 2 in October and I would love to be able to play in a game rather than DM. Sign me up for 4ed.

RK

I thought the same thing