WotC has a milking machine now (Draconomicon I)

[Maggan]

I'm just stating that when you deal with a hobby you normally don't keep things which affect it secret.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Business plans on fire in the halls of GenCon. I watched polyhedrons glitter in the dark in a rundown warehouse. All those moments are lost in secrecy, like tears in rain …

Or to put it more succintly: there's a boatload of secret things going on in the gaming hobby and the gaming business. For some, it's like the hobby and business was a game of Paranoia, or a game of Diplomacy.

I think you would have to lie down and hug the pillow for a while if you were to know how much stuff is done in secret, just so someone can get an advantage over the competition, or just score one over another gamer on a messageboard.

Undercover playtesting, promotional astroturfing, sock-puppeteering, late night development of new rules, NDA's, the list goes on and on.

And that's perfectly normal, and nothing to be worried about.

/M

 

[Steely Dan]

BEHOLD... The Wang Chung Dragon!!!

Everybody drag on tonight….

 

[Roman]

Samples for what? A goal of 4E is to make dragons runable out of the book. Thats why they won't have any customizable abilities anymore. Open the MM, take a appropriate aged (level) dragon and you are ready for combat.

Good point! Nevertheless, I fear that they will still manage to provide lots of filler material in the form of sample lairs with dragons, and sample dragons with class levels.

So what should they make samples off? Classed dragons? According to the designers its easy to add class levels to monsters so such sample should not be really useful.

Yeah, well, I think it is easy to add class levels in 3.X too, but that does not stop them filling recent releases with same creatures with different types numbers of class levels. As I said, I hope this trend will change in 4E, but since this negative tendency already started in 3.X I will not be convinced until I see concrete evidence of a change of this approach.

 

[Hussar]

Samples for what? A goal of 4E is to make dragons runable out of the book. Thats why they won't have any customizable abilities anymore. Open the MM, take a appropriate aged (level) dragon and you are ready for combat.

ummm, what?

The only thing they are removing from dragons is the spell casting, AFAIK.

There are a million and one things you could do to dragons to make them far more interesting than whacking on 15 levels of sorcerer.

 

[hong]

ummm, what?

The only thing they are removing from dragons is the spell casting, AFAIK.

There are a million and one things you could do to dragons to make them far more interesting than whacking on 15 levels of sorcerer.

Shush, you're interrupting Derren's milking of the cow.

 

[Steely Dan]

Shush, you're interrupting Derren's milking of the cow.

The religious one?

 

[Derren]

ummm, what?

The only thing they are removing from dragons is the spell casting, AFAIK.

There are a million and one things you could do to dragons to make them far more interesting than whacking on 15 levels of sorcerer.

As far as I have heard dragons will "only" have 4-5 signature abilities and you will be able to run them out of the MM. No form of customization required (or possible without rule 0).

 

[hong]

required

I do not think this word means what you think it means.

rule 0

This word too.

 

[Hussar]

As far as I have heard dragons will "only" have 4-5 signature abilities and you will be able to run them out of the MM. No form of customization required (or possible without rule 0).

4-5 signature abilities. Hrm. Lesseee:

• Breath Weapon
• Melee Schtick (like a wing buffet or a tail sweep)
• Some sort of defensive power
• Some sort of domination/fear power
• Access to rituals

What else do you need? Even with 5 options, you could come up with hundreds of variations.

 

[Derren]

What else do you need? Even with 5 options, you could come up with hundreds of variations.

You are not supposed to select the abilities the dragon has. They are fixed depending on the dragon type.