D&D 4E Your habits, considering 4e is coming

[Li Shenron]

How will your gaming habits be affected by knowing that 4E is coming?

That could be anything... I'm at the moment about 50% likely to play it, so I don't even know if one year from now I will play 3.0 or 4e or something else entirely.

I am a DM and a player, and in our group there are 2 other DMs. We're very different DMs when approaching the rules.

I am the one who tries to use as few HR as possible, but when I use one HR it's typically a major one (UA-types). I use major HR as a device to differentiate between campaigns, together with changing settings assumptions.

Another DM is an AD&D grognard, and he usually applies lots of HR and tweaks, typically small HR but sometimes unbalacing... He doesn't seem to care about that very much, but he is also a strong Rule0-ing DM so if something really doesn't work, he'll cover it up with another HR.

The third DM doesn't care much about the ruleset. She cares much more about settings and flavor. So she very rarely uses HR at all (unless requested by the players). She does care a lot about how hard for the DM it is to use a ruleset, and because of that she has already expressed her wish not to DM with D&D 3ed anymore... BTW she runs other games with different rulesets, but I'm not playing in them.

What I expect from each of us...

I will probably wait and see. Continue running my 3.0 games, check reviews and the 4e SRD and the forums. A few months after May I might decide to give it a try from the SRD (just like I did with 3.5), unless it looks bad. After trying, I'll make my choice (btw, with 3.5 the choice was to stick to 3.0: saved a lot of money also). This is only about DMing of course... if the other DMs will switch to 4e I will certainly play that with them!

The AD&D grognard will probably pick up 4e anyway, rant about it a lot, make the switch anyway in his campaign but apply loads of HR just like he did with 3.0. (OTOH notice that he did NOT switch to 3.5 at all. It was totally unnecessary given his large use of HR).

The third DM will stop DMing 3.0 for sure, but might not be interested at all in 4e unless she is convinced from the other games that is significantly easier to DM, and still likeable in flavor.

That means I'm very likely to at least PLAY it in one group, and 50% likely to buy it and RUN games.

Will this change any plans for long term campaigns?

No. We certainly won't make a switch mid-campaign. We can wait until we're done with the current ones.

Going to have your current game finish up around the time of the 4e release?

No.

Think you'll be losing gamers from your group if you try 4e?

No. But neither I think we'll lose gamers if we don't make the switch. Maybe we'll lose potential NEW players if we don't convert... but frankly I don't care: we already are a bunch of friends and we don't need new players, and if we do one day, we are going to introduce some of our other friends to the hobby rather than recruit strangers. Furthermore, the kind of gamer that is obsessed with following the mainstream product line ("convert of perish") is typically the kind of gamer we don't enjoy to play with for long anyway...

Actually, the only major change that I foresee is that if I don't like 4e I will stop spending time on online forums

 

[Arkhandus]

Considering that I make it clear at the beginning of my campaigns that they'll be using 3.0 material and little or nothing else, I don't expect to lose any players to 4th Edition. It may be more difficult to find other players to game with later on, if I needed to, aside from those who've already invested a lot in 3E/3.5E and don't intend to convert.

I've met all of maybe 1 person in-person who was looking forward to 4E and/or really optimistic about it. And maybe 3 or 4 people that are uncertain but not outright opposed to it as I am (given the form 4E will take, that is; I have no problem with a new edition in general, though I'd prefer it came 2 or 3 years later). I know a few people like myself who've already spent enough money on 3E products and who don't expect to convert as a result.

 

[Jack99]

How will your gaming habits be affected by knowing that 4E is coming?

Will this change any plans for long term campaigns? Going to have your current game finish up around the time of the 4e release? Think you'll be losing gamers from your group if you try 4e?

Stopped working on fluff for my current campaign, since I intend to switch to a PoL setting for 4e.

Oh, and I stopped purchasing 3.5 books, but that's mostly because nothing interesting is coming out.

 

[Wombat]

Currently it appears that 4e will make no real impact on my gaming.

As I have dropped D20/3e/3.5/whathaveyou for other systems and never worried about any of the "core campaigns", the notion that there will be a shakeup in the "core system" is about as important as McDonald's saying that the McRib sandwich is coming back ... again...

 

[paradox42]

How will your gaming habits be affected by knowing that 4E is coming?

Not all that much, for at least a year I think.

Will this change any plans for long term campaigns? Going to have your current game finish up around the time of the 4e release?

I have two games going right now- the primary game has been going 6 1/2 years (we started in the early days of 3.0), and oddly enough will be reaching a critical world event- potentially an apocalyptic one- right around the time 4E is set for release. At least, this is the case if in-game events proceed at the same pace they're going now for the next 6 real-world months or so. This event has been foreshadowed in the game plotline for years of real time, and my estimates for when it would be happening in our game sessions have varied over the years but recently settled onto about May or June of 2008. The event in question is set to a specific date on the game world's calendar and can't be altered, so it's a question of how quickly the PCs play through the intervening time- thus the timing of 4th Edition's release is a pretty amazing coincidence for my group.

The secondary game might have been involved in that event, but a wild and unexpected plot turn a few months ago sent the characters careening back in time about 1800 years, so now the timelines have completely diverged and I have no idea where that one's going to end up in a few months.

In both cases, 4E is not changing my plans, but the primary game arguably could finish around the time of the release with no hard feelings on anybody's part.

Think you'll be losing gamers from your group if you try 4e?

Not at all. Actually most are expecting me to convert, since I went to the trouble of converting the game over to 3.5 in mid-story- but due to the heavy presence of psionics in my homebrew I can't convert the world until the psionics material is available. Before then it would just be an exercise in futility.

 

[AdmundfortGeographer]

I was all set to buy things like the Rules Compendium and Exemplars of Evil. Not now. No way. And I'm a total buy-'em-all guy.

Because I'm going to be playing in Living FR when it debuts I grabbed Grand History of the Realms. That is probably my last WotC purchase until 4e.

I'm going to finish authoring my final commitments for Living Greyhawk adventures and just ride out the days until 4e by returning to my cartography. Unless I get picked to be an administrator for Living FR that I applied for, , then I expect to be swamped with that.