Slashdot Mirror
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Announced
bigstrat2003 writes "For the past day, Wizards of the Coast has had a countdown to "4dventure" on their web site. The countdown ran out at 6:30 eastern time today (and the web site promptly crashed), but stories are already appearing on the rest of the web. Wizards also has had their 4th edition forums up for a couple of days."
Well, I left the countdown running on my computer, when it ran out, it auto refreshed and showed me the new page. Maybe a few thousand other people did the same. Anyway, the site looks quite different now, and seems to have a lot of new content, although I can't navigate it (the server being down and all). the coral cache does work though (at least it was around 8pm).
Video Production Support
First they cancel the popular and successful Dungeon and Dragon magazines by not renewing the subscription with Paizo, and next they pull a stunt like this? I don't believe I'm the only one to find the DRM-laden "Digital Initiative" to be potentially a very poor substitute for the magazines, and this blunder will only compound the ill will directed against them.
This move will only alienate their consumer base. The fact that 3.5 is working, and in no need of overhaul, exposes the fact that they are doing this under the motivation of short-sighted greed. I shudder to think what sort of backlash (as before with Dungeon and Dragon were canceled) is taking place on the forum.
I'm literally in shock right now. I thought Wizards of the Coast understood its consumer base better and was comprised of people more concerned about the integrity of the game and more competent about long-term business strategies.
A front page D&D news story. That's gotta be hard to top.
I own damn near every 3.5 book there is. I haven't looked too much into the "new version" but I have no intention to replace the books I own. If the "new version" is mostly moot, as far as system changes, then I'll continue to buy their books.
Given that the system is fairly hashed out, I don't see much reason to change.
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
So how much xp do we get for killing the website?
I had to try 3e when it came out... I figured it was really cool that my favorite RPG was getting a facelift, as I was never really satisfied with the 2nd edition rules. But alas, after trying it out and playing it for a few weeks I concluded that it was a big mistake to have sold all my 2e stuff to finance the purchasing of 3rd edition material. 3rd edition D&D was not a role playing game as I understood it... it was basically just a pen-and-paper version of a computer game, requiring a ridiculous amount of number crunching and bean counting. Suddenly every single thing that a character was supposedly able to do was governed by a skill associated with a number... taking away a vital element of creativity that in my opinion is a vital core of any real RPG. Rather than trying to reacquire the 2nd edition stuff I formerly had, however, I decided instead to go all the way back to the beginning (well, almost) and go with first edition AD&D, because the number of books published for it was small enough that it wouldn't completely break my pocketbook to get them all. I spent a couple of weeks hunting for bargains on ebay and eventually got all the hardcover rulebooks for the game. I bought pdf's of modules through rpgnow, and I was good to go. I have now have a group of 4 players, and we play weekly.
Fans of 1st edition AD&D, check out the Dragonsfoot web site. 2nd edition is well received there too.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I think that I am (rolls a d20)...happy for this news.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
That would be a very good thing.
Predictions:
1) reductions in all rules requiring any DM adjudication
2) more caster nerfing to "balance" the classes across all levels
3) a new campaign world
4) idiotic marketing
Wizards doesn't seem to get the idea that it doesn't have enough momentum to carry the MMORPG market.
Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and the (incredible) Planescape:Torment put them on perfect footing to make a huge splash in the MMORPG arena, but they chose to hack their dong off by setting Dungeons and Dragons Online in Eberron, their new PnP setting.
Mind you DDO launched well after WoW.
They actually decided, I can only assume, to set their 1st mainstream attempt at an MMORPG in a completely foreign world to most of their customers in order to drive book sales.
Books.
Pulp.
Magazines. (now sadly gone)
That's how out of touch they were.
Wizards is still trapped in a world where metal must hit paper to make money, to their loss.
WoTC got its start with Magic, the object of which is to purchase as much printed matter from WoTC as possible.
I lost interest when they started coming out with all the specialized books for the various specialties.
When I realized I had more money tied up in D&D than I had in my stereo and computer systems combined I decided to quit cold turkey.
And I realized trying to get a game of D&D together when you're 19 is a pretty sad thing. Everyone else with their girls and drugs and booze, and me with my Horseshoes of a Zeyphr, and bag of holding.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
When 4th Edition comes out it will have been about 8 years since the 3rd edition books came out. Being mad because they were inconsiderate enough to release a new set of rules after that length of time seems a bit silly to me. Especially since the new edition coming out in no way makes the version you have less fun to play.
How come you aren't pissed that they made a 3rd Edition in the first place? How dare they give you a new system to use!
I'm going to have to spend all my money buying the new books! If I had a girlfriend, she'd kill me!
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
I run a nationwide 3.5ed D&D campaign (anyone can play -- www.livingplanar.com), and have talked a little bit with some people at WOTC about 4th edition. If you've been paying attention to their releases over the last year or two, you'll have noticed like I did that they've been experimenting with a lot of new 'systems' for doing stuff. The Tome of Battle completely redid combat for non-spellcasters, the Tome of Magic introduced 3 new magic systems which didn't fit in with the standard magic-user/cleric model that we've had since the '70s. Magic of Incarnum was another alternate magic system. Complete Scoundrel introduced 'skill tricks' which rewrote how skills worked. Complete Mage introduced 'reserve feats' which allowed spellcasters to cast (weak) spells all day long. Hell, the Warlock (which was a weak spellcaster that never ran out of spells) was probably their first real attempt at 'fixing' magic in D&D, which has long been problematic, is it has always overshadowed your mundane fighter types.
In 3ed or 3.5ed D&D, if you want to play a fighter (and you're optimizing your character), you play a spellcaster, and use spells to make yourself more human than the human.
At the San Diego Comicon this year I was a WOTC volunteer who was basically the 'Star Wars Saga Edition Guy' who got to explain the rules of Saga Edition to maybe 50 tables of people, running half hour games each time. Since Saga Edition is supposed to be real close to 4th edition, I'm probably as familiar as anyone with the hypothetical rules right now. Saga edition, in a nutshell... is okay. It removes your armor class and saving throws. Instead you have a joint AC/Save thing called Fort Defense, Reflex Defense and Will Defense, and the attacker makes all dice rolls (with the defense numbers normally 10 points higher than your old save, so a +5 reflex save would be a 15 reflex defense in the new system) so if I were to, say, fireball the party as a DM, I'd roll one d20 with my 10d6 fireball damage. If I got a 15 on the d20 'attack' roll, it would do full damage to everyone with a Reflex Defense of 15 or lower, and half damage to everyone higher. So you don't have to wait for 6 people to break out their dice, figure out their saving throw bonuses, etc. You just pitch the dice together, announce the result, and move on. A nice touch, though I'm a bit leery of running spells like Wail of the Banshee that way, as it will greatly increase the chance of TPKs -- we'll see if they keep one save for the party with that.
AC is now your Reflex Defense.
They have something called a condition track which runs concurrently with your hit points (you still have hit points -- Saga Edition is 90% the same as D20 rules). Any time you take more than your 'damage threshold' in damage (it's usually somewhere around a number between 15 to 20), you get a point of impairment, which adds a cumulative penalty to all your D20 rolls (-1, -2, -5, -10 KO), until you get knocked out at 5 points of impairment. So even if you have 200 hit points, if you take 20 damage 5 times in a combat, you'll be KOed, because they were bigger hits to you than 10 10 point hits.
The main thing that annoys me about the new system is that it is a little too generic. There's very little difference in the classes, with saves being almost totally revamped so that everyone's saves will be within 2 points of each other (your class save bonus only applies once, and you get the best of all classes that you multiclass in, and then progresses the same for everyone). Likewise, everyone gets a bonus to damage equal to half their class level. So a 20th level noble does the same damage with a blaster as a 20th level Jedi (3d6+10). The only difference in the classes are their 'special ability' talent trees, which work like in World of Warcraft. Essentially, every other level you get a new 'talent', many of which have prerequisites of other talents. So if you want the ability to reroll an attack roll once per day (a rogue ability) you might need the talent to reroll a skil
WARNING: The following product contains orcs, trolls, wizards and knights. Neither the author nor the publisher shall assume any explicit or implied responsibility for potential loss of sex, lunch money, or dignity. Prolonged use may result in permanent retention of "virgin" status.
Most rules books for RPGs explicitly say 'these rules only at the discretion of the GM', and they are right to do so. If a character is doing infinite damage every turn due to munchkining and slavish and/or badly twisted interpretations of some rules set, the GM is not doing his/her job, period. My favorite D&D system was 3rd ed, right out of the box (well, corebooks); needed few dice, easily scalable, removed most of the cruft from prior eds, and was easy to ad hoc or homebrew rules. When a book rule gave a counterintuitive mechanic for something, I or whoever else was GMing would craft a house rule that worked better. I have found that so long as the players trust that you are being fair and attempting for a fun game, they tend not to be crummy sports about the rules.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Come on, this deserves positive moderation for the oblique futurama/gygax reference:
... (rolls dice) ... pleasure
y -Of-Interest-I.html
GYGAX
Greetings! It's a
to meet you!
http://www.imsdb.com/transcripts/Futurama-Anthlog
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
People said the same damn thing about D&D, and then AD&D, and then second edition AD&D, and then D&D 3.0. "I'm not buying the new edition, I wasted more money than I can count on these [lame-ass over-priced useless] source books!"
A year or two after the new edition was out, they all usually break down and buy the new edition, sell off their old books to collectors or hobby stores, and move on.
Or you can be one of those old foggies who swears by the old edition, never upgrades, and then runs out of people to play with. But then, if you honestly bought every single 3.5 source book (seriously, why the hell would you possibly need all of those?), I imagine you have bigger problems than finding people to play with.
There's a pattern here that was also the same with DOS, Windows, Netscape, and perhaps others.
Version 1 was awful.
Version 2 was a little better.
Version 3 was excellent and stable.
Version 4 was big and bloated.
Version 5 fixed all the problems with version 4 that shouldn't have been made after version 3.
Of course, I played mostly 1ed and a little 2ed. I haven't played since the 3ed came out, but I always liked the 1ed rules with all the leftover nonsense from miniatures and wargames and stuff (1" = 10' indoors, but 30' outdoors).
To be honest I thought TSR was totally jumping the shark by the late 80's with all their "If it's not 'official', you can't use it." crap, and by 1992 or so most of the people I played with had moved out of town.
I really can't speak to WotC, but I thought of software given the comments I've read. "3.5 is stable" "3.5 is buggy"...
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I don't think he meant for him to be modded funny...
Hey, WTF!! He was talking about my post! Not his own! I'm the one that needs validation, not him!!
*shakes his fist at the gods of moderation*
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
I really like the idea of a new D&D version. It's a chance to improve some of the imperfect rules in the last edition. For instance the fact that it's nearly impossible to create a fast moving dexterous fighter that has parity with a burly strength based one.
As far as people complaining about having to buy another version I sympathize but you don't have to buy the new version and WoTC shouldn't be forced not to fix the system just because some of us bought the previous version. I don't know if I will buy the new one (I have 3.5) but the next generation of gamers shouldn't be stuck with the imperfections of the system we played.
On the other hand I'm a bit worried about the online subscription part. The publication of feats and other rule changes in dragon was bad enough but an online subscription has even more of an official air about it and will give WoTC a very strong incentive to put overpowerful feats in the subscription. Hopefully, they will mostly just include story/background material and the occasional fix but we will have to wait and see.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I need some more 3.5 stuff. Maybe this will put a little more of it on ebay.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
....and using some 1'st edition rules and books too. I just think D&D has kinda lost its "magic" that made the original game. I never really got into 3'rd edition or 3.5 edition. It's not about rules, it's about gameplay and overall 'feel' that made D&D what it is. If you didn't like a rule - throw it out. if you want to change something, then change it. The heart of D&D has always been flexibility to adapt. updaing the rules ad-nauseum doesn't bring the original theme back. In fact it dilutes the game.
A "hit" was considered a hit that would cause damage. Physically touching your opponent with your weapon was not enough to cause damage. (this was covered in the rules)
That is why certain armor types were better against certain weapon types.
Piercing weapons had a bonus to hit plate type armor, but a penalty to chain type armors.
slashing weapons had the opposite.
Bludgeoning weapons would have a penalty for leather, and an even worse penalty for padded armor types. etc...
It was all covered in the first edition rulebook, and that was only like 80 pages long.
Linux Zealots: Smarter than Mac Zealots, but still zealots.
I like how WotC's idea of "revolutionary product delivery" is "We can sell them paper ... on computers!"
Granted, they are adding that online client "to 'supplement, not replace' meatspace play," and a client like that is something that me and my friends have been saying would be cool for years now, but ...
They're still just selling us paper, but on computers.
Speaking of sex, I always wondered why there were no Upper Plane equivalent of Succubus. I mean, flirty fishing works and would be a perfect fit for Chaotic Good outsiders, so why don't they go about seducing blackguards away from evil or something ? A wink, kiss and some bedroom gymnastics could easily stop entire evil armies in their tracks.
In fact I'd say that the Balance requires such beings, unless of course sex is inherently evil in the DnD universe. I guess WotC is just too prudish to add them...
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You think you had it hard with marbles for dice and real dragons trying to eat you? PFFFt, you were pampered.
Why, When I played D&D, there were no dragons yet, and they hadn't even invented magic. To us the game was sci-fi!
NOW GIT OFF MAH LAWN!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Speaking from experience, if you are:
1) Intelligent enough to win a D&D tournament
2) Lucky enough with the dice to win a D&D tournament
3) Big and strong enough to literally bash through a wall
Then, yes, the one, single, supa-hot D&D honey will be all-up-ons. And lordy, lordy, will she ever be into cosplay, with more vinyl and leather than you can conceive of... super bonus round for fetish-addled roleplay freaks. Hot chicks love a fat geek, so long as he can kill a jock with his bare hands and understands the difference between her Sailor Moon costume and her Sailor Mars costume.
The rest of you will die alone.
Why would a new revision of the tabletop rules impact their online offering?
The differences between DDO and 3.5 are considerable.
Not quite, but close.
WoTC has provided an open source license that they call "open game license" (for, get this "open game content"). They have NOT provided the core books under this license.
What they have done however (and I applaud) is provide a vast majority of the core rules under the OGL. This is referred to as the SRD (System Reference Document). The SRD does not contain everything that the books do. In general, the books are more verbose, but the SRD relates the rules just as well. The SRD rarely says "why" (as the books occasionally do). I believe there are a rare few few key rules not covered in the SRD.
The best place to read the SRD? In my opinion it is at www.d20srd.org (no connection to myself whatsoever). Everything is HYPERLINKED! The site is amazing in terms of quick access to everything. It even includes spell and monster filters to help navigate those areas. This can make building adventures much easier at times. (Example: the SRD includes 5 Undead monsters between CR 5 and 15 who have a lawful alignment; beats flipping through the book and finding one or two.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
I'll agree that if you ignore the fact that D20 is a class based system, add many house rules, and have a good group and DM you can actually do something other than munchkin the game. But why not just use a different system if you want to really roleplay instead of rollplay?
Each gaming system has certain strengths and weaknesses, and D20's strength lies in its appeal to munchkins, rules lawyers, etc. Now, I'll also admit that there are some systems which manage to out munchking D20, Rifts comes to mind.
But I think the original poster's point stands: If you want to play something more than a hack and slash type game, you are vastly better off with a different system. For pure kick in the door type monster slaughters D20 isn't bad at all, you want a more nuanced gaming experience and you'll find that the rules begin to hold you back. I'll take GURPS, thanks. Now if only SJ games would do something like the OGL I'd be truly happy, and I think GURPS would benefit.
"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
"You you are a melee class and have chosen heavy armour. Do you know why it is called HEAVY armour? That is right, because it is HEAVY."
People who play role playing games (and write rules for them) routinely overestimate both the weight and encumbrance of armour. The heaviest combat armour from any period (i.e. ancient Greeks to late mediaeval) weighed around 40-50lbs, which is about half a modern military field pack, and unlike said pack, much of the weight was distributed around the body instead of being a heavy lump at the back. There are mediaeval woodcuts of men in full plate armour doing cartwheels, hand-stands, and running and jumping, and Joan of Arc routinely wore it despite being a peasant girl who wasn't trained as a warrior, so it was nothing like as restrictive and heavy as RPG rules (with the notable exception of Chivalry and Sorcery) routinely make it.
NB: many of the myths about mediaeval armour in particular come from the Victorian English, who failed to distinguish between late mediaeval jousting plate and war / combat armour. Jousting plate was massively reinforced on the left-hand side (the lance was couched in the right-hand, pointing to the left, so the left side took the impact), and restricted arm movement to what was necessary for aiming the lance and moving a shield up and down by about a foot, so people wearing it were unable to mount their horses without assistance. Jousting saddles were also specially designed to have low backs so that whoever got hit by a lance slid off instead of arching backwards, which experience had shown was an excellent way to end up as a paraplegic.
"What, you were already wearing? For the entire 6 hour journey through the old forest?"
I suggest you read some history, because people have been wearing armour of all types for periods of far longer than six hours for thousands of years, in climates ranging from winter ice to hot deserts and steamy, humid jungles. The reason for this was logistical: armour had to be transported by some means during campaigns, and wearing it was an excellent means of doing so that left valuable baggage train space free for food, water, missile weapon ammunition, siege artillery parts, and all the other sundry items that an army in the field requires.
"Okay you are entering combat finally, start the counter at 1. What counter you ask? Your exhaustion counter. You do not think you are going to last forever with a ton of steel hanging from your body do you? Ten rounds, that is your max before you are starting to loose it."
The main fatigue factor in pre-firearms battles came from the fact that swinging manual weapons of 2lbs+ around is a lot like chopping down trees with an axe, a notably exhausting activity despite the fact that it isn't usually done while wearing armour. Fatigue might be slightly increased by adding between 20 and 40 lbs of extra weight, but the effect would be minimal due to the fact that most of the warrior class (i.e. D&D fighters) had been training to fight in it since they were seven years old. A far bigger problem once helms with full face protection became common was limited visibility, which made it difficult to deal with threats that weren't directly in front of the armour wearer, thereby rendering them vulnerable to attacks from the side and rear.
"Also heavy armour tends to be very rigid, metals of the age just ain't the flexible, start counter3 to see when it will simply shatter."
The plates that were used in both platemail and full plate were hammer-forged, not cast, so they deformed when struck with sufficient force (i.e. they sustained dents) rather than shattering. There is no documented, or for that matter even mythical account of armour shattering, and there are no existing examples of even the cheapest munition plate (i.e. the stuff that was handed out to foot soldiers, and collected up again for storage) that shows any sign of shattering or cracking, although there are many which either exhibit dents and holes, or signs of dents / holes that ha
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I hated the 3.0 edition of D&D. It crippled the rather detailed world of D&D2 (i.e. AD&D) with its rich cultural and RP-able background into a hack'n slash orgy much like Diablo. It was geared away from sophisticated RP towards mindless slaughtering of mobs, character development meant "gather stuff" instead of actually developing your char.
Sure, the GM could lessen that effect, but still, what remained was that "character growth" was reduced to killing mobs left and right and looting. If you played actually by the rules, there was no room for "good role play" as something that could be rewarded sensibly.
Then 3.5 came out and, frankly, I hardly looked at it because after the 3.0 desaster, I didn't even want to take a closer look. It looks much like they heard the outcry, but I stick with AD&D.
Now, after everyone bought the books, we're hitting 4.0. So what now? Buy all those books yet again? Thanks, no. There simply is no need to. I can see that you have to stay current with games where you want to play tournaments and compete with people outside your group of friends, like in tabletop games or card games, but for role play? I choose the people I play with carefully. I don't need to compete with anyone outside of my group.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I still prefer 2nd Ed AD&D, and after that 1st ed. (Yes, I have the books.)
I was introduced to TSR's D&D and AD&D in the late seventies while in school, so it only affected my dignity as a pre-teen and I was okay with that. Of course, having a bunch of friends that played meant that I played ocassionally through my teens as well. My parents no doubt approved of this method of birth control.
Coincidentally, I worked at WotC when they aquired TSR, but had long ago stopped playing D&D since I had no time as a working professional and my D&D friends had scattered to the winds after High School. I left WotC before they were acquired by Hasbro, but cannot imagine that move was good for the product.
Now I'm a certified adult with job, mortgage, wife, kids, etc. and cannot imagine having time to play D&D. My kids aren't playing it. They're into Madden '08 and Guitar Hero II or sports outside. They'll ride a bike, surf the web^Wmyspace, chat with friends or play video games.
So who exactly is the core audience for this product? And why did it need to get rev'd into what is apparently a very different game from the story-telling enterprise it was thirty years ago?
These opinions guaranteed or your money back.
"I have, nothing special, just the dutch draft system, but I can tell you that a typical military pack is NOT light."
That was my point. A military field pack is around twice the weight of a typical suit of armour, and it's all concentrated in one place instead of being spread around the body, yet trained soldiers carry them over extremely long distances, and then fight battles. An excellent example of this was British paras and commandos, who fought after marching significant distances over extremely rugged terrain in the 1982 Falklands War carrying not only their own field packs and weapons, but also a variety of heavier armaments such as mortars and the ammunition for them (this was variously termed "yomping" and "tabbing", depending on whether one is talking to a marine or para).
"Sure a trained soldier/warrior will be able to do it, BUT not without a stat hit."
Romans routinely marched 50 miles a day on their roads wearing chainmail or lorica and a metal helmet while carrying a large shield, pilum, short sword, and a pack containing a water / wine skin, food, eating and cooking utensils, weapon maintenance equipment, and various digging and cutting tools. At the end of each day's march, they would use their axes to cut down enough trees to act as supports for earth palisades around the entire army, and then use their digging tools to bank the earth, and excavate a deep ditch around this fortified camp. Remains of such "marching camps" indicate that they were often of considerable size, e.g. the one at Raedykes in Scotland that covers 114 acres.
A true historical incident serves to show how different people who spent every day from the moment they could walk doing hard manual labour were from 21st. century Western blobs of grease. King Harald Godwinson force-marched 1500 men from London to Tadcaster, York (185 miles) in 4 days, where they defeated Harald Hadrada's Viking invaders in a day-long battle so convincingly that only 24 of the original 200 invading ships managed to escape. Then, he heard that William The Bastard had invaded in the south, so he force-marched his army back to London in another 4 days, where they stopped only to gather reinforcements, then marched 105 miles to Hastings, and fought another day-long battle against the fresh Norman troops, who were unable to break their shield wall despite having cavalry. Harald's Saxons still had enough energy to pursue fleeing Breton, Flemish, and Norman forces who routed, and although this pursuit led to Harald's eventual defeat, it is an excellent indicator of how hardy pre-industrial people were, especially when one considers that those forced marches weren't on what either we or the Romans would describe as "roads".
"Remember we are after realism, and if you think someone who has just marched through a forest for the day wearing a full combat outfit is as fresh as a person who hasn't, you must be superman."
Historical accounts from periods ranging from early classical to late mediaeval seem to indicate that there was little effective difference in freshness between armoured and unarmoured troops that was actually caused by its weight rather than other factors such as its tendency to trap heat on hot days, and radiate it on cold ones. However, the fact that people from very hot climates such as Greek hoplites and Persians clibanarii wore it, as well as those from cold ones such as Vikings is an excellent indicator of the fact that the advantages it conferred on its wearer far outweighed any discomfort that they endured.
"If you believe that soldiers wore their full equipment all the time because of ease of transportation I suggest you read up on tactics. You can do this, IF you want your soldiers exhausted when they reach wherever they are going."
Copious historical examples show that this is not the case. If tactical sources diverge from historical fact, then those tactical sources should be revised.
"This is known from roman times with accounts from soldiers on the difference between their march
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.