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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."
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.
They failed on their save vs. nerds roll.
So how much xp do we get for killing the website?
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.
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.
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
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.
....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.
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.
"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.