D&D Fourth Edition Books To Be Released in June

Bill Slavicsek, R&D director on Dungeons and Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, has announced via his personal column that the three core books for Fourth Edition will all be coming out in the same month. When the new game version was announced at Gen Con this year, the initial idea was that the books would be staggered over a three month period. "After conferring with our various trade partners, the Sales Team here at Wizards came back with word that they'd rather have the three core rulebooks release in the same month than over three consecutive months. As that's how we originally wanted to release them, Brand and R&D got together with our Production Team to see if we could accommodate the request. The answer is YES! The new release schedule looks like this: May: H1: Keep on the Shadowfell 4th Edition D&D adventure with Quick-Start Rules. June 6: 4th Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual." As a note, the article is trapped behind an inane login for the Dungeons and Dragons Insider site. Hey WotC? It's really hard to talk up your new toys when you make it hard to read your content. Why not loosen up a bit?

Comments

Buy our printed material!

[Anonymous Coward]

D&D 1st and 2nd edition were both on the market for decades. Then Wizards of the Coast purchases D&D and all of a sudden a new edition is coming out every few years. They are just trying to make people buy tons of their printed material, which is exactly what their business model was with Magic the Gathering.

Yay for printed material that becomes obsolete every few years. Can't wait for D&D 5th Edition, coming next Christmas.

Sticking to the core 3

[newgalactic]

I used to play D&D, and loved it. However, over the years I was turned off by all the expansion books that were available for each race, class, worlds. If I was going to get back into D&D, I would restrict myself to the core three books, PM, DMG, and MM. D&D was always about the story telling ability of the DM anyhow, Min/Maxing just took from the game.

Backwards compatible?

[psykocrime]

I more or less quit playing AD&D around 1997 or so, and didn't play any sort of D&D until about 2 years ago. By then AD&D was gone and v3.5 was out. So in the past 2 years I've spent around $600 or $700 on v3.5 (and a little bit of v3.0) books and stuff. So my question is: Is v4.0 so different that it totally obsoletes v3.5 materials? If so, I damn sure won't be "upgrading" anytime soon. If this is the case, they've actually cost themselves business from me, as I would happily keep buying new v3.5 supplements, but no way am I replacing several hundred dollars worth of existing materials...

D&D/gaming paraphanalia inverse relativity the

[Magdalene]

I used to be into gaming, I was right there at stage 1, complete with the puny little dice you had to colour in with the crayons that came in the first box. I graduated to AD&D and bought all the books printed by TSR and the *exalted* Gary Gygax. Complete with the the first edition 'No we didn't ask for permission, why are you suing us?' version of Deities and Demigods. I even have a box of painted lead guys I have to keep on a top shelf so my son won't get at them and eat them. (funny how they ban toys for having a bit of lead paint now but they used to *sell* us whole little lead guys to play with)...I remember being bored and twirling dice... Painstakingly setting up almost a hundred little separately bought lead guys for a battle and having the cat jump on the table and wreak havok.. *SAVE VS GIANT CAT!! MINUS 12 DAMAGES AIEEEE!!* oh yes, our DM was merciless.. if the cat reached up and knocked your little lead guy off the table you were done for. You sometimes had to hire an npc to run around the dungeon with 50 ft of rope just to keep it off your party's tail.

I was considered a weirdo, being a GIRL, they even made me roll vs pregnancy in the first few games I played, like my character could catch it from walking around in dungeons, but what did they know, they were adolescent boys.

We grew tired of the system mechanics TSR employed and adopted our own percentile system loosely based on twilight 2000 early on in the 'old school' days, and based our own worlds on it.

We had brief spells of Shadowrun, more book buying, more dissatisfaction with the limitations of the system, more making up our own rules loosely based on the best of the different hand picked ones we had grabbed from different books,. Then TSR fumbled and the guys at Wizards of the Coast picked up the ball, and the D20 system lured us back. More book buying, more dissatisfaction on learning the limitations of the system.... are we seeing the trend here? I am assuming a lot more people had the same experiences, and put a lot of money into the coffers of TSR/wizards/etc. trying to find their 'ideal' gaming system.

But enough about me, on to the theory:

My Gaming friends and I came up with this inverse theory of relativity:

The percentage of gaming books you own is inversely relative to the amount of dates you go out on. regardless of gender.

I still game occasionally, but I make do with the rules we have tuned over the years knowing now that they are going to be better than any the guys on the corporate side are shelling for 50 bux a pop.