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Ask the Designers of D&D Fourth Edition
This past August, big news dropped in the tabletop gaming community: 2008 would see the release of a fourth edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Since then the official D&D Insider site, and communities like the excellent ENWorld, have been doing their best to keep us up to date on the ins and outs of the newest way to dungeon-delve. With the release just five months away, we've been given a chance to put some questions to the team developing the game. One question per post, if you would, and we'll make sure to pass the best questions on to the designers. Don't forget to ask about the online version of the D&D tools as well! We'll get their answers back to you as soon as we get them, so fire away.
Will I need to have a paid subscription in order to download the PDFs of the 4th edition books that I buy?
I know at the moment there is only house rules for critical failures (i.e. rolling a 1 on a d20). Will there be set rules for this in 4.0?
3.5E had so many non-core sourcebooks that you could have easily respun and/or rebalanced the material into a new set of books if you had any need to sell more material (which you presumably do, as would anyone else in the same business). Based on what has been released and what I've read, 4E will be a radical departure of standards set back in 3E which were, in turn, meant to improve the game drastically.
Don't you think more work could have, and should have, been done to improve 3.5E? It seems like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
It upset quite a few folks when D&D 3.0E transitioned to 3.5E relatively soon after release, and made some people's investments in D&D become basically worthless overnight. While I appreciate that it's sometimes time to spawn a new edition that's incompatible with the old, it felt like 3.5E should have been an errata to 3.0E, rather than a totally new set of books.
I understand that WotC can't commit itself to any firm "we will not release another edition for X years" guarantee, but it would be nice to hear some sort of assurance that we won't see a repeat of the 3.0E->3.5E debacle. What's the plan? What lessons have you learned?
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
this is the `we're not making enough money' edition, right?
Seriously. 3rd, and then 3.5, and now 4th edition, all within what, six years?? and how long did 2nd last?
there's nothing wrong with the game as it plays, now, that a couple of house rules cant fix.
another `lets make everything from the last version completely obsolete' version is NOT going to sit well with a lot of players.
I paid all that money for 2nd edition books, and actually got my moneys worth. I had them for more than 10 years.
I held off on buying 3rd edition, because I was still happy with 2nd, and by the time I was ready to buy, 3.5 had been released, so that's what I bought.
considering how much I paid for all of these books, and how many 3.5 books I've purchased, I wont consider myself to have gotten my moneys worth from them until at LEAST 2012. So as far as I can tell, 4th edition is at LEAST 4 years too early. so I doubt that I'll be buying or playing 4th edition for a while.
So, really, My question is: Did you actually come up with something so completely new that it makes a new edition essential, or is this just a move by WOC to squeeze as much money out of the AD&D franchise as possible?
Can you publish an edition that likens back to 1st Edition AD&D where four books and a module pretty much could sum up a session? How about putting more energy into fleshing out a world instead of bloating the ruleset or creating more classes? Well designed modules/worldbooks will still generate the revenue that you are trying to force out of your clients with more core books.
The magic of AD&D (whether it be high, dark, monty haul, hack-n-slash, dungeoncrawling, or comic) is in the minds of the players....the world they mold around their characters. Then again....most gaming companies today don't really care about this. WotC, Whizkids, Games Workshop....they're all about the $$ and number of units sold.
During the 3.x timeframe, you introduced OGL, the Open Gaming License, a reasonably good share-alike compromise for the game system.
Alongside that, you published the System Reference Document (SRD) which contained most of the monsters and equipment from the core books and almost all of the rules. It made an excellent standard for spinning off games and creating publishable material based on a canon.
And yet, at the same that Creative Commons license gaining ground, and YouTube and other crowd-publishing sites (like Gleemax?) are looming massively over the entertainment playground, I hear the rumour that OGL and the SRD are going away!
What is Wizards really going to do to promote community publishing? Those of us creating content for the game, content that promotes the game, are waiting to hear that we'll have a green light, that we can publish our material freely for all to use without fear of The Lawyers, and that we can incorporate Wizards' canon material in those publications in a non-competitive way. Will we be given that license? Or will there be, as the rumor told it, licensing fees to keep out content creators?
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Many people are acting as if a new edition will not only obsolete their old books, it will actually prevent them from accessing the ruleset at all. Level-headed people of course regard that as silly, nobody's going to sneak into your house and burn your old books!
However, with more and more importance being placed on digital content (not specifically Wizards of the Coast, but in general), if the wrong decision is made regarding DRM, that nightmare scenario may actually take place if WotC stops supporting this edition.
Will WotC spend a lot of time and money in vain in adding restrictions that will only serve to frustrate legitimate customers, restrictions that pirates will figure out how to bypass within a week of release, if not sooner?
Is the issue of whether to DRM or not, and why and how being treated very seriously within the company?