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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 4th edition use the same or similar systems for miniatures? Will a medium creature still fit in a 5' x 5' square? A friend of mine has a large collection of minatures and a decent sized third party map, and I am just hoping we do not have to move onto something else in order to satisfy the new rules...
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
First off, thank you for no more Gnomes as a basic race (or so is the rumor)
What exactly is happening to the wizard class? It sounds like it's becoming more like the Warlock and gaining spell casting like the CHA based casters or spell like abilities based on memorized spells? Are you able to expand on this or give us more information yet?
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
It appears (to me, at least), that many of the new rules-changes mirror popular MMO's like WOW. How much influence do the designers derive from video games; and, to the extent that D&D 4th resembles WOW, is this a conscious effort to reach the MMO-generation of gamers with table-top role-play?
How do you feel you've struck a balance between a desire to simplify/streamline rules to speed play and make the game more accessible, and a desire to preserve the strategy and general goodness of the game as it exists today? Details about proposed changes that were a tough call either way would be interesting.
Why is there a need for a 4th edition? 3.5 wasn't released all that long ago (and the books were just as expensive as the 3.0 versions), so why do we need a 4.0? Is there a compelling reason or is this just a symptom of Hasbro casting "Animate Dead" on TSR's corpse?
Regards, Ian
I know that some of the old settings (Ravenloft, Spelljammers, Dark Sun, Planescape) have been transitioned to other companies or have been quietly kept alive by their fans with knowledge bases and efforts at rules translations between old rulesets and 3.5. Will any of these old, orphaned settings being making a comeback in 4.0? (Planescape. Please, Planescape!) If not, are the 4.0 rules being written to make these on-going translation efforts easier?
Short intro, I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. Play a lot of computer games. Enjoy reading up on lore and the like.
... well, the general populace. What are you doing to break free of this? Or do you embrace it? What are your thoughts & opinions on this strange negative publicity that popular movies push onto D&D players? Do you ever try to break free of that?
But I never got into D&D. I had friends that played it but I was never into it. I tried playing it a few times and had some fun experiences. But there's always been a sort of negative stigma associated with it among
My work here is dung.
It sounds like, in an effort to balance classes better, they've all become a lot more alike. That is, a wizard and a warrior will have a very different list of abilities, but they'll all have X abilities to use at will, X abilities to use once an encounter, and so on. Do you feel this is a fair assessment? If so, is there any concern that in making the classes more alike you'll have essentially created one well-balanced class that no one wants to play? In 3E, a lot of the classes require very different kinds of strategy and in my experience all players have different favorites for reasons that seem to be going away.
With D&D 3rd Edition, we were introduced to the D20 System and the Open Gaming License, which allowed third party publishers to produce supplements for the game. Will there be something akin to this for 4th Edition? What form will it take, and will it be more or less restrictive?
Has there been any thoughts or discussions on reducing the amount of books needed to play? Donating a bookshelf to every new edition is getting a little ridiculous for the casual gamer. I have 40+ books from first and second edition. I bought the Player's Handbook from the third edition, read the first thirty pages and went "bleh".
To reference another gaming system, I can generate a character in GURPS (Steve Jackson Games) in under an hour, have a little better feel for advantages and disadvantages, arm and clothe the character, and do it all from one book. Now there are other books available, but not necessary. Also, their magic system seems a lot more reasonable than memorizing spells. I always thought of spells more like skills than chunks of memory.
I know it goes against the business model, but can you actually make a game that can be played with less than four books?
Fast, cheap, correct. You get to pick two.
Currently, at higher levels, a fight between the party and a group of enemies can easily last a couple of hours.
How has combat been streamlined?
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
One of the things I dislike about 3rd edition is that at medium and high levels magic items are such a big part of a character's power. A PC has to be decorated like a Christmas tree with various magical doodads in order to be effective. Running a campaign in a world where magic items are rare or nonexistant required a lot of house rules and adjustment on the part of the DM. Will it be easier to run a low or no magic item campaign in 4e?
I am slightly concerned by the rendering of monsters into simply combat stats. Please take this opportunity to allay my fears, as much of what I hear, I approve of. Will there be more to monsters than combat? Obviously, that's their most important role, but an understanding of their capabilities outside of combat (rituals they can cast, things they know - stuff that they WON'T use in a fight against PCs) is important to give a monster an ecology, purpose, traction - to use a popular word. Please explain to me how 4e takes account of this, or if it doesn't, explain why you have designed it thusly. (Oh, and thanks for your time and effort. It can't be easy redesigning D&D, what with the internet and all.)
We know that you are providing a tool for editing character sheets on your computer, although you have not specified anything else. An editable PDF sheet seems likely. However, there have been many popular tools (e.g. PCGen) that can update many aspects of data automatically based on game events, rather than numbers. Example: You are the target of eagle's grace (assuming it still exists and has the same function). You have a +2 cloak of Charisma (once again making assumptions). You simply enter the fact that you are affected by that spell and tool automatically increases your Charisma score by 2, and also makes all relevant modifications elsewhere (save DCs, skill modifiers, etc.) Will the suite of digital tools released with 4th Edition include a tool that can maintain a character sheet that can be updated based on effects and modifications, rather than simple numeric input? If so, will it be extensible with published supplements/user-provided data?
In 3.5 and even basic 3d ed, Priests were far and away more useful than wizards and sorcers. They had damage spells, could use better weapons out of the box and had a serious of buffs, combined with their armor, that made them powerful and extremely difficult to kill. At very high levels, a powerful wizard can deal great damage with delayed blast fireball and whatnot, but at that point a good cleric can throw down greater aspect of the diety, divine power and a load of other spells and turn themselves into a combat machine, plus the ability to heal and a few good damage spells.
How are you going to balance the two main spellcasting types in 4th ed? Or are you going to leave things generally as they are?
One of the things that always seemed out of place for me was the use of Hit Points. As any humanoid became higher level (i.e.: gained power) somehow they received a commensurate increase in physical ability to withstand a blow from something like a longsword. This issue was resolved in Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds where the whole idea of HP was replaced with a saving throw against damage. Did the D&D4 designers consider this as an option to replace the age-old (and some say broken) mechanic that is HP? And if so, why did they choose to remain with HP over the M&M mechanic?
My first module as a player, and then as a DM, was Monte Cook's excellent Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. The thing is huge and complicated, with an enormous volcanic crater mapped out and populated by lots of NPC's who are -- sort of -- cooperating. Rather than giving detailed descriptions of what these NPC's will do, whether out of combat or in, the module simply gives their statistics and explains their personalities, and lets the DM figure out what they do. There were very few notes about combat tactics other than those that relate to personality ("Imix enjoys whacking things with his greatsword and makes little use of his spell-like abilities"), since it's assumed that the DM is smart enough to come up with tactics on his own.
... almost pre-scripted. There's a separate section of the book for encounters, in which separate maps are given just of the "encounter area", with all the NPC's placed on it and combat tactics given for them. So you get "Encounter K42: Wight ambush", with a separate map with a bunch of wights on it. I've not run this module, but it seems like DM'ing it is more of an exercise in executing a pre-written script rather than being creative. There's not much room in there for flexibility, either -- it'd require a bunch of rewriting just to get the NPC information in a format conducive to being flexible with it.
While NPC's are given locations, there's a note: "The placement of NPC's in, and the description of, the mines is just a snapshot at one point in time. They move around, do stuff, raid each other, etc., as time passes, and it's important to keep the place dynamic." The module encourages a huge amount of flexibility.
This was wonderful to DM, and the players enjoyed the feeling of being in such an active environment.
Now, look at a more recent module, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. The setting is wonderful, the maps are wonderful, but all the encounters are
In short: Wonderful setting (not written anew, swiped from 1e), uninspired writing. Writing is targeted to the lowest common denominator of DM's who can't figure out how to run NPC's/set up encounters on their own.
I hear Expedition to the Demonweb Pits is supposed to be pretty good, but haven't heard anything good about any of the other modern writing.
My question is this: Are the modules written for 4e, and the overall design generally, going to lean more on the side of accessibility to less creative players/DM's or the side of giving more experienced players/DM's more flexibility?