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D&D 4e Smalltalk

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Selganor [n/a]:
Warum sollte Wizards zweigleisig fahren?

Das hat ja schon bei White Wolf mit nWoD und Dark Ages nicht geklappt

Visionär:
Um mir und anderen Fans einen Gefallen zu tun und uns nicht über ein Jahr auf neues Material warten lassen?

Thalamus Grondak:
Da die wizardshompage moentan (logischerweise) sehr schwer zu erriechen ist, hier der teasertext:


--- Zitat ---I always thought we should have a magazine called “&”. After all, it worked so well for Dungeon and Dragon that it just seemed to me that we were losing an opportunity to make use of the bit that brings it all together. So, until we figure out what to actually do with that recognizable little ampersand, I’m going to use it as the identifier for my regular feature here at D&D Insider.

I’m Bill Slavicsek. I’ve been the R&D Director for the Dungeons & Dragons game since Wizards of the Coast acquired the company. Before that, I was a Creative Director and Game Designer with TSR, Inc. And way back when, I ran the creative portions of West End Games. Over the years, I’ve worked on roleplaying games, board games, computer games, miniatures games, novels, and nonfiction books of all kinds, and you can see my work on everything from Star Wars to d20 Modern to D&D. I’m going to use this space to regularly talk to you about things related to D&D from the unique perspective of my Director’s chair here at WotC. Let’s start out by talking about 4th Edition D&D and D&D Insider.

At Gen Con this week, we announced that the 4th Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game will debut in May 2008. We also announced that for the first time, the D&D game would consist of four integral and integrated parts. In addition to the physical products—the core rulebooks, supplements, adventures, miniatures, and accessories—the D&D experience would be enhanced by robust Community features (powered by Gleemax.com), a fully integrated Organized Play program that will offer benefits to convention and home play alike, and the digital initiative we’re calling D&D Insider.

Why 4th Edition and why now? Because the time was right. My R&D team has been watching the play environment since the release of the 3.5 rules, listening to what you, the players, have been telling us. Two years ago, I assembled a team of designers, led by Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, and James Wyatt, to review all the data we’ve been collecting and see if we could make the d20 Game System (the engine that powers the D&D game) better, more intuitive, and more fun. When I saw the first expressions of that effort, I knew we could make D&D better, stronger, faster, more fun. We could rebuild it. We could take the d20 Game System we all know and love and rocket it to the next level.

At the same time, we also began imagining a robust and exciting suite of digital features that could enhance and complement the roleplaying game. It became clear to me that we had two winning directions that would be even more powerful when we combined them, and that’s when we made the decision to move forward with D&D 4th Edition.

The future (only nine months away!) contains the same D&D we all play on a regular basis. It’s still going to be a tabletop roleplaying game. It’s still set in a medieval fantasy world of magic and monsters. It’s still the d20 Game System. But the rulebooks appear more vibrant, more visually stunning, and much easier to use. The game mechanics have been amped up to eliminate the game-stoppers, accentuate the fun factors, and make play faster and more exciting. In the future (now only eight months, 29 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes from now!) D&D Insider provides its members with immediate access to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, to enhanced and expanded content tied to the newest physical book products, to an amazing suite of digital tools to make Dungeon Master preparation and campaign management easier to handle, to a Character Creator that provides not only an interactive character sheet but a visualizer that lets you determine the exact look of the characters you create—and, D&D Insider provides a digital D&D Game Table that turns the Internet into your kitchen table. This amazing application, which we’ll talk more about as the weeks go on, allows you to supplement your face-to-face gaming 24/7, helps you find a group to game with if you don’t happen to have a face-to-face group, or lets you hook up with gaming buddies who long ago scattered to the four winds. Take a look at the prototype movie we showed at Gen Con to get a first taste of the D&D Game Table.

Wow. There’s a lot more that I want to share with you, but I’ve already exceeded my allotted word count for this first column. We’ll pick this up next time, when I describe a typical day in (and reveal a few secrets about) the life of an R&D Director—specifically, this R&D Director.

Keep playing!

--Bill Slavicsek

About the Author

Bill Slavicsek is the R&D Director for Roleplaying Games, Miniatures, and Book Publishing at Wizards of the Coast. All of the game designers, developers, editors, book editors, and D&D Insider content managers working on Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, and the WotC Publishing Group report into Bill’s R&D team.

--- Ende Zitat ---


--- Zitat ---Q: Dear Sage
When is 4th Edition D&D going to be published?

A: The 4th Edition Player's Handbook comes out in May 2008. Various products between now and next spring provide previews and sneak-peeks into the making of the new game. Keep an eye on dndinsider.com for all the latest 4th Edition news.

--- Ende Zitat ---

Races:

--- Zitat ---The Design & Development article series premiered on the D&D website back in September 2005, and has been a staple ever since. With the approach of 4th Edition, and our designers and developers focused on the new edition, this column will be the primary vehicle for 4th Edition coverage. We’ll not only give you peeks at what’s forthcoming, but also the “how” and “why.”

Keep in mind that the game is still in a state of flux, as refinements are made by our design and development staff. You’re getting a look behind the curtain at game design in progress, so enjoy, and feel free to send your comments to dndinsider@wizards.com.

Set the wayback machine to May of 2004!

Even at that point, we knew 4th Edition was coming, though official work on it wouldn’t start for another year. At the time, the design team used to meet regularly in what we jokingly called the “Design Cabal.” And one day, in May ’04, we started kicking around the question of how many slices of pie a D&D character should consist of, and how big each piece should be.

In 3rd Edition, class and magic items were two big pieces of the PC pie. Race was important at 1st level, but by the time you hit 20th, there was rarely much to distinguish a dwarf fighter from a half-orc fighter. The difference between a +2 here and a +2 over there was drowned out by the huge bonuses from magic items and character level—it didn’t matter any more.

We wanted race to matter all the way up through a character’s career. We wanted there to be some difference between two characters of different races, all other things being equal. We had tried out mechanics like the racial paragons in Unearthed Arcana and the racial substitution levels in the Races of . . . series of books, and we liked the results.

In May of 2004, we started kicking around ideas like “the 20-level race.” In a 20-level race, at each level you gained, you’d get not only new class features, but also new racial qualities. Your race might predetermine which ability scores you increased at some levels, so a dwarf’s Constitution would always have an edge over characters of other races. It would grant you new special abilities as you advanced in level, always appropriate to your level, of course.

One key advantage we saw to this system was that it made it much easier to find room for new races without resorting to the kludgy and awkward mechanic of level adjustments. If we spread the tasty magical abilities of drow out through their levels, they could start at 1st level on a par with other character races. Races like the githyanki already anticipated some of that idea by granting new spell-like abilities at higher levels.

Well, over the next few years, things changed, as things are wont to do. We blew the game out to thirty levels, but put your most significant racial choices in the first ten. Above that, other choices started to crowd out room for special abilities coming from your race.

In the final version of 4th Edition, most of your racial traits come into play right out of the gate at 1st level—dwarven resilience, elven evasion, a half-elf’s inspiring presence, and so on. As you go up levels, you can take racial feats to make those abilities even more exciting and gain new capabilities tied to your race. You can also take race-specific powers built into your class, which accomplish a lot of what racial substitution levels used to do: a dwarf fighter with the friend of earth power can do something that other 10th-level fighters just can’t do.

The rules have changed a lot since that first idea of the 20-level race, but they still serve the same purpose: to make sure that your race stays not just relevant but actually important all the way up through thirty levels of adventure.

About the Author

James Wyatt is the Lead Story Designer for D&D and one of the lead designers of D&D 4th Edition. In over seven years at Wizards of the Coast, he has authored or co-authored award-winning adventures and settings including the Eberron Campaign Setting, City of the Spider Queen, and Oriental Adventures. His more recent works include Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave, and The Forge of War. His second Eberron novel, Storm Dragon, releases this month.


--- Ende Zitat ---

Classes:

--- Zitat ---Class
Fighters: Choice of Weapons
by Rob Heinsoo
Art by William O'Connor

08/16/2007

Design &D Development Archive

   

The Design & Development article series premiered on the D&D website back in September 2005, and has been a staple ever since. With the approach of 4th Edition, and our designers and developers focused on the new edition, this column will be the primary vehicle for 4th Edition coverage. We’ll not only give you peeks at what’s forthcoming, but also the “how” and “why.”

Keep in mind that the game is still in a state of flux, as refinements are made by our design and development staff. You’re getting a look behind the curtain at game design in progress, so enjoy, and feel free to send your comments to dndinsider@wizards.com.

Here’s a highly probable conversation lifted from the future, one year from today, as two players who’ve just met at a convention discuss their PC choices for their upcoming D&D game.

“I’m playing a 3rd-level human fighter named Graelar.”

“Cool. Is he weapon and shield or two-hander?”

“He’s sword and board, man.”

“Longsword?”

“Yeah. I thought about going high Con and using a hammer, but I wanted to start with the chance to make a couple of attacks, so I’m using rain of blows as my good weapon attack, and I went with high Wis so that I can switch to the better oppy powers later.”

“My elf fighter uses a spear. I like the speed and the option to go past AC. But you’ve got the fighter covered. I’ll play a halfling rogue.”

The names and destinations of the powers mentioned above might have changed by the time the game is in your hands. What won’t change is that fighters care about which weapons they use much more than other characters. Other character classes have specific weapons and weapon types that they tend to rely on while still maintaining access to a larger chunk of the weapon chart. The fighter is the only current 4th Edition class with capabilities that depend on the weapon they have chosen to train the most with. Even at 1st level, a fighter who uses an axe has a different power selection than a fighter who relies on a flail or a rapier or a pick. In the long run, fighters can diversify and master powers related to a few different weapons, but most will opt to focus on the weapon that suits their personal style, helps their interactions with the rest of the PCs in the group, and carries all the magical oomph they’ve managed to acquire.

Many fighters will opt for swords. Swords have the most flexible assortment of powers. In a fighter’s hands, the longsword is the queen of the battlefield and the greatsword is the queen’s executioner. But each of the other significant melee weapons offers the fighter unique advantages and opportunities. For the first time, you’ll be able to say “I’m an axe fighter” or “I’m a flail fighter” and that will mean something cool.

--- Ende Zitat ---

Grimmstorm:

--- Zitat von: Bill Slavicsek am 17.08.2007 | 00:42 ---It’s still going to be a tabletop roleplaying game.

--- Ende Zitat ---

Für dieses Zitat bin ich so dankbar. Ich könnte den Boden küssen und den Himmel umarmen. Damit hat einer der Spieldesigner endlich ein Ende aller Diskussionen herbeigeführt die sich darum drehen ob oder was D&D etwas mit Rollenspielen zu tun hat...


Vom heutigen Tage an wird die Welt eine bessere sein. Und ich kann beruhigt alle meine D&D-Sachen verkaufen. Jemand Interesse? Ist auch massenhaft Forgotten Realms dabei!

Tantalos:
Lieber Grimmstorm:


--- Zitat von: Ein am 16.08.2007 | 19:56 ---Ich vermute liegt wohl am Stumpfsinn des deutschen Durchschnittsrollenspielers, der nicht weiß, dass Tabletop außerhalb Deutschland einfach nur bedeutet, dass man nicht im Feld oder am Flimmerkasten spielt.

--- Ende Zitat ---

Was Du daraus schlussfolgerst, ist deine Sache  >;D

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