Yet Another 4E post...
Well it sounds like I’m wrong on a lot of 4E rumors and right on a scant few. Of course everything I’ve gotten that information from could be wrong as well. In others I could just be speculating on my own speculation.
I usually get my information from ENWorld’s 4E information page, and bits from this place or that. A thank you goes out to Morrus of ENWorld for putting that page together because I was going crazy trying to guess what was legit, what was pure speculation, what was wishful thinking, and what was a joke.
Usually the jokes are pretty obvious, but you never can tell when someone says something utterly laughable but they are 100% serious. Those are the people you mess with or leave alone, depending on whether they own a gun or not.
One thing WotC has done quite well is keeping the information under control. Apparently even if we do get to play-test we won’t even be allowed to say so because that’s what the NDA says, or that we even signed an NDA. Gotta love that legal system.
From the snippets I’ve read and heard (plus my usual opinions and such)…
(Once again, I have no guarantee of correctness of any kind.)
Saving throws are out and are instead being treated as an attack roll. If you think about it, a saving throw is pretty much just an attack in reverse; you roll to avoid an effect rather than roll to obtain one.
This one I’m pretty “eh” on. It’s not much of a change at all if my understanding is correct. You could be replacing your current three saving throws with three new armor classes. I hope that I’m just perceiving these as more complicated than they actually are.
The full attack option is gone. Which means one swing and you’re done for the round.
Now they are going to have to make it up to the martial melee types whose goal is to deal a lot of damage. But if they simply increase the damage output, then attacks of opportunity damage increases as well.
So in my head only two options exist to solve this; either regular attacks on your turn deal more damage while all other attacks you make don’t or they’ll be doing a running total for initiative giving more attacks more often for higher level characters.
I’m hoping for simplicity’s sake it’s the former, but the latter kind of offers more realism.
The rumor mill has all but written off the gnome in the first core book set races.
It’s also a foregone conclusion that the bard is gone as a class for now, and probably the monk.
I’m hearing that extra-planar races might make it into the PHB1. Eberron lovers are pushing for warforged to be included in the PHB1. I am simply hoping for simple “vanilla” races and classes in the PHB1 as going for something too fantastical (tieflings or brownies) or something too non-traditional (warforged) would probably hurt 4E more than help it.
Death will be at -10 hit points, and they are moving away from insta-kill spells and effects as much as possible. I’m on the fence on this one. I can’t say I haven’t given players some bonus chances to avoid these things in the past, but I’m against totally removing save-or-die effects.
The “turning undead” family of abilities is getting a fix. They’ve given no clue as to how this is going to be done, but I believe them. I bet it’s a modified version of the “holy bomb” from the Ravenloft module.
The focus will be reduced on absolutely requiring having magic items to survive the higher levels. That’s a very good thing to me. I like having unique and interesting magic items that are rare and hard to make, with potions and scrolls being exceptions that should be somewhat easy to make.
I’ve heard that skills are going to be reduced in number, with some skills being rolled into one (like hide and move silently being combined into a single stealth skill). This will remove the need for synergies as well. That sounds good to me.
All classes sound like they are going to have spells or special abilities that can be used X times per day, X times per encounter, and unlimited per day. That’s a potential quagmire of things, but it sounds like it has potential to me. The obvious snag is how long an encounter is versus how many times you get to use an ability per encounter. If you have 10 separate combats in 5 hours, does that mean you get to use some special abilities more often than if you had one giant combat in 5 hours?
Weapons are going to change into a Might & Magic VI (a 10 year old PC game) type system where each weapon adds a special ability or gives a modifier to a combat skill. An example I remember was using longswords gave you a bonus to disarming attempts.
Experience points are going back to a static value. I prefer the CR chart stay around for decent scaling, but I’m not exactly irritated to see it go because I never can seem to find that chart. Plus removing it is a step or two less to take care of party XP.
A status mechanic called “bloodied” is going to be added. From my understanding, you are “bloodied” when you hit 50% of your hit points or less. Some special abilities can be used when in this condition, while others can only be used when you’re not “bloodied”. It sounds like an interesting mechanic, but it adds another layer of complication.
The “Points of Light” article online sounded a bit familiar. The civilized world has faced a cataclysm and now communities of races gather together in cities to defend themselves against the monsters lurking just outside the city. It sounds awfully familiar to my world in my last campaign. So I’m liking this idea for now.
The dark side of the points of light is something that appears like history repeating itself. T$R pretty much took the good and entertaining Dragonlance campaign setting and changed it until it was unrecognizable and all but ruined (in my eyes) by adding bits to the world that were alien to the original setting, and they let just about anyone write a novel to be published (because Dragonlance novels sold well), and then finally they took the world away from D&D to turn it into an entirely different game (that flopped). I’m seeing signs of this repetition in Forgotten Realms. Just about every novel for FR printed changes the world in some way or another. I’m just about to drop FR as a usable campaign because everything keeps changing on a yearly basis. As far as I can tell, the Forgotten Realms is no longer the same world that made it so popular back when it was first released. Ed Greenwood, the author of the world, uses his original FR, not what WotC hath wrought.
In other words, I’m pulling my grey box FR stuff off the shelf.
The “Digital Initiative” is going to be $10-$15 a month. That doesn’t sound worth it to me to basically rent information.
If you cancel your subscription do you lose all access to things you’ve had access to for years?
If you get a subscription do you suddenly have access to years of old information?
If someone steals your account do they treat you like a criminal by assuming that you just are sharing with friends and block your account until you call a 1-800 number?
Will they allow offline content but require some Digital Rights Media checking first?
In my opinion, the whole DRM stuff is taking things too far.
Good luck to WotC trying to get the DI up and running while not making your customers jump through hoops, not making them feel like you’re taking them for granted, and not treating them like criminals while still protecting your copyrighted material.
And finally I heard that sometime this week an e-mail is being sent out to potential play-testers. The downside is that it will be sent to random people on WotC’s web forum e-mail list.
That reduces our chances of getting to play-test quite a bit. (I’ve more or less given up on it)
Oh well, I’ll guess we’ll have to try and have fun playing D&D as we know it just a little bit longer.
Oh, and no babies yet.
I usually get my information from ENWorld’s 4E information page, and bits from this place or that. A thank you goes out to Morrus of ENWorld for putting that page together because I was going crazy trying to guess what was legit, what was pure speculation, what was wishful thinking, and what was a joke.
Usually the jokes are pretty obvious, but you never can tell when someone says something utterly laughable but they are 100% serious. Those are the people you mess with or leave alone, depending on whether they own a gun or not.
One thing WotC has done quite well is keeping the information under control. Apparently even if we do get to play-test we won’t even be allowed to say so because that’s what the NDA says, or that we even signed an NDA. Gotta love that legal system.
From the snippets I’ve read and heard (plus my usual opinions and such)…
(Once again, I have no guarantee of correctness of any kind.)
Saving throws are out and are instead being treated as an attack roll. If you think about it, a saving throw is pretty much just an attack in reverse; you roll to avoid an effect rather than roll to obtain one.
This one I’m pretty “eh” on. It’s not much of a change at all if my understanding is correct. You could be replacing your current three saving throws with three new armor classes. I hope that I’m just perceiving these as more complicated than they actually are.
The full attack option is gone. Which means one swing and you’re done for the round.
Now they are going to have to make it up to the martial melee types whose goal is to deal a lot of damage. But if they simply increase the damage output, then attacks of opportunity damage increases as well.
So in my head only two options exist to solve this; either regular attacks on your turn deal more damage while all other attacks you make don’t or they’ll be doing a running total for initiative giving more attacks more often for higher level characters.
I’m hoping for simplicity’s sake it’s the former, but the latter kind of offers more realism.
The rumor mill has all but written off the gnome in the first core book set races.
It’s also a foregone conclusion that the bard is gone as a class for now, and probably the monk.
I’m hearing that extra-planar races might make it into the PHB1. Eberron lovers are pushing for warforged to be included in the PHB1. I am simply hoping for simple “vanilla” races and classes in the PHB1 as going for something too fantastical (tieflings or brownies) or something too non-traditional (warforged) would probably hurt 4E more than help it.
Death will be at -10 hit points, and they are moving away from insta-kill spells and effects as much as possible. I’m on the fence on this one. I can’t say I haven’t given players some bonus chances to avoid these things in the past, but I’m against totally removing save-or-die effects.
The “turning undead” family of abilities is getting a fix. They’ve given no clue as to how this is going to be done, but I believe them. I bet it’s a modified version of the “holy bomb” from the Ravenloft module.
The focus will be reduced on absolutely requiring having magic items to survive the higher levels. That’s a very good thing to me. I like having unique and interesting magic items that are rare and hard to make, with potions and scrolls being exceptions that should be somewhat easy to make.
I’ve heard that skills are going to be reduced in number, with some skills being rolled into one (like hide and move silently being combined into a single stealth skill). This will remove the need for synergies as well. That sounds good to me.
All classes sound like they are going to have spells or special abilities that can be used X times per day, X times per encounter, and unlimited per day. That’s a potential quagmire of things, but it sounds like it has potential to me. The obvious snag is how long an encounter is versus how many times you get to use an ability per encounter. If you have 10 separate combats in 5 hours, does that mean you get to use some special abilities more often than if you had one giant combat in 5 hours?
Weapons are going to change into a Might & Magic VI (a 10 year old PC game) type system where each weapon adds a special ability or gives a modifier to a combat skill. An example I remember was using longswords gave you a bonus to disarming attempts.
Experience points are going back to a static value. I prefer the CR chart stay around for decent scaling, but I’m not exactly irritated to see it go because I never can seem to find that chart. Plus removing it is a step or two less to take care of party XP.
A status mechanic called “bloodied” is going to be added. From my understanding, you are “bloodied” when you hit 50% of your hit points or less. Some special abilities can be used when in this condition, while others can only be used when you’re not “bloodied”. It sounds like an interesting mechanic, but it adds another layer of complication.
The “Points of Light” article online sounded a bit familiar. The civilized world has faced a cataclysm and now communities of races gather together in cities to defend themselves against the monsters lurking just outside the city. It sounds awfully familiar to my world in my last campaign. So I’m liking this idea for now.
The dark side of the points of light is something that appears like history repeating itself. T$R pretty much took the good and entertaining Dragonlance campaign setting and changed it until it was unrecognizable and all but ruined (in my eyes) by adding bits to the world that were alien to the original setting, and they let just about anyone write a novel to be published (because Dragonlance novels sold well), and then finally they took the world away from D&D to turn it into an entirely different game (that flopped). I’m seeing signs of this repetition in Forgotten Realms. Just about every novel for FR printed changes the world in some way or another. I’m just about to drop FR as a usable campaign because everything keeps changing on a yearly basis. As far as I can tell, the Forgotten Realms is no longer the same world that made it so popular back when it was first released. Ed Greenwood, the author of the world, uses his original FR, not what WotC hath wrought.
In other words, I’m pulling my grey box FR stuff off the shelf.
The “Digital Initiative” is going to be $10-$15 a month. That doesn’t sound worth it to me to basically rent information.
If you cancel your subscription do you lose all access to things you’ve had access to for years?
If you get a subscription do you suddenly have access to years of old information?
If someone steals your account do they treat you like a criminal by assuming that you just are sharing with friends and block your account until you call a 1-800 number?
Will they allow offline content but require some Digital Rights Media checking first?
In my opinion, the whole DRM stuff is taking things too far.
Good luck to WotC trying to get the DI up and running while not making your customers jump through hoops, not making them feel like you’re taking them for granted, and not treating them like criminals while still protecting your copyrighted material.
And finally I heard that sometime this week an e-mail is being sent out to potential play-testers. The downside is that it will be sent to random people on WotC’s web forum e-mail list.
That reduces our chances of getting to play-test quite a bit. (I’ve more or less given up on it)
Oh well, I’ll guess we’ll have to try and have fun playing D&D as we know it just a little bit longer.
Oh, and no babies yet.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 3:04 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for the updates. I can't believe the total random playtest bs. Can't wait to hear about the babies.
I debate the subscription costs of the online stuff. I pay $12 for Tivo, $12 for lifeline cable, $12 might be reasonable for D&D.... IF it means I don't need to spend another dime. $144 a year would be an increase in my gaming budget, I usually buy two books a year. It would be nice if the membership would scale depending on whether you are a 'I buy everything' player or make selective purchases. I'd have to look into how music/book things like rapsody work, there should be a way to accommodate all levels.
The downside is there are months when I barely crack a book, same reason I hate/don't do subscription online RPG like WOW.
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