I’m a bit suspicious of their online plans. I can dig the rules revisions I see… but, man… wasn’t necessary.
Well, as they say, you can play the game perfectly well with just getting the books; they’re the ‘movie’ of a collector’s edition DVD set, to use WotC’s analogy. The online content is the ‘special features’ part, and isn’t necessary to enjoy the movie itself, but some people may find value in it. Now whether or not you’re inclined to believe them is another matter entirely, but that’s their public take on it.
I’m leery of where they’ll go with online content, too. I suspect they’ll be offering tools that only work while you’re online and logged on, and which can’t be downloaded for personal use elsewhere. In which case, I won’t be buying in.
But, man, it’s become increasingly obvious that they needed some rules revisions. Wild Shape and polymorph spells alone make that obvious. The effectiveness gap that increases with higher levels, between casters and fighter-types. How ridiculously complex it is to stat out monsters – particularly higher-CL monsters (ye gods, ever try statting up a high-CL dragon? yikes)
I’m hearing $10/month. And for an additional fee, electronic versions of the books you bought!
(I’m betting they’re not PDFs, but flash that you can’t copy and paste, and can’t keep if the subscription expires)
Oooh! Online copies of Dragon! That… you probably can’t keep either.
$10/month? For what they’re offering? Bleh. Yeah, the mag was $5 each, but they had to print it. Costs just went down for 'em.
I wouldn’t mind a fee for a suite of services, and the online utilities look really neat. The problem is that it sounds like all my players are going to have to be paying fees. It’s great that I can enter the secret code from a book I purchased and have all its options become available. But what if one player owns the book and another does? Can they exchange an item from an unshared source? Can a GM give a character an item from a book he owns, but the player doesn’t?
Part of what they’re trying to do is what every publisher is trying to do – eliminate the freeloaders. If you play, you have to pay. Outfits like World of Warcraft manage it. No more of this second-hand or sharing. A book is an object, an indelible fact of the world, and once they’ve gotten the money for it, it can be freely exchanged or sold with no more money going back to the copyright holder. What they want is for everyone who gets the use of the book to pay into the system. So, they’re trying to tie demand for the book in with something less tangible, more temporary, and which requires an intial investment and ongoing payment from each individual who wants to use it.
As nifty as their tools look, I wouldn’t be sanguine about asking all my players to get subscriptions to D&D Insider even if that was my main campaign. Even if the character creation tool is fantastic, so far it sounds like you can only create a limited number of characters – which makes it substantially less useful than HeroForge, which is free. It also won’t support even other d20 systems. The dungeon generator looks cool as hell, but I can’t use it for my Star*Drive game, or Gamma World, or anything but a D&D game using only content I’ve paid for. OpenRPG may not have the same bells and whistles, but it is actually a lot more useful because I can use it for any game I like. I just can’t see wanting to keep paying for utilities that are less useful than what I’m already using.
D&D 4.0. You ask me, it’s all been downhill since the classes were Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Elf and Halfling. (I hope I got those right - it’s been a long time)
You forgot Rogue (or was it Thief?) and Dwarf.
Personally, I’m satisfied I came into the game at 3.0, just before 3.5 came out, for primarily one reason: THAC0. From all accounts, 'twas a vile thing.
I haven’t played since high school. There’s no THAC0 anymore? What is the new calculation?
It’s…well, mathematically it’s the same, just inverted. Armor Class is now higher = better, and you have to roll at or above the number. So if your target has AC 15 and your attack bonus is +5, you need to roll a 10 or better on the d20 to score a hit. Attack bonus +6, roll a 9 or better, and so on.
It’s functionally the same and produces the same probabilities, but it’s vastly easier to keep track of and makes for smoother gameplay, IMO. It also allows for theoretically infinite expansion of Armor Class, but I’ve heard differing opinions on how valuable that is.
Wasn’t Halfling the Rogue class? I did forget Dwarf, which was just another flavor of fighter, and Elf was the multiclass fighter/magic-user. My brother’s got the well-worn books tucked away in storage somewhere, else I’d look it up.
Oops! My mistake.
There was a distinct Thief class in Basic edition. Halfling was basically a fighter with some shared thief skills and racial combat bonuses. (still have my pink rulebook:) )
Oddly enough, it kinda sounds like 4th is going back to some of the flavor D&D had when each (non-human) race was also a class. There will be class options that can only be chosen by a specific race – so dwarf fighters will supposedly be very different in play than elf fighters. I wouldn’t be surprised at halfling fighters ending up with some “thiefly” stuff from their race.
And I wonder how they’ll deal with accessing the online content from purchasing a book, if the book is used and someone else has already accessed the content. Sounds like there’ll be a passcode in the books to unlock the online content… if someone has already unlocked it, does that mean no access? Could put quite a chill on re-selling used D&D books – which is quite common now. Good for WotC sales, I guess, but I’d expect more howls of outrage will follow if that’s the case.
Well, if the idea is to prevent freeloaders, they could simply make the code transferable. That is, grant access to the last person who entered the code and remove access from the previous person. This prevents people using books that are illegally distributed online, as no more than one person can have that book active at any one time.
Have they said anything about whether they’ll be releasing an OGL version of D&D 4.0 just as they did with 3.0 and 3.5?
-FrL-
Yes, they are.
But the point of the code is to make the book itself non-transferable. If you were buying the book used, you’d be wary that you were not getting all of the content that went with it.
Has WotC said that, or are you inferring it? I’ve been checking out the 4.0 news, but I might have missed something.
About the online content: I was reading the material they have about this on the WotC website, and watching some of the videos on there, and it didn’t seem like any of that stuff was required to play the game. It was just a digital toolbox, replicating what most GMs do with a pad of graph paper, or a plastic mat and some wet-erase markers. They looked like neat aids, sure, but unless I missed something, there’s not going to be anything on line that’s remotely essential to running a 4.0 game.
Not at all. They said very specifically that if all you want to do is buy the books and play 4.0 on tabletop, you can. The online stuff is completely non-essential. Using the code in the book does unlock extra optional features and also allows you to use the book with the online character generator, but nothing will prevent you from grabbing a blank sheet and filling it out like you’ve always done.
Oh, I wanted to address this, too:
If the current update cycle of HeroForge is any indication, we won’t see a version supporting 4.0 until they release 4.5. The latest version of HeroForge includes content only up to the Player’s Handbook 2 and nothing after that, and they’re still chugging along with the current update. The creator seems to prefer doing huge, sweeping updates all at once, rather than updating as each sourcebook is released. shrug Yeah, HeroForge is an excellent tool, but don’t expect to see a 4.0 version anytime soon.