Games will Live! Games will DIE!

[athelind]

Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons page is currently showing nothing more... and nothing less... than a big, full-screen image labled
"4DVENTURE"

...accompanied by a countdown that is currently in the 19-hour range.

GenCon starts tomorrow; the target is almost inevitably the announcement of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition.

the_gneech, might as well table your Star Wars Saga Edition Sword & Sorcery conversions; D&D4 is almost certainly going to look very similar to SWS.

The Rumor Mill is pretty certain that 4th Edition will not be OGL; the Noble Experiement of d20 licensing and Open Source Gaming may be dead. Word is that the Hasbro suits have never liked the idea of giving away the milk from the cash cow. Of course, the genie's out of the bottle -- they can't make the last seven years of OGL/d20 product just go away, and I'm sure there are going to be people using the old SRD as the basis for their homebrewed games for years to come.

At least when superhero comics do a massive Retcon Crisis, you don't have to throw out all your old comics...

Comments

[doc-mystery.livejournal.com]

That simultaneously fluorescent and bilious green GLEEMAX page on the main screen made my retina melt.

And I sadly suspect you are right about the announcement of D&D4.

::B::

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

For some reason I'm comforted by the fact that I wasn't the only one annoyed by that "GLEEMAX" thing. ;D

"Bilious green." I need to add that one to my vocabulary!

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Well, here's hoping any new rules n' whatnot work in our favor. :) I think the local D&D crew n' I have just about every 3.5 guide and extra book available.

[bfdragon.livejournal.com]

Been too long since I've had a chance to game.. haven't really done anything serious since the 3.0 rules.. I don't even own the 3.5.. oh well.

[halfelf.livejournal.com]

While I have tons and tons of 3.0 and 3.5 books, the likelyhood is high that I won't be involving myself in D&D4. I'm getting off the infinite book bandwagon.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Does this mean I'll be able to find The Draconomicon at Darth Paul for a buck now?

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

Ah, Draconomicon. The book that talks about a blue dragon that interbreeds with orcs, halflings, trolls, and shambling mounds.

Shambling mounds are walking piles of compost.

Someone got paid to write that.

And that someone wasn't me!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

As always, Rafferty, you highlight the worst aspects of something, completely misrepresenting the work as a whole.

It was a BLACK dragon. Jeez.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, whatever. I don't play the game, I just want pictures of big lizards!

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

I don't know if you ever hang out at ENWorld, but there's an army of people there convinced 4e is right around the corner and scouring the internet for evidence of it. However, what leads me to suspect that it's not quite "right around the corner" is that there are entries on Amazon for D&D and Star Wars RPG books well into 2008, and 4e books aren't among them.

That said, I don't really care about D&D itself at this stage. Killing E-Tools, Dragon magazine, and Dungeon magazine pretty much wiped out my interested in keeping up with it, as they were three of my four primary resources.

My SWSE conversion pretty much fixes the things I didn't like about D&D ... and if I'm going to be converting anyway, it doesn't matter if I'm converting from D&D, AD&D, GURPS, Fantasy HERO, or Runequest.

I suspect that if/when 4e comes out, there will undoubtedly be SWSE elements in there, but there are still going to be fire-and-forget wizards, a Disneyland world, and magic items out the wazoo. I'll stick with my conversion. ^.^

-The Gneech

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

Followup:

Apparently I'm wrong.

Oh well, still not interested.

-TG

[breimh.livejournal.com]

I miss Chainmail... you know... back in the days when players and GM's were the ones who used their imagination and home-fiat rules to make the game work and create the setting/races/et. al. from their own heads.

Now, everyone expects things to be found in one new suppliment or another.

What a sad commentary on our times.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's so much a "sad commentary" as it is just a reflection of the nature of the beast. Now, my preference is for simple systems that leave a lot in the hands of the GM (and cooperatively, with the players), rather than having a rule for EVERYTHING, buried in some supplement ... somewhere. However, you aren't likely to find "Make It All Up Yourself: the RPG" taking up much space on the shelves.

It's all the "We'll do it for you" stuff that becomes something marketable and saleable ... and hence, that's what's going to take up a large portion of the shelf space. (Even with the "generic" systems, where ostensibly you could be making your OWN world settings, the company generally goes that extra step and releases a bunch of world-setting supplements for those GMs who have more money than time or imagination.) If WotC just gets to sell one core book, and that's it, then there won't be any "regular" customers. It's only through an endless stream of supplements and revisions that they can continue to churn out products for the same game.

There will always be an opening for players and GMs to rely upon imagination and "home-fiat" rules - but that's something that happens in individual game sessions, not in the game store and certainly not on Wizards of the Coast's web site, so it just won't likely be as visible to the gaming public as those brand-new, shiny books at the game store.

[shdragon.livejournal.com]

I have nothing useful to add to this discussion (Haven't played D&D much since the AD&D days, never had a lot of 3rd ed books and only bought one 3.5 book) except to add that your icon hypnotizes me. WHERE did you find that?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...I fear I don't remember.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Wow. How did I not even notice the icon until you mentioned it? That is pretty wild. =)

(That reminds me of "Ascending and Descending," an entry in the Hirst Arts Design Derby from last year.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

By the way - speaking of icons - what's that cool silvery dragon in the picture? (Is that a toy from somewhere?)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Looks like a chromed Lego Dragon.

[shdragon.livejournal.com]

Yup. It's a Lego dragon. I don't know if it was chromed or if that's one of the colors it came in (I stole the icon from a picture from some website a few eons ago)

I just looked through Lego's website and can't find the dragon in particular in their catalog, it was a part of some of the older sets. It seems like that have a new dragon design now.

[stalbon.livejournal.com]

This will no doubt spark my interest in a cautionary way, and I'll go look at the new books once they've been released, I'm sure, but my D&D life has always been sporadic, as half of the games just can't keep my interest going in their favor for too long. I'm certainly hoping they do change some things, but I'd rather they keep most of the stuff around...unlike what they've done to their published magazines. Here's looking 4ward.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

While some of the changes in Star Wars Saga Edition sound worthwhile, they'd interest me a lot more if they'd streamline things to the point where I didn't have to devote so much page space to pointlessly interconnected data to describe various critters, monsters, and NPCs the players might run into on a regular basis. That is, I can't just conjure up an NPC from the top of my head. There are FEATS to consider. And SAVES. One thing I definitely prefer about Ironclaw is that there are very few stats required for "average" NPCs or critters. Rather than having a Will Save that is calculated based on a function of your Wisdom bonus plus a progression based on your level (Let's see - was it 3/4 or 1/1 for a cleric? Where's that table?), you get to just roll your Will and Mind versus a mental-type effect.

Sometimes I feel like D&D is designed to keep a DM busy number-crunching for his dungeon for hours on end, and to encourage players to browse and shop through scattered supplemental books to find the perfect cheesy prestige class or feat combination. All the work is a "game" unto itself.

I don't see any of that going away with 4th edition, so I'm not getting excited.

Has it really been all that long since 3.5? 3rd edition in 2000, 3.5 in 2003 ... okay, I guess they're following the Games Workshop model of "start over every 3-4 years." Somehow it just didn't seem all that long ago.