Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition Announced
I guess it's official. My extensive library of 3rd edition and 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons crap is going to be obsolete next summer. Dungeons & Dragons, the great ol' granddaddy of all role-playing games, is apparently receiving another facelift.

For a scary amount of detail pulled out from GenCon and press releases, check out this thread at ENWorld.

This time around, the goals for the latest revision seem to be:

* Faster set-up time and game play
* Easier / More Accessible to new players
* Integration with digital distribution, and the online gaming community, including online "gaming tables" to bring people together to play across the Internet
* Trying to see if they can't buy into the whole MMORPG "monthly fee" thing.

All noble goals, to be sure. And there are rumblings and rumors that there will be a 4th edition equivalent to the "Open Gaming License" that helped make the original release of 3rd edition such a huge success.

Bill Slavicsek, the Dungeons & Dragons R&D director, drops some more hints about what's going on:

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.

But will I be buying into it? That, I cannot say. I am sure I'll be picking up the 4th edition Player's Handbook, at the very least, because I am a Dice & Paper Role-Playing Game junkie and I read game books for games I never play just for the fun of it. Yes, I'm a sick guy who probably needs professional help.

But playing it? Probably not so much. Besides the problem of convincing our gaming group (which has now swelled to WAY TO FREAKING MANY PLAYERS for a Saturday night game - we have enough for 2 separate games now) to buy new rules, there is a really huge issue in that I am not seeing (at this point) a compelling reason to change.

First of all, the designers did too good of a job in 3.5. They fixed most of the "bugs" in 3rd edition (which was a fantastic re-envisioning of the game on its own). Unlike the previous editions, there isn't a whole lot that I'd consider "broken." Other than the fact that the game is a little on the complex / unwieldy side, but as a Hero system veteran I mock those who think it's "too complicated." I mean, you don't even have to do long division in the middle of combat!

Secondly - edition 3.5 finally feels "mature." This means something different to a consumer than to the publisher. To a publisher, "mature" equates with "stagnant." Sales have dropped off because people already have all the books they could possibly use - and then some additional ones besides. I can't blame them for wanting to press the "reset" button at this point to go back to the days where everything was fresh and new, and players were ready to buy every single piece of crap book you could throw out at them.

To the player - mature means something else entirely. To me, it means I've got a sagging bookshelf full of possibilities that will take me years - decades, really - to get close to exploring fully. It means our gaming group is finally comfortable with the rules and gaming sessions tend to go more smoothly. It means I'm heavily invested in one product, very satisfied with said product, and not particularly interested in making a switch to a competing product even by the same manufacturer, even under threat of dropping support for the old product.

Because it's been a pretty plentiful seven years.

A similar thing happened with White Wolf's World of Darkness system (of which "Vampire: The Masquerade" was the flagship). Second edition really cleaned up the problems with the first editions of all the books. Then the third editions came and broke almost as much as they fixed. And now they've completely modified the entire world in an effort to push that reset switch and get everyone buying brand-new sourcebooks all over again.

But meanwhile, a lot of people (our group included) are still playing 2nd edition. Or a hybrid of 2nd and 3rd.

Still, it'll be interesting to follow what happens. Even if you don't touch the dice & paper stuff, you know there'll be some licensed D&D 4th Edition CRPGs we'll be playing in a couple of years.

The first official 4th edition D&D book will be the Player's Handbook, to be released in May 2008, followed by the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide in June and July, respectively.

For more information, check out the new website, DNDInsider.com.



(Vaguely) related expositions of my geekiness:
* Original Dungeons & Dragons Trivia
* Disappointment in the Demonweb Pits
* Adult Dungeons & Dragons
* Teenagers and D&D
.

Labels: Roleplaying Games

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