I hope you don’t mind my talking about the upcoming reboot to D&D, because I’m going to be doing it a lot in the next year or so. :)

One of the things I’m most enjoying about the rules as they trickle out to us is the feeling that, indeed, this is MMOGish. In fact, several oldschool gamers I know have pronounced that ‘they’re turning it into a massively multiplayer game’ in dire fashions with frowny faces.

My response, I think, belays the amount of growing up I still have to do, and goes something like ‘Woohoo!’

Aggro Me (nice to see you posting again, man) has a lengthy piece up on specific conventions adopted from online gaming. Obviously some of these elements were picked up from online games from yet a third party. It’s easy to see correlations just the same.

What happens when there’s a bug in your MMO? Well, it gets patched (or at least you hope it does). It’s a pretty good system and I appreciate when companies patch their games often. But what happens if there’s an error in a D&D book? Well, they can’t really patch that can they? It’s a physical text. But Wizards may be borrowing the concept of patching for D&D. See the following quote from here:

Another factor that will change the face of errata is the implementation of the database, which plays such a central role in our management of 4 Edition. With the institution of ebooks that accompany one’s physical copy, we have the option of keeping one’s ebook updated with the latest changes, from the very small (a “+2” instead of a “+3”) to the very big (changing the text of an ability or feat). That’s not to say there still won’t be a physical copy of the errata, but we might simply compile quarterly changes made in the database into a readable format, rather than the sporadic release that now exists.

Keiron Gillen talks about the same issue more broadly over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and brings up the same issue I have: price.

To get all the D&D Insider stuff you need to pay a MMO-equivalent monthly fee of $9.95. However, it’s also been said on the forum that not all the group may need to pay this - i.e. Players may play free, or at least cheaper. I’d hope that’s true. I’m aware that pretty much every group I’ve ever ran, none of the players owned any of the books, and trying to talk Kid-with-knife to give some Americans ten dollars a month (”That’s more than a drink!”) just so I can excitedly narrate about the molted brown skin of an orc in voice-chat is, I suspect, the sort of impossible quest that’s more traditionally reserved for inside the game. So we’ll see.

(As an aside, orcs are greenish-grey, noob. L2DM.)

I’ve been running Dungeons and Dragons for almost sixteen years now. Since I got back from college I’ve run three campaigns, two of which lasted more than a year (and one of which lasted almost three). To put it mildly, the idea of being able to run a game online for folks I wouldn’t otherwise be able to play with: tasty.

What I’m really looking forward to are the possibilities for systems we haven’t heard anything about yet: items and crafting. Itemization has long been recognized as one of the weakest elements of D&D 3.x, and the Magic Item Compendium attempted to solve that via a mighty big patch. Likewise, crafting is broken. The rules for making an item with your Craft(blah) skill are tediously annoying, and have no place in the average D&D game. I’m not saying I want players to be able to bang out a suit of full plate in a day, but … they’re heroes! Why does it take a player archer weeks and week just to craft a single quiver of 50 master work arrows The careful attention that Massives pay to these two systems has me very hopeful that 4.0 will address these issues as well.

As for excitement about what they’ve already revealed, it’s hard to pick. As a player, I’m probably most excited about the implications made surrounding class balance. Fighters will now have completely different combat styles based on the weapons they wield. Wizards, meanwhile, focus their arcane arts through staff, wand, or orb, and follow specific traditions - with implied factional affiliations. Fascinating. As a DM, the encounter creation simplification has me jumping for joy. The recent podcast about the Monster Manual saw me literally dancing in my seat … which was bad, since I was listening to it while hunting in the ruins of Dalaran. Damned elementals have huge aggro radiusessuses.

At the end of the day, it’s all about the fun, right? So far, everything they’ve mentioned sounds really fun. The only thing that doesn’t sound fun is the constant nickling and diming … but that’s pretty much par for the course for Massive games too, isn’t it?