So guess what popped into stores today?

That’s right, D&D Fourth Edition is here for realz. I’m incredibly happy for WotC, and tabletop gaming in general. My little nerd-ghetto sport has had a rough time of it the last few years, and this is going to be a great big shot in the arm.

I was lucky enough to write two articles about it for Wired, and it turns out they’ve used them today for launch. I wrote them initially eons ago, but time and fortune delayed their appearance until today:

• New D&D Rolls a 20 for Playability - Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is a fitting tribute to Gygax and Dave Arneson’s original vision of a game built around a story with few mechanical supports. D&D, when it was first released, was little more than a few dozen pieces of paper stapled together. They were the barest bones of a game system, requiring players and DMs to fill in the blanks to create fun experiences. D&D 4th Edition returns to those early roots by freeing the participants from boring mechanics and petty arguments about rules, by allowing them to focus on what’s truly important. Good story, good friends, rolling dice, having fun. What else could be more important, in the real world or the one of Dungeons & Dragons?
• The Miscast Spell: D&D Insider’s Missed Opportunity - If Wizards of the Coast were serious about breaking open the online tabletop market, it would offer players the opportunity to buy hours at varying rates. For folks who only want to play once a week, a handful of hours would buy them all the time they needed. That’s the typical user, and Wizards would still get a decent amount of money from that transaction. The key is that this type of model includes the other two extremes much better.

Weak sauce this week, and I apologize for that, but whatchagonnado? I played plenty this week but have no video evidence to back it up. Instead, I’m going to offer you the usual sextet of screenshots along with a unique live-action video.

Enclosed, Scary Door-style, is a short clip from a session of the Shadowrun tabletop game … probably circa 2004? This slice of gaming bliss is one of the things I just freaking love - me and a bunch of my friends around a table with some dice. To give you a sense of who is who, when the camera settles down we have the following: directly in front of the camera to the right (the elbow) is Kathleen, further along the table is her husband Brian, at the far end is Ben, out of sight to the left is Alan, directly left of Alan is my wife Katie, and I’m behind the camera.

To set the scene a bit, they’ve just come back from an extended period away from Seattle to find that things have gone badly. Their apartments and vehicles are bugged, people have been ‘checking in’ with acquaintances, and Katie’s character’s mother has gone missing under strange circumstances. That’s about all you need to know; they’ll sort of work through some interesting ideas over the course of the video.

Let me know what you think of this randomness; Hope you’re looking forward to a good weekend.

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Gary Gygax has passed away. The old man didn’t have a lot to do with D&D or tabletop gaming nowadays, but it’s hard to argue with his contribution to that medium or the huge impact Dungeons and Dragons had on videogames.

/salute

Additional: Fitting memorial tributes from all over.

I’m (still) really excited about Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition, and so it was a lot of fun getting to arrange an interview with the designers over at Slashdot. If you have any questions you want passed on, go toss em up in a comment!

You may have noticed from my occasional comments that I’m sort of a fan of the Shadowrun series. I took it into my head that my vitriolic comments might be of interest to others, and so inquired with the folks at 1up. I found that they were interested … and then proceeded to write the most unprofessional drivel that’s ever escaped my fingers.

Thankfully, time and editing heals all wounds. The article Running From Shadows: Why Shadowrun Made Fans Cry went up on 1up.com today, and I think it turned out not too badly.

This year’s release of FASA Studio’s Shadowrun FPS left a lot of people scratching their heads. Design and control decisions left fans on both sides of the PC/360 fence feeling cold. Tabletop players wondered why it wasn’t an RPG. And, of course, there were a lot of gamers who just wanted to see a new version of Crimson Skies. Surprisingly, the deepest disappointment seemed to stem from the game’s use of the Shadowrun license. As a tabletop role-playing game it never reached such high profile as the fantasy juggernaut, Dungeons & Dragons. Why then was the complaining and kvetching so loud? Why all the bad blood over what amounts to a relatively obscure franchise?

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?

On Wednesday, the 22nd of August, I had the chance to be present for one of the first public unveilings of the Fourth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. Myself and a group of journalists (mostly from tabletop trade publications, but a few websites as well) sat for a presentation on the newest thing from Wizards of the Coast. We didn’t know for certain that we were about to see the new edition of D&D, but I’m pretty sure everyone in the room was thinking along the same lines. Again, in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll point out that this presentation was done at a fairly nice steak restaurant. We were fed right after the presentation was done.

My initial reaction was the same muted anger I think a lot of people felt when they first heard the news. Over the course of just the presentation, though, I found myself swayed. I was easily swayed for a couple of reasons:

1. I am not that big a fan of the 3.5 rules. Almost every argument I’ve ever had with a player has been over a rules dispute, and any effort to clarify edge cases and make flow work better is a win for me.
2. On the flip side of that, I have a lot of respect for the D&D R&D team. Chris Perkins, James Wyatt, and Bill Slavicsek are righteously smart people, and it’s been an interesting disconnect to be frustrated by the D&D game rules, but agree so heartily with the Design and Development column on the Wizards website.
3. Likewise, the changes to the D&D mechanics they’ve introduced in more recent books have all been stuff I’ve really enjoyed. Players Handbook II is a gold mine; I’m about to start playing in a campaign, and three of the four characters are using classes out of that book because they’re so well done.

So even just after the presentation was done, I was hopeful, and I’ve grown even more hopeful in the last two weeks. Why is that? Well, let me walk you through the presentation I was given. I’ll try to lay out their play just the way they did. Then I’ll lay out what they’ve released about the setting since then, primarily in the form of the Design and Development articles, and the Playtest Notes pieces. They’ve actually already given us lots of hints about what the new game will be like, and the differences are quite stunning. I’ll also offer up a few opinions of my own, suspicions I have about what things are going to be like. Hopes, as it were.

I’m doing this as much for me as for you, but I hope that you find this amalgamation of information to be helpful. This is what D&D 4th Edition is going to look like. I hope.

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