Yep, just for YOU I listened through nearly every minute of the D&D Next seminar that was streamed live from GenCon. I don't know if I made my sanity save yet - time will tell. Here are the highlights, in no particular order:
1 - A whole lotta nothing ;)
2 - Forgotten Realms will be the first setting. It is being strongly linked to the fiction side of the company (which it always has been). Still, the marketing push for the series of novels introducing the revised Forgotten Realms was damn heavy. Seriously, the books gotta sell for WotC to have a chance of making their Hasbro set sales goal.
3 - There will be electronic releases of all of the prior D&D stuff - but they didn't say PDF. My guess? Some proprietary viewer so you can only use it on your PC - because you know about those evil pirates, they're everywhere! If they do go back to PDF, I want my file access at RPGNow returned to me. I paid for that shit! Grrrr!
4 - Uhm - something about critical failures, different magic systems, releasing the Sorcerer and Warlock this weekend for levels 1-5
5 - Oh, and D&D is the only game that tells you to ignore the rules when needed. Apparently no other RPG does the same. Thanks Mike! They must have that copyrighted or something...
Looking Forward to 2025: FRPGs, Thirteen Parsecs, and Basic Bestiary
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We are nearing the end of 2024. I did not get as much done here as I
wanted. That is sort of my theme for 2024, really. Since I had no specific
plans fo...
4 minutes ago
I am a greyhawk fan, so when Ed Greenword walked out on stage, i knew it was FR. I HATE FR!!! I have read a few of the stories, tried to play in their settings, just can't do it.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with FR is there is TOO much of it. You can't keep up. Then a player comes up and says "This thing that you haven't read or even bought looks really cool I want to do this right now." Then you have to disappoint them. Not good.
ReplyDeleteThe Gray Box of FR was good as I remember it. Plenty of open space for you to ADD. Now it's full, isn't it? You have to subtract to personalize it.
And Drizzt(?) can wander off over the horizon thank you very much. Mr. Two weapon blight.
I can't hear the word Forgotten Realms anymore. FR here, FR there. I had hoped for Greyhawk or Mystara, but NOOOO, Forgotten Realms again...
ReplyDeleteWe'll as it stands now, interest in Next greatly diminshed. The othert two settings would have been a strong lure towards next for me....
Couldn't agree more about the "whole lotta nothing". Why did Mearls spend several minutes explaining what D&D is to an audience at Gen Con, of all places?
ReplyDeleteIt was all marketing fluff and almost no substance.
As has been said, the moment Ed Greenwood walked on stage you knew the setting of choice was going to be ultra-bland/generic FR (because that's what sells).
Not that I'll probably ever play D&DNext, but this whole "designed by committee" and "we'll throw everything in there so we can please everyone" approach seems destined for failure.
For instance, Mearls said there would be THREE different rules sets for magic, so does that mean an adventure featuring a magic-user would need to include THREE different ways of using him (to cater for different DMs' approaches)?
That said, I actually looked at the playtest packet for the first time last night and was reasonably impressed. Still don't understand why we need to the Strength and Charisma of a giant beetle, but at least the monster stat blocks aren't quite as unwieldy as with 3.5/Pathfinder!
The DM can ignore rules?
ReplyDeleteThat's preposterous!
Next they'll be saying a DM can create new rules!
This will not do.