08.16.07
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition coming out
So we just went to the Wizards announcement of D&D 4th edition. Here’s what I remember:
- The new Player’s Handbook is coming out in May 2008. MM in June, DMG in July.
- The core classes are going to level 30, not level 20.
- Classes are going to have more clearly defined “roles”. I’m not even sure what this means, I guess clerics aren’t healing enough or something.
- They committed to fixing some stupid things, e.g. Wizards not being fun at 1st level because they only have 1 spell, and the party camping whenever the cleric runs out of healing spells.
- They said it’ll still be d20, so presumably it won’t be totally different than 3.5 edition.
- There’ll be a whole set of tools – 3d virtual tabletop, 3d visual character creator, “mechanics” character creator. They showed some pretty videos of these. It looked like a 3d version of maptool, pretty impressive if it’s not faked.
The audience reaction was mixed – some things were cheered, other things (e.g. Dragon and Dungeon going online) were greeted with dead silence.
Also they gave out free t-shirts (good) and USB sticks with images on them. The USB sticks also had an autorun program that crashed when I tried to exit it.