Goodman Games

Attacking 4E on dubious "videogame" grounds seems like a strange thing to do at the board of the company that sells Wicked Fantasy modules.

And 4E is going to be a big hit. That doesn't mean you have to like it -- I think everyone dislikes a good portion of the top of the music sales charts -- but it's not going to flop.

Attacking? So you call voicing your opinion "attacking" over on these boards too?

Puhlease! Its just opinion.

You know, just the other day I was trying to find their old Sage Advice column, and I couldn't.

I hope that didn't go away...there was some great Q&A there...

I still see it on the main page. It is below the fold in my browser, but it's still there.

...or is it only there when you're signed in to D&D Insider?

Go re-read the OP's post. It's almost entirely supposition based on rumor -- and directly contradicts some of the stuff we know -- and it is most certainly an attack on it, unless you somehow read the OP as being excited by the prospect.

The search engine database seems to have gotten hosed in the transition to the new site, and a lot of articles seem to be missing obvious-to-people-used-to-the-old-site ways of finding it again.

I hope most of it is still there, as well. There was a lot of dross on the old sites, but also a lot of goodies. (I still prefer their defunct Far Sides of the World series to the eventual environment books WotC put out.)

I remember when 3.0 came out. For a long time, I thought roughly the same thing -- these rules, they have no style. They make the game too videogame-ish. Long story short, I played 3rd edition because it's convenient, but I think I was right all the same. I'm surprised people haven't brought up two fairly evident facts about D&D and Wizards:

1. Wizards has to publish editions much faster than previous companies did for D&D, because otherwise they won't make any money off of the tabletop RPG market, which really isn't that big to a company like Hasbro. Come on, upgrading to 3.5 just to fix rangers and haste? That's not worth $70+ some-odd dollars. They just wanted (needed?) your money, and if you wanted to be able to play in groups using the most up-to-date rules, you pretty much have to capitulate or you'll miss some pretty esoteric changes and screw the game up.

(Honestly, though, I'm surprised they had the nerve to come out with 4th edition so soon.)

2. D&D is a legacy product as far as game systems go. It's probably not the best gaming system in the world, but it's comforting to people who've done fantasy roleplaying for a long time. That means two things:

a. Trying to force D&D into a more clearly top-down, "streamlined" system with less nascent tables for everything under the sun lying around is going to piss off fans of the classic game, and is going to trend away from the feel of old-fashioned D&D. That's a trend that's been going on since Wizards bought the license, and we traded in the baroque rules of 2nd ed. for 3rd ed. Honestly, though, if you really wanted a game like that, you should probably just scrap the d20 rules system altogether and make a D&D supplement to Heroes or GURPS, since they're better top-down style systems. (For instance, despite the best efforts of whomever makes it, Champions is still far-and-away better than d20 Mutants & Masterminds, and I don't know anyone who plays d20 Traveler who wouldn't prefer GURPS.)

b. It's going to be hard without a slick marketing campaign to sell to teenagers whose idea of "gaming" was Final Fantasy and Everquest. We play D&D because D&D is classic, not because it's particularly good. Or, it is particularly good, but good can not be separated from the context of a system's history.

I wish someone would just re-print 1st ed. so I could buy the books cheaply and live out the apocalypse when D&D one day goes out of business. I think it's inevitable, but may take a decade or so more.

That's a fun point to make, and a popular one, but I don't think it's entirely accurate. I was a teenager who played the Final Fantasy games something fierce, have over time played them all except XI and XII, and now I'm a 34-year-old who's finally about to beat Final Fantasy IV Hard AND writes the odd D&D module now and then.

"Gaming" is gaming, whether it's Legend of the Five Rings, Puerto Rico, Final Fantasy VI (best of the series!), or Xth Edition D&D.
Each one requires a different skill set, obviously, and for that reason fulfills different needs. Any sort of gaming is a kind of gateway to any other kind of gaming...if you like, for example, any of the Twilight Creations Zombie! games, you may enjoy Call of Cthulhu. And so on.

All I'm saying is: it probably won't be that hard a sell.



RPGNow has 1ED .pdfs...not a book, but cheap. Goodman Games has made at least two 1ED modules (maybe more...not sure on that one), and I understand that Hackmaster is pretty much 1E (again, not sure).

Well, I think Hackmaster is first and second edition Ad&d on steroids.

Paizo sells the 1E rules books (and 2E) as PdF's. $4.00 each. RPGNow probably does as well, for $4.95. Not to mention almost every module.

Heh heh, most aptly put!
For those who still cling to the good memories of 1st Edition I would highly recommend HACKMASTER. While also intended as a pun it is a very good, complete and old-fashioned game system that makes a lot of things better than AD&D in the old days. It really is the AD&D that never was...

Concerning 4E: imho there is no denying that the new edition aims to appeal more to the "virtual" or online players which may or may not come from MMORPGs like World of Warcraft or EverQuest. While its not really a bad thing to provide for internet play (like it or leave it, doesn't hurt anyone) I feel not good at all for paying cash every month (or any other installment) to get access to updated material and extra content. Especially not since I enjoy printed and bound material, e.g. Books.
But then again - it might keep me from buying too many sourcebooks, something I have really kept in check with 3.5. Hm.
I will definitely check out 4E. But I seriously doubt that it will make me sell all the 3.5 stuff I have accumulated.


That is a bold statement--and a little off-topic--but I think I have to agree here. While I adore the HERO SYSTEM (it has the imho best universal game mechanics ever), many people might find Mutants & Masterminds a little bit easier to grasp and less time-consuming when creating characters...

They've always said they're going to be collecting the online content into books on a regular basis. They did this in 3E already -- the Far Corners of the World series was the nucleus around which the environment series of books eventually formed -- but it sounds like it'll be much more formalized going forward.

Those of us who enjoy books aren't in any danger of not having WotC trying to sell us many, many, many of them.

/agree
borrowed from the Paizo boards:


Castles & Crusades:
1) sped up the pace of the game
2) cuts down prep time
3) Stat blocks are a breeze (personally, I keep thinking "that's it??")
4) PCs are identified more by their prime attributes
5) no full suits of clunkmail worn by these rules

By these standards C&C could be called the new & improved game

That is going to be a sell I don't see happening. Nobody is going to stop grinding their MMO characters to play a "slowed down 2D" version of the game they already got.
They may think rolling dice is kind of novel. But as soon as they figure out how much xp/day they lost messing with pencils and paper they are going back to grinding.

I, for one, am pretty excited about the upcoming 4E release. According to this article:



As a DM, this is music to my ears!

Argamae brings up an interesting point:

Speaking as a former noob who started playing 3e with a character that was pre-generated for him, I can emphatically state that: NO it is not clear, especially to first-time players. The first PC I ever played was a 7th level Paladin/Pious Templar. I became Jerri the Mighty, Slayer of Dragons and Opener of Doors. I was paired up with a Wizard, a Rogue/Fighter and a Cleric/Fighter. Since I had the highest charisma and best diplomacy score, I became the de facto party spokesman, even though the Wizard was really the brains behind the brawn.

At least in my experience, just reading through the class descriptions in the PHB really doesn’t really give first time players a clear idea of what role they’ll end up playing in the party. And if I had been forced to choose for myself which class to play, I would have been stumped! I probably would have steered away from spell casting classes altogether because they seemed to involve too much bookkeeping for my tastes. So WHY isn’t there just a SIMPLE chart in the PHB that shows which classes are spell casters, maybe show which ones cast Divine magic as opposed to Arcane magic, and which classes don’t cast spells at all? Why should you have to read all the way through every Class description in the book as well as the Magic school section just to try and figure out which classes might appeal to the noob?

Have you ever tried to explain to a noob which skills and feats he/she should take? The whole character creation process is so convoluted that in order to KNOW which skills and feats are desirable, you pretty much have to plan out your character several levels in advance. I DREADED having to level up my Paladin because I would be clueless about what feats to take, where to stash my limited skill points, and I knew that somewhere there was some house rule or some part of the arcane Armor Class formula that I was missing which would result in a mis-recorded stat. If I had some goal or more specific “role” in mind for my character at the time it would have helped immensely.

Of course, after you’ve created your own characters from scratch a few times, it becomes old hat and you eventually find yourself rolling up new characters for fun in your spare time. But that road can be a long and hard one to follow, and throwing noobs into the pool to see if they sink or swim may not be the best remedy.

I’m hoping the new “Leader” roles as defined by the 4e handbook will help noobs at least understand that there even ARE party roles to be filled, and better equip them to make self-informed choices during the character creation phase. The 3e and 3.5e PHB editions don’t offer nearly enough guidance for the noob IMHO. Even for experienced players, there’s a short-hand character generation section in the back of Player’s Hanbook II complete with suggested feat progressions for each character class that should have been in the first book.

Now I DM my own campaign and I prefer playing straight-up Clerics. But if you had told me 5+ years ago when I first started playing that I’d ever be able to master the rules to a degree that would enable me to DM a game, I would have politely told you that you’re out of your flipping mind. RE: 4e: Anything that could possibly make my job as DM easier and faster sounds like a worthwhile proposition to me. Bring it on!

I got to "hang out" at my LGS Saturday and today for the first time since 4E got announced (my LGS is 54 miles away, and for once I was not in a hurry).

My LGS is also outside of a military base. If the discussions and attitudes I heard about 4E at the store are any indication of the over all attitude of "real people", IE those who don't hang out on websites, 4E may actually be in trouble.

Nobody ever foresaw the day Nintendo would be less then leading, either. (Much less be the #3 guy).
I know of another team (my old DM's) that play "D&D". Why the quotation marks? Because they were using WW's WoD rules. I never thought I woulda seen the day somebody played "D&D" with no d20s at all. It was all D&D-type gaming. Dungeons, traps, monsters, and the like. Just using a fistful of d10s for everything.
Now I've seen everything!

So you saw my old group using Shadowrun and its d6's for our D&D gaming?

I guess it was just me. I could have sworn that when WW came out they were all kinds of severe to the idea of "dungeon crawling" in an RPG. They were out to 'change' the way RPGs were played.
ShadowRun was FASA. Heck, I even played GURPS D&D for years. But somebody using WW and calling it D&D just struck me as ... odd.
Like I said, maybe it was just me.

Honestly, I hope D&D4 doesn't flop. But I say the same thing about WoD. I was sad when Tri-Stat died. I hate seeing any game go down. Somebody probably played it and had fun somewhere.

I think that 4e has the potential to be a good game, and criticizing it before we see it is stupid. BUT, I think that they way WOTC is going about it is just plain stupid. Yeah, Its a cash grab. WOTC wants World of WarCraft money. They want 7 million people to pay them 15 bucks a month. hell, who wouldn't. But to say they are not monkeying with the table top game for the sake of online play is bull crap. The game is getting streamlined to play online. The game is adopting elements similar to online play. The mechanics are changing to less DM arbitration and more dice rolling. Look at the things they are doing with the social encounters. Every time you open your mouth you're going to roll the dice to see what happens. This is because they don't want some DM during online play in Tacoma, Washington jerking around a player in Dallas, Texas. One bad experience with some jerky DM or group and a guys going to say, "Screw this, I'm not paying fifteen bucks a month for this. . ." What the game design geniuses at WOTC haven't figured out is that World of Warcraft is an objective computer program that rewards palyers for time spent playing. Anybody knows that if they put in a gazillion hours they are going to get something out of it... This online play stuff that WOTC is betting the farm on isn't in their hands is a big gamble. They are basically putting the future of the games in the hands of Online players. But hey, It may be the greatest thing ever, who knows. But I wish they would just be honest about what they are doing and why they are doing it. A good game is a good game and 4e could be a good game.

I don't think so. I think WOTC has made it extremely clear that 4E is going to be much more of a powergaming munchkins fantasy come true than even 3E is.

Doesn't take much brains to see the truth of that.

well, Treebore I still think criticizing something before you see it is a dumb idea. I think that they are catering to the munchkinism, that's what the kiddos want. And, by the way, I play Castles and Crusades exclusively. Its the true third edition Dungeons and Dragons. I agree with you all the way.

They have given us a lot to chew on though. More so then I expected. I got the freebie stat card for the spined devil in 4e stats.

The main reason I am going to stay well away from 4e is that the new gimick it is bringing along with it, D&DI. I spent a lot of time playing various MMORPGs. EQ, CoH, EQ2, WoW, AO, until finally I landed in D&D:Online. What I realized there, in D&D:O, was that I really missed D&D as the tabletop game. So I quit. And started a new campaign. This was about two years ago(?). I played D&D3.o but didn't have the books so I went to the gamesstore nearby and picked up the core ruleset for 3.5. Since then I have gotten back into tabletop games full bore. CarWars, GURPS, SilverAge Sentinels, and currently C&C.
I am not going back to computer games. Even if it is a cocooned up tabletop. I could play 4e without all the bells and whistles. But why, when I already have a lot of fun playing these games I already mentioned. Without D&DI there is nothing new to 4e. Nothing new that I need for my game, anyway.

And there's one vote for me having no brains.

They have....? I must have been dozing....


I know I will take a good look at 4e when it is out. I've tried to look for info on WotC's forums, but too many things seemed to be someone's guess that someone else was reporting as a rumour that then became "the truth". And all that was followed by a sermon and an argument and then a sermon about an argument and an argument about the sermon. I haven't seen anything in Wizard's own previews (at least the ones I've seen) that screams "powergamers' fantasy!" and have seen things I like the sound of (but can you hear sights?).

And the game I started with (blue booklet) was the munchkins fantasy, there were practically no rules and we didn't understand them all, and we made up amazingly unbalancing things. But damn, we had so much fun that three or four of us are still interested in the game, whatever form it takes. And plenty of other games, too.

As for DDI, it looks irrelevant, unless you want to use it. Maybe it is because I've never been a completist, never 'had to have' each book and magazine that came out... content I'm not interested in, appearing in a new format, doesn't become interesting. And playing online with folks hundreds of miles away sounds like it has potential, but I don't expect it to actually work. If I play 4e, it will be with books and at a table, same as every other RPG I've played in the past 30 years. They can do what they want, it won't effect me. Like Lincoln said, "folks that like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."

Ultimately, a good game comes down to the folks you're playing with and that moment when you say, "remember that time five years ago when you were climbing down the ravene when the stirges attacked, and then that bulette..." or "remember that time we had to stop the demons from consorting and you died so many times and got poisoned so many times in that fight and we kept bringing you back, we joked that you had less actual blood in you than Keith Richards...". That's the test. 'Nuff said.

A good game is a good game whether its developed by a bunch of corporate boot licking nerdlings or not. I really can't say that 4e is going to suck, teens will probably love it. The older crowd not so much
Anyway I just don't like they way its been presented to the gaming public. They come out and tell everybody to wrap up your 3.5e campaigns and then they show us some computer online thing that looks pretty cool. .. IF IT WERE 1992. You know guys, I've been thinking... I think the Online thing was designed to fail. It looks cheap so they didn't spend a lot of money on it( just like their crappy miniatures---have you seen the production values on the starter set?). What they want us to do is buy the books for a 100 dollars and then sign up for the online thing for at least 3 or 4 months. That way they double their money at launch. If it works for them then they make a lot of World of Warcraft dough and everybody gets a trophy wife. If it doesnt work and folds in six months at least they made enougn money to keep their corporate masters off their back for a couple of years.
If we truly hate what is going on we need to buy another game and let them know we're buying another game. Just saying that you're going to protest by keeping all your old edition stuff and running off into the jungle and homebrewing it for the next twenty years ain't gonna work. They've already written you guys off. Pick a game, pick any game, hell it could be pokemon monopoly for all it matters. Buy it, and mail the receipt to WOTC and say I spent my money on this instead. Me? I'm going to buy the new Dungeoneer RPG. It looks like its going to be everything that the 4e is saying its going to be except that it's not murdering years and years of gaming table memories.