Here we have a statement:
5:32 PM: Haaldaar All of the new D&D Essentials will have new material. Not a reprint of existing product.
which you gloss as entailing (among other things):
FrankTrollman wrote:Similarly, the D&D Essentials Fighter will have all new abilities, because none of them will be reprints. So essentially it's a whole new class.
You've glossed the original statement as basically a universal quantification over 'new material' ('For every single sentence in the Essentials Players book: that sentence does not appear in the 2008 PHB 1.') whereas I'd gloss it as an existential one. The new product will have
some new material in it, so that it can't be touted (as a whole) to be simply a reprint of an extant product.
You also seem to think that altering the prose in a rules text automatically means that we get new rules. If you think that (I'm not entirely sure), it's a non sequitur. Take your own re-write of the entry on Milestones in PHB 1 - that doesn't alter the rules, only their text. And that is exactly what I expect from the "Essentials" line.
See, I think they're actually too lazy to do an entire new design. They're simply taking the rules texts they have and simplify those. A less kind term would be "dumb them down". Per example, consider the minotaur's racial feature (if used as a PC race rather than a monster), and how they changed it from 2008 to 2010:
2008 version (MM, p.278):
"Ferocity: If you are reduced to 0 hit points, you can make a basic melee attack as a free action before falling unconscious."
2010 version (PHB 3, p.10)
"Ferocity: When you drop to 0 hit points or fewer, you can make a basic melee attack as an immediate interrupt."
Two points stand out:
(1.) Apparently the word "reduce" is to complicated, especially in the passive ("are reduced to").
(2.) On the other hand, a greater degree of precision in the rules bit: "as an immediate interrupt" specifies exactly where what when takes place. Sure, it presupposes that people know how interrupts work, but once they do, there's absolutely no room for interpreting it further.
That's the twin tendencies that I predict Essentials 4E will capitalize on - dumb down the prose, and rigidify the rules terms as much as possible. Not a bad way to go, I think.
The result, then, is a solidification of the 4.0 rules text, very far from a simple (if selective) reprint of the rules text they have in their books currently. Which is what the above quote says. It's 4.0. I do, however, predict outrage that the "new" class builds for rogue and fighter will simply be streamlined versions of extant builds (and their powers), with cleared up prose but new names and taglines. Imagine them releasing the reprint of the minotaur's "Ferocity" as "Brutality" or whatever. Yep, that's what I think we're going to get. A selection of level 1-3 powers, the 'simpler' ones with few conditional effects, with new taglines and names.
FrankTrollman wrote:So for example: the new rules might simply not mention Close Bursts or the Petrified condition (hey, they gotta cut something to get the whole book into 30 pages).
This was refuted above. There's no claim by WotC that the 30 pages player book will contain the entirety of the rules in the game. You've already been pointed to the 64-page supplement for the DM in the 2010 Red Box, as well as the Rules Compendium for the "Essentials" line to come out later which clocks in at 256 pages (iirc).