4E: what can we expect from SAGA and Bo9S?

[Jacob_Orlove]

It looks like SAGA and the Book of Nine Swords managed enough traction to get their mechanics into 4E, while stuff like Incarnum and Truenaming did not. Not being very familiar with Bo9S, and not being at all familiar with SAGA, what can we expect to see incorporated into 4E?

At a guess, they'll be replacing skills and feats with their SAGA equivalents, and manage combat and magic more like Bo9S, but I have no idea what that means in practice. Thoughts?

[Fwib]

What I'm wondering is how much backward-compatibility they'll have - will it be 'nearly none, apart from flavour' (like 2e->3e) or 'mostly compatible, just a few tweaks' like (3e->3.5) - probably near the latter?

That being that case, I can't see how they'll make magic not be considerably more uber than melee (when used by those who know what they're doing) - Bo9S melee-mechanics or not.

I look forward to musings from those more erudite than myself. (and also to whatever happens in 15 minutes, of course)

[RandomCasualty]

Well I'm figuring warblade will replace the core fighter and we'll see manuevers in addition to spells. Also the per encounter paradigm may get brought into 4E or it may not. I'm really not sure.

As far as Star Wars SAGA, I'm honestly not sure what's going to get brought in. The skill system maybe, possibly the level based save/defense system, along with class talents and possibly getting rid of iterative attacks (though I still find Saga's system for this to be clumsy at best). They may or may not adopt the SAGA philosophy of "everything is a defense, there are no saving throws", though personally I prefer the D&D method better. It really sucks if you die instantly to a finger of death and you don't even get to roll the save. The DM just says "Yup, you're boned."

I figure we'll still see vancian spell casting, I don't think D&D is quite ready to abandon that yet.

My guess is that battlefield control is going to be awesome still, because the designers have yet to realize how good it is. They at the very least have probably figured out that polymorph is broken, so hopefully they ditch the poly/wildshape mechanics entirely. That seemed to be the goal of the PHB2 anyway and I expect they're going to stick with it.

[endersdouble]

Bo9S is kind of a mixed bag. I do hope they ditch fucking stupid per day balancing, and go to per encounter (or rough equivalents). That part of Bo9S was sweet.

Frankly, I think the best magic system would be along the lines of SR--no limits on casting per day or week or 4.5 hour period, you just get drain.

[RandomCasualty]

1187302641[/unixtime]]
Frankly, I think the best magic system would be along the lines of SR--no limits on casting per day or week or 4.5 hour period, you just get drain.

Question would be how to handle drain in D&D. You really can't deplete HP, because that just makes casters a glass cannon even more. And fatigue and exhaustion are generally not something casters really care about.

I think they're better off making spells a combination of per encounter and action point based casting.

I really don't think they'll abandon the vancian per day casting though. Thus far Bo9S and the warlock are the closest they've come to a variant casting system, and neither of them works particularly well for all the crap they want wizards and clerics to do. So it's a good bet that instead of coming up with some new untested system, they'll just stick to the old one that hasn't changed since 1st edition.

As much as I'd prefer durations like "combat" or "until slot is reallocated", we'll probably be looking at the old style 1 minute/level crap in 4E too.

[Jacob_Orlove]

It's worth noting that both Dragon Shamans and some new reserve feat allow "free" healing up to 1/2 total hp. I wouldn't be surprised to see Clerics get something similar if they're moving towards a per-encounter standard.

[Tokorona]

The announcement is up.. and the server is zergrushed/slashdotted/down

[Fwib]

[edit] Rant, rant! *sulk* I wants too see it too, precious!

[endersdouble]

1187302961[/unixtime]]

1187302641[/unixtime]]
Frankly, I think the best magic system would be along the lines of SR--no limits on casting per day or week or 4.5 hour period, you just get drain.

Question would be how to handle drain in D&D. You really can't deplete HP, because that just makes casters a glass cannon even more. And fatigue and exhaustion are generally not something casters really care about.

I think they're better off making spells a combination of per encounter and action point based casting.

I really don't think they'll abandon the vancian per day casting though. Thus far Bo9S and the warlock are the closest they've come to a variant casting system, and neither of them works particularly well for all the crap they want wizards and clerics to do. So it's a good bet that instead of coming up with some new untested system, they'll just stick to the old one that hasn't changed since 1st edition.

As much as I'd prefer durations like "combat" or "until slot is reallocated", we'll probably be looking at the old style 1 minute/level crap in 4E too.

Well, if they're taking stuff from SAGA...So I've been told, it's got a "condition track"--which sounds basically like the health system in RPGs that don't suck, where you take a penalty on actions at non full health. That'd be an easy way to do drain--you go down the condition track.

[Prak]

well this is interesting:

It’s still the d20 Game System

that, ostensibly, means that 3.x should still be compatible, though whether there's a balance difference between a $e wizard and a 3e wizard will remain to be seen.

hell, maybe we'll all be lucky and WotC have bought K and Frank and will be putting out Tome style stuff. That'd be nice... but unlikely...

One thing I'd like to see is more "Character" monsters. IE: more monster designed such that if I want to play them, I use my CR as my level.

I'll bet all the classes will have the "ability slots" we've seen in Bo9S and ToM and Frank has been talking about.

It should be interesting, especially if we can actually use 3e and $e together... that'd be rather nice and a good PR move on WotC's part...


this is also interesting:

D&D Insider provides its members with immediate access to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, to enhanced and expanded content tied to the newest physical book products, to an amazing suite of digital tools to make Dungeon Master preparation and campaign management easier to handle, to a Character Creator that provides not only an interactive character sheet but a visualizer that lets you determine the exact look of the characters you create

It explains why code monkey's license rights were revoked, because DM Tools were going to become an integral part of 4e's marketing... as, of course, will Dungeon and Dragon... interesting, I'm actually looking forward to this, especially if I can get the DI for free... The fact that pre-cancellation subscriptions to Dungeon/Dragon are being converted to subscriptions to Paizo's new mag and not the DI seems to imply the DI will be free.
or that they hadn't decided whether it would be free or not at the time of cancellation...

[Tokorona]

Alright, from an IRC channel:

[15:46:39] <@Aslan_Cross> Managed to get into the design and development article about the Fighter
[15:46:54] <@Aslan_Cross> &#129;gYeah. I thought about going high Con and using a hammer, but I wanted to start with the chance to make a couple of attacks, so I&#129;fm using rain of blows as my good weapon attack, and I went with high Wis so that I can switch to the better oppy powers later.&#129;h
[15:46:54] <@Aslan_Cross> &#129;gMy elf fighter uses a spear. I like the speed and the option to go past AC. But you&#129;fve got the fighter covered. I&#129;fll play a halfling rogue.&#129;h
[15:48:54] <@Aslan_Cross> Many fighters will opt for swords. Swords have the most flexible assortment of powers. In a fighter&#129;fs hands, the longsword is the queen of the battlefield and the greatsword is the queen&#129;fs executioner. But each of the other significant melee weapons offers the fighter unique advantages and opportunities. For the first time, you&#129;fll be able to say &#129;gI&#129;fm an axe fighter&#129;h or &#129;gI&#129;fm a flail fighter&#129;h and that will mean something coo[L]

[Leress]

From the Design and Development article

Here’s a highly probable conversation lifted from the future, one year from today, as two players who’ve just met at a convention discuss their PC choices for their upcoming D&D game.

“I’m playing a 3rd-level human fighter named Graelar.”

“Cool. Is he weapon and shield or two-hander?”

“He’s sword and board, man.”

“Longsword?”

“Yeah. I thought about going high Con and using a hammer, but I wanted to start with the chance to make a couple of attacks, so I’m using rain of blows as my good weapon attack, and I went with high Wis so that I can switch to the better oppy powers later.”

“My elf fighter uses a spear. I like the speed and the option to go past AC. But you’ve got the fighter covered. I’ll play a halfling rogue.”

The names and destinations of the powers mentioned above might have changed by the time the game is in your hands. What won’t change is that fighters care about which weapons they use much more than other characters. Other character classes have specific weapons and weapon types that they tend to rely on while still maintaining access to a larger chunk of the weapon chart. The fighter is the only current 4th Edition class with capabilities that depend on the weapon they have chosen to train the most with. Even at 1st level, a fighter who uses an axe has a different power selection than a fighter who relies on a flail or a rapier or a pick. In the long run, fighters can diversify and master powers related to a few different weapons, but most will opt to focus on the weapon that suits their personal style, helps their interactions with the rest of the PCs in the group, and carries all the magical oomph they’ve managed to acquire.

Many fighters will opt for swords. Swords have the most flexible assortment of powers. In a fighter’s hands, the longsword is the queen of the battlefield and the greatsword is the queen’s executioner. But each of the other significant melee weapons offers the fighter unique advantages and opportunities. For the first time, you’ll be able to say “I’m an axe fighter” or “I’m a flail fighter” and that will mean something cool.

[Leress]

Why Race matters

Set the wayback machine to May of 2004!

Even at that point, we knew 4th Edition was coming, though official work on it wouldn’t start for another year. At the time, the design team used to meet regularly in what we jokingly called the “Design Cabal.” And one day, in May ’04, we started kicking around the question of how many slices of pie a D&D character should consist of, and how big each piece should be.

In 3rd Edition, class and magic items were two big pieces of the PC pie. Race was important at 1st level, but by the time you hit 20th, there was rarely much to distinguish a dwarf fighter from a half-orc fighter. The difference between a +2 here and a +2 over there was drowned out by the huge bonuses from magic items and character level—it didn’t matter any more.

We wanted race to matter all the way up through a character’s career. We wanted there to be some difference between two characters of different races, all other things being equal. We had tried out mechanics like the racial paragons in Unearthed Arcana and the racial substitution levels in the Races of . . . series of books, and we liked the results.

In May of 2004, we started kicking around ideas like “the 20-level race.” In a 20-level race, at each level you gained, you’d get not only new class features, but also new racial qualities. Your race might predetermine which ability scores you increased at some levels, so a dwarf’s Constitution would always have an edge over characters of other races. It would grant you new special abilities as you advanced in level, always appropriate to your level, of course.

One key advantage we saw to this system was that it made it much easier to find room for new races without resorting to the kludgy and awkward mechanic of level adjustments. If we spread the tasty magical abilities of drow out through their levels, they could start at 1st level on a par with other character races. Races like the githyanki already anticipated some of that idea by granting new spell-like abilities at higher levels.

Well, over the next few years, things changed, as things are wont to do. We blew the game out to thirty levels, but put your most significant racial choices in the first ten. Above that, other choices started to crowd out room for special abilities coming from your race.

In the final version of 4th Edition, most of your racial traits come into play right out of the gate at 1st level—dwarven resilience, elven evasion, a half-elf’s inspiring presence, and so on. As you go up levels, you can take racial feats to make those abilities even more exciting and gain new capabilities tied to your race. You can also take race-specific powers built into your class, which accomplish a lot of what racial substitution levels used to do: a dwarf fighter with the friend of earth power can do something that other 10th-level fighters just can’t do.

The rules have changed a lot since that first idea of the 20-level race, but they still serve the same purpose: to make sure that your race stays not just relevant but actually important all the way up through thirty levels of adventure.

[Prak]

1187304455[/unixtime]]Alright, from an IRC channel:

[15:46:39] <@Aslan_Cross> Managed to get into the design and development article about the Fighter
[15:46:54] <@Aslan_Cross> &#129;gYeah. I thought about going high Con and using a hammer, but I wanted to start with the chance to make a couple of attacks, so I&#129;fm using rain of blows as my good weapon attack, and I went with high Wis so that I can switch to the better oppy powers later.&#129;h
[15:46:54] <@Aslan_Cross> &#129;gMy elf fighter uses a spear. I like the speed and the option to go past AC. But you&#129;fve got the fighter covered. I&#129;fll play a halfling rogue.&#129;h
[15:48:54] <@Aslan_Cross> Many fighters will opt for swords. Swords have the most flexible assortment of powers. In a fighter&#129;fs hands, the longsword is the queen of the battlefield and the greatsword is the queen&#129;fs executioner. But each of the other significant melee weapons offers the fighter unique advantages and opportunities. For the first time, you&#129;fll be able to say &#129;gI&#129;fm an axe fighter&#129;h or &#129;gI&#129;fm a flail fighter&#129;h and that will mean something coo[L]

what the fuck is that!? Are they actually making the various weapons mean something beyond damage potential!? Like spears can go past shields, and hammers are better at crushing shields and such? I'm getting more optimistic about all this!

[Leress]

Ampersand

I always thought we should have a magazine called “&”. After all, it worked so well for Dungeon and Dragon that it just seemed to me that we were losing an opportunity to make use of the bit that brings it all together. So, until we figure out what to actually do with that recognizable little ampersand, I’m going to use it as the identifier for my regular feature here at D&D Insider.

I’m Bill Slavicsek. I’ve been the R&D Director for the Dungeons & Dragons game since Wizards of the Coast acquired the company. Before that, I was a Creative Director and Game Designer with TSR, Inc. And way back when, I ran the creative portions of West End Games. Over the years, I’ve worked on roleplaying games, board games, computer games, miniatures games, novels, and nonfiction books of all kinds, and you can see my work on everything from Star Wars to d20 Modern to D&D. I’m going to use this space to regularly talk to you about things related to D&D from the unique perspective of my Director’s chair here at WotC. Let’s start out by talking about 4th Edition D&D and D&D Insider.

At Gen Con this week, we announced that the 4th Edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game will debut in May 2008. We also announced that for the first time, the D&D game would consist of four integral and integrated parts. In addition to the physical products—the core rulebooks, supplements, adventures, miniatures, and accessories—the D&D experience would be enhanced by robust Community features (powered by Gleemax.com), a fully integrated Organized Play program that will offer benefits to convention and home play alike, and the digital initiative we’re calling D&D Insider.

Why 4th Edition and why now? Because the time was right. My R&D team has been watching the play environment since the release of the 3.5 rules, listening to what you, the players, have been telling us. Two years ago, I assembled a team of designers, led by Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins, and James Wyatt, to review all the data we’ve been collecting and see if we could make the d20 Game System (the engine that powers the D&D game) better, more intuitive, and more fun. When I saw the first expressions of that effort, I knew we could make D&D better, stronger, faster, more fun. We could rebuild it. We could take the d20 Game System we all know and love and rocket it to the next level.

At the same time, we also began imagining a robust and exciting suite of digital features that could enhance and complement the roleplaying game. It became clear to me that we had two winning directions that would be even more powerful when we combined them, and that’s when we made the decision to move forward with D&D 4th Edition.

The future (only nine months away!) contains the same D&D we all play on a regular basis. It’s still going to be a tabletop roleplaying game. It’s still set in a medieval fantasy world of magic and monsters. It’s still the d20 Game System. But the rulebooks appear more vibrant, more visually stunning, and much easier to use. The game mechanics have been amped up to eliminate the game-stoppers, accentuate the fun factors, and make play faster and more exciting. In the future (now only eight months, 29 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes from now!) D&D Insider provides its members with immediate access to Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, to enhanced and expanded content tied to the newest physical book products, to an amazing suite of digital tools to make Dungeon Master preparation and campaign management easier to handle, to a Character Creator that provides not only an interactive character sheet but a visualizer that lets you determine the exact look of the characters you create—and, D&D Insider provides a digital D&D Game Table that turns the Internet into your kitchen table. This amazing application, which we’ll talk more about as the weeks go on, allows you to supplement your face-to-face gaming 24/7, helps you find a group to game with if you don’t happen to have a face-to-face group, or lets you hook up with gaming buddies who long ago scattered to the four winds. Take a look at the prototype movie we showed at Gen Con to get a first taste of the D&D Game Table.

Wow. There’s a lot more that I want to share with you, but I’ve already exceeded my allotted word count for this first column. We’ll pick this up next time, when I describe a typical day in (and reveal a few secrets about) the life of an R&D Director—specifically, this R&D Director.

Keep playing!

--Bill Slavicsek

[endersdouble]

Different weapons being good at different things is the win.
Different classes being able to use small subsets of weapon types is the lose.

Seriously, I had a flashback--the bad Vietnam kind--to WoW. "I won't use that cool mace we just got, because I'm a Ranger. Rangers can't use maces, silly!" Fuck that shit.

[Prak]

hopefully they aren't doing that, but rather different clases can use weapons in different ways.


and if they are doing that, who are we kidding, anyone that goes over to 4e will just house-rule patch it.

[RandomCasualty]

1187305340[/unixtime]]Different weapons being good at different things is the win.
Different classes being able to use small subsets of weapon types is the lose.

Seriously, I had a flashback--the bad Vietnam kind--to WoW. "I won't use that cool mace we just got, because I'm a Ranger. Rangers can't use maces, silly!" Fuck that shit.

Yeah, I hope they don't do any bullshit like that.

[Jacob_Orlove]

Oh noes! Rangers don't get Fighter class features for free!

Seriously, though, you'll probably get a minor nonproficiency penalty, and not get access to kewl powerz. No biggie. And you can even multiclass into fighter to get said kewl powerz (unlike WoW).

[Prak]

if there is going to be a non-proficiency penalty, it should be no more than -2, preferably -1, because in a game like D&D, non-proficiency really shouldn't matter, like the points in Whose Line or the bonus you get from Weapon Focus.

[Tokorona]

And 4e hits suck and keeps hitting the down arrow

- Uses the SWSE skill system and condition track (bad, good)
- Removes Aoo'S. (BAD!)

[Leress]

I just watched the teaser trailer...well, all it was about the "evolution" of Dungeons and Dragons

[Prak]

1187307274[/unixtime]]And 4e hits suck and keeps hitting the down arrow

- Uses the SWSE skill system and condition track (bad, good)
- Removes Aoo'S. (BAD!)

haven't seen the Saga skill system, nor the condition track, can someone explain them to me?

and where did you find out they were removing AoOs?

[Captain_Bleach]

1187304432[/unixtime]]well this is interesting:

hell, maybe we'll all be lucky and WotC have bought K and Frank and will be putting out Tome style stuff. That'd be nice... but unlikely...

Frank said in another thread (I forget which) that several employees in WotC hate his guts, so if this is true, then it is highly unlikely.

[PhoneLobster]

Different weapons being good at different things is the win.
Different classes being able to use small subsets of weapon types is the lose.

Hint. Based on SAGA. ie, d20 Modern.

Therefore that axe fighter/sword fighter specialist training shit they are talking about are CRAP TALENT TREES, like the ones first "pioneered" in d20 Modern, then recently "tested" in SAGA since no one actually played d20 modern...

That's bad news right out the gate.

Also their racial ability trash looks like bad news too. See now I like the IDEA of racial abilities tradable for some other ability set for various reasons. But since we are talking racial abilities tradable for feats, and lets face it fucking talents its going to be bad news. Unless talents are less dumb and feats are more plentiful (and also less dumb).

No, looks to me like they are leaning to a d20modern model of limited mediocre non scaling feat and talent options which totally bone you unless you cherry pick like a bitch.

When they SHOULD be moving toward a Frank and K model like ROW feats and demonic spheres with easy to choose nice option sets that automatically scale with level and remain relevant forever.

I know it sounds pessimistic but reading between the lines thats what I'm seeing.