4th Edition – Mais detalhes

À medida que o tempo passa desde o anúncio oficial da quarta edição de D&D, mais informações vão surgindo por todo o lado. Inevitavelmente, referir qualquer uma destas informações aqui não é mais do que o trabalho de replicar dados presentes noutros sites, mas decidi fazê-lo por uma questão de consistência. Nos fóruns do Gleemax foi colocado o resumo mais interessante e completo que descobri até agora de um seminário sobre esta nova edição onde se abordaram algumas das alterações que nos esperam (ou seja, finalmente começa-se a falar do que realmente interessa). Podem ler o texto na integra já a seguir, ou consultar a thread original aqui. Tomei a liberdade de corrigir alguns erros ortográficos do texto original, mudar algumas formatações e de destacar alguns dos elementos mais relevantes para simplificar a sua leitura.

What follows are my notes from the Secrets of D&D seminar, held Friday at GenCon:
Alright, here goes, cleaned up so they should make some sense. First off, the Santa Fe room was a lot smaller than expected- the event guide say max numbers for the event was 200 – that’s about 50 over the listed Max Person Number. So, lots of people standing or sitting on the floor.

Andy Collins, Mike Mearls, Rich Baker, and Bill Slavicsek presented this, with Andy leading (and if you don’t recognize the names, you haven’t cracked open a D&D book in the last few years).

They started off with going over the upcoming products. Some are 3.5. Several are 3.5 with D&D Insider info planned, which should make them useable in 4E. These include Exemplars of Evil (major nasty bad guys), Dragons of Eberron, City of Stormreach, Elder Evils (mini-adventures which can involve the guys from Exemplars, as well as Cthulu-type stuff), and Deserts of Desolation, the next mini expansion which will include 4E monsters, with revisions like the new troll and new ones like the Fire Archon shown on the box art. And then there are the Edition-Proof stuff; coffee table books like Dungeon Survival Guide (art spreads of famous dungeons), books like Confessions of a Part Time Sorceress, Dungeon Tiles, and Inn Fighting, a new noncollectable dice game.

In December, we should expect to see the first major 4E preview, Classes and Races. January brings Worlds and Monsters. Both should have lots of concept art and more. After that will be Dungeons of Dread, another mini expansion; one concept art shown for this was a four armed skeleton.

The PHB is due out in May; in April, we’ll get Keep of Shadowfell, the preview adventure. It will have quickstart rules and pregens, so you can start playing right away. It will focus on how 4E will approach encounters differently, including noncombat encounters, social encounters, and dynamic battlefields.

May 2008 is the release of the PHB. They stressed that this is an evolution, not a revolution, so a more gradual change than the switch from 2e to 3e.

• 30 levels: So, epic support in the core.
• Easier to DM: Rather than the current standard where 4-5 PCs face off against a single monster, they want groups of PCs to fight groups of monsters, and still have it go smoothly.
• Defined roles: Make it clear how each character is supposed to contribute, but give the character the tools to do their job, and then other stuff. So, if your healer is a druid, he’d be able to heal, and still have all this other stuff that ties into his being a druid. I’m probably not explaining this well, but the point is, each character will have a role, and whoever you pick for that role can fill it, but that is not the be-all end-all for the class.
• New power sources: Arcane, Divine, Martial, and eventualy Psionic (not core, but it will be supported) so that everyone has choices, beyond clerics and wizards choosing which spell to use, while the fighter gets to choose how much he power attacks by.

Is this a power up? Yes and no, more toward the no but now everyone gets to make meaningful choices. Tome of Battle was held us as an experiment to give fighters spells, a successful experiment in WotC’s eyes by the sound of it.

Every class will have abilities that function At Will, Per Encounter, and Per Day. So, still resource management, but even if you use all your per day spells, you still have other options. A specific example – a wizard should never have to rely on a crossbow because he’s out of spells.

When leveling, you’ll have about one decision each level – a new feat, a new power, something. There will be lots of options, but you only have to worry about this one category.

They want to get away from the reliance on magic items. Magic items will still be a part, but as tools; you’ll be cool because of what your class lets you do, not because of your stuff.

Level Division

• 1-10 Heroic: Foes are orcs and ogres, some giants, small dragons. Adventures tend to be local.
• 11-20 Paragon: On par with the current low to mid teens right now. Bigger threats are faced that might threaten a kingdom.
• 21-30 Epic: World or Planar threats.

The goal is to have the levels play in a similar manner – they don’t want a 25th character overwhelmed with 80 abilities. The main differences should be in the story, not how they play.

PHB and MM should both be 288 pages, the DMG 256.

There will be a new encounter design, with more monsters in a typical encounter. The monsters will have their own roles and their own abilities – the orc will have orc abilities, not fighter or barbarian abilites; Mearls offered up an acid spitting orc shaman as an example that was heartily embraced by the rest of the team.

June sees the release of the MM. I hope you guys get to see the pics of the prototype gargantuan Orcus – very cool. He’s also featured on the MM cover. They’re hoping for about 300 monsters on the 288 pages; with smaller stat blocks, it might work.

Things that aren’t changing:

• This is still a tabletop RPG (although that tabletop could be online).
• It is still a game with cooperative storytelling.
• Still Medieval fantasy, and they were pushing this. Greyhawk is out as the default setting; they don’t want kingdoms and empires spanning the globe. Instead they want points of light in the darkness; there’s little travel between these points of light, and those that do stick to the roads. Adventurers are the guys who go off the roads.

There will be some sample gods in the PHB, and building blocks for making your own. Figures like Asmodeus, Tiamat and Orcus will all still factor into the game. There are still some Greyhawkisms, like Vecna, Modenkainen and Bigsby. They want to give the DM more flexibility.

Options not restrictions is a key point. Make it easier to make characters that don’t suck.

A question came up: does this mean the end of Vancian spell casting? Answer: yes and no. There’d still be elements of it, but a wizard who casts all his memorized per day spells should be at about 80% of power.

Still D20, still have the OGL, but modified (I wasn’t able to attend the OGL meeting that night). The skill system would be truncated; if you want to be a tailor, write tailor on your sheet because they’re tossing profession: tailor. The focus will be on active skills. Some skills are getting combined. Who buy Hide without Move Silent? Almost no one, so they’re getting combined. Skills will also be more interactive; diplomacy should be more than just a single die roll.

What about conversion? They admitted the conversion guidelines they’d put out had never covered everything. Now, there are 8 years of books, how could they convert them all? What has been done as WotC staff games moved from 3.5 to 4E, they would build up the character from the ground up, making the as they thought he/she should be. Rich mentioned his 8th level Warmage/Warblade. He picked 8 levels of classes and ended up with a character that he felt captured his original intent. Andy talked about his brother’s spellthief, which was remade as a wizard/rogue that really got the magic-using rogue feel that was intended.

DMG in July.

The 4 Parts of 4E:

• Physical Products
• Community
• Organized Play
• Digital Offerings

D&D Insider

• A lot of stuff on that’s been on the website for free – previews and such, will still be free.
• Subscription should cost about what a Dragon and Dungeon subscription cost, but it sounds like there will be more overall content.
• Dragon and Dungeon should still be the place for newcomers to get published.

Now into answers to questions:

Prestige classes will still exist, but different. They want to make them easier to integrate. They also don’t want you to have to stop being your core class to enter a prestige class – you could be a frenzied berserker but you’d still advance as a barbarian. They couldn’t say much on this.

They want to make it so you don’t have to plan so far ahead. Retraining akin to the PHB2 rules should help. Also getting rid of some – not all – feat trees. Whirlwind was an example here, with 5 or so prereqs; they don’t want you to have to spend several levels working toward something.

Multiclassing will be more useful. No more bogus combo – a fighter/wizard shouldn’t be a character who sucks as a fighter and sucks as a wizard. To help with this, they’re trying to smooth out the power curves.

XP will be easier; no more comparing CR to party level to find out how much they’re worth. CR is also gone, melded into monster level. To build an encounter, you determine the XP value you want, and then pick out monsters that total that XP value. This should also make it easier to modify encounters.

A question on grim and gritty play was that it wouldn’t be addressed in the PHB, but maybe in the DMG – though not necessarily the first DMG.

For monsters, the focus is going to be on what the monster is likely to do. As they did from 3.0 to 3.5, they’ll cut out a lot of monster abilities because a monster with a life expectancy of 7 rounds doesn’t need 30 abilities.

Digital issues of Dungeon and Dragon (the compilations at the end of each month) should be useable offline. D&D Insider expansions for books will probably require you to be online (and they are working on how to keep someone from copying a code in the store and logging on with it).

Wizard and Sorcerer are being pushed further apart; there will be a bigger difference in the classes than just resource management.

A common phrase with R&D is “Class X kills Class Y and takes his stuff.” Example: Ranger and Scout cover a lot of the same themes. Are both needed? Not really, so Ranger kills Scout and takes his stuff; the scout is out, but his abilities will be kept as options for the ranger.

This is not 4.0, this is 4th Edition; they do not want a 4.5. Errata will be downloaded into the virtual copies of the book.

Monsters are not going to be designed with the idea that they might be used as PCs, as it was felt this limited monsters. Some monsters will be obvious choices as races; goblins and such. The goblin won’t have as much support as a core PC race, but with enough interests, it might get more in online enhancements.

There will be slightly fewer core classes, since each will take up more space.

Alignment will not be as it is now. Andy Collins doesn’t want it as a mechancial element, Bill backs him, so Andy’s getting his way.

Will magic item creation use XP? No. Hell No! XP are not a resource. So says Andy, and again, he gets his way. Likewise, no monsters eating XP.

Every adventure published in Dungeon online should be portable to the virtual table top.

They want to make active cool things for races, so that a dwarf fighter is really different from an elf fighter, and more than the dwarf getting +1 to damage vs goblins. Mike spoke about his dwarf fighter, who took a beating and kept going, because he’s a Dwarf fighter.

Conscious avoidance of ECL: It was a kludge they want away from. Since they don’t want everything to be playable, that should help.

And that’s the end of my notes. Hope you’ve learned something new looking through those words.

Tenho de admitir, sinceramente, que muitas destas alterações me agradam. Sim, é um facto que continuam a ser vagos relativamente a muitos detalhes (o que é natural, dado que tudo isto ainda está em desenvolvimento e muitas destas coisas podem mudar nos próximos meses), mas no geral há coisas aqui que me parecem passos na direcção correcta.

Ainda estou incerto relativamente a coisas como cada classe ter o seu papel definido e o mesmo para cada monstro em combate, bem como a qualidade e a fluidez desses mesmos combates na nova edição. Mas paralelamente, a nova classificação das habilidades de cada personagem intriga-me de uma forma positiva. Também me agrada saber que um maior ênfase será dado à qualidade das personagens em si e não dos itens que utilizam. Apesar de me parecer que vai haver um crescimento notório dos elementos de magia no jogo, é agradável ter a segurança de que isso não se irá manifestar tanto em objectos ou outras coisas passíveis de serem adquiridas externamente por qualquer personagem (ao longo do tempo tenho vindo a apreciar cada vez mais ambientes low magic onde os heróis progridem recorrendo mais vezes à sua ingenuidade do que ao seu “poder de fogo”).

A nova escala de progressão de níveis deixa-me um pouco indiferente, mas é bom saber que os níveis épicos estarão mais detalhados nas regras base e que, finalmente, cada nível vai ser sempre relevante e trazer algo de novo (dead levels são uma praga irritante de D&D 3.x). Paralelamente, uma maior diferenciação de cada uma das raças é muito bem vinda, enquanto que a redução de classes me deixa a pensar quais serão as sacrificadas. O foco notório dado na progressiva facilidade de evoluir cada personagem nas mais diversas direcções, e o ênfase num multiclassing mas útil leva-me a suspeitar que as “vítimas” serão o bardo (não é uma classe muito popular, e não passa de uma espécie de rogue/sorcerer), e/ou o paladino (com as mudanças em alinhamento que ai vêm o conceito de lawful good pode deixar de existir, bem como um paladino não é mais do que uma espécie de fighter/cleric).

Existem bem mais coisas que podia comentar, mas isso tornar-se-ia extenuante e este artigo ganharia proporções excessivas. Resumo a minha opinião dizendo que (e mais uma vez), para já, gosto do que vejo no geral. Quando a vocês, deixo-vos para tirarem as vossas próprias conclusões, mas não deixem de as partilhar comentando este texto. É sempre uma mais valia!

Para já, vou continuar atento às notícias que vão surgindo pelos mais diversos recursos da Internet e ver se consigo deitar a mão a uma cópia do Star Wars: Saga Edition. Já foi dito, mais do que uma vez, que esse livro é o mais próximo que temos agora de uma preview do que nos espera efectivamente na quarta edição. Estou bastante interessado em lê-lo com a devida atenção.

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