Grrrr! 4e D&D

What I'm interested in is the fact that it looks as if they may bring back the old campaign settings, apparantly they will be releasing one campaign setting a year.

Could this mean a return of Planescape?

What seems interesting to me is what they said about races. Every race should be playable from level one and all races gain more powers as they level up, i.e. dwarves gain "Dwarven stubornness +20" at level 15.
Also: Fighters get different powers based on the weapons they use. Their example said something about armor piercing with spears and more hits per turn with swords.

For all it's flaws, I don't find 3.5 complicated (except for grappling)

Just watched the intro videos ... some of the tools look nice, particularly the character sheet which allows you to create a visual model of your character and the tool which allows you to create "hand outs" on your computer.

It seems the focus here is really about making playing over the internet viable ... which will be a great addition for alot of people who can't otherwise get together.

The dungeon mat system looked terrible, however. I have always hated miniatures and now they have it set up so you need to use them on the computer.

Also this DnD insider subscription thing puts me on guard, as it means more money required to access web material ... as if the hobby wasn't getting expensive enough.

And, as someone else said, I did not care for the fact they were being so dismissive of the previous versions in their trailer ... not a good idea to insult the system you're currently using, or the players whom have been following the hobby for so long.

Best line of the entire video: "I'd like to thank ... Vecna."

Are you talking about Bruce Cordell's playtesting thing? I think it's just that there aren't any 4e rules for psionics, yet, so they're temporarily using a wizard-in-all-but-name until they get some proper psionics rules.

I wouldn't assume anything about those rules from this.

For lack of time with an internet connection here in Bulgaria, I'm not going to share my full opinion on the matter, but:

HOLY HELL! I leave for three weeks and you pop a new edition on me!? I was just blurdy getting the hang of 3/3.5! I think I now finally understand all of the people that cling to the older and more complex (in my uneducated opinion) 2e rules instead of converting to the more logical (again, in my view, since its what I'm used to) 3e. The sad part is, I'm not sure if I'll convert... I just might.

More importantly, though, and I'm surprised nobody has touched upon this yet (that I've found in my short foray into all the missed posts), what happens to Planewalker? Updating? Sticking to 3.5e for now? Crying in a corner along with me?

It sounds like some spells will still be fire-and-forget, but that wizards will now be able to have some spells they can cast throughout the day. Like, a fireball might be once per encounter rather than once per day, and magic missile would be at will. I don't think they're going to use a point system.

What that means for psionics is anyone's guess.

I wish they would ditch the charts for how many spells of what kind you can cast each day... I've always hated those (imagine if fighters had to keep track of each sword or spear-thrust they made, and how powerful it was... you get the idea!) Instead, I'd let spellcasters cast spells until they got fatigued (sort of like how barbarian rage is handled). Or maybe they would have to roll a certain DC to cast a spell, with higher DCs for more powerful spells...

I'm not switching, but I'm hoping that someone will come out with conversion rules for 4->3.5.

What I'm really worried about is if/how the WotC stance on officially sanctioned sites like Planewalker will change, as well as how the OGL will change, and if it will prevent 3rd party 3.5 stuff from being produced/sold.

Of course, if you really want to play with the Vancian spell casting system, you can try the Dying Earth rpg ( http://www.dyingearth.com/ ) which does an excellent job with this ... and one can easily see the types of characters this game encourages ending up in PS.

Whether or not magic is "just another weapon" is more about how you play it than the mechanics, in my opinion.

The question being, as ironic as it sounds, do we want planescape to return?

I mean look at the influence we have over it. (heheh we have power over the planes) If it does return all we've set out to achieve will undoubtedly be changed. It'll be out of our hands to literally affect the planes. Gee I never thought I'd ever be worried about losing power, but dammit! this is planescape!

I've always imagined that one of the primary reasons WotC more or less ended the Planescape setting is because they felt that they probably couldn't maintain it.

Could be totally wrong. Maybe it was because Planescape wasn't making enough money (although, damn, even Ravenloft came back for a while). But my first (and possibly completely wrong?) impression was that writing for it can be intimidating as hell.

I think that even if Planescape did make a triumphant return via WotC, it would be much simplified, retconned, and headed in a different direction. This isn't out of any malignancy on their part, but it is a difficult setting to come to know, with a comprehensive history and obscure rules. I highly doubt that any new writers that are hired to continue the setting would research it half as well as we already know it. Nevertheless, I also highly doubt that our work here would have any serious effect on an official product. Granted, perhaps, some of the more famous/published authors here might be asked for a few consultations, or even offered a job, but it would still hardly change their gameplan. So, overall, I hope that WotC does not pick up our beloved Planescape, and leave it to our, in my opinion more experienced, hands.

Let me put it this way... if you thought that getting a succubus and an erynies apart in a Blood War skirmish was tough, you aint seen nothin' yet!

You're in Bulgaria? :shock:

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Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing some support for planar stuff in 4E, but I'm fine without any official 4E update of Planescape. My PS campaigns are always pre-Faction War anyway....

This is from Rick Baker's blog:

"Anyway, let me tell you what I've been up to since GenCon. In a word: monsters. The writing team (that's me, James Wyatt, Bruce Cordell, and Chris Sims) is working on fleshing out the Monster Manual entries and doing a bit of a "story" pass on the monsters. Last week I spent a couple of days working on devils. Here are a couple of devilish tidbits I'll leak for now:

- Devils are angels who rebelled. They rose up against the deity they served and murdered him. The crime of deicide is unimaginably perverse for angels, and hence devils were cursed and imprisoned in the Nine Hells.
- The Nine Hells are what became of the murdered deity's divine realm after his death. The Hells are the devils' prison, and it is difficult for them to get out without mortal aid.
- We've re-sorted demons and devils a bit, since we want these two categories of monsters to make a little more sense. Devils tend to be more humanoid in form, usually fight with weapons, and often wear armor. Most have horns, wings, and tails. One consequence of this: the erinyes and the succubus were holding down pretty similar territory, so we've decided that they're the same monster, called the succubus, and it's a devil.
- Ice devils don't look like other devils. We've decided that they are actually a demonic/yugoloth race... one that was entrapped by Mephistopheles long ago in an infernal contract. So ice devils hate other devils, retain their insect-like appearance, and have a special loyalty to Mephistopheles. It's one of the reasons why Asmodeus has never chosen to move against Mephistopheles. Asmodeus would of course win if he did, but that would let the ice devils out of their contract. "

This is a big "F**k you" to Planescape and 30 years of D&D. I'll continue on just fine with my 3.x ed books without contributing money to this stupidity.

I would call that a bad excuse for selling a new setting.

How does it go?

"Every few years the Clueless change their ideas on how the planes work. Every fewyears we prove why we call them clueless."

I think they're dropping the Great Wheel. They're just (somewhat bizarrely) retaining some of the old familiar names in the new cosmology.

I see it as an attempt to simultaneously sterilize D&D's complicated planar lore for presentation to less experienced players who would be intimidated by the wealth of strange and idiosyncratic knowledge while simultaneously pandering to those who are experienced with it all by giving little winks and nudges.

"The Astral Sea..." *wink, wink, nudge* "...and the Elemental Tempest..." *wink, wink, nudge*

Personally, that construction philosophy has always struck me as combining the worst of both worlds, but that's just from a myth-building point of view, not a marketing one.