D&D 4th Edition - Vorfreude und Diskussionsthread

[Yang Kwan Sun]

Zitat von David Noonan

Daily Work: After a quick consult with a couple people here at work, I've got my various "how to juice up a monster" sections for the DMG ready to put through their paces.

It's a fun part of the process. There's no better way to explore the monster-makin' work my colleagues have done than to take those monsters and upgrade, downgrade, sidegrade, and otherwise fold, spindle, and mutilate them. I learn something about my how-tos, and something about the monsters.

But it isn't all "playing with monsters" today. It's going to take an hour two, easy, to keep track of where all the various playtester waves are right now. It's juggling--some balls are ascending, others are falling, and there's no shortage of spectators throwing new balls my way. Were it not for the fundamental enthusiasm of all the testers, though, the balls wouldn't have the momentum to keep moving. (OK, consider that metaphor completely stretched out.)

Nichts Neues...aber mir war danach hier wieder was posten zu können und besser das als nichts. Und wer es schon immer geliebt hat an Mostern rumzubasteln, kann sich jetzt nochmehr drauf freuen.

[GuildGoodknife]

Hat zwar nur indirekt mit 4th Edition zu tun, aber da Orcus auf dem Cover des neuen Monster Manual sein wird passt's dennoch. Die nächste Figur in der D&D Icons Miniaturen Reihe wird ein Gargantuan Orcus:


Sieht mal extrem geil aus das Teil! Macht sich sicherlich gut neben dem Gargantuan Red Dragon...

[Yang Kwan Sun]

Zitat von Jennifer Clarke Wilkes

WotC_JenniferClarkeWilkes, 10/22/2007 3:42:57 PM

I've been spending the last week or so trying to get started on the Monster Manual. Lots of tasty monstery goodness, but also lots of little picky things that only editors care about, and somewhat bigger things about presentation. We are starting to get a handle on things, though, and playtesting up a storm (here at work and in a group at home).


Phrase of the day: Sexual dimorphism.

Absolut nutzloser Post!!! Hat aber Sex als Wortbestandteil enthalten und von daher auf jedenfall hier zu finden.

Zitat von Guild

Die nächste Figur in der D&D Icons Miniaturen Reihe wird ein Gargantuan Orcus:
...
Sieht mal extrem geil aus das Teil! Macht sich sicherlich gut neben dem Gargantuan Red Dragon...

Entweder du enthälst uns hier etwas vor oder eine der Größenangaben ist falsch. Es gibt keinen Gargantuan Red Dragon. Nur den Colossal.

[Yang Kwan Sun]

Zitat von Design&Development

Monsters
Zombies, Part Two
by Chris Sims

10/22/2007

Design & Development Archive

The Design & Development article series premiered on the D&D website back in September 2005, and has been a staple ever since. With the approach of 4th Edition, and our designers and developers focused on the new edition, this column will be the primary vehicle for 4th Edition coverage. We’ll not only give you peeks at what’s forthcoming, but also the “how” and “why.”

Keep in mind that the game is still in a state of flux, as refinements are made by our design and development staff. You’re getting a look behind the curtain at game design in progress, so enjoy, and feel free to send your comments to dndinsider@wizards.com.

The simplest monsters are cooler in the new edition of the D&D game, and zombies are no exception. But even though they're soulless animated corpses, zombies don't have to be dead simple. The 4th Edition designers threw the new zombie a bone, coming up with a few ways that everyone's favorite corpse creatures can function in the game to give more chills and kills.
To this end, in the Monster Manual, three exotic zombies appear. The first is the chillborn zombie, the coldness of the grave given just enough volition to be bent on murder. The corruption zombie is a paragon of rot with a great throwing arm. The final new zombie is the gravehound zombie.

That list might spark some preconceived notions about what these undead do. All three possess the implacable resilience of regular zombies, but each comes with an added spin. You might expect easy clichés and predictable performances, but the ideas behind these new breeds of zombie aren't dead on arrival.

A chillborn is cold, but it's not merely an icy zombie. Whatever accursed rites or foul maledictions gave a semblance of life to the chillborn made it even tougher than normal, its body and mind hardened by the freezing hand of death. Life-sapping cold streams from the creature, and the more chillborn zombies in a group, the deeper the freeze. As might be expected, the remorseless fists of the chillborn deal some cold damage, but when a chillborn strikes you, you just might freeze in place, still able to fight back but unable to flee the biting aura the zombie exudes. All chillborn deal more damage to immobilized victims, and your inability to maneuver certainly benefits anyone relying on the chillborn to provide a defensive front line.

One creature that requires such a line of defenders, although probably provided by allies other than the chillborn, is the corruption zombie. This creature is so tainted that its body constantly exudes putrid flesh. It tears off chunks of its own rotting body to hurl at its foes, but leaving itself unharmed due to the supernatural nature of its tissues. If one of its thrown motes of corruption strikes you, however, you're in trouble -- not only does the gobbet hurt, but the unclean flesh also weakens you. Your instincts might dictate charging the zombie to stop its ranged attacks. But the stink of death is so strong near the creature, so sickening, that it can overwhelm the fortitude of the hardiest warrior, slowing his movement and enfeebling his attacks. Even so, if you can stand the smell, pressing the corruption zombie into melee might be an effective way to put an end to the creature.

This isn't true of a gravehound zombie. So named because it's usually created from the corpse of a sizeable dog, a gravehound zombie is a melee monster like many other zombies. It's much faster than normal zombies, and its bite makes up in damage what it lacks in accuracy. The real problem with gravehounds is that their bite causes continuing decomposition around the wound. That trouble can persist even after the gravehound is destroyed. When the gravehound goes down, it lashes out one final time. If it hits you, its jaws lock. Until you can use brute force to open the death grip, you have to drag the hound around and deal with the decay its teeth cause. Being hindered like that during a battle can be more than just a minor nuisance.

When you're playing D&D, you want exciting entertainment. Defeating these exotic zombies is all the more satisfying, the possibility of horrible death all the more threatening, given their terrifying abilities. They set a great precedent for the zombie category's future expansion, and the prospect of even more terrifying fun.

Ooooh Yeaaah!! Mehr Zombies. Die Zukunft bringt interessantere Zombie-Encounter mit sich. Die neue Generation Zombies, totally pimped and tawesome!

[Yang Kwan Sun]

Weniger 4E Content dennoch thematisch passend:

Der Dragonlance Movie-Trailer.

[Yang Kwan Sun]

*aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii* It's an OWLBEAR run!!!!!!!!!

Zitat von Michele Carter

WotC_Miko, 10/23/2007 8:48:57 AM

Just a quick note this morning: the warlock = fun.


During yesterday's lunchtime playtest, our group was assaulted by a bunch of kruthiks. Man, those little buggers are tough! Things were looking grim for Greg Bilsland's paladin, who was surrounded and about to go down, when one of my warlock effects went off and pushed them away from him...just enough so that Jeremy Crawford's wizard could catch them in an area spell that took them all down. It was a marvel of tactics in action and I'm so *stoked* to see those kinds of interactions occurring on a regular basis.


On tap for today: working on the PH skills chapter, four different meetings, and Greg's Tuesday night game. Fun will be had at...oh, at least two of those. Possibly three.

*guruguru**guruguru**guruguru**guruguru**guruguru*

[Yang Kwan Sun]

Hier das Cover eines der Previewbooks

[GuildGoodknife]

Für mich weniger spannend, aber für alle die mehr über D&D Insider erfahren wollen, hier der neue Design & Development:
D&D Insider features a variety of resources that will help players and DMs if they choose to subscribe. D&D Insider is part client applications and part web resources. The client applications will be rich Windows clients, with some functionality only available when the user is online and identified as a D&D Insider subscriber, and others available even when the user is offline.
D&D Insider and 4th Edition

D&D Insider will launch in June 2008 with the new Player’s Handbook, but is not required to play D&D 4th Edition; it simply provides extra options that you can unlock with the subscription. These digital tools are by no mean necessary to play the game, but are designed to facilitate some of the game’s aspects.
System Requirements

The D&D Insider client applications are developed for the PC platform. Two of the D&D Insider
applications (the D&D Game Table and the D&D Character Creator, both demoed in their prototype versions at Gen Con) use a 3D engine based on DirectX.

Our recommended specs for the PC platform includes Windows XP SP2, 512MB RAM, AMD XP 2400 + or Intel P4 2.6Ghz, and a graphic card with 128 MB RAM and support of Shader 2.0. These recommended specs allow you to experience the full range of lighting and Shader effects our 3D engine offers.

There are at least two reasons why we chose the PC/DirectX route. The first one is related to market research indicating that PC users are a much larger user base than Mac users, and the second is the fact that we already had a DirectX-based 3D engine in-house, and there was no point reinventing something we already had available. The other applications will be designed for Windows, but will not rely on this 3D game engine so that they can be used on lower-end PC platforms. We have not yet established our minimum specifications at this time. We’ll post those as soon as they become available.

Because the other D&D Insider applications are not DirectX driven, they should also be usable on Mac computers using the dual boot system.

The D&D Game Table

A rough prototype of this DirectX 3D application was demoed in the first part of the D&D Insider teaser movie. The D&D Game Table is meant to be an online meeting space, allowing players that can’t gather together the means to play D&D. The overarching goal is to create an experience as close to the tabletop game experience as possible.

We are designing the D&D Game Table to be as flexible as we can make it, to accommodate even non-D&D games. The D&D Game Table will not adjudicate game rules any more than your kitchen table adjudicates rules for you. DMs and players decide what they can and can’t do. DMs and players can communicate their rules adjudication through voice interaction provided by the VOIP (Voice-Over Internet Protocol), the text chat window, and the DM's settings. We do plan to offer integrated functionalities from the VOIP to allow Dungeon Masters to manage their communications and channels with their players the way they want.

In the movie prototype, dice were shown rolling on the screen. There is a special connection between the gamers and their dice, and we all feel this connection is fully a part of the D&D experience. However, visible dice rolling is a feature that can be turned off. Random numbers can be generated without having to see the dice rolling, if that’s what you prefer. Lastly, DMs will be allowed to “fudge” dice rolls if they want to; players will not have this power, however.

The D&D Game Table allows DMs to decide for themselves how things will be done in their games. For example, some DMs allow players to draw on the game map, while others prefer to do so themselves. There is no "good" or "bad" approach to this; it will be handled by the DM’s settings. Another thing that DMs can set is the speed at which figures move on the game table. There’s the "slow" motion of the miniatures seen in the D&D Insider prototype movie, or the DM can speed things up so the miniatures are moving from location to location quickly.

The D&D Character Creator

The Character Creator has two parts: the character visualizer and the character sheet. The character visualizer was demoed at Gen Con in its prototypical form, a DirectX 3D application that allows players to customize the visual aspect of their characters. Snapshots of portraits, full-screen wallpaper, and virtual miniatures of characters will also be made available to D&D Insider subscribers.

We want this tool to be as flexible as possible. Consequently, the 3D engine allows players to experiment with all sorts of tints, and lighting. They can personalize everything from a character’s build, face and pose, to the coloration and variations of their characters’ armor and weaponry.

The character sheet portion of the D&D Character Creator is a data-driven Windows rich client application designed to facilitate character sheet creation using the D&D 4th Edition rules. D&D Insider subscribers will be able to create characters using content from any published book. To get access to the full details of the relevant rules and mechanical elements, though, you will need to own the E-version of the physical book where these rules or mechanical elements were published. When you purchase the printed book, a code will grant access to the E-version of the book for a nominal fee. As a subscriber, ownership of the E-version gives you access, when you are online, to the rules content while you’re filling out or updating your character sheet. Without the E-version, however, the character sheet will give you only the barest information (such as the names of feats and such) and refer you to the appropriate published books.

The D&D Dungeon Builder

The Dungeon Builder will help create tactical maps for your games. This Windows rich client application is improving on the dungeon tile builder that is currently available for download on the D&D site. Using dungeon tiles or basic drawing tools, Dungeon Masters and players can create tactical maps that can be used on the D&D Game Table.

The D&D Encounter Builder

This application is designed for Dungeon Masters, and it allows them to build encounters quickly, and then link them together to form a ready-made adventure. The Encounter Builder uses a format that allows DMs to take their encounters and play them on the D&D Game Table. It has been mentioned in the Gen Con seminars that 4th Edition encounters are not necessarily combat encounters, but also social encounters and other type of challenges; the Encounter Builder will enable DMs to create these as well. Like the character sheet, the detailed stat blocks of the monsters will be available online, for the owners of the E-version of the book where the specific monster was published.

Character Vaults

This part of D&D Insider lives online. The Character Vault is the place where you store your characters (both visual images and character sheets) so that they can be used in the D&D Game Table. The number of characters you can store will be finite, and we are still working on the exact details of that storage space. As a player, you will also be able to present your vault of characters to the world, and publishing a journal of your adventures (via tools like blogs). You can make your character files accessible so that other players can use them in their own D&D Insider applications suite, assuming you allow this.

Some of the Character Vault’s functionalities, such as blogging, are tools that the Gleemax infrastructure provides to anyone with an account, even if they have not subscribed to D&D Insider.

Campaign Vaults

Like the Character Vault, this part of D&D Insider lives online. As a DM, you will be able to store your encounters and maps, so that they can be loaded in the D&D Game Table. You will also be able to showcase your campaigns, keep track of what is going on there, present background information to selected friends (your gaming buddies certainly, but you will be free to expand or restrict viewing as you see fit). You will have access to tools such as campaign wikis, and can also upload information taken from the D&D Insider applications suite (the Dungeon Builder and the Encounter Builder, for example) for others to use, always with the ability to choose what you want others to see and have access to.

Some of the Campaign Vault’s functionalities are basic tools that the Gleemax infrastructure provides to anyone with an account, even if they are not D&D Insider subscribers.

Next time: a look at ’s digital objects, including the virtual mini, tiles and tokens!

[GuildGoodknife]

David Noonan ist immer noch mit den Magic Items im Dungeon Masters Guide beschäftigt und hat heute ein paar Zeilen über Rods (Ruten oder wie auch man die auf deutsch nennt) geschrieben:

Sorry I missed yesterday’s posting. I was unable to escape the gravity well of magic items—specifically rods, which need some redesign to accommodate new thinking elsewhere in the system. Looking at the parameters Rob Heinsoo gave me yesterday morning, I saw two clear paths before me…two different (and mutually exclusive) ways that rods might work in 4th edition.

I’m pretty sure it was Yogi Berra who said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” So I did. I designed a couple dozen rods down one path, then a couple dozen rods down the other path. I let my muse (insofar as it exists) just wander around, because one of things I wanted to answer was the extensibility question: Can we crank out more rods a few years down the road, or is the design space essentially constrained from the very beginning?

It’s worth noting that the answer isn’t strictly determinative. We’d absolutely go with rods in a constrained design space if that space was really, really interesting. But if the expansive design space is also really, really interesting, then we’ll go with the bigger real estate every time. For both business and fun reasons, D&D functions well when its elements are extensible.

The interesting thing was that when I’d finished the process, I’d made only a few of the rods twice. Our two paths for rods not only diverge, but they quickly go perpendicular. And one of the design spaces is certainly more constrained than the other one. So I suspect we’ll opt for the more expansive design space.

Immediately before writing this, I sent off all the rods to the other designers, who’ll look at them. Collectively, we’ll pick a path. (Ten bucks says some unforeseen third path will emerge, and I’ll scrap a bunch of today’s rods. Such is the nature of being the first designer on the scene.)

And hey! Getting rods done means I get to play with…dun dun DUN…artifacts for a while today.

[Yang Kwan Sun]

Ein paar kleine Add-Ons die auch von Dave stammen:

Zitat von David Noonan

Podcast: We go into the recording studio today with a couple of guests: Steve Winter and Logan Bonner. We’re basically going to play “tell us about your character” and give the listeners a firsthand account of what it’s like sitting at the playtest table right now. For what it’s worth, Steve is playing a fighter and Logan is playing a warlock.

D&D Game Day: I am, it appears, part of the “worldwide” in Worldwide D&D Game Day. I’ll be at the London Dungeon in (you guessed it!) London on Nov. 3 to play D&D and talk 4th edition until I’m blue in the face. So come to the dungeon and quiz me about 4th edition. Or just point and laugh at Dave’s badly atrophied 3e DMing skills! (D&D is like anything else—you’ve got to practice to stay good. And I haven’t had 3.5 practice in months. I’m gonna engage in some woodshedding before next week.)

In all seriousness, show up and we’ll talk D&D, roll some dice, and have some fun. But there’s an important part of the drill: If you want to go, you need to email mike@leisuregames.com and get on the list. The event is free, but you have to be on the list.

Nähere Infos zu Fighter und Warlock, ich hoffe es gibt Crunch!! - I love Fighters!

Ihr habts gehört, Dave ist am 3.11. in London, geht hin und sprecht mit ihm, wenn ihr das Geld/Zeit/etc. dafür habt.

Zitat von David Noonan

Books: Every (remaining) day this week, I’m going to highlight a nonfiction book that will make you a better gamer. But wait a minute…D&D is a cooperative game, right? There isn’t a way to “win” D&D, so how can a book help my D&D game?

Well, the obvious answer—and it’s really obvious—is that all sorts of books can generally inspire you, give you cool details to add to your game world, and make your characters more lively at the table. And there are certainly strategic tomes—from Sun Tzu and Machiavelli on down—that will sharpen your ability to manage the tactical game and the social/interactive/narrative game.

But those are all hacking at the branches, so to speak. I’m going to suggest a book that goes to the root of making you a better D&D gamer. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by (deep breath) Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes the author’s research into what’s happening in the heads of chess players, ballet dancers, long-distance runners, and other achievers when they’re at their peak.

About a year ago, I wrote a website column about what Flow offered D&D players. You can read it here. No sense in repeating myself, huh? But warning: It's a little on the long side.

Flow is not a self-help book. It’s clearly written by an ivory tower guy (chair of University of Chicago’s psych department) who’s a little unused to writing for we unwashed masses. It’s not going to tell you—beyond the very basics outlined in the research—how to achieve a state of optimal experience. But here’s how it makes you a better D&D player: Once you’ve read Flow and know what you’re looking for, you can recognize those flow-like moments at your D&D table and nurture them both in yourself and in your buddies. That is, I think, the root of being a better D&D player: shepherding those optimal experiences in yourself and the other people at the D&D table.

And while I picked Flow as my book to make you a better D&D gamer, it has a lot to offer gamers of other stripes. Because RPGs are overt exercises in the suppression of self and the emergence of another identity, I think Flow speaks most strongly to those of us who roll our polyhedrals on the tables in our basements.

And if you want to talk Flow some more, drop a comment in the Gleemax-alpha version of this blog, which you can find here.

Wiedermal absolut keine Verbindung mit der 4E aber es kann nicht schaden, sich zu einem besseren Rollenspieler zu machen oder daran zu arbeiten. Ich könnte das natürlich in einen eigenen Thread stellen, damit alle diesen Artikel gleich entdecken können aber ein wenig extra Werbung hier und vllt gewinnt die 4E ja neue Fans dazu.