At Gen Con, Wizards of the Coast’s cadre of role-playing game designers announced that they would be revamping the king of tabletop role-playing games, and that we’d be playing an all-new version of Dungeons & Dragons by next year. This version would be tied directly to an internet-based initiative named D&D Insider — a subscription-based service that would offer robust online character management tools, as well as an online gaming table so that players could meet up for an evening of dungeon crawling from the comfort of their homes.
Gamers have been clamoring for information on the forthcoming 4th Edition, and we went straight to the source for the scoop. While it’s still too early to get all the details, read on to learn all about the future of Dungeons & Dragons from Christopher Perkins, Wizards of the Coast’s Story Manager, D&D RPGs and Miniatures.
Christopher Perkins: Refreshing a living game such as D&D is very important. Our understanding of what works best for today’s players is always evolving, and ignoring that would result in a stagnant game that nobody plays. Add to that the opportunities presented by our digital initiative, as encompassed by D&D Insider, and it just made sense to update all of the components of the game and the brand at the same time.
Christopher Perkins: Releasing three core rulebooks in one month is too much of a strain on retailers. They don’t have the money to stock up on that much gaming product in one month.
Christopher Perkins: The game is evolving in exciting ways that will improve your play experience, but the core mechanics of the game will be familiar to current players, and the game itself will be easily recognizable as D&D to players from any edition. The revolution comes from the addition of the D&D Insider components, a more robust organized play program, and more enhanced community features.
Christopher Perkins: Although 4th Edition assumes that most players are using miniatures to represent their characters and monsters, 4th Edition doesn’t require the use of miniatures any more than the previous edition does.
Christopher Perkins: We faced a similar situation with the change from 2nd Edition to 3rd Edition, so we assume that not every 3rd-Edition player will switch over to the new game overnight. All in all, 4th Edition offers a much better gaming experience for players and Dungeon Masters. Even though 3rd Edition is an excellent game, 4th Edition gives players better character options at every level, makes DM-ing less of a chore, and speeds up round-by-round combat. We expect that the improvements in gameplay will convince even reluctant players to switch over to 4th Edition. We also anticipate that the majority of d20 publishers will support 4th Edition going forward.
GameSpy: What are the elements of the D&D Insider subscription? How much will it cost?
Christopher Perkins: D&D Insider is the digital portion of our 4th Edition D&D offerings, featuring the digital versions of Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine, a character creator, a suite of DM tools, and the D&D Game Table that turns the Internet into a kitchen table around which you can play D&D with your friends. We’re still finalizing what those costs will be, but we plan to peg the cost as slightly more than the cost of a magazine but less than the average MMO monthly subscription rate.
GameSpy: Will there be varying subscription levels? Can someone subscribe to the community features and the toolsets (like the character builder and gaming table), but not the magazine content?
Christopher Perkins: A free D&D website will continue to exist, which will include news of upcoming products, message boards, forums, and the like. The select D&D Insider portion of the website will be available to subscribers only and features such items as the digital magazine content (Dragon Magazine and Dungeon Magazine), DM and Player Tools, and the D&D Gaming Table.
GameSpy: Besides the Dragon and Dungeon magazine subscriptions what other pay elements make D&D Insider worthwhile as opposed to the Web things that are currently free?
Christopher Perkins: In addition to the more robust editorial content via Dragon and Dungeon content, the key elements for D&D Insider include a character creator, a suite of DM tools and the D&D Game Table that turns the Internet into a kitchen table around which you can play D&D with your friends.
GameSpy: Will you be moving anything that’s currently free on the Web behind a D&D Insider subscriber wall?
Christopher Perkins: Some content will remain in the free section of the site. Other content will move to the subscriber section of the site.
GameSpy: Will every player in the party (as well as the DM) have to subscribe to D&D Insider in order to make use of the digital gaming table?
Christopher Perkins: Subscribing to D&D Insider gives you 24/7 access to the D&D Game Table. A non-subscriber will have the ability to “buy” a seat at the game table on a session-by-session basis, but this cost has not yet been determined.
GameSpy: Will players be able to manipulate the gaming table, or is it strictly under the purview of the Dungeon Master? What kinds of manipulation “permissions” can the DM offer to players?
Christopher Perkins: Players can, by default, move their own digital miniatures as well as adjust their camera view. Dungeon Masters can also give players limited control of other aspects of the table, including lighting functions and drawing tools.
GameSpy: Will WOTC be releasing printable replacement stat cards via D&D Insider so that their existing miniatures can be used in their 4th Edition games? Will these cards be updated with errata and updates electronically?
Christopher Perkins: We plan to provide free stat card updates via our website for a number of full D&D Miniatures sets, as well as provide new stats for an “All-Star” set of popular figures drawn from earlier sets. We’re going to ask the D&D Miniatures community to help us determine which figures make it into that All-Star set.
GameSpy: What’s the role of Gleemax vis a vis D&D Insider? What kinds of Gleemax tools will players be able use with their Insider subscriptions and will there be any Insider-exclusive Gleemax material?
Christopher Perkins: Gleemax provides D&D players with free access to a central repository of fan-created D&D content as well as a social network that includes customizable personal pages, blogs, friends lists, calendars, and more. Gleemax will also allow D&D players to store their characters and campaign notes in “vaults” that can be made public or private by the individual user. Some additional features of the Character Vault and Campaign Vault may be available to D&D Insider subscribers only, but the exact details and features have yet to be determined.
GameSpy: We’ve been reading a lot about talent trees in 4th Edition, similar to those in Blizzard Entertainment’s Diablo and World of Warcraft games. Will 4th Edition characters progress similarly to those in an MMORPG and was this sort of play dynamic the inspiration for the new 4th Edition rules?
Christopher Perkins: Talent trees aren’t unique to MMORPGs. Wizards has produced other games that use talent trees, such as the d20 Modern Roleplaying Game and the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Saga Edition. The theory of game design, regardless of platform, is constantly evolving. We’ve taken our gaming experiences over the past decade, as well as player feedback on the games and supplements we’ve produced in that time period, to build a system for character creation and advancement in 4th Edition that draws inspiration from numerous sources, but isn’t exactly like anything that’s been done before.
GameSpy: What do you think talents bring to the game that was lacking in previous editions?
Christopher Perkins: The system by which characters are created and advanced in 4th Edition will be revealed in the coming months, both on D&D Insider and in the Wizards Presents: Races and Classes preview book releasing in December. Until then, it would be premature to discuss the details.
GameSpy: One of the biggest announcements was the level cap. Why thirty levels? Why not stick with the traditional 20?
Christopher Perkins: We liked the idea of building “tiers” into the game, so that Dungeon Masters had clear start points and end points for their campaigns. Levels 1-10 is called the heroic tier, levels 11-20 is the paragon tier, and levels 21-30 represents the epic tier. We felt strongly that we wanted to include epic-level play in the core game and make it less of a departure from the core system, rather than tack it on in a later product. Although each tier promises a slightly different play experience based on the capabilities of characters and monsters at these levels, every tier will still feel true to D&D.
GameSpy: Do you feel that players who enjoy the current generation of MMOs and computer RPGs have gotten used to their large level caps with more frequent reward plateaus? How has this impacted the way you’re now breaking up character progression? If the intent is to reward players more frequently, like in an MMO, why not go with fifty levels or more?
Christopher Perkins: We know that players enjoy the experience of “leveling up,” provided it’s not onerous, and so we’ve built a system that allows them to level up more often. We didn’t want players to have to “level up” their characters every session because that would get onerous; doing so every two or three sessions seemed more appropriate and palatable, and that’s how the new system is currently built.
GameSpy: Has the road to the endgame been lengthened, level-wise, or is there a new upper limit to how powerful D&D characters will get? For example, will a level 30 character in 4th Edition be as strong as a level 20 in 3.5, or is a level 20 character in 4th Edition about as strong as an epic-level character in previous editions?
Christopher Perkins: The way character advancement works now, it takes fewer encounters to gain a level, but it takes roughly the same length of time to reach 30 levels in 4th Edition as it takes to reach 20 levels in 3rd Edition. The rate of level advancement is still being playtested, however, so the jury’s still out on whether the final game will work this way.
One of the goals of 4th Edition is to make high-level play as fun, balanced, and manageable as low-level play, and to make high-level characters as easy to create and run as low-level ones. Comparing high-level 4th Edition characters to high-level 3rd Edition characters is not an apples-to-apples comparison because they’re built very differently. However, there isn’t a startling increase in overall power level from a 20th-level 3rd Edition character to a 20th-level 4th Edition character.
GameSpy: The “Vancian” fire-and-forget magic system has been a D&D staple since the system was created — yet it’s also one that never seems to be emulated in either the paper and pencil or videogame world and is often criticized for being unwieldy and for slowing down games. Now it seems as though 4th Edition is bowing to the inevitable. Are you completely abandoning the classic “Vancian” magic system? What will replace it? Is this an example of the video game world bleeding back to the tabletop universe?
Christopher Perkins: It’s safe to say that the “Vancian” spellcasting system has received as much scrutiny as every other aspect of the D&D game. One thing we don’t want is a character running out of cool things to do in combat. In 4th Edition, all characters have a selection of at-will, per-encounter, and per-day resources. The exact mechanical execution of this base concept will be disclosed in the coming months on D&D Insider and the Races and Classes preview book.
GameSpy: It seems as though many of the changes and new rules in 4th Edition were inspired or emulate the ease-of-use of the current generation of MMO (World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online and the like). How has the popularity of such systems affected D&D and how has it contributed to the creation of 4th Edition’s game systems?
Christopher Perkins: Just as MMOs have looked to the D&D game for inspiration, so too have we learned a few things from MMOs (and not just MMOs, but games of all kinds). However, the D&D game is not an MMO, nor are we turning it into one. As it happens, certain things that work well in MMOs also work well in RPGs. For example, we like the idea of being able to create different “builds” within a single character class, so that one player’s 5th-level fighter can look and feel different than another player’s 5th-level fighter. This is something we experimented with in various other game products produced by Wizards in recent years.
GameSpy: We’ve been reading a lot about class roles and how creating clearly defined roles (and different ways of approaching those roles) are a large part of what will differentiate 4th Edition. Is this inspired by the MMO party foundation of tank, healer, dps, and crowd control? If so, do you anticipate having the same issues with hybrid classes, like WoW’s Paladin, Druid and Shaman?
Christopher Perkins: Party roles existed in 3rd Edition, but they were never discussed openly in the core rules. We simply assumed that a typical group of players would know enough to make sure their party included a front-line fighter-type character, a cleric or other healer-type character, a wizard or other artillery-type character, and so forth. In the interest of helping less-experienced players build stronger parties, we’ve addressed the issue of party composition more openly and directly in 4th Edition by explaining party roles and the importance of having characters who can fill these roles. Each base class in 4th Edition has been designed to fill a specific role, but that’s not all the class aims to do, and every base class has things that it can do outside of its primary role.
GameSpy: Greyhawk has generally been the de facto “starter setting” for Dungeons & Dragons. With the announcement of RPGA’s Living Greyhawk campaign being replaced with a Living Forgotten Realms, is the incredibly popular Forgotten Realms now the default campaign setting for 4th Edition?
Christopher Perkins: The core rulebooks are not aligned to any specific campaign setting. Dungeon Masters may use any, all, or none of the proper names and locations mentioned in these books when building their own campaigns. For example, in the Dungeon Master’s Guide we’re aiming to include a fully-detailed town or village that DMs can use as the starting point for their 4th Edition campaigns, but they are free to change the details to serve their own needs.
GameSpy: What settings are slated for 4th Edition support? Specifically, will there be 4th Edition sourcebooks for Eberron, Forgotten Realms? Are you planning on bringing back any older settings such as Planescape or Ravenloft and are there any new settings in the works?
Christopher Perkins: We will continue to support the Forgotten Realms and Eberron campaign settings both in game product and with novel lines. The Forgotten Realms campaign setting will be the first one updated for 4th Edition in print, with a new campaign guide releasing in August 2008. Other classic campaign settings may be revisited in print product as demand warrants, but not as full-blown product lines. Most of the support for these less-popular campaign settings will occur on D&D Insider, in the form of articles, wikipedias, and the like.
GameSpy: What are the first videogames we’ll see using the 4.0 mechanics? Do you expect Turbine’s Dungeons & Dragons Online and BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights toolset to adopt 4th Edition?
Christopher Perkins: No licensing plans have been announced at this time, and nothing is likely to be announced until after the 4th Edition rules are finalized.
GameSpy: Do the rules feel videogame-friendly and ripe for translation to the electronic realm and were they in any way created with that sort of thing in mind?
Christopher Perkins: Fourth Edition was created to be the best tabletop role-playing game on the market. The staff assigned to build the new game aren’t professional videogame designers, but it does seem that the rules could be translated to the “electronic realm” with relative ease.
