D&D 4E
Given that I'm so very curious about these things ever since designing a D&D game for the Sony PSP, yesterday I dropped my money on the core rules for D&D 4E.
A read through the rules has proven verrrrrrry interesting. At first glance this looks like a great improvement over the old system. What impresses me is that a lot has been done to regularize mechanics across the system, with fewer true exceptions to the rules, so the same common framework is used regardless of whether you are a fighter, a wizard or whatever.
This make sense of something that Ed Stark was telling me on his visits over from WotC during development of D&D Tactics--that the company had one eye on the future and perceived that future would see a convergence of the pen and paper and software games. Which is to say that the pen-and-paper game would remain the core product, but that it would be redesigned to be easier to convert into software games.
Having had to deal with the utter mindfuck of porting 3.5E to a console, I can say that my job would have been much easier using this rules set.
Not that there aren't many challenges. There would be a lot of fiddlesome detail in each of the character class powers that you'd have to code. But at least everything runs along common principles and so you could devise software tools to make it easy to craft each of the powers without a lot of bespoke tools. It would become, essentially, an extensible set of scripts that you could give to to a script-monkey to handle.
Sweet.
I was asked recently whether I saw this kind of convergence as a good or bad thing for manual gaming.
I'm not sure I see it as good or bad.
It interests me that D&D is the ur-text from which a lot of computer games have borrowed. If you look at the conventions of software games--for example, the concept of 'levels' to measure advancement and powess, or highly-attritional man-to-man combat systems--are all rooted in D&D.
But now D&D is now borrowing back from software games. Some of the terminology in the new Player's Handbook would be familiar to an audience used to playing MMOs. It seems to me they are doing something very canny here.
Ed Stark said to me straight that the pen-and-paper game is not going away. Not ever. It's still a cash cow. However, this streamlining may help players move swiftly between the paper game and software games. A new Neverwinter Nights or new MMO could have tools for porting your character between the rulebook and software game.
The other thing it does it make is easier for Hasbro/WotC to produce software tools for the player or DM. Already they are pushing electronic character creators. How long before they have other game assistance tools that a DM can bring along on his/her laptop and run throughout a session?
I don't think this affects the rest of paper gaming much at all, but for D&D, which is the biggest boy on the block, 4E's coder-friendliness looks like a great way to maximize revenue.
A read through the rules has proven verrrrrrry interesting. At first glance this looks like a great improvement over the old system. What impresses me is that a lot has been done to regularize mechanics across the system, with fewer true exceptions to the rules, so the same common framework is used regardless of whether you are a fighter, a wizard or whatever.
This make sense of something that Ed Stark was telling me on his visits over from WotC during development of D&D Tactics--that the company had one eye on the future and perceived that future would see a convergence of the pen and paper and software games. Which is to say that the pen-and-paper game would remain the core product, but that it would be redesigned to be easier to convert into software games.
Having had to deal with the utter mindfuck of porting 3.5E to a console, I can say that my job would have been much easier using this rules set.
Not that there aren't many challenges. There would be a lot of fiddlesome detail in each of the character class powers that you'd have to code. But at least everything runs along common principles and so you could devise software tools to make it easy to craft each of the powers without a lot of bespoke tools. It would become, essentially, an extensible set of scripts that you could give to to a script-monkey to handle.
Sweet.
I was asked recently whether I saw this kind of convergence as a good or bad thing for manual gaming.
I'm not sure I see it as good or bad.
It interests me that D&D is the ur-text from which a lot of computer games have borrowed. If you look at the conventions of software games--for example, the concept of 'levels' to measure advancement and powess, or highly-attritional man-to-man combat systems--are all rooted in D&D.
But now D&D is now borrowing back from software games. Some of the terminology in the new Player's Handbook would be familiar to an audience used to playing MMOs. It seems to me they are doing something very canny here.
Ed Stark said to me straight that the pen-and-paper game is not going away. Not ever. It's still a cash cow. However, this streamlining may help players move swiftly between the paper game and software games. A new Neverwinter Nights or new MMO could have tools for porting your character between the rulebook and software game.
The other thing it does it make is easier for Hasbro/WotC to produce software tools for the player or DM. Already they are pushing electronic character creators. How long before they have other game assistance tools that a DM can bring along on his/her laptop and run throughout a session?
I don't think this affects the rest of paper gaming much at all, but for D&D, which is the biggest boy on the block, 4E's coder-friendliness looks like a great way to maximize revenue.