Highlights from the D&D Gen Con Presentation
August 9th, 2010 by Ed Grabianowski
Let’s start the post-Gen Con reporting with the biggest news from the biggest company in gaming. Saturday morning, Wizards of the Coast devs gave a presentation outlining upcoming releases for D&D all the way into 2011. Gamma World, Ravenloft, rules changes, comic books, novels and more!
- A lot of the presentation revolved around the D&D Essentials collection, a topic big enough for a separate article discussing it. Briefly, it will be a set of ten always-in-print books designed to lead new players into the world of D&D.
- The biggest reveal was that the 2011 4E campaign world will be Ravenloft. There were few details, but it was revealed that players will be able to play vampire and werewolf characters (sparkling optional).
- In just a few weeks, a different Ravenloft product will be hitting store shelves: a board game based on 4E rules. I didn’t get to take a close look at it, but it appears to be the first in a series of WotC board games that follow the Fantasy Flight formula: big, deluxe boxes with lots of quality pieces, but possibly a bit pricey.
- Later, the Wrath of Ashardalon board game will come out, using the same engine as the Ravenloft game (described to me as a cooperative game of D&D in which “the board” is the DM). Solitaire is possible, and the games will be compatible with each other.
- A different type of board game will be released in the 2nd quarter of 2011. Conquest of Nerath will be a military strategy game (think Risk or Axis & Allies) set in the Nentir Vale region. It will accomodate two to four players, and in addition to sweeping armies of zombies and dwarves, you’ll have heroes who can enter dungeons to find items that will aid their side.
- A collector set of four beholder minis is in the works, featuring a ghost beholder, shadow beholder, an ice beholder and one more. The minis looked awesome.
- Starting with the publication of the Essentials line later this year, there will be a change to the way D&D handles magic items. They will be grouped as common, uncommon or rare. Typically, a character will only ever have one rare item at a time, and won’t be able to buy or create rare items. You’ll have to find those in dragon’s hoards or in ancient ruins, you know? Uncommons are less powerful than rares, but act the same way — players might be able to buy those in some circumstances, at the DM’s discretion. Common items are the potions and basic weapons you’ll be able to find at Ye Olde Magic Itemme Shoppe.
- Those Gamma World card booster packs I was wondering about? They give various boons and mutations to characters who draw them, creating a “random wahoo element,” in the words of Director of RPG Development Bill Slavicsek. While there are apparently rarities among the cards, Slavicsek suggested that you weren’t meant to buy a case and build an optimized deck, just get some packs and add some wacky randomness to your Gamma World game.
- A similar idea will be coming to D&D in 2011 with the Fortune Deck. These cards (available via random booster packs) will provide benefits to characters who meet certain conditions when they’re drawn. They’re meant to invoke the plot twists and dramatic changes of fortune that occur in comic books and adventure movies.
- The Shadowfell boxed set has cards too — a despair deck that imparts various gloomy effects on your Shadowfell rambling PCs. The effects (haunted and madness were named) were described as “Cthulhu-esque.”
- There will be a mix of product types in D&D. Boxed sets like the Shadowfell one and the Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale will contain poster maps, lots of creature tokens and the occasional deck of cards. Some books (like the Hero Builder’s handbook, an advanced guide for min-maxers) will follow the sturdy hardcover format. Many books, such as the Essentials books and Heroes of Shadow, will be published as 6″x9″ softcover digests with a lower price point.
- 2011 will also bring us Champions of the Heroic Tier, which will bring the character themes of Dark Sun to core D&D, along with a separate subsystem for character skills that will let you, for example, make a character who is a skilled blacksmith without spending skill points or feats on it.
- Next year, we’ll also have the Neverwinter Campaign Guide to look forward to, as D&D revisits the Forgotten Realms.
- In fiction, I’m interested in a new series of “pure” D&D novels set in the Nentir Vale. WotC is trying to create some iconic characters that will represent the game in much the same way that the original Planeswalkers represent Magic. Bill Slavicsek wrote the first book in the series.
- Two new comic book series will be published by IDW. Dungeons & Dragons will start up in November, written by Leverage creator John Rogers with Art by Andrea Di Vito. The sample issue introduced the “core characters” mentioned above, and looks to be a fun, rollicking adventure not dissimilar to Leverage. You might blame Rogers for recycling ideas, but I think “Leverage + D&D = MORE PLEASE.” In January, the Dark Sun series will begin, written by Alex Irvine with art by Peter Bergting. The story looks interesting, but I’m not totally sold on Bergting’s art style.
- Finally, we’ll also get to experience some kind of universe spanning storyline in 2011 called the Abyssal Plague. It will show up in novels, board games, RPGs, and affect settings from Dark Sun to the Forgotten Realms.
- Wait, one more last thing. The superadventure for 2011 is the Madness of Gardmore Abbey. My group has already been to the depths below the abbey, uncovering a horrible (seriously) demonic secret, but I guess we’ll have to go back, because it looks like someone scattered a Deck of Many Things about the premises, and someone needs to find all those ridiculously powerful cards. Unlike Tomb of Horrors, this one will be a boxed set.
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August 9th, 2010 9:37 PM
Soooooooooooooo The future of RPGs is cards? I hate random distribution, especially for these. What good are the doubles you’re inevitably going to get? It’s not like there’s an advantage to having more than one decapitation in the critical deck. I get that it’s a revenue stream for them, but I’d rather just buy a critical hit deck of X amount of cards, and then grab the second wave deck, and mix them together until I have an epic pile of cards. Buying a few booster packs and walking away with doubles of most is not ideal for me. I don’t mind the random packs in magic because I can use a pile of commons by scattering them through my many decks. I don’t need twenty critical hit decks, unless they make cards that are themed for different monsters. Then I could see a use, though I still don’t like it.
August 9th, 2010 10:46 PM
I agree. The “living card game” model used by Fantasy Flight would be ideal. You get a non-random deck, then later non-random releases add cards to that deck, allowing for expansions or more options.
August 10th, 2010 2:56 AM
I can get behind that. I play Magic mostly in drafts, and then in a very small metagame of my friends, so rarity actually affects gameplay in my world, where out there in tourney land those rares get expensive but rarity has no inherent affect on the game. In the non-competetive environment of a critical hit deck the limitation of resources that rarity creates has no impact. There’s no need to compete over scarce powerful cards if the deck is a communal pot. I don’t like this. If it’s supposed to act like the Planechase cards, why not make them not random like Planes and Schemes are? I really see no use for this.
August 10th, 2010 7:40 AM
A lot of this is old news, right? Anyhow, I am actually really excited for the “Essentials.” Whatever WotC says, insists, pleads, they ARE a soft reboot– a fully backwards compatible one, but still. They have incorporated changes to the 4e that make it sound reinvigorating. Now if I could only get my Big Book of Non Combat Powers, I’d be happy…
August 10th, 2010 8:34 AM
During the Q&A, someone asked if they would ever make a book “like a Monster Manual, but full of skill challenges.” Slavicsek asked if the DMs in the room would want that, and there was a general outpouring of “Hell yeah!” So he told Mike Mearls to “put it on the list.”
August 10th, 2010 12:53 PM
Well, that’s a step in an interesting direction. A Big Book of Traps would be awesome too, since the DMG has Pit Trap, Deeper Pit Trap, Covered Pit Trap, Pit Trap With Spikes, Arrow Trap, Rocks Fall Everyopne Dies. Holes in the floor get less scary at higher levels.
August 10th, 2010 1:11 PM
“Starting with the publication of the Essentials line later this year, there will be a change to the way D&D handles magic items. They will be grouped as common, uncommon or rare. Typically, a character will only ever have one rare item at a time, and won’t be able to buy or create rare items. You’ll have to find those in dragon’s hoards or in ancient ruins, you know? Uncommons are less powerful than rares, but act the same way — players might be able to buy those in some circumstances, at the DM’s discretion. Common items are the potions and basic weapons you’ll be able to find at Ye Olde Magic Itemme Shoppe.”
OK, I’m not up to date on magic items in 4th, but isn’t the “Rare” magic item pretty much what artifacts do? Or the various named items? I do like this purely from a fluff perspective, because it gives a reasonable perspective on what sorts of magic the common man would see. It always bugged me that there was all this crazy magical stuff the PCs had, and it was all simultaneously super rare awesome, but run of the mill. I mean, how rare can magic swords be when everyone’s got one and game balence is built around them. The hardest part of worldbuilding for me is trying to figure out just how common magic is, especially in the default settings of of D&D/Pathfinder.
August 10th, 2010 6:08 PM
I am really intrigued by the revamping of the magic items. As my group knows I have been quite vocally displeased with the 4e magic items since their inception. I think they are very anemic compared to all previous editions suggesting that the designers wanted to tone down the role of magic items and yet the game’s mechanic is based on presuming that the characters are constantly upgrading their items, particularly their weapons, armor and implements.
I don’t think that ‘rare’ items will fill the roll of Artifacts, since they are ‘supposed’ to leave the character after a few levels to continue their little artifact journeys. I assume the rares are supposed to be more or less permanent items that the characters own that are more impressive than their other accessories.
The world balance effect has always bothered me as well. I prefer a variant on the old role master scheme for superior items. Steel is rare, so most weapons are iron (the common stufff you get at PHB prices). Then you can buy steel items if you find a smith who knows how to make it (+1 or maybe +2). Then perhaps you find a wizard who will make you a +3 sword or you recover an ancient hero’s blade. etc. That way if the local lord has a +2 sword, it might just be that he found a really good smith, rather than a visit to the magic item quarter master who issues the requisite items and the proper levels.
August 10th, 2010 7:03 PM
My adventure is going to involve a made-up NPC type called “Imbuers.” These are essentially artificers that can add effects to your existing magic items or even mundane items within limits. Here’s the deal though: You need residuum to make this stuff work. This doesn’t mean you can suddenly have a +6 item (imbuers have their limits), but it can allow you to make that +3 radiant craghammer into a +4 without having to find a whole new weapon or buy that one that just happens to be in stock.
August 11th, 2010 4:33 PM
Yeah I like that. I usually prefer enhancing a current item rather than ‘trading up.’ Trading up can be OK in some instances but if that’s how it always works then it feels mundane.
August 11th, 2010 6:58 PM
Yeah, I would always, always just level up some of the players signature items.
August 11th, 2010 8:59 PM
Oh, Ryk, I was thinking the artifacts of 3.5 which were basically huge crazy magic. I guess this sounds more like the big 100,000 gold items in the back of the magic items section. The stuff that everyone oohs and aahs over but never actually uses for fear of breaking the game. I do like the idea of getting an enchanter to level up your swords, but this would be a hilarious problem for my Rogue, because he breaks so many when he critical misses.