Quote from: Peregrin;435578You mean I can't play or enjoy a game if a company drops the line?

Guess I have a lot of boxes to throw out...

Send your unnecessary and out of print materials to me immediately. I will make sure they are "taken care of." Ahem.

Quote from: oldgamergeek;435567I was talking to the 4E crew at my friendly local game store  and they do seem to be worried that WOTC may dump 4th edition D&D if sales get any worse. They also informed me it was my non 4th edition playing that is at fault, not that I care. And by the way WOTC is still fired.

Your first mistake was listening to the idiots at a FLGS.  There are a lot of gamers that think they have good busienss sense but as poorly run as gamer owned companies are I would only listen if the person actually had business background.

Anything out is pointless fanboy chatter.

But FLGS store owners are unlikely to give Bill Gates a run for his money anytime soon, either.

And Peregin, if you need an address to dump your old games, I'm happy to provide one.

Most people at my FLGS are pretty decent folks and the owner knows his stuff, but to quote the owner "there are still people who come in with no clue and lots of money so long as they spend I can stand them"

Coming from the DDE summary so far...

'Parently there's going to be a supplement to tie the PHB to Essentials.

Also seems to be a lack of direction in where they want to go, both design-wise and product-wise.

But at least they're acting like they're listening to the concerns of fans.  Don't know how much it'll help, though.

Still, I wish they'd just go all-digital already for new content, and just release a 3-book core set that details the basic rules (including all of the crap from the DMG 2, and rituals, and other things they left out of the compendium).

I know it's not the ideal thing, but I already have S&W for my "one D&D book with everything I need and simple enough to make up the rest."  If I'm going to be playing the new hotness and they're insistent on releasing periodic content updates, I'd rather it be digital so I can pick and choose what I want rather than accumulating more fucking books that are nothing but "new class/artifacts X, Y, Z."

As for the rituals, I'm just using the feat and other rules straight from the 4e PHB, works fine in Essentials too.

Quote from: Sigmund;435871As for the rituals, I'm just using the feat and other rules straight from the 4e PHB, works fine in Essentials too.

Yeah. If I was to run Essentials, rituals would be the very first thing I'd port back in.

Quote from: Peregrin;435665I know it's not the ideal thing, but I already have S&W for my "one D&D book with everything I need and simple enough to make up the rest."

OMG and the flavor too. The class descriptions in the S&W complete rules are fucking amazing.

Well, I suspect that they can reel some of the pathfinder crowd back eventually while retaining the 4e crowd if they retain the skill and saving throw / attack mechanisms and ditch the powers system for something more traditional.  The minion rule must go, of course.  What moron ever thought that was a good idea?

They can always make powers an optional rule with a sourcebook for those who want them.

Quote from: David Johansen;435903.  The minion rule must go, of course.  What moron ever thought that was a good idea?

I've been using "minions" since 1980 or so. Here's a 2008 post from my blog on minions which explains why I came up with the idea and why I consider them extremely useful:

QuoteMinions are a New Idea?

WOTC posted an article on minions in fourth edition D&D recently and it has gotten quite a bit more reaction than I expected on blogs and in forums. The idea of easy to kill hordes of followers is apparently new to many people. Perhaps I'm unique, but I've been using the minion idea since about 1980. I even called them minions (although one of my regular players always called them "mini-onions" as a joke).

You have to understand that I find combat boring -- especially combats that drag on and on. I don't mind quite a bit of combat in an adventure session so long as most of them are over very quickly. After a few years of streamlining combat to make it play fast, I "inherited" a couple of good players from another much more combat oriented GM. They liked combat with lots of opponents -- trouncing three dozen orcs in the temple of Orcus before they could reach the Evil High Priest was their idea of fun. Even though the orcs were not real threats.

Tracking hit points of a couple of dozen orcs was a pain and if they took two or three hits to kill, combat ended up taking up way too much time for me. This was especially true as the combat with those 30+ orcs was only there because they liked it.

It did not take me long to come up with the idea of monsters who were minions: the hordes of often fanatical, but minor followers of some important enemy. I started giving them 1 hit point per hit die. They still had all their powers, AC, etc. They could still dish out damage to adventurers and would be almost as much threat to non-adventurer "normal men" as the standard non-minion version of the monster. They just could be killed quickly by adventurers able to hit them with a sword or mow them down with a fireball.

It worked well. My two combat-oriented players could have the large battles they liked and the rest of us could have the fast combats we wanted. It did not really hurt realism. After all, if you are an evil leader, you are likely to hire bunches of weak troops because because they are cheap and use them as cannon fodder shock troops to delay the your powerful enemies while you and your important followers get away or get in position to turn the tables. Your minions may be cannon fodder to your real enemies, but normal people -- non-adventurers -- aren't any better so you can still use your masses of minions to take over villages and rob merchant caravans.

I continued to use minions long after those two combat-loving players had moved away because they made game much easier to run and much more fun for the players to play in. Therefore I find myself in the odd position of defending some fourth edition rules as a really good idea. While fourth edition minion rules apparently only give minions one hit point each so that one hit will surely kill them, that really isn't much different my 1 hit point per hit die minions -- one hit from an average character is all it takes to kill either of them.

The idea of minions isn't so bad, it was the implementation of it, combined with way too many 'auto damage' powers, that made them non-viable in 4e.

D&D has minions also. When a kobold has 2 hit points, and every attack every player makes does at least 2 damage, you're pretty much already there.

Later on, when orcs had 4 hit points, and everyone had either 18/01 str or specialization or a +2 weapon that rolled 2d4 for damage...the orcs were minions too.

It just never got like in 4e where a player could simply close his eyes and kill an infinite number of minions.

Quote from: David Johansen;435903The minion rule must go, of course.  What moron ever thought that was a good idea?

The problem I have with this kind of 4E terminology ("leaders", "strikers" etc. included) is that it is the pinnacle of meta-gaming. The characters, both PCs and NPCs, are just that: fictional living beings. "Send Joe the Tank forward!" or "Let's mop the floor with these minions" should be things said by *the characters* not by the rulebook.

My usual example is that in a party composed only by clerics (sent by their Church to find an holy artifact) the one played by Brian Blessed could very well be "The Tank" (or "The Bull") - for sure, they will not consider each others all "leaders". What does even it means?

And I doubt that two orcs who *want* to survive will see themselves as "minions". Just play your characters and let their personalities and the dice decide who they are.

Quote from: Benoist;435873OMG and the flavor too. The class descriptions in the S&W complete rules are fucking amazing.

Yeah.  I was torn, as AD&D has a special sort of feel about it, but I think I'm going to run OD&D using S&W, since the way S&W Complete just gives you the simple core rules, and then everything else from the OD&D supplements as optional sidebars is kinda nifty.

Quote from: RandallS;435926I've been using "minions" since 1980 or so. Here's a 2008 post from my blog on minions which explains why I came up with the idea and why I consider them extremely useful:

Question Randall, did you ever run a Hill Giant adventure with Hill Giant minions who had only 1hp per die, or a demonic adventure with one Type-IV "Nalfeshnee Leader" and 12 "Nalfeshnee minions"?

Quote from: Reckall;435935The problem I have with this kind of 4E terminology ("leaders", "strikers" etc. included) is that it is the pinnacle of meta-gaming. The characters, both PCs and NPCs, are just that: fictional living beings. "Send Joe the Tank forward!" or "Let's mop the floor with these minions" should be things said by *the characters* not by the rulebook.

My usual example is that in a party composed only by clerics (sent by their Church to find an holy artifact) the one played by Brian Blessed could very well be "The Tank" (or "The Bull") - for sure, they will not consider each others all "leaders". What does even it means?

And I doubt that two orcs who *want* to survive will see themselves as "minions". Just play your characters and let their personalities and the dice decide who they are.

But it works so well in MMOGs....