D&D 4e
In two weeks Wizards of the Coast will release Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition to the world. Within are mountains of changes, with the ‘core’ D&D experience supposedly intact. What is the ‘core’ D&D experience?
How can you distill the game into extra, changeable parts and required, necessary parts. D&D, at its core, might be about dice & chance, elves et. al., quests & adventures, treasure & loot, and dungeons & dragons. Although, I’ve also described WoW, Everquest, and innumerable other games played on a PC, console or with cards. Does D&D intrinsically require miniatures? or is that some ploy of WotC to get everyone to throw money at their specially designed 4E rules compatible figurines?
D&D to me, at its core, is some people getting together, to tell a story and throw in some rules for conflict resolution. Books aren’t needed, character sheets, minis, heck, even dice could be supplanted with a sufficiently complex rock, paper scissors series.
Lots of forums and websites have mentioned the new ‘fair use’ rules. How can we market D&D compatible products with the new release? It turns out WotC doesn’t want people to play their older games when they are releasing a new cash cow. Games won’t translate well, and players will be divided as to which version they want to play. WotC has a great business motivation for doing this, they don’t want people NOT buying their new books.
But why put out new books? WotC wants to regain control of D&D, which has been slowly leaking to other companies who publish adventures, addons, worlds, minis that work with their current ‘fair use’ documents. Why do they need to cut off everything before it? To rewrite the rules and keep their monopoly.
