On June 6, Wizards of the Coast plans to release the fourth edition of 'Dungeons & Dragons.' The latest edition of the iconic game, the first since version 3.5 was released in 2003, will simplify some things for players, such as what roles they play, and the company hopes that that will mean that more people will play the game than ever. Pictured here is the forthcoming fourth-edition 'Monster Manual.'
(Credit: Wizards of the Coast)SAN FRANCISCO--This is not your big brother's Dungeons & Dragons.
On June 6, Wizards of the Coast will officially roll out the fourth edition of the D&D franchise, as well as a new suite of digital tools, and the world-famous game will never be the same.
And this time, it won't require the death of the game's inventor, Gary Gygax, to get D&D into the news.
I got a preview of what's new on Monday, and while I'm certainly no D&D expert, I'll try to spell out what I saw for you here.
To start with, the digital initiative, which is called Dungeons & Dragons Insider, will, for the first time, make it feasible to play a game of D&D with your friends over the Internet and without having to pull out the thick, iconic, hardcover books that have for so long been an essential element to the experience.
This is the fourth-edition 'Player's Handbook.' Among the new innovations that will be released with the fourth edition of 'Dungeons & Dragons' on June 6 is a new Web-based suite of tools known as D&D Insider. This will allow players to play the game online against friends from anywhere, but is based entirely on the paper game. It is not, in other words, a video game, but rather a Web interface for the regular game.
(Credit: Wizards of the Coast)The basic idea behind Dungeons & Dragons Insider is that it will allow players to create their characters using an online avatar maker and then import those creations to a digital game table where they can they wage campaigns online with their friends.
And while the idea is not to turn D&D into an MMORPG--a massively multiplayer online game--like World of Warcraft or EverQuest, there can be no doubt that Wizards of the Coast has taken some cues from those games.
One of the sets of tools included in the D&D Insider is a complete collection of the items, classes, races, and spells from the books, as well as any of the official D&D magazines.
Then, once players have gone through the character creator--which allows them a pretty high degree of customization within all the various classes and races of their characters--they can then begin playing.
But those who are taking on the role of dungeon master can also use the character creator to build non-player characters that they can then put inside the dungeons that players will use as part of their campaigns.
One nice thing about using these online tools is that it is likely, I was told, that the entire process of getting ready to play will be much faster than it has always been to use the hard copy books. That's because, D&D Web specialist Chris Youngs told me, everything is organized in the online tools in such a way that players and dungeon masters alike will be able to find what they need without being required to flip around through the books. Which for anyone who ever played D&D knows is a seriously time-consuming part of the experience.
One of the major features of D&D Insider is the character creator, which allows players to make highly-detailed characters, which can then be imported into a digital instance of the game.
(Credit: Wizards of the Coast)And while the online tools can automate the process of "rolling" a character, players can choose the option to still roll real dice and then input the results into the Web interface.
The last major element of the D&D Insider is the so-called "dungeon builder," a tool that allows dungeon masters to craft the environments where their players will carry out their campaigns.
One nice thing about this is that dungeon masters can set certain areas of the dungeons they're building as off-limits to players until the campaign leads naturally to them entering those areas. Then the DMs can toggle the access to allow the players in.
Practically speaking, this means that DMs can see the entirety of their newly-created dungeons while players can only see what the DMs want them to see.
One other nice element of the dungeon builder is that as DMs add more features--pits, fireballs, monsters, and the like, they can put dynamic lighting effects on those features. This is a nice little design choice and looks great.
As for the digital game table itself, it starts out two-dimensional, but can be rotated into being 3D.
Besides being digital, however, the upshot of all this is that the online version is designed to allow players and DMs to do anything digitally that they could previously do in the analog version of the game.
Yet, in keeping with this still being D&D, the digital setup does not set the rules or enforce them. Rather, the dungeon master is still in control of campaigns and gets to run things his or her way.
This is the fourth-edition 'Dungeon Master's Guide.'
(Credit: Wizards of the Coast)"It's not a video game experience," Youngs said. "It's a D&D experience."
Of course, even as Wizards of the Coast makes playing D&D digitally something to change the game forever, it is also preparing to launch an entirely new version of the game itself.
On June 6, the company plans to unveil the fourth edition of D&D, the first version since 3.5 was released in 2003.
Andy Collins, a member of the fourth-edition design team, told me the major idea behind the new edition is to streamline D&D so that there is less abstraction for players to absorb as they set out to create characters. That means all players will fit into four roles: Defenders, Strikers, Leaders, and Controllers.
The idea is that by pigeon-holing all classes of character into the four main roles, every player will have a sense of what they're doing in the game. Previously, Collins said, some players had been able to choose roles that didn't quite end up having any real place in a campaign.
Or, as James Wyatt, the lead story designer on the fourth edition, put it, "We didn't have the language before to tell you what (all the) classes were doing."
That problem is effectively solved in the fourth edition, Collins and Wyatt said.
"We rebuilt all the character classes from the ground up," Collins said, "to reduce to the core of what made...D&D exciting."
One thing I was curious about was how the emergence of games like World of Warcraft has affected D&D.
Wyatt said that such MMOs--and the ways that they have advanced the fantasy game genre--can help the D&D design team see elements of their game that they can refine.
Dungeon masters will be able to create non-player characters in the character creator for use in digital campaigns.
(Credit: Wizards of the Coast)But mainly, he added, he doesn't see MMOs being a major influence on the D&D team so much as an adjunct to find more depth in how to make D&D richer.
"We're not learning from (MMOs)," Wyatt said, "so much as looking in the mirror."
Finally, while Wizards of the Coast is still aiming D&D at its core players, it is also hoping that the fourth edition can reach many new players, especially those for whom the old versions of the game were effectively off-limits.
What that really means, Collins said, is that the fourth edition does away with some of the complexity of the game that was, effectively, a barrier to entry for many people.
That's possible, he, Wyatt, and associate D&D brand manager Sarah Girard said, because the new edition of the game boils down some of the complexity of the game and makes it simpler for players to find answers to questions that might previously have required spending a long time flipping around through the various books that make up the rule sets for answers.
"We've chosen to spend our complexity capital on things to do," Wyatt said. "Our books are full of options rather than nitty gritty details" that slow the game down and chase away many would-be players.
For now, players excited about the release of the fourth edition are going to have to bide their time. But, on May 20, Wizards of the Coast will release a single adventure, known as Keep on the Shadowfell, that will give players a taste of the fourth edition.
Then, on June 6, the company plans on rolling out the new edition. The following day, game stores around the country and the world will host D&D games so that players can get an instant taste of what's new.
Gary Gygax helped keep me out of trouble when I was in junior high school.
I was saddened earlier Tuesday to hear that Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and the father of modern role-playing games, has died. He was 69 years old. My CNET Reviews colleague Will Greenwald has already written about Gygax's role in the gaming community.
(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)
For many of us who grew up before PCs became ubiquitous and long before it was cool to be a geek, Gygax's creation meant Friday nights spent playing games with your friends, not wishing you were someone else. Instead of finding creative ways to break the law, we were busy rolling 20-sided dice and doing battle with Orcs and other evil beasts.
It was a fantastical world for adolescents. Gygax managed to mix The Lord of the Rings and mythology with comic book adventures. Naturally, there were absurd D&D-related scares in the early-1980s regarding kids delving into Satanism and disastrous episodes of real-life sword fighting. (I always thought if kids were dumb enough to fight with real swords, they had bigger issues than the influence of a role-playing game).
My own memories: Before moving on to the decidedly autocratic role of Dungeon Master, my favorite D&D role was a long-sword-wielding ranger named Toranaga (I think the miniseries Shogun was big at the time and that's where I got the Japanese name). He had a magic girdle of strength and ran a speakeasy on the side. For the record, Toranaga was Chaotic Good, had a 17 strength (that's non-magic girdle-enhanced), had a sturdy constitution of 14, but was a bit clumsy due to his 9 dexterity. For those of you who never played the game, well, sorry, this probably doesn't mean much to you. Let's just say 17 is good (18 is the highest you can get); 9--not so good.
I also seem to recall my ranger/barkeep met his untimely demise at the hands of an Ochre Jelly monster that made a home in his bar. It was an ignominious death for a guy named after a mighty Japanese warrior.
Times have changed, of course. Like most kids, I moved on from D&D and hadn't even looked at a D&D book in decades, until a former colleague of mine brought into the office. While we may have been oddball hobbyists 25 years ago, role-playing games are now mainstream, thanks to gaming consoles and the Internet. World of Warcraft is a billion-dollar enterprise, and D&D lives on in various forms. But without D&D paving the way, it's hard to imagine WoW would even exist.
So let's pay our respects: You have to wonder how many of today's writers, computer programmers, video game creators, and other creative sorts wiled away their winter nights playing D&D. Thanks, Mr. Gygax. You allowed us to use our brains.
Gary Gygax at Gen Con 2007
(Credit: Alan De Smet)Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and one of the fathers of tabletop role-playing games, died on Tuesday at the age of 69. He had suffered from heart problems.
The news was first announced on the message board of Troll Lord Games, the publisher of Gygax's most recent works. It has since been directly confirmed by the company, which will post an announcement on its Web site later Tuesday.
Gygax was best known for helping create Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. He also pioneered tabletop role-playing games. The first D&D rulebooks were released in 1974 by TSR, and since then have produced three full-fledged sequels, numerous revisions and updates, and dozens upon dozens of additional rulebooks, settings, and campaigns. While Gygax hadn't had much direct involvement with D&D for many years, he developed and contributed to many role-playing games, including Troll Lord Games' Gary Gygax's Fantasy Worlds.
If not for his contributions, video games and geek culture would probably look much different than it does today. Beyond jokes about "d20s" and "saving throws," D&D's systems and mythos have spawned many excellent games, including Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment.
Dungeons & Dragons continues to develop. Since TSR was purchased by Wizards of the Coast, the game has seen even more expansions and updates. The company released Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition in 2000, and Dungeons & Dragons 4.0 is scheduled to ship in June. Though he didn't actively produce the latest editions of the game, neither they nor the countless video games, books, and other media that carry the D&D name would have been possible without him.
Not all games need a computer or a video game system. Long ago, before the Internet and broadband and (one assumes) wheels and indoor plumbing, gamers played games on tables. Card games, role-playing games, and strategy games were all played with pens, paper, cards, dice, and figurines. Plenty of gamer geeks still play those games today. I count myself as one of them.
(Credit:
Wizards of the Coast)
Wizards of the Coast owns Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering, respectively the largest tabletop RPG and collectible card game franchises ever. WotC recently announced the strangely named Gleemax, a social site focused specifically on the pen/paper/dice/card gamer crowd. Gleemax will bring together tabletop gamers of all stripes with game reviews, game blogs, friend lists, local event calendars, and other handy services. You'll be able to hunt for players/hosts for various role-playing, card, and miniature strategy games, and even find out if any game stores nearby are hosting tournaments or campaigns.
Computer gamers will be able to get in on the action, too. If you're not a fan of tabletop games, you can use WotC's new video game portal to find new independent strategy games and WotC's own online games, like Magic Online and the upcoming Uncivilized: The Goblin web game.
You can check out Gleemax.com for a preview of the site, though it won't really get going until its social networking features get rolled out in August.
- prev
- 1
- next
