Fourth Edition (1/17/08)

Sometimes it seems that myself and perhaps four other people in this world are looking forward to the release of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition.  From players who’ve felt betrayed because the seven-year run of 3E seemed too short to fanboys who point fingers and cry Havoc because Wizards of the Coast has obviously [sarcasm] stolen ideas from World of Warcraft, the tubes of the internet are blocked with pessimism, wild leaps of logic, and insults towards a system of rules that has yet to be unveiled.

A lot of ire comes from the release of the 3.5 revision released a scant 3 years after the 3E release.  Personally, I think that was a serious misjudgment on the behalf of WotC.  Enough rules change were made to alter the game significantly, but did not offer enough improvements to, in my opinion, justify another $90 for the three books a Game Master would need to efficiently run a game.  But here’s a newsflash, my little geeklings: no one is forcing you to make the change to 4E.  If you want to keep your 3E games going, a man in a black suit and Wizards badge isn’t going to show up to your gaming table with a cease and desist order.  There’s so much 3/3.5 material out there right now, it would take decades of gaming to go through it all.  If one so chose, they could play out from here to the end of their weekly hobby lives on 3E alone.

What really gets to me is the people who claim 4E is ripping off World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs.  Much like our ill-informed gaming brethren who would dare to compare Warhammer to Warcraft in my presence, most of these comments seem to make the assumption that Warcraft was the founder of all things RPG, and the rest of the crowd merely riders on to its glorious eight million subscriber tailcoats.  Warcraft is refined to the degree that it is precisely because it lifted some of the best elements of its current form from the many RPGs and fantasy licenses that have come before it.  Blizzard put them together in Diablo, draped its more marketable Warcraft skin over the game, and published one of the most popular MMORPGs of all time (I believe that title goes to Ragnarok Online with 25 million, but if you’ve heard different, let me know).

Take this comment on youtube.com when the preview videos came up:

“They have a Warlock class?  Why are they even calling it Dungeons and Dragons anymore?” or the backlash when it was discovered that characters grew through skill trees.  Here’s a bit of trivia for you: the Warlock class was in WotC’s Complete Arcane book, published on November 18, 2004, nearly a week before World of Warcraft’s commercial release.  On top of that, the very concept of the word “warlock” to refer a demonic pact maker has been around since the Dark Age concept of witchcraft.

On the subject of skill trees, I’d like to know where the outrage was when Ragnarok Online had stolen the idea from Diablo II, released barely a year before (unlikely, due to the extensive Beta testing prior to its August 31, 2003 release).  What about the fist shaking due towards Exalted’s character path system?

You know what, let’s just rewind and say that everyone above owes Sid Meier their growth systems because of his work on Civilization's tech trees.  No wait; he lifted the idea of upgrade pathways from Mega-lo-Mania, didn’t he?