Yeah, this will kill my group buying WotC products.

Sure, it's a business, but damn, this just isn't necessary from a game standpoint.

...well, could always mean there may be a good market in used 3 - 3.5 stuff soon.

Been doing pretty well filling in my library of SRIII material since 4th ed came out.

4.0 isn't going to fix that. the rules will start bloating again, probably with the first or second splatbook.

From what I could gather from the site, they're not really interested in fixing rules bloating or anything of the sort. It's more of a delivery platform to celebrate some online tools they're trying to push, with a few minor upgrades to the system to actually facilitate even more rules bloat (like weapons having different and individual charactertics in combat).

I'm just sick to death of classes and levels. I don't really ever want to run another level based game again.

I love fantasy games- treasure, castles, dragons, it's all good. But when level comes into play- it just kills it for me.

...come to think of it, didn't Runequest dispense with character levels as well? I vaguely remember rolling against skills used in an adventure to improve them instead of having blanket levels to increase your abilities. I know Call of Cthulu (not the D20 version) uses the same mechanic.

I think DragonQuest also used a similar system that allowed your character to go for training to increase your skills between adventures.

Man that was a more than a quarter century since I last played either RQ or DQ. Yikes! Has it been that long?

...yeah I really miss RQ, though I occasionally have the opportunity to play CoC now & then.

...but just like the biz of Computer OS & software, it seems the inferior product gets the biggest slice of the market pie over the better one.

Many of D&D's more controversial features (levels, classes, arguably even alignment) make more sense if you reclassify the game as a tactical wargame. This is before the "role-playing" perversions, of course.

~J

Having thought long and hard about what disease 4th ed will cause i have realised that the disease will be quick, and efficent (or streamlined in designer speak). So I suspect 4th edtion D&D will cause Ebola.

Deadlands rocks! The original Pinnacle game is still my second favorite game of all time.

Deadlands is cool. I haven't played the SW version of it yet, but I know a few people that have played both and prefer the original.

KK, pick up the Explorer's Edition. $10, full rules, packed with awesome.

...pretty cool. have to check My FLGS this weekend.

Love Deadlands, just wish more people where I lived played it. A game right up my namesake's alley.

Ebola - perfect! I love it! The mere announcement of 4th edition D&D has certainly killed any desire to continue buying WotC stuff in our group, especially considering that the two main GMs (myself included) are rather heavily invested in 3.5 (and Eberron in my case). Talk about alienating the fanbase

...almost makes 'ol Mr Gygax & TSR not seem all that bad anymore...

I believe the prison camp reference was only in relation to the 4e announcement (and the area in which it was made). I could be wrong.

yeah, I just heard last night from a friend of mine, whose friend in Boston is one of the artists for something that has to do with 4th Edition. He said that is has something to do with a sort of MMO kind of game and gameplay, but also that R.A. Salvatore is one of the writer's for it.

Perhaps they'll just reissue 1e, exactly the same as it was, including the classic blue cover, and just call it 4e. That would be awesome.

bleh. This is partly why I stopped playing "that other game"; they release a set of rulebooks, a year later "version x.5", a year after that "version x.x", etc. You're shelling out megabucks for ever more versions of core rules. But what do I know? They're still #1 in sales and popularity, so they must be doing something right.