Well folks, I’ve been here at GAMA Trade Show for about 48 hours now and it’s been non-stop action! I was lucky enough to get into the packed house for the 4e seminar with Bill Slaviscek and Scott Rouse, and I thought I’d report everything that I saw. I’ll also throw in some content I got from the Gleemax seminar earlier in the day. I didn’t get everything down, and I’m sure some of this is old news to you 4e news hounds out there, but here’s the big info dump!

Gleemax

They want Gleemax to be “the community for gamers on the Web.” Their goal is to support a community of players of all hobby games, based on three pillars:

• Community: Blogs, friends lists, community moderation…your standard social networking suite.
• Games: The alpha of their games site is set to launch at the end of the month. It will be free for a while, but will soon switch to be a subscription site! I think this is new information, and I for one wonder how they’re going to charge for what so many sites give away for free. The pay section will have digitized versions of their board games, new digital board games (The Goblin Game), and indie developer games. Community features like the forums will still be free.
• Editorial Content: This is going to include professional reviewers and writers, as well as official content from R&D staff.

Dungeons and Dragons Insider (DDI)

There are six parts to DDI.

1. Rules Database: Online searchable database of all game rules in published books. It will be updated in real time, so as soon as a book is published, its rules will be integrated into this database.

2. Character Visualizer: They spent a lot of time showing models of characters, including Jonathan Tweet’s fighter and some other R&D characters. “It was described as an MMO-style 3d character generator.” It includes all races, classes, magic items, weapons and armor, and equipment from the books. It also has glow effects that can be applied to any and all individual parts of a character, and you can pose your character in a variety of ways (they showed off the menacing pose and heroic pose).

3. Online Character Sheet: It’s powered by the rules database, so everything in there will be available. It can also be homebrewed to your heart’s content, although it will always show as a rulebreaking character even if you add custom rule content. One of the coolest parts of their new physical character sheet product is that it has a landscape option so it fits on the table easier with a battlemat or tiles, but there was no mention if this would be supported by the online sheet.

4. D&D Game Table: Obviously a lot of attention was focused on this. Rouse said this will “let you get the band back together,” promoting the renewing of old gaming groups that we’ve seen before. He also said this will allow for small chunk gaming, like an hour or so after the kids go to bed. A lot of their marketing spiel seems geared toward new ways to play D&D that their tools will allow. They also mentioned how the Game Table could be used to enhance your tabletop play by bringing a laptop to the table, but they didn’t go into detail.

At one point Bill interrupted Scott to point out that you still need the books to play. There is no built-in rules engine in the Game Table, it’s not its own game. It will have tools like a dice roller, text chat, and VOIP support.

5. Dragon and Dungeon: All content will be produced by R&D (really?), so everything will automatically be what they call “canonized rule content”…it’s all 100% official. That also means everything published will be RPGA legal. This way they can integrate it better with the rules database as well.

6. Gleemax Community: Since the Gleemax community features are free, I guess they can count this as integrated, although paying for Gleemax and DDI every month seems a bit excessive.

They confirmed the price point for DDI subscriptions: $14.95 monthly, $12.95 a month if you buy 3 months at a time, or $9.95 a month if you subscribe for a full year. They’re also going to be implementing one-shot usage fees for convention games and occasional in-store events.

Ok, you know what? I lied. I’m not going to get through all my notes, because it’s about 4am and I have to be back in there at 9am, so you’ll have to stay tuned tomorrow (today?!) for my rundown of all the 4e releases and information.

Oh, I’ll leave you with one tidbit…

Forgotten Realms 4e is three books, period, done, end of line: Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, Player’s Guide to FR, and an adventure. All settings will be done like that, one per year, until they run out of settings. They mentioned Greyhawk, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer as settings on their list! Eberron, of course, is the ‘09 setting release (same three books), but it will also get DDI updates starting in June.

When you’re tired enough at a convention, right now seems like last Tuesday, and vice versa.