Scott Rouse and Bill Slaviscek talked quite a bit about 4th edition plans and products, so here’s that information.

First, Bill said their design philosophy had four components:

• Physical Product (books, minis, and tiles; “the heart and soul of the game, it’s never going away”)
• Organized Play (Heavier integration with game releases, and a completely new structure that includes play at conventions, stores, and in the home; Living FR was mentioned, as were D&D campaigns, and Retail Dungeon Delves like the one at Gencon!!!)
• Community (Gleemax)
• Digital Offerings (DDI, which Bill described as the second “Bonus features” disc in a special edition DVD)

Things that are not changing:

• Cooperative play
• Group storytelling
• Medieval fantasy
• d20 System

Product Delivery

• Updated look and feel (interestingly, all the campaign setting books have the exact trade dress of the core books…the FRCG looked exactly like the PHB/DMG/MM, except with different art.
• Annual Products (PHB/DMG/MM every year, all serialized numerically, so they’ll always be called PHB 2, MM 3, etc.) The annual books will not contain errata, they will be all new materials.
• DDI
• Integrated OP (I presumed this to mean OP related to the adventures they’re releasing, as well as to take advantage of the new character and DM options present in the annual core book releases)

I got to handle and look through all the core books, the DM Screen, and the Keep on the Shadowfell this week, which was pretty exciting. The core books all have glossy, raised covers which give them a really beautiful look and feel. The DMG has a mini-setting in it that’s a generic area to be dropped into any world, and which contains all the locations for their first adventure path (see below). I cannot begin to tell you everything I saw in the books, but if you ask in the comments I’ll do my best to answer questions.

They mentioned that WotC delegates already have access to Quick Start rules and an adventure, so if your local store has a delegate you could be playing 4e this week!

Saturday, June 7th is Worldwide D&D Gameday. They have retailer packs that contain enough material for six gamers, five players and one DM.

Also they are generously supporting Free RPG Day with an exclusive tile, exclusive mini, and exclusive adventure…all for free. Hopefully your retailer is on the ball, because they said they’re already out of kits!

Going back to DDI, they talked about Dungeon Builder. It’s got a drawing function, you can import your own jpgs to create a custom battlemat (although they won’t snap to the grid like official digital elements will). You can’t print from the Dungeon Builder, but you could use it to visualize and then draw your own maps. It has no z-axis, so avatars can’t actually fall into pits or fly…it really is a visual representation of the tabletop, in their words (although you can stack tokens under minis on the tabletop to show elevation). One cool thing is that the tiles do flip, so you can hide elements of the dungeon until the characters encounter them (it also has fog of war), and then flip over the tile to reveal the hidden stuff (like pit traps, summoning circles, secret doors, etc.

Also on Dungeon Builder, the minis and tiles available to you for free will be updated as new books come out. You’ll be able to purchase add-ons or customized content, such as different looking base monsters and dungeon dressing.

Ok, that’s enough for today. Tomorrow I’ll bring you info on all the products they talked about, the list of which was pretty extensive!

Propagandroid, stringing you along since…well, Tuesday.