"Martin Johannsen" <m.j@mail.dk> wrote in message
news:3e509636$0$157$edfadb0f@dread14.news.tele.dk...
> Er der nogen der ved noget om den nye version 3.5 af d&d, ud over hvad der
> står på wizards of the coast's hjemmeside? jeg gad godt vide hvad der er
> nyt, og hvad der er ændret i disse nye regler.
>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Oliva" <SteigerwaldEDV@T-ONLINE.DE>
---------------------------------------
The following is a report from the private RPGA meeting at Winter Fantasy.
The notes were taken by Maryrita Steinhour and Mike Mistele, and kindly
forwarded to me by Piratecat with permission. We already know much of the
info here, but I've decided to reproduce the notes in their entirety for the
sake of convenience.
Thursday morning, Mary Elizabeth Allen from WoTC Marketing; Anthony
Valterra, the Category Manager for D&D; and Andy Collins, D&D R&D spoke to
an invitation-only meeting of judges and volunteers about the upcoming D&D
revision, which they called 3.5.
General
This is definitely a fine-tuning of the existing 3E "kernel", rather than a
new edition - there are no significant changes to the fundamental rules.
They fully intend that this will be "the" edition of D&D to take them
through to 4th Edition, whenever that is (and, since there are absolutely no
plans for 4E in the pipe, that's years away at least). The words they used
were "changes to facilitiate play", and they stated that the guiding
principles were "do no harm to the system" and "CLARIFY!!!".
They're coming out with a line of pre-painted and pre-assembled plastic
minis for D&D (Fall, 2003), since their research has shown that 78% of
players use some sort of "minis or markers on a grid" to play. It sounds
like they've ceded the unpainted metal mini market to others, but this new
line might be of use to those who want to use minis but don't want to /
can't paint. (I'm not sure that's true - he did say that this is different
from the Chainmail line....) The results of that research also affected
their attitude when updating the books - they are written with the
assumption that people will use minis or markers.
Anthony Valterra said that we should expect some sort of significant
announcement regarding e-Tools and other electronic aids for D&D in the next
few weeks.
They weren't completely sure about this, but think they're dropping the
background lines from the pages in the books.
Glossaries are being extensively updated.
A question was asked about the binding - Anthony said it was supposed to be
the best available ( :-/). It was pointed out that the first priting was
stitched and subsequent ones were not, and that surprised him. The group
advised him to check on his vendors ....
They are NOT raising prices!
Covers will be very different - you can tell the difference between 3.0 and
3.5, but they're still unmistakably D&D (they told the art director "make
them exactly the same but totally different"
.
The SRD will be updated at about the same time as the books come out, which
is July, 2003. All the books will be out at the same time.
Licensees (for translated books) know about the revisions, but when they
ship is up to them.
Psionics handbook - "cannot say whether it will be revised" (It might not
have been with this book, but they did comment a couple of times that they
could only discuss items which were already "announced" in their catalog.)
Changes are focused on how the games work. Also, they are trying to get away
from relying on the DM to figure out how something works.
Looking at making the Epic Handbook and Deities and Demigods available via
SRD.
No plans to republish older products, and in fact, should not need to. Some
tweaks will be necessary to use the Builder Books and other older products,
but nothing fundamental.
They considered rebuilding the metamagic rules from scratch, but decided
that it would be too much change and there wouldn't be enough time for
playtesting. We may see variants in other products.
Revisions will not greatly change character sheets.