BREAKING NEWS: D&D 4th Edition Announced at GenCon

Submitted by The Game on Thursday, 16 August 20079 Comments

Thanks to Ogrecave for putting this in my RSS feed- there’s a full blown press release officially dating D&D 4th Edition for May of 2008. Like the 3.0 release, the PHB will be released first, with the DMG a month later, and the MM a month after that. MerricB over at ENWorld has been collecting all the known info in one thread. Other highlights include 7 books in 2008, integration with Gleemax (and probable reason that Dungeon & Dragon were cancelled) and some kind of new licensing scheme, not like OGL but still a way for third parties to produce D&D material. (This last point definitely needs more data)

More updates as we find out, our intrepid webmaster is currently at GenCon so I’ll see if he can find anything…

UPDATE 1: ENWorld’s main page has some more updates, including links to PDFs given away in press packs. Of interest (to me) is that they list the MM coming out before the DMG. They also talk about new D&D minis products, which implies a new set of rules for the D&D Minis battle game. That, of course, raises the question of what happens to the old stats and rules. Also, a price was given for “D&D Insider”, the Dungeon & Dragon mag replacement that will also function as an online way to play D&D. All that and more will cost you $9.99 per month.

UPDATE 2: While the real official announcement is going on at GenCon, the Wizard’s countdown officially launched… supposedly. Millions of nerds are currently slamming the D&D site, which is full of new goodies for the lucky few who are getting through. For most of us, we’re seeing “Service Unavailable.”

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Dave The Game is Dave Chalker, son of science fiction author Jack L. Chalker. In addition to being a semi-professional game designer Dave is the Editor-in-Chief of Critical Hits (which means he writes about everything.) He also maintains a blog for everything not related to gaming in his life (which isn’t much) and is Executive Director of the RPG Bloggers Network.

9 Comments »

Yehuda Berlinger said:

Great scoop. Thanks.

Yehuda

- 16 August 2007 at 4:07 pm

TheMainEvent said:

As I said earlier to The Game, I’m hoping they get rid of prestige classes and just offer new feats and substitutions in supplements rather than Prestige classes. All those classes tend to just be superfluous or fodder for min/maxing.

- 16 August 2007 at 6:42 pm

Reverend Mike said:

Wow…glad I didn’t actually invest in any books aside from the 3.0 PH…

Thank you, Limewire…

- 16 August 2007 at 7:44 pm

The Game (author) said:

Though I have bought piles of 3.5 books, I too kept up with downloading the books as they came out. But if the “D&D Insider” program means that I get digital copies of books I buy for access anywhere with a net connection… well, now that’s something…

- 16 August 2007 at 8:43 pm

Reverend Mike said:

Yea…online books are good, especially when you only have so much shelf space…but I still prefer having the actual books…easier to memorize when they don’t kill your eyes…

- 16 August 2007 at 10:08 pm

Bartoneus said:

How in the heck can their site NOT handle that kind of traffic? You’d imagine with M:tG and other things they are doing their site would be well-attuned to it.

- 17 August 2007 at 8:36 am

The Game (author) said:

Well, it was a pretty massive surge of people all at once. (Probably even worse if there weren’t so many people at GenCon!) I’m just surprised- and I shouldn’t be, because it happens all the time- that they didn’t arrange for some extra bandwidth in the meantime. It took nearly a full day to get back up and running.

- 17 August 2007 at 6:24 pm

Critical Hits » The Case for Fourth Edition said: