... niice
Oh, and this "errata" was on the first preview, before the one I linked. Heh.
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Off-site at the den, "Windjammer" posted this link to a podcast (I can't access over weenie-filter).
http://thetome.podbean.com/2010/08/06/tome-gencon-special-design-and-dev-seminar-part-1/Taking him at his word, his response is:
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[spoiler]Remainder of post cross-posted from my posts on RPGSite, where ggroy had linked a recording of WotC' GenCon Seminar covering Essentials (among other things).
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Thanks for linking the recording. Very informative. Strongly recommend to listen to that.
It appears the whole "is Essentials a new (half) edition?" issue that vexes the forum is the wrong question to ask. Instead of asking what Essentials is when compared to 4.0, the question ought to be - what happens to 4.0, now that Essentials is coming out. The answer to that in the podcast is striking, and as follows.
Every power currently in the DDI will be brought in line with the Essentials bench mark. A huge swath of "updates" will ensue once Essentials is out. Every power will be screened individually and be brought in line. There will be mostly nerfs, or leaving powers untouched, but power-ups will be far and few between. In short, 4.0 will be removed from the DDI whole sale.
At that point someone in the audience asked about Magic Missile. Basically what's described in the previous paragraph is exactly what happened to an individual power like Magic Missile already. What no one knew so far - this is going to happen to every power in the game. The question was a very good one, as it applies not just to Magic Missile but to the Essentials overhaul across the board:
"Why do you change powers to line them up with Essentials? Why not have two powers on DDI, say Melf's Magic Missile and Evard's Magic Missile, so people on DDI can choose which one they want to use?"
To which Bill Slavicsek answered:
"There were two goals with Essentials. One is to introduce new players. The other is to make 4E a simpler, more streamlined and more accessible game. Having 17 versions of magic missile in the DDI runs counter to that."
So that's it. Abyssal Maw and others were right all along. Essentials 'still is' 4E, because it will be the only rules version of 4th edition there is. 4.0 will be updated to be D&D Essentials.
I'm intrigued how this will go down. The last huge wave of errata in May (? don't mean the one in July, but an earlier one) pissed off fans so much, because it was so excessive, that WotC issued a press statement to the effect "yeah, we know that we've been updating too much - from now on our policy is to issue updates only conservatively". Well, that appears to have been a bit shortsighted on their part.
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I forgot one thing in the podcast, which is relevant and interesting to this news.
Some powers in the upcoming "Heroes of" splats will be exclusive to PCs using Essentials builds. Meaning, you can't choose it for a non-Essentials class build. (Personally, I don't think the Character Builder will explode if you tried, or simply bar you, but then your character will be labelled "non-legit".)
So there are two reasons for that.
One - this allows the WotC team to ignore unwanted synergies from Core and Essentials, and prevents them from thinking through all the possible loop holes that people could come up with by combining the extant powers from the Power splats (or items from the Adv. Vaults) with material in Essentials. This was the reason given in the podcast. Giving them more elbow room on the side of design.
Two - this is my own take. Making stuff exclusive for Essential builds? Clear incentive for players to use these builds. Even if you find the class write up subpar, if there's a couple of powers you REALLY want, you'll go and play the Essentials build. Now that is clever.
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Oh, and one other revealing thing. The WotC people were asked the question whether the future (and design) of 4th edition D&D will depend on whether Essentials is a success or not. Meaning, if Essentials is doing well, everything will be Essentials, and if isn't doing well then everything will revert back to where things were before Essentials shuffled things around.
To which Rich Baker (or the other guy, don't recall his name) said, laughingly: "Well, if Essentials does poorly, we'll all lose our jobs, so I guess this is a question for Bill Slavicsek."
Slavicsek: "There is no question for us whether Essentials will be a succes or not. We already premised the future of 4E on Essentials."
I didn't get the impact of this while listening to the podcast - probably because it came up before the remark on benchmarking 4.0 to fit Essentials. But now it's obvious what he meant: since the core game will be changed to fit the Essentials benchmark, there's no going back to a pre-Essentials stage design-wise. As I said upthread, for WotC there'll only be one game for now on - Essentials. It's really the final step in a long road away from 4.0 over the past two years. As stated, it consolidates all the errata that were issued so far and adds a batch of its own.
[/spoiler]
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... so what
this other errata means is:
4e is completely subsumed into the new Essentials stuff ... regardless of the books you bought.
All of the DDi "updates" / erratas are really just previews of Essentials.
Remind me again why I bought any 4e books ?!
