Quote:
Originally Posted by Spectral Knight
For anyone who is interested in the actual game's success (I'm not, personally), I rather hope this pricey publicity move doesn't constitute pissing in the punchbowl. After all, the party for 4E hasn't even started yet. There's still half a year before the release. Hopefully that's enough time for the irritation to die down.
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Really though, there's a huge amount of giveaway info, rumor and preview nuggets available at Wizards, EnWorld and here, absolutely free. 6 months ago, I downloaded the revised-for-3.5 White Plume Mountain from the Wizards site, absolutely free-- they have lots of giveaways on the site (unlike the old days when you got what was there in Dragon, and then later, Dungeon, and that was it.) Not to mention the zillions of homemade things out there available for the price of tracking them down.
My own bias is that I am looking forward to exploring the new ruleset since I liked some of the consistency and and reworking of the rules in 3.0/3.5 but got tired of the novel-sized stat blocks involved in monsters & NPCs. So if it keeps the options and customizing, the more intuitive rule structure, but eliminates the needless complexity, then yay! It will be a fun game when you want to play a good tactical kill-'em-and-take-their-stuff crawl, and can probably be used for other things as well.
So how would capitalizing on the buzz by offering a $20 softcover with some behind-the-scenes design tidbits be pissing in the punchbowl? There's nothing required in the book, it's just a little marketing ploy and teaser for people who are curious and have some disposable income.
Sure guys, it's just fluff.. but on the other hand.... it's just fluff.