Thema: 4E - Inspirationen der Designer

[Zechi]

Es gibt einen Artikel über die Inspirationen für die 4E einiger der Lead-Designer und zwar hier und im Wortlaut für die Nicht-Angemeldeten (aber ohne Bilder ):

   
Living Around D&D

by Rob Heinsoo

1st-Level Gamer: Original D&D

I got into D&D in 1974 by ordering the original three booklets in the brown box from a wargaming catalog. I was ten years old, living in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and I was the only person I knew who had read Lord of the Rings, much less heard of Dungeons & Dragons.

The D&D combat rules went over my head. I'd never seen a twenty-sided die (or any other die that didn't have six sides), so I jury-rigged a melee system based on the hand-to-hand combat rules from The Wargame, a book of Napoleonic miniatures rules my dad had picked up for me at the Fort Leavenworth book store. Incomplete understanding didn't lessen D&D's impact -- I was hooked on roleplaying games for life.

A few dungeon levels later, my family moved to Oregon, and I'd figured out the D&D rules, though I still hadn't encountered a d20. That changed when I tried running a dungeon for a couple grad school-age gamers who balked at drawing random numbers out of a blue plastic Chitty Chitty Bang Bang cup. After recovering from the embarrassment, I branched out from D&D into most of the other early rpgs: Boot Hill, Metamorphosis Alpha, Monsters! Monsters!, Bunnies and Burrows, Knights of the Round Table from Lou Zocchi, and The Arduin Grimoire (more on Arduin later). I didn't make a huge distinction between RPGs and wargames in those days, and my RPG-related thoughts were equally influenced by constant playing of Melee/Wizard, Ogre, the Starguard miniatures game, and a somewhat god-mode fantasy miniatures game I'd created to use all my favorite minis at the same time.

Mid-Level Adventures: AD&D

By the time AD&D came out, I had tinkered with enough game systems that I was impatient with AD&D's claim to be the un-modifiable system everyone should be playing with. I was more interested in other rpgs -- I only ran AD&D once.

I did play AD&D quite a bit while I was in high school, in a campaign with college friends. The DM was named Joe, I think he still runs games in Eugene, Oregon. Back then, he was running modules involving temples and giants. Joe had a particular talent for enabling the spellcasting members of the party to rival the monsters as threats to the PCs' survival.

Missing an Edition

I skimmed through the 2nd Edition AD&D rulebook and decided I liked the games I was already interested in a lot more. I didn't see 2nd Edition AD&D as an improvement over Runequest or Champions, so I gave it a miss.

Now skip ahead many years via many other non-D&D game systems.

The Real Good Thing: 3rd Edition

Third Edition brought me back to D&D. I playtested 3E as part of Jonathan Tweet's Wednesday-night gaming group. By this time, 1999, I'd worked at a few game companies. Playing 3E, I was ecstatic that D&D had surfaced ahead of the other RPGs I'd loved. This new edition of D&D didn't hurt my head. It was fun and "good for thinking." I could appreciate the design decisions behind the most important features of the game.

Jonathan's Wednesday-night game turned into the best RPG campaign of my life, and I was privy to his thoughts as the 3rd Edition rules coalesced into their final form. Before the process was complete, in early 2000, I got hired onto the D&D Worlds Team at Wizards of the Coast. I was at less of a disadvantage than most new employees because I knew only the 3rd Edition system, not the 2nd Edition that everyone else was having trouble forgetting.

I didn't work on D&D for long. I moved over to the card side of Wizards' R&D department, where I worked on several trading card games before drifting back into the D&D orbit as part of the Chainmail minis team. From there I ended up running the D&D Miniatures line and designed Three-Dragon Ante in my spare time. I'd been playing 3E and then 3.5 all along, as well as running my own idiosyncratic D&D campaign.

And that leads us into my final topic -- other than the 3E Players Handbook, the D&D book that has had the most influence on the way I think about D&D is The Arduin Grimoire. So much so that the homebrew 3E campaign I ran for years was set in my own version of Arduin. And my 4th Edition campaign is headed in the same direction.

The Arduin Whaaa?

The Arduin Grimoire Back in the days when Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry were stapled-together booklets published by TSR and full of strange, variant rules for D&D, Dave Hargrave's stapled-together Arduin Grimoire was full of even stranger variant rules. Highlights included long lists of random special abilities for dozens of character classes, dangerous critical hit and fumble tables, ridiculous monsters like the Kill Kittens, a gazetteer to the 666 levels of the Abyss, and bizarrely evocative character classes like Star-Powered Mages.

The Arduin Grimoire and its follow-ups (Welcome to Skull Tower, The Runes of Doom) never claimed to be D&D supplements. Instead, Hargrave and his fans said that Arduin was its own game. But you couldn't play Arduin without using concepts, rules, character classes, and mechanics inherited from D&D.

It wasn't Arduin's mechanics that made an impression on me. As solid game design, Arduin didn't have all that much to offer. But as inspiration for lifting your own fantasy roleplaying game way above the ordinary, Arduin rocked. It shaped my concept of how cool D&D should be.

My current homebrew Arduin is an interdimensional city ruled by representatives of twelve major races whose roles in the city government are determined every three years by lottery. If the dwarves land the Nexus Diplomacy post while the drow (they prefer to be known as the Silver Folk) are in charge of Urban Defense, you know everyone's going to be in for a rough three years.

Meanwhile, out in the hinterlands, my Arduinian dungeons are terrifying supernatural eruptions that spiral in toward the city, growing stronger and deeper the farther they travel. If a dungeon survives long enough to surface inside the city, it becomes a permanent feature of the landscape. The citizens only have to look up at Skull Tower's red eye sockets to know just how bad that can be, so adventurers are treated as somewhat valuable members of society, so long as they stick to their job of depopulating and looting dungeons and don't get too involved in city politics.

Do these ideas in my campaign have anything to do with the text and background details of Dave Hargrave's Arduin? No, not as far as I know. Nor have the rules and mechanics inside the various Arduin books penetrated the 4th Edition D&D rules system. But the spirit of wild possibilities that animated the Arduin rules has influenced my design perspective while working on 4th Edition. We don't have whacky tables of random abilities for each grouping of character classes, but we have powers and abilities for each class and race that I'm not going to need to doctor up to fit into my home campaign.

Other Influences

I've been an omnivorous gamer, with one odd exception I'll mention at the end of this note.

My favorite non-D&D roleplaying games are Feng Shui (a mélange of all Hong Kong action films), Over the Edge (conspiracy and fringe play on a polyglot Mediterranean island), and Greg Stafford's world of Glorantha as it appeared in Runequest and Heroquest. Cults of Prax, a Runequest supplement that detailed the religious powers, hierarchies, and myths of a wasteland section of Glorantha, was probably the single most influential RPG product in my life, given that it set me on the path to study anthropology.

Speaking of life influences, I might not have set out on the path of the game designer without Lee Gold's Alarums & Excursions fanzine. Arduin introduced me to A&E, and A&E's free-ranging RPG conversations and arguments introduced me to most of the people I worked with or for when I first started working as a freelance gamer-guy.

My favorite miniatures games are De Bellis Antiquitas (simple twelve-unit ancients warfare, usually abbreviated as DBA) and the Great Battles of History series from GMT Games. Yeah, technically the Great Battles of History games are board games, but the counters play like minis on a board, so let's call 'em as they play.

Other board games I like best include Up Front, Wiz-War, the Lord of the Rings cooperative boardgame, Ingenious, Knightmare Chess, and Twilight Struggle. I haven't decided whether GMT's new Combat Commander WWII tactical game is going to supplant Advanced Squad Leader in my affections, but I hardly ever get to actually play ASL, so Combat Commander has that in its favor.

The exception to my omnivorous gaming habits? Computer games. I did enough solitaire gaming as a kid, so playing against a computer alone, or even in MMORPGs, is something I can tolerate only for a short time before I spring out of my chair looking for something more creative to do. I prefer face-to-face interaction. I'm aware this could change if I get back to creating computer games, but for now I keep track of electronic gaming by watching other people play. Every couple of months I play an hour or two of World of Warcraft and about as much Combat Mission, but that ain't much compared to the rest of my comrades.

About the Author

Rob Heinsoo was born in the Year of the Dragon. His new game, Inn-Fighting, goes on sale October 15.

The Ties that Bind

By Andy Collins

In August of 1981, my life changed forever because of a birthday present from my Uncle Ralph. I certainly didn't expect it at the time (nor, I'm sure, did Uncle Ralph), but it's safe to say that no single object has ever affected the course of my lifetime as much as that 9"x12" cardboard box with a picture of adventurers busting in on a dragon defending its piles of gold.

Months went by before the first time I actually played the game. Not only was I unaware of anyone else who played, I'd never even heard of it (or of roleplaying games in general) before opening up that box. Frankly, a youth of Monopoly and Risk just doesn't prepare you for Dungeons & Dragons. But I was already a diehard fantasy fan, having devoured The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings while classmates were still struggling on spelling tests. So I kept coming back to that little blue rulebook, trying to figure out how you could have a game without a board or playing pieces.

The Keep on the Borderlands Finally, I just decided that we'd stumble through and figure it out as we went along. So one Saturday I sat down to roll up characters with my brother Greg and our friend Kurt, and I led them through the Keep on the Borderlands. Those old character sheets have long-since crumbled to dust, but many of the names still linger in my memory -- Bard (the character's name, not his class…we didn't have the Player's Handbook yet), Garn, Pentegarn, Lester, Krylla … these heroes and many more braved tunnels full of orcs, hobgoblins, kobolds, skeletons, and -- of course -- a maze with a minotaur.

I remember that the adventure's rumor chart provided a (false) clue to the characters indicating that the goblins' shout of "bree-yark" meant "Hey, Rube!" which, to a 10-year-old in Olympia, Washington, was just as alien a phrase as it had been in the original Goblin language.

I remember the characters running into a (way out of their league) black dragon somewhere in the wilderness, which they managed to kill by strangling it with to a rope wrapped around its neck by the two talking ravens they'd encountered earlier … well, it all made sense to us at the time.

Most of all, I remember nine hours of the day disappearing without any of us becoming bored, or getting hungry, or maybe even leaving the room at all. Whatever we'd stumbled through was enough to hook me (and my brother) for good.

Kurt played a few more times with us, but ultimately the game didn't stick to him the way it did to us. We don't hold it against him. But then, we also don't see him on a monthly basis like we do many of our other childhood friends who still play D&D with us.

Yeah, that's right -- I still game with folks who started playing with me 20 years ago (or more). That's one of the benefits of folks staying relatively close to home (and, I'd like to believe, of me running a kick-ass game). Greg, obviously, has been in my game since the beginning -- that's more than 26 years now. Brent joined us when we were in 5th grade together (late 1982). Greg recruited Viet and Marc in '83 or '84. I met Dennis in German class in 1987, and Kevin and Scott in '88 or so. (Until I joined WotC eight years later, they were "the new guys.")

While in college I had to make do with an entirely new group of gamers, but one of them followed me back home. Now I run a game for Neil, his childhood buddy Brian, his sister Lindsay, and her husband Mike. (That's right -- in this game, the woman brings her SO along, rather than the other way round. That's progress!)

Over the past eleven years, I've been fortunate enough to work around a whole pile of gamers, so the group's continued to grow steadily. Joe joined us shortly after I started at Wizards in 1996, and Chris not long after that. Jesse was bold enough to join us in '98 or so; at the time, he was a lowly editorial assistant with Dragon Magazine, but I like to think that our little group gave him the confidence to later become my boss. James Wyatt is the latest co-worker to join my now super-sized group (currently spanning three separate monthly games).

I met Gwendolyn through another D&D game. Of course, now she plays in my group as well. She's not the only significant other who games regularly with us these days -- we've come a long way since grade school -- so we also welcome Adrienne and Amber to our sessions.

Obviously, not every player from the old days is still around. Along the way we also had the pleasure of gaming with Charlie, Garon, Kyle, Michael (whose grandfather vouched for us when the Motel 6 in Spokane wouldn't rent to high-schoolers in town for our very first game convention), Dan (who crumpled up his character sheet and threw it across the room when the medusa petrified him -- but keep in mind he was only 10 or 11 at the time), Ken (the undisputed master of the deck of many things), and Robert ("Uh-oh, purple worm!"). Over the years, they drifted away socially, psychologically, or just geographically from the core group, but the group itself survived.

W've played Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun and Dragonlance, Planescape and Ravenloft. They've delved into just about every dark hole in the ground from the Tomb of Horrors to the Slave Pits of the Undercity. They've battled barbarians and beholders, destroyed demons by the dozen to steal the Wand of Orcus, eviscerated evil elves in Erelhei-Cinlu, and ganked giants of every flavor.

It didn't matter what the game was called -- Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Advanced, 2nd Edition, 2nd-with-Player's-Option-books, 3rd Edition, 3.5, "Andy's D&D/Alternity hybrid that nobody quite understands but let's keep playing anyway" -- it was always D&D, and it was always good.

(OK, except for that D&D Immortals boxed set. I think it was kind of metallic gold, but I've suppressed most of my memories of it. What was up with that thing, anyway?)

And now, we're playing 4th Edition. It's still D&D, and it's definitely good.

Twenty-six years ago, a simple cardboard box held my future inside. I'd like to think that next year a copy of the Player's Handbook will hold a similar secret for some lucky 10- or 12-year-old and that a quarter-century later, he or she might pen an essay just like this one.

I look forward to reading those words (or perhaps having them beamed directly into my cerebral cortex -- who knows?). I'll be 62 by then -- but of course, I'll still be running D&D games for all my friends!

Other Influences

The #1 influence on my 4th Edition design and development work has been my own D&D campaigns.

I don't care how good a game designer you think you are. You can't write good games without playing them. And you can't learn what works or doesn't work in D&D without playing the game. I've been playing in and/or DMing an average of three campaigns at a time for the last eight years, and that hands-on experience can't be duplicated by anything else.

I often cite the "thirteen encounters in one day" session from my "Greyhawk Dungeons" campaign as an example of what D&D can be without such strict limitations on daily resources. It became a touchstone for our discussions about character powers as well as on encounter and adventure design.

Playing in my brother Greg's "Island" campaign and then in his Red Hand of Doom campaign, I learned firsthand how useful the concept of character role can be and how frustrating the game can be when you fight against it.

Most recently, the finale of my Eberron campaign featured several encounters that each included ten or more monsters facing off against a half-dozen PCs. Under 3rd Edition rules, these would each have been a four-hour battle royale. However, after re-imagining the foes with 4th Edition design guidelines for monsters, each fight took less than half that time (and would've been even faster had the PCs also used 4th Edition rules).

Play the game. It's a simple mantra, and there's really no substitute.

About the Author

Andy Collins served on the Fourth Edition D&D design team for two years before assuming his current role as Manager of Dungeons & Dragons Mechanical Design & Development (or MD&DMD&D for short). His professional credits include development (Magic Item Compendium, Unearthed Arcana), design (Draconomicon, Gamma World campaign setting for Alternity), and editing (Dark•Matter campaign setting, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil). He currently runs two different D&D campaigns and plays in a third.

No School Like the Old School

By James Wyatt

There's something about a new edition of D&D that stirs up a sense of nostalgia about the old ones. Not so much about the mechanics of the old editions -- I, for one, have no desire to return to the days when you couldn't play D&D without reference to attack tables, or THAC0 for that matter. I think it's more about remembering the feelings we had while we played D&D back in the old days.

I started playing D&D in 1979, the summer before I started 6th grade. I still remember the time my buddy's magic-user and my ranger took on Yeenoghu (no DM involved; we shared the responsibility of running the demon prince and his hordes of gnolls). The image of the magic-user blasting Yeenoghu with spell after spell while I stood atop an ever-increasing pile of gnoll bodies has stuck with me through all those years.

I remember the smell of the room in the public library where we played sometimes in high school, and the weird, adapted combat tables we used when we played in some room on the campus of Cornell University -- in middle school. I remember my first exposure to 2nd Edition, which I had previously resolved not to buy, and how quickly I was won over by the new look and the new rules.

I started working at Wizards of the Coast a few months before the launch of 3rd Edition. That was an exciting time, though also a bit frantic as we all pitched in to get the books out the door in time. This is when I start thinking about the nostalgia factor. People were running 3E playtests using old adventures like Against the Giants and Tomb of Horrors. I dug out The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and used it for a game.

As I worked on 4th Edition, I did a lot of looking back to the old days. When we talked about ability scores, I went back to look at how the first Player's Handbook defined them. We shared a lot of laughs around the department looking back at how absurd the old psionics rules were and had great fun explaining to one of our younger editors first how THAC0 worked and then how much of an improvement it was over the previous edition's combat tables. As lead designer of the Monster Manual, I frequently looked back at old MMs to see the original design of monsters and how they'd changed over the years.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City One of the adventures I kept pulling out was I1: Dwellers of the Forbidden City. I have fond -- I won't say memories, because I don't remember running it, although the pages of notes stuck between its covers clearly indicate that I did, probably not long after its release in 1981. I have fond impressions of that adventure, probably mostly because it marked the first appearance of yuan-ti.

So one day in a department meeting when we were talking about adventure design, I had a brainstorm. We were discussing what I thought was a really interesting idea -- an adventure product that detailed a site in exhaustive detail and then gave PCs a wide variety of reasons to enter the site and goals to pursue inside. In some ways, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft is that kind of product -- you can go into the castle many times, with different aims in mind, and things will change each time.

But it occurred to me that the Forbidden City in which those first yuan-ti dwelled would make a great site for such an adventure. That's really what the first adventure was -- it had a main storyline (retrieve the stolen caravan goods and kill the wizard responsible), but then the last two pages of the adventure were other quests that could send you into the city and other ideas for adventures you might have inside. With several different entrances to the city, three main groups of residents, and mini-dungeons within the ruins, the Forbidden City was ripe for that kind of adventure.

So when the department launched into an intensive three-week playtest period in the summer of 2007, I pulled out I1 and got to work. I had grand visions but not nearly enough time to implement them. It turned out that three weeks of gaming on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons was not enough to pull off the mini-campaign I had hoped to do. Nevertheless, it held promise, and when I get a full-fledged 4th Edition campaign going in the fall, I'll be pulling out the old adventure again.

There's no school like the old school. The old editions of the game have a lot to teach us about the sheer fun of the game, as well as examples of game mechanics and adventure design to steer far away from. (I haven't, for example, pulled out EX1: Dungeonland -- the first of two adventures based on Alice in Wonderland -- for inspiration.)

Other Influences

It's no accident that the site-based adventure model that inspired my plans for the Forbidden City campaign sounds a great deal like the instanced dungeons in World of Warcraft. I'm playing WoW a lot less than I did for a while, but that is one element of the game's story design that has stuck with me. An instanced dungeon is very much like a D&D dungeon, with a little more realism than the rest of the computer-game world, in that the things you kill stay dead. It's just your party against the monsters, a lot like it is in D&D. (Of course, the main difference is that when you leave an instance and come back, everything is reset to the way it was when you started.)

What works well about instanced dungeons in WoW is the quest model. You might spend a while adventuring in the world to pick up a handful of quests that will lead you into Blackfathom Deeps, for example. Then you get a group together and venture in, completing as many of those quests as you can. Inside, you find one or two more quests that lead you back outside the dungeon. Once you leave, you might get more quests -- reasons to go back into the dungeon.

In D&D, that model works even better. When you leave a dungeon and come back, it can change in response to what you've already done. There might be more guards to replace the ones you killed, better prepared for your assault. The mastermind might have moved his secret hideaway, or a new mastermind might have come to take the place of the one you killed. It's that dynamic response to your actions that gives a sense of realism to your D&D adventuring, a sense that your characters occupy a world that works like ours does -- actions have consequences, and you can make a difference.

About the Author

James Wyatt is the Lead Story Designer for D&D and one of the lead designers of D&D 4th Edition. In over seven years at Wizards of the Coast, he has authored or co-authored award-winning adventures and settings including the Eberron Campaign Setting, City of the Spider Queen, and Oriental Adventures. His more recent work includes Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, Cormyr: The Tearing of the Weave, and The Forge of War. His second Eberron novel, Storm Dragon, released in September.

[Archoangel]

Ich wünschte mir (nachdem ich mich durch den langen Text gequält habe, der zwar keine direkte Aussage zur 4e macht, aber leider genügend Andeutungen von Seiten der drei am Design-Prozess beteiligten), dass TheRaven, Scurlock und Berandor die Hauptdesigner der 4e wären ... dann (und ich fürchte nur dann) würden ernste Hoffnungen meinerseits bestehen, annähernd das Spiel zu erhalten, dass ich gerne spielen würde.

Zumindest mir sagt dieser (obige) Text genug aus (über den Entwicklungsprozess zur 4e hin). Zumindest mehr als alle anderen bisher veröffentlichten Artikel zusammen. Komentare über Unterschiede im Spielstil zwischen den Kulturen spare ich mir an dieser Stelle, sie gehören nicht zu diesem Thema   .

Auch wenn ausser Frage steht, dass ich mir die Grundregelwerke der 4e kaufen werde (ich bin schliesslich auch Besitzer der Grundregelwerke sämmtlicher Vorgängereditionen).

Nennt mich einen Schwarzseher, aber aus den Aussagen der Drei Designer lese ich herraus, dass die 4e (nun tatsächlich, wie einige obig genannte schon befürchtet haben) deutlich Dungeonlastiger wird. Der eine spielt selbst in einem "Interplanaren" Sigil-Verschnitt, in dem aus dem Hinterland Dungeons "spiralengleich" zu Himmel schiessen, die von Abenteurern gesäubert werden müssen, der zweite schwärmt von "Festung im Grenzland", einem grottenschlechten Einstiegs-Abenteuer, in dem sich noch kein Designer gefragt hat, warum der hungrige Eulenbär nicht die Goblins um der Ecke gefressen hat (und stattdessen auf die Helden als Snack wartet). Der Dritte gibt wenigstens gleich zu, dass er ein "Old-School-Gamer" ist.

Nun Frage ich: Was für ein D&D haben wir von diesen Drei Designern zu erwarten? Für die Art, wie ich zu spielen pflege, kein gutes, fürchte ich...Ich sehe schon Tonnen von Würfel-Quests und Dungeon und Kampf und Epic undundund vor meinem geistigen Auge und werde wohl (schweren Herzens) zu DSA4 zurückkehren müssen - dort missfällt mir wenigstens nur die Entwicklung der Welt (natürlich werde ich auch weiterhin 3.5 spielen).

Ich zitiere (nicht wörtlich) den König der Pferdeherren:

 "Ach müssen diese dunklen Tage die Meinen sein..."

[Zechi]

Zum besseren Verständnis was Andy Collins als Inspirationsgrundlage sieht, sollte man zwingend dies gelesen haben.

Übrigens nochmal zwei wunderbare Beispiele dafür, dass Archoangels Vorurteile haltlos sind.

Gruß Zechi

[Thalas]

Muss Zechi zustimmen...Archoangel....DU musst doch keine Abenteuer spielen die im Dungeon angesiedelt sind wenn du nicht möchtest.

[Wormys_Queue]

James Wyatt hat an so wunderbaren Büchern wie dem FRCS 3E, dem ECS 3.5 und anderen Eberron-Büchern mitgearbeitet und zeichnet für das wunderbare Abenteuer "City of the Spider Queen" verantwortlich. Kann wirklich schlimmeres passieren, als dass er an der 4E mitarbeitet.

Man muss echt kein Fan der 4E sein, um diese ständigen Miesmachereien so langsam nervig zu finden.

[Ferrus Animus]

dann (und ich fürchte nur dann) würden ernste Hoffnungen meinerseits bestehen, annähernd das Spiel zu erhalten, dass ich gerne spielen würde.

Nachdemdas Spiel, das du gerne spielen würdest (Daily&Soap, wie man in deinem vor nicht allzu langer Zeit erschienenen Hilfe-Post lesen kann) sowieso keine Regeln oder sonstwas braucht, da es effektiv nur Improv-Schauspielerei ist und genauso gut mit mensch-äregere-dich.nicht umgesetzt werden kann, wage ich zu behaupten, dass dies nicht schlecht für das Spiel sein wird.

Nennt mich einen Schwarzseher, aber aus den Aussagen der Drei Designer lese ich herraus, dass die 4e (nun tatsächlich, wie einige obig genannte schon befürchtet haben) deutlich Dungeonlastiger wird.

Schwarzseher.....
Das Speil heißt Dungeons& Dragons, und vor allem frühe Abenteuer bestanden oft aus (Überraschung) Dungeons. Und heir erinnern sich die Designer, wie sie mit frühen Abenteurern ihre ersten Spielerfahrungen hatten.
Da gibt's nix rauszulesen über 4E.

Der eine spielt selbst in einem "Interplanaren" Sigil-Verschnitt, in dem aus dem Hinterland Dungeons "spiralengleich" zu Himmel schiessen, die von Abenteurern gesäubert werden müssen,

Nicht ganz richtig.
Die inhaltlich passende Übersetzung ist: Dungeos, die sich auf die Stadt zubewegen und unschädlich gemacht werden, da sie ansonsten Monstern direkten Zugang zu Stadt geben.

der zweite schwärmt von "Festung im Grenzland", einem grottenschlechten Einstiegs-Abenteuer, in dem sich noch kein Designer gefragt hat, warum der hungrige Eulenbär nicht die Goblins um der Ecke gefressen hat (und stattdessen auf die Helden als Snack wartet).

Nein, er schwärmt von seinem ersten Erlebnis mit D&D, dass ihm im Laufe der Jahre viele Freunde und Spass gebracht hat, durch das er seine Frau kennen gelernt hat und weswegen er mit vielen seiner Schulfreunde noch regelmäßigen Kontakt hat.
Als Pädagoge solltest du wissen, wie sehr ein erstes Erlebnis die Wahrnehmung beeinflusst und da er hier hauptsächlich über den Spaß am Spiel (und nicht das Abenteuer) redet, ist das wahrscheinlich auch nichts schlechtes.

Der Dritte gibt wenigstens gleich zu, dass er ein "Old-School-Gamer" ist.

Und redet hauptsächlich über den Spass, den frühe Editionen gemacht haben, und dass er es erhalten will und wie toll es ist aus D&D eine lebendige Welt zu machen.

Nun Frage ich: Was für ein D&D haben wir von diesen Drei Designern zu erwarten? Für die Art, wie ich zu spielen pflege, kein gutes, fürchte ich...Ich sehe schon Tonnen von Würfel-Quests und Dungeon und Kampf und Epic undundund vor meinem geistigen Auge und werde wohl (schweren Herzens) zu DSA4 zurückkehren müssen - dort missfällt mir wenigstens nur die Entwicklung der Welt (natürlich werde ich auch weiterhin 3.5 spielen).

Nochmal zum Mitschreieben:
Du musst nicht deine Zeit in Dungeons verbringen, manchen Leuten macht es Spass, anderen nicht. Bei der 3E schaffst du es doch auch ein Spiel zu leiten, das trotz Hunderter verfügbarer PKs und tausender Feats und Dutzenden von Dungeon-Abenteuern und Unmengen von Magischem Zeug und und und, absolut gar nichts damit zu tun hat und eher einem Jane Austen-Roman entsprungen zu sein scheint.

Was hält dich davon ab es mit der 4E genauso zu handhaben?

[Archoangel]

Wer ist Jane Austen?

[Hedian]

Eine nicht sonderlich bedeutende und gänzlich schlechte Schriftstellerin.

TheRaven, Scurlock und Berandor die Hauptdesigner der 4e

Gott bewahre!

[Ferrus Animus]

Eine nicht sonderlich bedeutende und gänzlich schlechte Schriftstellerin.

Nicht falsch, aber ich bezog mich eher auf die Thematik, als auf die Qualität.
Der vor 2 Jahren erschienen Film zu "Pride & Prejudice" sollte einen ganz guten Eindruck vermitteln, ist sicher in der ein oder anderen Videothek zu finden.

[Hedian]

Der Kommentar war ein Link, klicken und die Ironie bemerken.