Wow, just read Hasbro/WOTC has bought the X-Wing game license and is now having a team change to X-Wing 2nd edition.

This crack team consists of the same talent used to take D&D 3.5 into the light of 4th edition D&D.

Well, truth be told, D&D 4th edition was a lot more solid mechanically than 3.5 (and for a game like X-wing, mechanics are probably the most important aspect). IMO the guys writing 4th edition were a lot better at writing mechanics than the guys who wrote 3.5. It's the rest of stuff that goes into an RPG that they sucked at writing.

Well, truth be told, D&D 4th edition was a lot more solid mechanically than 3.5 (and for a game like X-wing, mechanics are probably the most important aspect). IMO the guys writing 4th edition were a lot better at writing mechanics than the guys who wrote 3.5. It's the rest of stuff that goes into an RPG that they sucked at writing.

3.5 was a smoking ruin where fun and balance were concerned. 4e let everybody get involved in combat, and not incidentally was a pretty **** fine tactical combat game.

I don't need an RPG system to provide flavor; that's what the DM and players are there for. I need it to provide a mechanical framework for resolving tasks and combat, and 4e did that okay and very well, respectively.

(I only playtested the first two versions of D&D Next or Fifth Edition or whatever they ended up calling it, but judging by those early versions the lesson WotC learned was to run away from everything that made either 4e or 3.5 good in favor of "Hey, over here! Look at us, and how retro we are! We're sooo retro now! Specifically, we're way more retro than any other surprisingly successful swords-and-sorcery game! Retro retro retro, that's us.")

Well, truth be told, D&D 4th edition was a lot more solid mechanically than 3.5 (and for a game like X-wing, mechanics are probably the most important aspect). IMO the guys writing 4th edition were a lot better at writing mechanics than the guys who wrote 3.5. It's the rest of stuff that goes into an RPG that they sucked at writing.

3.5 was a smoking ruin where fun and balance were concerned. 4e let everybody get involved in combat, and not incidentally was a pretty **** fine tactical combat game.

I don't need an RPG system to provide flavor; that's what the DM and players are there for. I need it to provide a mechanical framework for resolving tasks and combat, and 4e did that okay and very well, respectively.

(I only playtested the first two versions of D&D Next or Fifth Edition or whatever they ended up calling it, but judging by those early versions the lesson WotC learned was to run away from everything that made either 4e or 3.5 good in favor of "Hey, over here! Look at us, and how retro we are! We're sooo retro now! Specifically, we're way more retro than any other surprisingly successful swords-and-sorcery game! Retro retro retro, that's us.")

You might be the only person I've ever heard prefer 4 over 3.5...

Hello X-wing community,

For those of you that know me you know I post mostly in the Armada community. For those of you that don't: I don't post any personal info about where I'm from or where my sources are, but you can trust my information is legitimate from the highest source.

I am a playtester for FFG and have an active NDA on record. That means anything about any game that I post can only be based on public information. I don't play test for X-Wing, but any source that told you that could be in jeopardy of legal problems. I would STRONGLY recommend you not pass that sort of info on as it could place you in the same predicament.

Having been under NDAs in the past I get your meaning here, but newt has never posted anything spoiler-related. All she's ever given out is shipping information. And while technically there may be some sort of veil between that tentative information and the general population, I see nothing ethically wrong with giving people a street date for when we can expect to have a product.

1st off, people here know that there are always delays, so all this tells us is that this is the EARLIEST we can expect to see this stuff.

2nd, it actually helps people who need to save money for the release, by giving them some sort of time-table to base their planning on.

3rd, FFG releases very similar information on their upcoming page. But lately for some reason it hasn't been getting updated. I'm very curious as to why the Raider still says that it's at the Printer, and why Armada wave 1 said on the boat, like 36 hours before being in my hands.

I suspect they don't want official word to be early, and for all we know newt is an FFG employee giving us realistic expectation without the legal hassle having to apologize if a natural disaster or strike delays delivery.

We get Some interesting characters on the Armada forums. Newt is likely somewhere downstream in the distribution chain, perhaps a third party distributor. If this is what FFG is telling their business partners, that is official.

We also had a guy on the forum that knew the names and unloading status of the boats that Armada was on. If you can find his posts, he can probably tell you the real status of the raider, as he clearly works somewhere in the logistics area between FFG and the ports. Heck, he even knew one of the boats was back on its way to China.

You might be the only person I've ever heard prefer 4 over 3.5...

In 3.5, by 3rd level you only got to play the game if you were a cleric, druid, or wizard. The other classes got to sit around and watch the clerics, druids, and wizards play--with an asterisk for sorcerers, who got to play when their spell selection intersected with whatever the DM had you doing.

The game was broken at almost every level even if you never ventured outside the Player's Handbook, and by about 9th level it was hilariously broken. And worse, when you start delving into interviews with the designers, it becomes clear that it was broken by design.

Whatever its other faults, 4e meets the goal of making sure that every player gets to participate meaningfully in the game. 3rd Edition and 3.5 don't, and never did.

Well, truth be told, D&D 4th edition was a lot more solid mechanically than 3.5 (and for a game like X-wing, mechanics are probably the most important aspect). IMO the guys writing 4th edition were a lot better at writing mechanics than the guys who wrote 3.5. It's the rest of stuff that goes into an RPG that they sucked at writing.

3.5 was a smoking ruin where fun and balance were concerned. 4e let everybody get involved in combat, and not incidentally was a pretty **** fine tactical combat game.I don't need an RPG system to provide flavor; that's what the DM and players are there for. I need it to provide a mechanical framework for resolving tasks and combat, and 4e did that okay and very well, respectively.(I only playtested the first two versions of D&D Next or Fifth Edition or whatever they ended up calling it, but judging by those early versions the lesson WotC learned was to run away from everything that made either 4e or 3.5 good in favor of "Hey, over here! Look at us, and how retro we are! We're sooo retro now! Specifically, we're way more retro than any other surprisingly successful swords-and-sorcery game! Retro retro retro, that's us.")

EDIT: 3.5 being a long term co-operative game, one could easily spend the first session discussing character concepts and makimg sure they are around the same level. Fighters were unplayable only if somebody brought out the big guns (anything with a full spell list).

It's also highly doubtful it was broken by design. Most of those interviews sound awfully like 'um...we totally meant it!'. Few people are willing to publicly admit their incompetence in what they do for a living. Take eexamples like sean K. Reynolds, who have proven repeatedly they had no idea how the stuff they worked on really worked.

he can probably tell you the real status of the raider

yes, please.

EDIT: 3.5 being a long term co-operative game, one could easily spend the first session discussing character concepts and makimg sure they are around the same level. Fighters were unplayable only if somebody brought out the big guns (anything with a full spell list).

I completely understand what you mean here, but I'd call that a fundamental failure. If you can't put a fighter and a wizard in the same party, then you're not playing a swords-and-sorcery game but rather a swords-or-sorcery game.

It's also highly doubtful it was broken by design. Most of those interviews sound awfully like 'um...we totally meant it!'. Few people are willing to publicly admit their incompetence in what they do for a living. Take eexamples like sean K. Reynolds, who have proven repeatedly they had no idea how the stuff they worked on really worked.

Monte Cook talked extensively about two principles that, IMO, should have gotten him fired in the design phase of 3e:

(1) Some characters (i.e., anyone without a 9-level spell list) improve linearly as they level up, and some (wizards, clerics, druids, and sorcerers sometimes) improve exponentially.

(2) In RPGs, just like in M:TG, there should be good and bad game elements. This requires players to learn to tell the difference between good and bad game elements, and that sort of system mastery is an important skill in an RPG.

It's possible those were post-hoc justifications for (really) bad design, but he was very confident about it, started talking about it very early in the lifespan of 3/3.5, and designed the same principles into other games.

I mean, at this point it's all sort of moot. (It's also off-topic, but since the OP is a naked assertion without any backup, I'm not too worried about that.) But it's why I preferred 4e to 3.5.

We get Some interesting characters on the Armada forums. Newt is likely somewhere downstream in the distribution chain, perhaps a third party distributor. If this is what FFG is telling their business partners, that is official.

We also had a guy on the forum that knew the names and unloading status of the boats that Armada was on. If you can find his posts, he can probably tell you the real status of the raider, as he clearly works somewhere in the logistics area between FFG and the ports. Heck, he even knew one of the boats was back on its way to China.

Information delivered from an unofficial source is still unofficial.

I completely understand what you mean here, but I'd call that a fundamental failure. If you can't put a fighter and a wizard in the same party, then you're not playing a swords-and-sorcery game but rather a swords-or-sorcery game.

I agree 100%, it's a flaw, it's just a flaw that my group found much easier to cope with than the flaws of 4e, like finding in game logic to most mechanics, like why would a fighter be able to perform certain techniques 1/day or why various defender marks (with different sources, mechanics and fluff) did not function together for example.

Monte Cook talked extensively about two principles that, IMO, should have gotten him fired in the design phase of 3e:

(1) Some characters (i.e., anyone without a 9-level spell list) improve linearly as they level up, and some (wizards, clerics, druids, and sorcerers sometimes) improve exponentially.

(2) In RPGs, just like in M:TG, there should be good and bad game elements. This requires players to learn to tell the difference between good and bad game elements, and that sort of system mastery is an important skill in an RPG.

1) Linear fighter, quadratic wizard was a bad idea from the get go, because it forced certain players to not make much difference for lengthy periods of the campaign (fighters at high levels, wizards at low levels) and because there was no way to prevent people from starting off as fighters and then retiring their characters or killing them off and making high level wizards, but they weren't even competent enough to make the idea work, because (with the possible exception of barbarians and Tome of Battle, which was among the last 3.5 books) there aren't really any non-casters that outshine casters even at level 1. Casters start just as strong/stronger and the gap only increases from there.

2) Based on the characters they played during the 'playtests', the sample characters they published and various articles (like Sean K. Reynold's feat points article where he rates Great Fortitude as better than Natural Spell) I have significant doubts they had any clue which choices were good and which were bad.

my cat "Batman" said the raider is already out but they had to redo some of the cards so that is what is taking so long with it.. It required repackaging everything!! However My cat batman also said the raider would be out in february!! I think he is just yanking my chain for cat treats!!

The thread starter needs to check the meaning of the word "official" again.

But thanks for that very solid rumour. It's a bit annoying that it takes so long from announcement to release, but that's FFG for ya.

The thread starter needs to check the meaning of the word "official" again.

But thanks for that very solid rumour. It's a bit annoying that it takes so long from announcement to release, but that's FFG for ya.

And you need to go to Tanagra, with your friend Jalad.

The thread starter needs to check the meaning of the word "official" again.

But thanks for that very solid rumour. It's a bit annoying that it takes so long from announcement to release, but that's FFG for ya.

And you need to go to Tanagra, with your friend Jalad.

Get your Ns and Ms right.

Oh, it official? Hey everyone, not to worry it is official. I mean the word is right there so, yeah it is official. All you have to do to make something official is type in O-F-F-I-C-I-A-L and magically it is like a legal binding term just like a Facebook communique.

Ok, when the OP was saying something was "official", I assumed he was saying that he had seen something from FFG that was stating it and he was just passing it along because whatever he saw hadn't been made public. It would be like someone telling a group with no internet access that "it's official, the k-wing is going to be in wave 7". It is official, FFG have stated it, but that group just hasn't had access to where it was officially stated. Why does anyone think this is any different? Especially since the OP apparently has a good track record thus far.

It's still a rumor, but it is a rumor about an "official" FFG set date. That was my take anyway.

The thread starter needs to check the meaning of the word "official" again.

But thanks for that very solid rumour. It's a bit annoying that it takes so long from announcement to release, but that's FFG for ya.

And you need to go to Tanagra, with your friend Jalad.

Get your Ns and Ms right.

Oh wow my bad! Does that happen to you often?

Ok, when the OP was saying something was "official", I assumed he was saying that he had seen something from FFG that was stating it and he was just passing it along because whatever he saw hadn't been made public. It would be like someone telling a group with no internet access that "it's official, the k-wing is going to be in wave 7". It is official, FFG have stated it, but that group just hasn't had access to where it was officially stated. Why does anyone think this is any different? Especially since the OP apparently has a good track record thus far.

It's still a rumor, but it is a rumor about an "official" FFG set date. That was my take anyway.

My feeling is that it is "official" the way you mean it, but it may still be wrong.

My feeling is that it is "official" the way you mean it, but it may still be wrong.

Oh, absolutely. FFG can't keep a date to save their life. But I was getting annoyed at all the people pedantically accusing him of putting on aires and saying something other than "FFG is saying it will be released in August, but I can't tell you how I know that".

I think there were less accusations about "aires" than there were accusations about poor word choice. At least there weren't any Inigo Montoya memes, right?

Oh wow my bad! Does that happen to you often?

It does. But don't worry, reminding me of Star Trek is never a bad thing for me.

(I only playtested the first two versions of D&D Next or Fifth Edition or whatever they ended up calling it, but judging by those early versions the lesson WotC learned was to run away from everything that made either 4e or 3.5 good in favor of "Hey, over here! Look at us, and how retro we are! We're sooo retro now! Specifically, we're way more retro than any other surprisingly successful swords-and-sorcery game! Retro retro retro, that's us.")

I highly recommend checking out the free basic 5th-edition rules. I've found it to be the most rewarding version of D&D. It has a nice balance of flavor and mechanics, and it runs much quicker and lighter than other versions, even at high levels. It's been refined quite a bit since the early playtests.

http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/basicrules?x=dnd/basicrules

A few things that have really sold me...

Rogues get a free extra action every turn to hide, take an extra move, or disengage from combat. It makes them highly mobile and, well, roguish.

Wizard specialty classes get some neat, flavorful things. Diviners can pre-roll some dice at the start of every day. Transmuters can change a material to a different one (in small quantities). Abjurers create a spell shield every time they cast an abjuration spell (makes them very tanky).

Some monsters are legendary, and they get to break the action economy. Dragons, for instance, can make attacks off-turn and move around, creating all sorts of havoc (like you'd expect from such a creature). If you encounter them in their lair, they can also turn that against the PCs. The lairs have combat effects, but they also have environmental and story effects. For instance, within a mile of a black dragon's lair, all water turns spoiled and brackish.

There's plenty more (and I could go on at length), but I won't. Instead, I'll point to the free basic rules and suggest you give them a shot.

Waaaait a minute.... which forum is this?

@MortalPlague: Punning Pundit actually started a thread in the Off-Topic forum for the D&D conversation. I'm a little short on time at the moment, but I'll respond to you over there later today.