"The D&D Lair Assault program is designed for players looking for more complex, strategic, and highly tactical challenges. The D&D Lair Assault program is tailored to groups of players who enjoy solving tactical puzzles, optimizing characters, and using rules to their advantage. Each D&D Lair Assault challenge features complex encounters prepared in advance by the Dungeon Master. Players are then pitted against their DM in an attempt to solve highly customized and creative challenges."
That is from here. I found out about it at Geek Related. Here is the official Wizards of the Coast announcement from a few days ago.
I almost wish I hadn't read any of it. There is so much to be disturbed about in the above statement that I won't even go into it. I will say that I don't understand the people at WotC that are currently in charge of Dungeons & Dragons. On the one hand they almost acknowledge that 4e is going in the wrong direction and attempt to right the course by releasing Essential. Then on the other hand they go and release their ridiculous collectible cards and now they are doing this.
Congratulations Wizards of the Coast you are now managing to piss off and alienate even the 4e crowd. Maybe they figured they had pissed off fans of every other edition so they might as well go for the complete set. Not all of those who play 4th edition are pissed of course, some really like the sound of this. But is it really a good idea to fracture your market yet again? It just doesn't seem like good business sense to me, but then again neither did refusing to sell old school PDFs.
4 comments:
I understand your frustration, but check out supplements such as: Hammerfast, Vor Rukoth, and Gloomwrought. These products may help restore some faith that there are still tremendous role-playing and story-based elements in 4e. I really dislike the organized play programs from WOTC but story-based home campaigns are still very viable.
You had tournament level modules before and this is just their version of it. Think of it as a flip side to the Encounters program they have. This Lair Assault is built for the "expert" players.
Given that organized play programs like this are nothing new, and given that when organized play programs like this popped up in previous editions, the author didn't decide to accuse the designers of turning D&D into a board game (presumably), I'm hoping that the author can explain why he decided that THIS particular tournament-style organized play program warranted calling D&D a board game (which, when you think about it, is kind of a silly accusation to make).
Any thoughts, Labyrinthian?
There are a lot of 4e players (and DMs!) who very much enjoy the tactical combat side of the game. Just because WotC has a competitive program that caters to a certain subset of their customers doesn't mean that everyone else has to play that way. Just the opposite. This is proof that 4E is incredibly versatile. It supports in-depth role-playing as much as any previous edition, while offering the deepest set of mechanical character development options of any edition of the game.
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