Posted in: Games, Movies, Video Games | Tagged: dungeons & dragons, dungeons and dragons, entertainment, Greg Bilsland, Mike Mearls, rpg, RPG Gaming, Starter Set, Trevor Kidd, wizards of the coast, youtube

Watching The Dungeons & Dragons Unboxing Video

By Christopher Helton

Wizards of the Coast released an "unboxing" video for the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set. In the video were Dungeons & Dragons senior manager for the Dungeons & Dragons research and design team Mike Mearls, Greg Bilsland, a producer for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, and Trevor Kidd ("seen" only as an occasional set of hands in the video), Community Manager for Dungeons & Dragons.

You can watch the video yourself here:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9pBZTyQ-iA[/youtube]

The video is, unfortunately, about an hour long, and rambles a bit at times. If you don't want to watch the video yourself, here are some quotes and highlights from it.

One thing, if you are going to make a video blog or podcast you should remember to mute your mic when you are typing. Hearing the sounds of typing was highly distracting during the video, and as someone who has hearing difficulties it meant having to re-listen to parts in order to make out what the people were saying.

From a couple of the comments in the video, it sounds like The Forgotten Realms are going to be the default setting for the game. This is a departure from the previous standards of Greyhawk having been the default setting. As a long time gamer, this is a bit unfortunate I think.

The Starter Set box will contain a rules book, an adventure and pregenerated characters for play in the adventure. The Basic Dungeons & Dragons PDF will eventually have character creation rules, but the Starter Set will not.

There are 20-30 monsters (and named NPCs) in the Starter Set so that, along with the guidance for DMs in it, you will be able to add adventuring locations and stretch out the amount of play from the it. According to Mearls, just the adventure contained in the Starter Set will allow for 16-24 hours of gameplay. This of course can vary depending on the approaches of the players to roleplaying and exploration.

There is "a lot more art and graphic design than in previous editions," according to Mearls. The Starter Set itself will be simpler in graphic design, and contain less art, than the core Dungeons & Dragons books, but the core rules will have a lot of art in them.

One of the problems that they encountered in playtests was that "getting" characters was more difficult for players in Dungeons & Dragons than with video games. Because of this characters have goals and role-playing traits that allow the player to easily identify with their character and get into what motivates them. For me, this talk came across as being something similar to the Bonds used in Dungeon World to tie characters to each other.

In referring to the art on the box itself, Mearls said that there "is a green dragon in the adventure." However, characters are not super-heroes (my word, not Mearls) and first level characters are not going to be able to defeat a dragon.

A couple of points only semi-related to the Starter Set itself were brought up as well. Kidd mentions in the background at one point that the electronic initiative for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, the Dungeons & Dragons Insider will continue for the foreseeable future (the quote was "as long as people are using it"). No definite deadlines were mentioned, but Kidd said that it would still be around for at least a year and that people would still be able to use things like the character builder during that time.

Some more definitive releases for the Basic Dungeons & Dragons PDF were mentioned as well. The first "zero" release would be timed with the release of the Starter Set, with an update near the end of July to add character creation information. In August the Basic D&D PDF would again be updated, adding monsters, magic items and DM guidance. As much of the material from the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master's Guide are still in development, this material would be a preview of material that is "still being worked on" in house.

The development cycle for the rules of the new edition followed the pattern of: develop the simple core rules for the Starter Set, transfer this text to the Player's Handbook and add more options and clarifications, and then take that text and distill it to the version that will be available in Basic D&D.

Overall, as a marketing effort, this video could have done much better than it did. Unscripted, the participants ramble at times, and it is also obvious in a couple of places that they were trying to pad out the recording. This video could have been much more effective with some editing, and a much shorter running time. The overall feel of the video was not that this was something produced by the last remaining real corporate entity in tabletop roleplaying. It came across as amateurish. There are so many better fan-based YouTube productions out there on the internet that you might be better off waiting for the actual release of the Starter Set and seeing what some of these people have to say.

The Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set is scheduled to be released July 15th.

Christopher Helton is a blogger, podcaster and tabletop RPG publisher who talks about games and other forms of geekery at the long-running Dorkland! blog. He is also the co-publisher at the ENnie Award winning Battlefield Press, Inc.  You can find him on Twitter at @dorkland and on G+ at https://plus.google.com/+ChristopherHelton/ where he will talk your ear off about gaming and comics.

Christopher has a crowdfunding page to help raise money to defray the costs for going to the Gen Con gaming convention and cover it for his Dorkland! blog and Bleeding Cool. Please click here to go to the page and help out.

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