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Hey all! I was just at my FLGS for D&D Games Day yesterday and I learned a number of things about 4.0. I'm not sure if I'm just slow on the uptake on it, but I figured I would share what I heard in case others hadn't heard it either.

First things first, part of the swag for playing in the Games Day adventure was a mini which included both a 3.5 stats card and card they were calling a "4th edition preview" which had the Spine Devil's 4.0 stats. Most interesting were the saving throw numbers, which say simply "18" across the board. I'm surmising that saving throws are going to become target numbers instead of a bonus to a DC. Beneath these is an entry called "HP/Bloodied." There are several things that this could be, but my guess would be some sort of a shock value. The six basic stats look like the old familiar system, though the bonuses look scaled up somewhat. On the reverse, we see that it has an AC of 20. But directly below that there is an entry with "DEF" as its title (I think it's a fairly safe bet this is short for "defense" ). I'm thinking that this could indicated a passive and active defense system, rather than just a straight up AC, which could be very interesting.

Other stuff that I learned is more specifically of interest to this forum, since it concernes Forgotten Realms. Evidently, when the campaign setting for 4th edition comes out, we're suddenly going to find that the current campaign year will have jumped ahead an entire century. I understand that this is partially due to accommodating a new magic system that is so different from what is in 3.5 that they had to come up with a story reason for it (we already know this is called the Spellplague and that it involves the death of Mystra and the complete collapse of the Weave). Given the sudden nature of the Spellplague, I'm wondering why they feel it necessary to jump so far ahead. Personally, I would be more interested to know how the existing canon NPCs deal with it than I would be in meeting new NPCs. But it could be that they feel it necessary to have the new nature of magic be well established for play reasons.

Anyway, that's just the stuff that I learned yesterday. Some of it was rumor and some of it was based on official information. Take what you will out of it.

Berz.

:3