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More D & D News From Twitter And The Net

Published Fri, 23 May 2014 13:45:52 -0500

By Christopher Helton

More news from Twitter on the D&D front. Once again, Mike Mearls's Twitter feed is proving to be an important part of the gaming writer's morning routine. At least we get an explanation for this tweet from the other day:

To clear up the Starter Set – it's aimed at DMs, so no PC creation in the box. But players will be able to make characters without it.

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) May 20, 2014

Now, we have an answer to how that is going to happen:

@intensewiz we just announced at the ACD distributor conference that about 15% of the Player's Handbook will be available for free as a PDF

— Mike Mearls (@mikemearls) May 22, 2014

So, it looks like the answer will be that there isn't going to be any character creation rules in the Starter Box, but that's okay because there will be a free PDF that people can access. My question is: what about all the people out there who don't access gaming stuff on the internet? Even now, with a ubiquitous internet, there hasn't been a lot of evidence that the gaming industry can find to show that more than a minority of gamers uses the internet for finding things gaming related. Could the fact that this was mentioned to retailers mean that there will be some sort of distribution of this free PDF through brick and mortar stores? Let's hope so.

There is also a good interview with Wolfgang Bauer and Steve Winter over at the ENworld gaming site.

There will be more to come.

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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