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5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons Announced
New submitter lrsach01 writes "Wizards of the Coast has announced a 'new iteration' of their Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. Early information says the game will be more inclusive, with a basic rule set that 'builds out.' This Spring, WotC will be 'conducting ongoing open playtests with the gaming community to gather feedback on the new iteration of the game as we develop it.'"
1974 - First edition
1989 - Second edition
2000 - Third edition
2008 - Forth edition
2012 - Fifth edition
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Started playing again recently after a long (15 year) break from gaming, and I have to say it has been a lot of fun.
Unfortunately for me, my first 4th edition game starts up next Friday.
playing my kender :(
Wizards of the Coast has announced they need more money because everyone who plays d&d has already bought all their old books.
So now it's time to obsolete everything again and make them start over.
Elan, Haley, and Roy just got to 4th edition over the summer!!!
If 4th Ed was "the WoW" clone.... Will this be a Skyrim clone... Just one character that walks around and does stuff.
I'm just finally mastering the 2nd edition rules.
Don't they realize that the more often they change the ruleset the more often players have to spend money buying new books?
Oh...
I think despite what many say it is actually quite fun the only real issue is that combat takes way way too long. Fun that there is so much to the tactics and such but annoying when two fights take up an entire nights game.
A lot of people's complaints of 4e is that they basically made a pen and paper version of WoW. Hopefully 5th edition is more like 3.5e which is where they really got D&D right (IMHO IMHO).
I wonder how much of this revamp is being driven by Pathfinder and the other Open Gaming License games. As with F/OS (second S dropped intentionally) goodness, you can download the Pathfinder rulebooks for free, and only pay for them should you want the nice full-color hardback.
Much easier to get people into a game if they don't have to buy two or three $50 books just to start.
It's a pretty obvious game to the cynical old grognards like me. It started when TSR was sold to WotC, and then WotC was bought out by a megacorp.
Now that Hasbro owns the trademark, all they're interested in is more sales.
My group's been together for over 20 years, and we stopped buying books after 2nd edition. We still play using "2.5 ed" rules, and we don't have any problems finding new members every now and then.
I can see the fnords!
I'm sorry, I started playing in 3.5 and got pretty good at the rule set and all the info you had to know about playing certain classes. Then 4.0 came out to completely obsolete the 3.5 books which in some cases allowed for horrible abuses of min-maxing (PunPun anyone?). For all it's maligning, I'm actually perfectly happy playing and DMing 4.0 campaigns. That they're asking us to buy a complete new set of books, campaign guides, and player sheets not 4 years into their new reboot of the system (in which we were promised a full Online DM tool) is still not out, I'm going to re-evaluate my Pencil and Paper RPG game options and probably either stay on 4.0 or go to a system that doesn have the insatiable hunger to up the edition number (and milk the dwindling population for more money).
Based on a lot of the different articles I have read today from Forbes, NY Times, Escapist Magazine and so on it seems that this version may be going with a GURPS philosophy -- Here is your basic game. You have more than enough information to design characters and play the game. But then...
Oh, you want to play a more miniatures based, combat-oriented style of play? Here is the miniatures rule book/module and here is the epic combat rule book/module and off you go.
Oh, you want to mix magic and psionics in one campaign world you are creating? Well, here is a book for world designing and the rule book/module for psionics.
Oh, you want to play such and such... and so on, and so forth.
I believe they want one basic ruleset so that you can then go with how your play group usually games - from those who are diehard first edition players to those who choose a more MMO style of play. From the role-players who want a much wider creative range to play within to those who say "I want to bash shit in the head" and have to do little creative input into designing your character, I believe Wizards wants to give them the option. All from a single starting point.
I am going to be cautiously optimistic and do both "wait and see" and get my play group into helping test so we can give our feedback. Just some quick background - my play group has played under 1st ed, 2nd ed, 3rd ed, and 3.5 and we are currently running an extended player-designed world and campaign under 2nd edition rules (with house rules/modifications as Gygax intended :-p).
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Actually, the equation Edition(Year) is not described by an exponential, but instead rather well by a polynomial:
Edition(Y) = 0.0018684 Y^2 - 7.35 Y + 7223.2, where Y is the year
If we extend the curve, we get the following:
2018 - 6th edition
2023 - 7th edition
2028 - 8th edition
2032 - 9th edition
So we should expect vast growth over the next 20 years! Invest now.
Of course, by the 9th edition out future generations may have fully sentient AI's acting out the roles of in vat-grown bodies on a theme park on the surface of Mars. At least, one could hope...
When I play D&D, my friends and I use to original edition hardcover AD&D rule books. The rules are simple, we all know them, and we all know the books well enough to quickly point at the rule if there's disagreement. We do allow combo spells from the original lists to make new ones, cleared in advance or even on the fly if they're straightforward enough. The players & DM are mostly programmers and lawyers, so we're more interested in the role playing and storytelling than in the rules themselves. And the hunkering down in a man-cave all night to act like 14 year olds.
--
make install -not war
This game sounds fun... what system does it run on? I am not sure what d20 is, does anyone know if my iPhone has it?
I got a couple 4th edition books and waited to see what all my obsessive gaming friends would do. All they did was bitch that it was boring, all the classes the same, much easier if you had a computer, blah, blah, blah.
So the game I am playing in has harkened back to the "good old days" by playing a 2nd edition game. So much fun! Every class is different, weird quirks, odd rules, overly powerful spells, crazy monsters. It is actually fun. The rules shape the game but they don't, uh, rule it. And there are other options online that we've played with, many rough, some worthy.
Good-bye WoC. I don't need you anymore. All the D&D I care about sits on my shelf as modules I've always owned or bought used dirt cheap. Suck it on your continued corporate money grab while raping D&D for everything you can get.
Used to play and DM 1st and 2nd edition a couple of decades ago.
Then life (often spelled with a 'w') happened and I sort of drifted away from it.
I participated in a handful of one-time meetings where they used the 3rd edition (or possibly 3.5) which seemed to be a mostly welcome evolution of the 2nd.
I tried running an adventure for my kids based on 4th edition once but it felt like a completely different system, and not in a good way. More like a computer game.
What's the 5th edition like?
yet we're still waiting for the second part of Combinatorial Algorithms...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm currently building a nice 6' x 10' gaming table for my Napoleonic & WW2 era miniatures wargames. Just a different branch of the nerd tree.
Thanks for taking something fun, pure, and good, and turning it into something that ... isn't. I wish you the best of luck on your new disaster, I mean product. In the mean time, I'll stick with Pathfinder.
The thing I miss the most - THAC0.
It took years to master figuring it, now that I know it I'm never going with "Base Hit" or what ever they use now!
No kidding.
I for one spent too much time gaming with pinheads, especially pinheads I didn't really like.
Here's a rule I have now about gaming, if you don't want to hang out with the people you game with outside of the game, you shouldn't be gaming with them at all.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
4th edition = failsauce
WoC is a terrible company, they will probably have this new edition out before the end of 2012. Just look at how often they spin out new sets of MTG. Will be a new D&D edition every 2 years with the way they run things.
Its probably a good thing Pathfinder picked up the 3.5 stuff and running with it.
Started with D&D, moved over to The Fantasy Trip and played that for a number of years. Hell, I helped out some friends who started Jersey Devil Game Company. Used to beta test games, and then help with shrinkwrapping and distribution. I even started designing the computer version of Silo 14 (one of their games). Those were the days (sniff!)...
I hear D&D 12 is basically just tweaks to the roster, er, monster manual and fixing some bugs; but D&D 13 is supposed to be built on a whole new engine! Supposedly they're finally introducing 7-sided dice, which the community has been trying to get for ages.
If only there was a way WotC could prohibit the use of old versions; sadly, no central server is required to get together and play with other people, so they can't turn it off and force you to upgrade every other year.
(Hmm, the premise of my sarcasm might be off - I'm not sure how much crossover there is between pen-and-paper RPGers and players of EA Sports titles; hopefully the general dislike for EA will help pull this off...)
It's designed to be flexible - to let the Dungeon Master House Rule. But they give little guidance of power balance. There is always a tendency to come out with new, slightly more powerfull stuff, or worse yet, 'combos' of rules created by two different writers that were never tested together. DM's are not experts (no matter what they think). They need to not just know what rules are optional, but ALSO what new rules are high powered, what are on the weak side, - both the normal stuff and the optional stuff. More importantly they need more guidelines to help them judge what things should work together and what should not.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I was under the impression that Pathfinder (essentially a licensed fork of D&D 3.5) was outselling Wizards of the Coast D&D these days.
If you're playing with people who don't like to cheesemonkey the game, 3.5 was pretty good. Pathfinder's the only thing close to that WotC still makes though, and from what I hear it's beating 4th in sales these days due to the fairly awful reputation 4th has among many longtime players.
So I'm hoping that this new stuff goes backwards from everything they screwed up in 4th.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Been many years since I played, but I always remember: AD&D (1st edition) Bard. Scary.
When I was younger, I could just never get into D&D, even though shortly after high school I had a friend who was really into it. Years later, after computer gaming and FPS'ers were big, the idea of rolling dice to determine the outcome of a battle still didn't sound appealing to me..maybe even less so.
Now, many, many years later, being a fantasy/sword 'n' sorcery fan, I'd be willing to give it a shot, but the wife would probably pack up and leave. She's got a grudge against D&D, as her ex used to play it all the time and ignore her or something. Ah well. Maybe I can get away with reading the manuals, just to keep the peace while satisfying my curiosity.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
There is a very nice Pathfinder SRD document that has everything in it from the Pathfinder Core rules except the Product Identity (Setting Information) and artwork.
I own the core and lots of the sourcebooks in hardcopy as well as PDF for use on my iPad, but if you want to search for something fast the SRD PDF searches faster than the PDF of the Core Rulebook.
At least 2 of the guys in my Pathfinder group have the Pathfinder SRD app on their phones which is also fully searchable and the app is also cheaper than the Core Rulebook.
I like Paizo, I like how they actually put up Open Content on their website, and how much of a community has built up around them because of their openness. I like the fact they let the community look at some of the early playtest materials for new books.
I'm not a subscriber, I buy all of their stuff a la carte, but I do like what they are doing with the game. I probably won't play the MMO or read the comic book they've just announced.
I am chomping at the bit for my case of pre-painted minis to show up this week.
I am also developing a scifi setting/RPG based on a Pathfinderization of the D20 Modern SRD which has a lot of strange D&D 3.0 artifacts baked in.
I started my daughters (17 and 14 now) on it a couple years ago and they seem to enjoy it. The gf is also big on it. The rules are simple, a PHB is enough for them. I don't give them access to the other books. It turned out to be a much better playing experience than I expected. Thinking of inviting more adults to join in now.
MD area, north of Baltimore.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
In those days we created characters on parchment made from jaguar hides and used dice carved from the femur of a wooly mammoth.
Bah, you whippersnappers have it easy. In my day, we didn't play D&D, we just went outside an stabbed real beholders and dragons...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The reason you have all these versions isn't huge problems with the game system(s), its that there is a fundamental flaw in traditional RPG publishing. Once you sell someone a set of rules, you have to keep paying the bills and you have a hard time selling just accessories. I think that publishers keep re-writing things so they can keep re-selling core rulebooks to people.
Microsoft has the same problem. Once they sell you a good word processor, you never really need to buy another one. What features on office 2010 are there that you didn't have on office 97? The core product is EXACTLY the same.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I won't be buying any of the 5th edition stuff, for the same reason I didn't buy 4th or 3rd or... well, I do have some 2nd edition, but anyway.
I've wanted to play D&D since I first heard about it over 20 years ago, but the core problem has always been simple: I don't know anyone who plays D&D. I don't know how to find anyone who does. I've tried all the methods I can think of, found a few online group-finding sites and the like, but no go. I DID stumble across a 2nd Edition group not long after I left school who I played with for a handful of sessions, but then I moved away and lost touch. There aren't even any tabletop gaming shops here anymore; the last that stocked anything like D&D closed a couple of years ago, and just sold the books, no starter sessions or noticeboards or anything of the sort.
What I want from D&D right now is twofold; firstly, a decent, official, centralised, and above all *global* (I'm not in the US) grouping system to find people to play with. Maybe even go a little on the social networking side and let players say a little about themselves, their playstyles, and maybe even their characters if they have any they like to stick with. Secondly, a decent, official method of playing the games online; at the very least a chatroom with a map screen with tools for the DM to build it up quickly and easily, along with a LFG system and a friends list to help forming regular groups, preferably support for microphones/webcams, characters/enemy abilities/stat tracking, session saving, and while we're at it an easy way to print off the state of play for if you ever wind up with a great group, and decide you want to take it off the screen and get round a table, as Gygax intended. You don't have to expose all the rules of play if you still want people to buy the books, or heck, have each book contain an authorisation key to lets you use the features/skills/whatever that that book contains.
If either of those features already exist, then what I need is for them to be more public, because I've looked and haven't found them.
The reason for that rigidity is that too many players and too many DM's get screwed over. The dice are involved as much to keep the DM honest as anything else.
As a player, it sucks to have the DM railroad something by to let a beloved villain escape even though you just scored a crit and the target ran out of HP 5 rounds and 70 HP ago. While there is an argument to be made for preserving the story, a good DM adapts the story to the actions of the players without negating the players actions. Too many DMs just hand wave it.
And on the flip side, a lenient DM with 4 casual gamers and 1 power gamer is going to end up with a single player game once the player using 'Ingar the Invincible' starts to dominate all the ingame combat.
Finally, not everyone is interested in playing a powerless protagonist while the DM recites 5 hours of marginally interactive amateur fiction. As long as everyone at the table has fun, there is no wrong way to play.
END COMMUNICATION
Probably it's more board game and Warhammer driven. Pathfinder doesn't sell as well as Warhammer, I expect.
4e is like Warhammer where you only have one mini, but with many powers. 5e will likely be similar in that.
4e is quite fun on a strategic level. The character optimization is quite cool when powers work together. I hear 3.5 and 3.75 had more of that. I wouldn't want something with a lot of third-party input. It makes game balance too hard.
In the end, there are many ways to play. Find a group you're happy with and you're fine.
Pathfinder srd
It will be interesting to see what they come up with... 4th Edition really split the customer base and I think the damage has already largely been done.
When 3 was the current system it was the RPG that everybody already knew the rules too and it was flexible enough to kind of do what we wanted. 4 came out and did a lot of work of balancing things but in the process removed a lot of the stuff that we were using to make our games fun. 4th Edition got a lot better at one style of play but less flexible in the process. This gave me and others the impetus to look and see what other RPG systems are out there - and well there are some really fun games that do the sorts of games I like to run a lot better.
I can't see myself going back to dungeons and dragons unless they do something conciderably different to 4th edition and the other games I am playing but here are some of the things I would like to see.
Keep working on the balance of the combat system - this is probably the best thing Dungeons and Dragons has going for it.
Characters in 4th edition feel way to mechanics driven. I want my characters to be story driven, the 4th edition mechanics seem to get in the way of this.
Only the most generic classes and races in the core rule book, it's harder to deny a type when it is in the core rule book and it that type doesn't really suit the story or world being run.
Look at other successful tabletop rpgs of late and look at the stuff that they are doing that can't be emulated on computer. I know a lot of this went on for 3rd edition and 3rd edition was a lot better for it. Don't copy those systems per say but do try to give us something new and fun. Don't bother so much with computer based RPGs these work better on computers.
I wish that they made it have some kind of opportunity to turn it into a chess-like game, where strategy was very advantageous.
Now, it feels like some kind of tit for tat game where we don't get to really think our way through. I don't like that.
I hate the railroading of recent editions, but I think that it is okay if the emphasis is on story telling. I don't mind it for Encounters, but for serious gaming, I think that the railroading has to disappear.
I don't mind dealing with dice and rules, most of the time, but it seems silly that we still have to roll for things that seem so simple. It's almost as if we have to roll just to confirm that we can breathe normal air.
testing out my trending skills
The OGL is a trademark-license. It basically allows you to place "D20-comaptible" to your material.
Since game rules are NOT COPYRIGHTABLE it does not grant you anything new -- you already had the right to release add-ons without any OGL whatsoever.
Apart from the trademark-grant, the OGL is a sham.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
3.5 was the last incarnation of the traditional game that wizards released. They created a new game to attempt larger market share and kept the name. If you want the newest incarnation of the traditional game see PATHFINDER. They can't call it D&D but that's what it is.
"1st edition" was the code word that my friends and I used for porn when talking on the phone around parents.
You know, I've played D&D from the red box on, and 3rd edition, is when I felt it really came into its own. I honestly really enjoy 4th ed, too, but in a very different way. I wish that WotC had kept development going on 3.5, or, had thrown in with Pathfinder and officially licensed their materials. I don't really see the NEED to stick with one iteration. Heck, books with 4/3.5 stats/rules are pretty nice as well. The rules give structure to the story. Good GMs and players can bend them as needed. I will admit, I am still sad that the saga system that was developed died. It was one of the most creative ways to tell a story I have seen. One of my favorite systems from "D&D".
Though I haven't played in a long time I'll probably pick up the rule books and read through them.
Now if you want a man's game you would play Hackmaster. Mmmm... a fun world... insanely great rules.. really funny.. and it provides a great backdrop of Knights of the Dinner Table! How I do love that game.
The first thing WOTC needs to do is cut the price of the core rulebooks, bought new, from $35/each to $10/each max. It costs over $100 for new gamers to dive in, which prices the game beyond the reach of the most critical market--teenagers and young college kids. Teenagers and college kids are the lifeblood of tabletop games and WOTC needs to keep a constant stream of new blood coming in, but their pricing strategy makes that almost impossible. I don't know many 18-years olds who are willing to drop $100 on a book-based game when they can get the latest best-selling XBox game for one-half or one-third that much.
And no, offering a condensed "Essentials Starter Set" won't cut it. Nobody wants to drop $20 on that and then have to go drop another $100 on core rulebooks to play the full game if they liked what they saw. All that does is hike the price of entry.
Additional products could be a little pricier, but nothing should cost more than $20.
I've converted to Castles & Crusades by Troll Lord Games.
Back to basics: real roleplaying with an updated d20 mechanic and a simple resolution system for almost everything [ SIEGE Engine (tm) ].
It allows me to convert and or use 0E, 1E, 2E, & 3E stuff and play it so your old books are still good
You don't need minatures or maps and the having fun in the game comes first - the rules are not at all set in stone.
Rules lawyers and munchkins need not apply.
Rules light and very fast to play.
E. Gary Gygax actually worked for Troll Lord Games before he died and finally got a chance to release His Dungeon with them.
I'm teaching the 8 years old to do something besides sit in front of the TV this weekend, in fact.
http://www.trolllord.com/cnc/why_play_cnc.html
There alre a lot of free choices out there too, Basic Famtasy Role Playing, OSIRC, Labrinth Lords...
Why stick with WoTC with there are better, less expensive alternatives?
Just my opinion.
assertion: a positive statement, usually made without an attempt at furnishing evidence
I was pretty active with 1st gen. A little with 2nd gen. To be honest, unlike many of you with the exception of the few kids reading this, I grew up.