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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
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.
I'm just finally mastering the 2nd edition rules.
Started playing again recently after a long (15 year) break from gaming, and I have to say it has been a lot of fun.
So....how's the divorce going ....
Don't they realize that the more often they change the ruleset the more often players have to spend money buying new books?
Oh...
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!
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.
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make install -not war
Haha. She is OK with it. Probably because there is no fear of other women being involved....
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.
I think because GURPS never got the advertising budget TSR gave its baby back in the day. The market for tabletop RPG is already pretty small. TSR, I think, established itself as *the* brand early on and has held the lead until recently at least.
And as for why WotC/Hasbro would go this route now, I suspect it's because they're looking around at the various games using the OGL rules for things outside of standard European, medieval swords and sorcery settings and wanting to consolidate that player base back into their welcoming arms.
Also because, hey, more money.
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.
That's my big gripe as well.... It's especially maddening. Having not played any of the other editions, are the encounters really much shorter in any other edition?
Yeah, it sucks big time when you're fully immersed in an exciting campaign plot and then some unexciting but non-insurmountable creature was blocking the way forward. That was usually my cue to go and pick up the pizzas.
This was IMO the worst aspect of most of the common RPGs when I first started playing in the early eighties. Every time the rules were revised I got excited at the opportunity for them to have streamlined the fight encounters. Unfortunately, that never happened. I honestly used to think that the R in RPG stood for 'roll', not 'role'.
After a few years we started playing 'abbreviated rule' games where we'd used most of the material, but when it came to fight scenes, they'd be heavily optimised. In the end it's far better to let the GM handle the encounters and outcomes in an interactive story style (with maybe the occasional roll of a die) rather than spend half an hour rolling dice until the proverbial 'band of orcs' has finally been dispatched.
The best gaming sessions we ever had were mini-freeforms where we'd go somewhere and wander around as a group and let our GM (a brilliant story teller) describe the scenes, act as NPCs and referee the interactions. Awesome stuff. One Friday night our group went to see Star Trek IV (opening night) for someones birthday, and ended up spending the rest of the weekend immersed in a time travel universe set in historical earth (but we got to carry around cool Star Trek equipment and capabilities).
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.
Encounters were quite short if you didn't search for traps. But so was your character's expected life span.
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!
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.
It is, according to industry measurements. I wish WotC well, but I honestly don't think they "get it" why Pathfinder is doing so well. Obviously it's a combination of a lot of factors, but one of the biggest ones is what you mentioned: the license.
D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder are under the OGL (Open Game License). It's a very permissive license that allows 3rd parties to effectively reprint and use almost all the rules (and in Pathfinder's case all the rules) in development of other products. Want to take a known monster, amp it up, and include it in the adventure module you're writing? The OGL allows you to do exactly that. Just include the OGL text and keep the attributions correct, and you're good to go. Pathfinder owes its existence to the fact most of 3.5e was open. The www.d20pfsrd.com site is a huge proof to the idea that open rules licensing doesn't kill the product. Aside from campaign-setting lore, names, and artwork, all the rules are available on that web site. And yet Paizo is doing great.
On the other hand, 4e was published (eventually) under a GSL, which breaks down mostly to "you can't do anything, for any reason, and if you do it, you'll wish you didn't." WotC has maintained very strict control over the 4e rules and no longer even sells PDFs of their books.
I have no reason to believe that even if WotC does open playtesting there will be any shift in licensing terms. The product will remain closed up and DRM controlled by Hasbro. Well, sorry. No 3rd-party ecosystem, no support... the name "D&D" alone isn't enough.
"Oh no... he found the
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 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.