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Dungeons & Dragons Next Playtest Released
New submitter thuf1rhawat writes "For a certain type of geek, nothing is more important than Dungeons & Dragons. In January, Wizards of the Coast announced that the next iteration of the game (referred to as D&D Next) was under development, and now they've released an open playtest. They hope to gather as much player feedback as possible to help refine the new rules."
The playtest is pretty limited. Lots of little minor changes. But what I can make out so far:
4th Edition Base - Limited Power System + New simplified math system for positive or negative modifications to circumstance + Vancian Casting (kinda)
If you're expecting a huge shift or one back to 3rd you're better off sticking with Pathfinder at this point.
There is no d3. The lowest die is d4.
As an ancient D&D player, I must say you are wrong. The Three Sided Die is shaped like a football with three ridges. The football shape keeps it from standing on either end, and you read the top ridge.
You can use: "d6 divided by two, rounding up" in a pinch, but prepare to be pointed and snort-chuckled at.
D&D and AD&D had several versions alongside each other (they were separate games developed in parallel by TSR). After Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, they merged them into a single line that was named D&D but was more like TSR's AD&D rules. Consequently there are 2 different things called D&D 3rd Edition, D&D 4th Edition--to avoid confusion, Wizards of the Coast refers to the old TSR-released ones as "D&D Version 3" and reserves the name "3rd Edition" for the post-WotC merged game. But historically the TSR one was also called D&D 3rd Edition.
The timeline was something like:
D&D 1st Edition/Chainmail rules
D&D 1st Edition/Greyhawk rules
D&D 2nd Edition
AD&D 1st Edition
D&D 3rd Edition
D&D 4th Edition
AD&D 2nd Edition
D&D 5th Edition
(Wizards of the Coast buys them out here)
D&D 3rd Edition
D&D 3.5th Edition
D&D 4th Edition
Wizard of the Coast's D&D 3rd Edition and later are evolutions of the AD&D rules more than of the D&D rules
Unofficially the later years of AD&D 2nd Edition are called the 2.5th edition sometimes.
The original 1st edition of D&D you had to have the Chainmail table-top game rules to resolve combat; that changed when the Greyhawk supplement was released, giving D&D its own combat rules. So a lot of people consider the change from Chainmail to Greyhawk rules to be as significant as an official new edition.
rage, rage against the dying of the light