Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Editorials

Wizards of the Coast’s plans for another edition of Dungeons & Dragons continues to spark interest from a range of sources, and today the online words come at us from The Examiner, as well as Nevermet Press. A snip from the former:

There are plenty of modular toolkit role-playing games; the Generic Universal Role-playing System (GURPS) and HERO system have already trod the same ground. It seems Dungeons & Dragons is planning to become a similar modular game, a toolkit flexible enough to accommodate any style of play.

Of course, we had this with the D20 glut of games that appeared in the past decade. The difference was that third parties were responsible for the expansion of the rules rather than Wizards of the Coast. As the role-playing game market continues to shrink, Wizards is once again interest in errant gamers. They can’t afford to ignore them, both for the future of the hobby and to achieve the aforementioned goal of $50- to $100-million in annual sales.

This design philosophy means Dungeons & Dragons will likely be a skeletal framework with different “edition rules” to add on. The first and foremost of these is the elimination of a battle grid as a requirement. None of the early editions required battle maps, so it will be necessary for the game to be gridless in order to accommodate gamers who prefer a more freeform play.

Probably the group most at risk of not transitioning to the new game are 4th Edition players. The recent admission that Wizards designed 4th Edition with the eventual goal of launching a massive multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) is indicative of what happened with the launch of 4th Edition: the most previous edition pales in comparison to the launch of the new game.

And an excerpt from the latter:

Gamers rightly wonder if an already supremely flawed system can be improved and if they’re willing to pay for it. With the cost of sourcebooks rocketing towards unreasonable, how can many gamers, with a smile, plunk down another $60 for a set of core rulebooks? What would Gary Gygax think?

Currently WotC, like many software companies, only supports the latest version of our beloved game supplements and additional materials are all geared for 4th edition rules and players. Will the same policy hold true for 5th edition? Will all the great official and 3rd party content developed by 4E become abandonware?

The fundamental problem here is that your gaming dollars are being wasted on a system that’s being replaced not upgraded simply replaced every few years. For serious gamers this represents a significant investment. The average 12-year old doesn’t have the gold pieces to plunk down to update his entire gaming library. The players that have the spare gold (and platinum), those 30-somethings still trying to decide if dating or dice are more important, are becoming bitter about how flippantly their investment is being treated.

Treasure troves aside, what’s the plan with 5th Edition? Rumors suggest that WotC wants to (take the best of all previous incarnations,) but that’s a no-brainer. What else would they do? Isn’t that the bare minimum gamers can expect? Massive tomes of Powers and Abilities don’t impress. Any Gamer with a shred of imagination can work with his DM to hash out new powers and skills. Feats? More feats? New classes? New player character races? As if the Fey, Tieflings, Changlings and Dragon Born weren’t already pushing it. Gnomes that look like tiny elves and Goliath (Hill Giant) Rangers make for an inconsistent and free-for-all setting. Why don’t we just all play Vampires and Illithids. Except for you Jimmy, you can be a Were-wolf Death Knight whose father was a Dragon and mother was an Elemental.