5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons Announced

[Lazybones]

http://games.slashdot.org/story/12/01/09/1921245/5th-edition-of-dungeons-dragons-announced

[Thorin]

@%&# ME!

[Melbosa]

FFS...  I was hoping 4E would last as long as AD&D did... so I could justify what I spent on books.

[Mr. Analog]

Not surprised in the least, saddened, but not surprised.

[Lazybones]

I suspect much like school books they make all their money during the Edition / revision push.

[Mr. Analog]

Most certainly they do, and it pays for them to utterly revamp the system.

I suspect they are victims of their own success, the 3.x launch was a Big Deal^tm, re-invigorating a sector of WotC that had been more or less dead after the acquisition of TSR (they were still publishing modules and books for 2nd edition in the late 90s but they were still fairly low profile, I'd say). Now Wizards was still enjoying the dizzying success of CCGs but that was petering out big time right when 3.x launched and it turned into a big hit for them.

I think when 3.5 launched it was more or less trying to follow the traditional paths set by TSR many moons ago keeping the system evolving in the hopes that new mechanics / modules would keep players going but *I* think that with the open-ended d20 system they ended up having to compete with the gamers themselves who were publishing custom rules and modules online.

4.0 came along promising to clean up a lot of the mess in 3.5 (and also change the licensing to cut people out of legit mods/tools). 4.0 brought a lot of changes that made the game fun for an even wider slice of humanity and it flew off the shelves (again big success).

Now it's been a few years and 4.0 hasn't really moved all that much (it "just works" for most people), so on one hand you might say that WotC has decided to side-step the whole rule-bloat issue by deciding to run with a whole new version AND/OR realized that if you force an upgrade that will likely sell 15 books per standard party size... well it's hard to not want to rake in a profit like that.

Again this is all my conjecture/demented thoughts, but WotC really has to be careful about the pace they set, they should neither want to burn out nor fade away...

[Thorin]

One thing, it's a couple of years off yet.  They're talking about internal playtesting some ideas now, then opening up external playtesting next year on those and other ideas, then changing / poishing as necessary, and maybe releasing in 2014.  None of that is for sure yet.

I just hope they don't drop the electronic tools for 4th a year before they release, like they did with eTools for 3rd...

[Mr. Analog]

I hope not, that actually reminds me I have to deactivate my DnDI subscription until I know when we're going to play again...

There would have to be some pretty compelling features in 5 to get me excited, even if it won't launch until 2014 or so (damn that sounds futuristic...)

[Thorin]

source: http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/01/11

[Mr. Analog]

Pretty spot on, ALL our campaigns are erotically charged sexventures

... cough

My theory is that they're just repackaging GURPS as "D&D 5th" without telling Steve Jackson Games