D&D5e is coming.

[Grunker]

Our playgroup uses .pdfs for almost everything these days. A laptop isn't anymore disrupting for play than a book is when it's just looking things up.

Still, I know that is hardly the feeling of all players, so I still very much doubt they're gonna make that move. Probably just Andhaira talking out of his ass. We'll see, though.

 

[Storyfag]

Our playgroup uses .pdfs for almost everything these days. A laptop isn't NEARLY as disturbing for play as the 5+ books necessary to play D&D 3e.

 

[CappenVarra]

Bump happens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/10/a...e-uses-players-input.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all

But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, is expected to announce that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.

 

[MaroonSkein]

Official confirmation: http://wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20120109

That is why we are excited to share with you that starting in Spring 2012, we will be taking this process one step further and conducting ongoing open playtests with the gaming community to gather feedback on the new iteration of the game as we develop it. With your feedback and involvement, we can make D&D better than ever. We seek to build a foundation for the long-term health and growth of D&D, one rooted in the vital traits that make D&D unique and special. We want a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game. In short, we want a game that is as simple or complex as you please, its action focused on combat, intrigue, and exploration as you desire. We want a game that is unmistakably D&D, but one that can easily become your D&D, the game that you want to run and play.

 

[Menckenstein]

Rules for romantic encounters included?

 

[20 Eyes]

Great news. 4E seems like a failed experiment.

Rules for romantic encounters included?

If your DM doesn't use FATAL's rules for romantic encounters with any game you might play, you need to find a new group.

 

[Mozgoëbstvo]

S...s...s...seriously?



YES! YES! The bets are on! How many think this will be a just and complete backpedaling???

 

[CappenVarra]

Well, I'd like to be optimistic and say this means we'll hear an honest "Sorry guys, 4th ed was a cheap shot by any objective measure". However, it sounds more like "WoW and Skyrim are making bajilions; we're not. We tried asking a focus group what should we do to make bajilions too, but they failed. We thought about asking an even bigger focus group, but hell - let's ask The Biggest Focs Group Ever - that'll work, right? I mean, we're a serious business now, and that means we don't care about what kind of game we release, as long as it makes bajilions. And we're kinda out of ideas - hey, any of you guys want to tell us what we should do to make bajilions? Thanks in advance." Then again, Monte Cook...

Edit: By the gods, the 4venger butthurt in the wizards.com comments is... delicious. Ahhh

 

[Jaesun]

D&D is old, tired and busted. Pathfinder is the way to go.

 

[Mozgoëbstvo]

I pretty much agree, but I'm still curious to see where the Old Glory is headed.

 

[Harold]

Bring back the Blood War and scrape that Lucifer bullshit you WoTC faggots.

 

[Spectacle]

Sounds like they're trying to make a d&d that is everything to everyone. I have a hard time believing anyone can pull that off, it will probably suck to everyone instead.

 

[Mozgoëbstvo]

I've even lost the count... how much time ago was 4th ed released? It has to be the shortest lived edition yet.

 

[Aldebaran]

Bring back the Blood War and scrape that Lucifer bullshit you WoTC faggots.

Yes, the Blood War needs to come back, and fast. The entire point of the Blood War was that if it ever ended, everything else was screwed.

 

[Art Vandelay]

It will depend on who has the license and what they intend to do with it.I'm not optimistic...

 

[mondblut]

Will it be subtitled "Cataclysm" too?

 

[Notorious]

2nd Edition 89
3rd 00
4th 08

so 5th should be 2016+ or so... or they just want to outdo Games Workshop in money grabbing.

 

[Crichton]

Honestly, I'd like to be optimistic about this but just can't. I don't play PnP but I tend to prefer D&D cRPGs to cRPGs with homebrew rulesets because most developers seem to have a hard time coding the game and writting/balancing a decent rule-set in the alloted time. Since I don't play PnP, I don't know much about 4th edition but from what I've heard the single biggest change was all to the good. That is, giving all classes a similar mechanical structure makes it possible to balance them.

However the specific changes to the D&D races and classes sounded kind of horrid (this is probably why I don't play MMOs). If 5th edition keeps the idea of giving each class roughly the same number of options in combat and returns the races/classes/setting to something like 3rd edition, I'd probably stand up and cheer. But it looks like WoTC really thought they could appeal to a broader audience by introducing all the new garbage (dragon-people! a class that heals people by shouting at them! teleporting rangers!). Will their recent set-back change their mind on that score? Almost certainly not, they'll conclude that the flaw was not adding enough garbage and pull up a few more pails of it.

What I'd really like to see in a new edition of D&D is something akin D20 modern or KotOR1. Which is to say, instead of starting out as wizards/jedi/Bruce Li/swamp thing, all characters start out as relatively pedestrian soldiers, scholars, thieves, craftsmen and the like and only later developed into magical beings of one sort or the other.

 

[Alex]

Oh, hey, a new edition! Sure, I hated 4th edition, but maybe Wizards realized that the RPG industry isn't the videogame industry, that selling things only on hype and no content doesn't fly around here and trying to contain the player's imaginations so you can sell more sourcebooks will just drive away customers. Maybe we should be optimistic for this one...

The Forgotten Realms will be supported from the start, and a video game art studio from China has been hired to fully detail the Realms.

 

[MisterStone]

Recently, Monte Cook got rehired by WOTC.

Monte Cook. MONTE COOK!

I want back all the money that I wasted on shitty Rolemaster books when I was a teenager. With INTEREST, MOTHER FUCKER

 

[Xi]

The more they get away from their niche, by trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the more sales will slump. DnD has always been a nerdy past time that many players are somewhat shy to talk about in social settings. This is something that will probably never be mainstream, so 4th Edition's attempt to do so has really proven this point. Simplified rules aren't better. Depth, complexity, and intrigue go a lot farther than the shallow 4E could ever hope to take it's already seasoned player-base. Dumbing it down just meant that the people who would actually buy books stopped doing so because these players want more depth to sink their fangs into, not less.

Hopefully this one can deliver us a cRPG. That I cannot wait for.

 

[LibertyRansom]

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/dungeons-dragons-plans-comeback-200249601.html

yahoo article. It's interesting reading the 100's of comments, a lot of praise for 80's RPG's like bards tale, Ultima, Wasteland and the Gold Box. Ought to let these guys know about the codex...

 

[Grunker]

Signed up as a tester. Hopefully I get in - if so I will "LP" the system for great justice

Here's hoping they learned their lesson with 4th.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Sorry, D&D is dead to me after 4th edition and Eberron. It's all well and good to experiment with different ideas for designing a game, but ruining a franchise dating back to the 70s isn't the way to do it. They should have maintained some continuity with previous versions of D&D and put their healing surges in some other game.

The only way they will get my attention again is to recant their heretical beliefs about game design and release a non action, non MMO, non facebook CRPG. That's not going to happen.

 

[Spectacle]

It's kinda strange, that for all the talk of D&D 4E being too similar to video games, there hasn't been a single worthwhile CRPG released based on it. Games based 1st, 2nd and 3rd ed all have their place among classic PC games...