Next Edition of Dungeons & Dragons Announced
By ALLTheDinos 9 Comments
In case you missed it, Wizards of the Coast announced a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons today, with a preliminary release date of 2024. As with 5th Edition, they've started a playtesting process, which you can find out more about in that link. I participated in the previous playtest and was pretty confused by the early form of 5e (which attempted to go by the name "D&D Next"). This one seems a lot more like an expansion than a reinvention of previous editions, as they've done with 3e, 4e, and 5e. I've been extremely satisfied with 5e (to the point where it's now my favorite edition of the game), so I'm not exactly in any hurry to purchase a bunch of new books. However, the long lead time and integration into existing game architecture is pretty promising.
Scrolling through the 21-page document they provided as the first part of the playtest, it really does look like any of the Unearthed Arcana online supplements WotC has steadily unveiled over the last 8 years. The biggest changes appear to be the return of feats as a key part of character creation (and giving them levels), moving the ability score bonuses from a racial to a background perk, restructuring magic into sources (like in 4e) rather than class-specific lists, and formally incorporating a lot of rules present in nearly every game actually played. Of course the playtest materials are limited to level 1 impacts, and even then just to races and backgrounds. You can't use this material to start a campaign, but you could certainly use it as the framework if you wanted to homebrew a system.
Overall, it seems like an interesting though not unexpected development. I had wondered if they'd attempt to incorporate a lot more elements of smaller TTRPGs, but with D&D still accounting for more than half of all Roll20 games, why fix what isn't broken? Interested to see what others think about this announcement, and if anyone else is checking out the playtest at this time.
9 Comments