It’s true. Monte Cook kicked me in the jimmies today. It happened, plain as day, in the most recent Legends & Lore column. Cook wrote:
… it would be difficult to imagine that THAC0 would make a comeback.
And I drop to my knees, hands clenched around my privates. I glance forlornly at the sidebar of my blog, where THAC0 tops my “Wants” list, and I cry silently to myself.
Just thought it might be fun to compile some of the conversations I’ve been having over at the DnDNext forums recently. I have to say, the quality of conversation is improving a bit since WotC started really cracking down on edition wars. Anyway, here’s some of the things we’ve been discussing this week:
First there was the big news: there was going to be a new edition of D&D. It was followed by the expected cheers of joy, nerd rage, rampant speculation, and edition wars. Then DDXP came, and we all combed the transcripts and Twitter feeds for any and every morsel of concrete 5E information.
Now here we are a month out from the announcement and … um.
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of burned out by the anticipation. I’m tired of “This is what 5E should do” threads in the forums, because they feel rather pointless. I’ve read and reread the same vague, crunch-less reviews of the DDXP playtests over and over, jonesing for a sense of the rules. I’ve started planning out what I want my first campaign and first adventure to be when I finally get ahold of the playtest rules. I’ve revisited old rulebooks, dusted off old campaign settings, and even re-copied an old character sheet that had gotten damaged in storage.
I totally get why WotC announced this so early, but the wait is becoming unbearable. I think part of it is knowing that there’s been a playable mock-up out there, that people have gotten to play it, and I couldn’t be more jealous. I want to play, too!
It’s also frustrating because those play testers have been so thoroughly tight-lipped. Seriously? Not a single DDXP playtester has broken ranks, created an anonymous Blogspot account, and posted mechanical details about the game? Spell lists for the wizard? Feat descriptions for the fighter? No one was able to sneak a snapshot of a character sheet with their smartphone?! You should all have your nerd cards revoked! This is the Internet; shit needs to leak.
WotC said at DDXP that the playtest would begin “sometime in the Spring”. It’s gonna be a long winter.
Prior to the announcement of 5E, I hdn’t played a tabletop RPG since March 2010, when the 4E PHB 3 came out and I said “Okay, enough is enough.” I threw myself into tabletop wargaming and MMORPGs, and I hadn’t gone looking for an RPG group since.
But the 5E thing has really rekindled my need to play a tabletop RPG again. I’ve been pulling my old books out, rereading the original RAVENLOFT boxed set, and pouring over character sheets spanning four different editions of the game (2nd ed. 3.0, 3.5, and 4.0). My plan was to simply sit on my cravings until the public playtest, at which point I was going to put together a group and go to town.
But then I went to game night this weekend, and my Malifaux game didn’t materialize. What was materializing, however, was a table of X-Crawl, the dungeon crawl cum bloodsport subsetting for Pathfinder/d20 3.5. And they needed more players.
One thing I’ve been vocal about as we head for the 5E public playtest is the need for D&D 5E to be rooted in the 21st century. In other words, for any version of D&D to come out and thrive in 2012 (or 2013, or 2014, depending on whom you ask) it needs to embrace digital delivery and digital technology.
So far, a lot of the conversation about D&D and digital has centered on PDFs. But I’ve also been thinking about something else: smartphones and other mobile devices. And this morning, I saw something that really got my imagination about Digital D&D absolutely churning.
Of all the discussions I’ve seen around 5E, one that seems to irk people more than most is the question of alignment. Opinions generally fall into three camps when it comes to “Core” 5E:
I am firmly part of Camp #1, though when I discussed alignment before, I wasn’t ready to go so far as to predict that the old 9 alignment system would be making a comeback. One of the reasons I am firmly in Camp #1 on this is because, in matters of 5E, I find myself trending towards nostalgia and a return to “the way things used to be.” But I’m also in Camp #1 because, as the 5E designers have said numerous times, 5E is supposed to be about the essence of D&D. And alignment is not only quintessentially D&D; it’s also part of the collective cultural zeitgeist. Continue reading »
All this talk of 5E [or DnD Next -- is it time for me to make the switch?] and how its going to basically make old stuff playable again, made me keen to dig out all my old D&D material. So I went looking for it …
… and remembered that I’d sold a bunch of it off seven years ago when I was between jobs and needed cash. EPIC FAIL!
Not everything. I kept a core of 3E stuff that I used regularly to play, and some of my favorite stuff from 2E. But a good bulk of my Ravenloft and Greyhawk collections went up on eBay to help me pay the rent one lean summer, along with some other assorted 2E and 3E stuff.
“No sweat,” I thought, “I’ll just grab some of it off of eBay!” So I headed over, did some searching, and …
Holy crap, the price of old D&D stuff is high right now!
I don’t remember selling some of this stuff for anywhere near the prices I’m seeing for some of it. $60 for the original Ravenloft Box Set? $50 for Forbidden Lore? $35 for the S&S 3rd Edition Ravenloft book?$20 for the Greyahwk: The Adventure Begins book?!
I’m wondering if the rise of 5E isn’t starting to cause a bit of upsurge in demand for this old stuff. Or am I just out of the loop, and demand for the old stuff has been on the rise since 2008?
Yeesh, I gotta go figure out my budget …
“New Coke.” It’s a classic blunder so resonant that I can reference it in a blog 27 years later and still know that most people will “get it.”
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, the Wikipedia page is surprisingly robust. Also — and I was a bit surprised by this — Coca-Cola has their own page on New Coke, where they try to put the best spin on it that they possibly can. For those of you who believe firmly in TL;DR, here’s a brief version of events.
[Don't worry, this is relevant to D&D; just bear with me.] Continue reading »
So apparently, sometime during DDXP 2012, Baldman Games quietly announced that next year, DDXP would be called … Winter Fantasy.
As you may recall, the wintertime con in the Midwest (most commonly held in Fort Wayne, IN, though it moved around sometimes) used to be called Winter Fantasy back in the day. But after the launch of 4E in 2008, WotC took over the event and made it into DDXP. So for four years — the life cycle of 4E, more or less — WF was instead the D&D-only DDXP.
And now that DDXP has come and gone, and 4E got that 5E-shaped knife in its back … the con will return to being good ol’ Winter Fantasy again.
When all is said and done, will there be ANY part of 4E that WotC doesn’t roll back?
The Sunday 5E Seminar on “Reimagining Skills and Ability Scores” was an absolute treasure trove of crunchy goodness!
Apparently, no one has told Monte Cook, Bruce Cordell, or Robert Schwab yet that no one has actually been sharing details of the 5E playtest online, because they seemed to be talking as if we’ve all been privy to the details of the 5E playtest. But there was enough context to understand most of what they said. And I liked a lot of what I heard. Here’s the stuff that stood out to me the most. Continue reading »
