Friday, December 20, 2013

New D&D Officially "Next Summer"


Other good things about summer
There's a nice broad range for you. I'm guessing Gen Con or right before Gen Con.

Press release, En World comments etc. here.

Notable line:

Players will be immersed in rich storytelling experiences across multiple gaming platforms as they face off against the most fearsome monster of all time.

Say what? Vecna? Tharizdun? The Tarrasque? Typos? Overly corporate cross-platform-marketing-schemes?

The Winter Fantasy con is in February and I expect we'll see some actual dates announced there.

My take is ... I don't know ... there were things I liked in Next and things I didn't it's difficult to tell from all the versions of the rules we saw, plus their weekly Q&A, plus various interviews, what we're really going to get when the dust settles.   I'm having a hard time getting excited about it. Just not that amped-up at the prospect of buying the PHB-DMG-MM all over again, not to mention the inevitable fighter book, wizard book, Forgotten Realms book, Eberron book, special combat rules book, and all the rest. The editions may change, but the marketing plan does not.

Between the 4th Edition stuff I still have to finish, the Pathfinder stuff I am running, and the occasional foray into Labyrinth Lord I'm going to need more than "Hey it's new D&D" to get energized about this one.

2 comments:

thekelvingreen said...

I've never been a fan of the Three Core Books publication history of (A)D&D so I'm sort of hoping they do a Cyclopaedia-type single volume for the new edition. I don't think they will, but I hope they do; I know the playtest was the barest bones of the game but there didn't seem enough material to fill three 200-page hardbacks, even with padding.

Adam Dickstein said...

While not a D&D fan, I actually always liked the Player's Handbook, GM's Handbook, Opponents Catalog trinity. I wish more games would have done things that way.

Over the years I've had this reoccurring dream that I owned a version of Star Frontiers that consisted of three hardcovers of a similar style. I so wish they had been real. The Alien Manual is really cool looking...in my head.