All that was old . . .

Good morning, friends,

I have news of some portent for you this morning. A new edition of D&D is in the pipe. You can learn more from the wizard's mouth here.

There is also an articles in The New York Times.

It is evident from reading the articles that WotC is taking a page from the open playtest playbook, used to such great affect by Pathfinder. It also seems evident that they intend to go back to the "toolkit" roots of the game. Love 3E and 4E or hate them, there are certain unavoidable truths about them. 3E attempted to enable diversity among characters with an idea that looked good on paper. That edition's rules for multi classing and prestige classes originally struck me as very cool. In play, however, they battered the gates of reason allowing a flood of munchkins. I also believe that such a tightly woven rules set, where virtually every contingency is spelled out, further opens the doors for munchkins. Because, really, what is a rules lawyer, but a munchkin with a better vocabulary?

4E was awesome, IF you played its game. Stray too far from the RAW at your own peril. One of my chief issues with 4E was the herculean effort it took to create new classes. As you may know, I'm a fan of a small number of basic classes, role-played as "ranger", "illusionist", whatever. But, that was rendered almost impossible in both editions. So, creating new classes along the new model, in order to personalize the game to the world, was almost impossible in 4E. It wasn't nearly so difficult in 3.x. There were numerous examples of using prestige classes to good effect to bring certain aspects of a campaign to life.

There was another thing that I took away from the article. It seems that with 3E and 4E the keys to the game were given to the players. Sure, there were improved stat blocks and new encounter paradigms, but the players were the clear focus. The DM became less of a Master and more of a Moderator. The game didn't belong to him anymore, it belonged to the rules, and to the players' interface with those rules, the characters. It became less an exercise in collective story telling and more about the DM entertaining a table full of players. Players, by the way, that were empowered to tell the DM he wasn't entertaining them properly if they caught him in a rules faux-pas.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I always look forward to a new edition, at least on the run-up, I'm an edition whore, after all. If they can put more of the game back into the DM's hands, and make it more of a toolkit, it should be pretty exciting. By the way, if you follow the Wizard's link above, you can sign up for the open playtest. Make your voice heard. Power to the people.