D&D 5th Edition

Just by way of personal history, I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons in one form or another since about 1981. I've played other roleplaying games in that time of course, though none have held my interest or endured real life nearly as long as D&D. Science fiction roleplaying games still hold some allure, but I have always come back to fantasy roleplaying specifically and to D&D as my system of choice.

I started playing with AD&D and migrated through each edition of the game, albeit with growing unrest at the dying company producing my particular brand of fun. I also avoided huge swaths of undesirable product, mostly crappy game worlds and soft cover supplements. Yet I remained loyal to the brand and the system itself, even as dumb marketeers grew more and more out of touch with customer desires and out of depth as computer technology also advanced. Some of this is of course hindsight.

My original gaming friends have long since moved on, having become 'normals' whereas gaming has become a lifestyle for me. I now have about thirty years worth of experience as a customer and nearly as long as an amateur designer, since anyone wearing the mantle of game master must of necessity delve into design. No version of any roleplaying game is ever really complete, covering every possible situation or physics problem. I now run the Pathfinder RPG, which is without doubt the legitimate child of D&D.

I can honestly say that the recent 5E announcement and the various optimistic knee jerk reactions to it pretty much sicken me. Why anyone would trust Wizards of the Coast to produce yet another iteration of D&D is absolutely beyond me and I've seen a lot of shit happen. The only conclusion I can come to is that American consumers must have far more money to burn than I do. Were I a 4E consumer, I would be absolutely livid. I'd be angry with myself, for having been duped into filling my bookshelves with absolute drivel, and with the company for engendering the epic fail of the D&D brand. Trust is the issue here though, not money.

I comes as no real surprise that Wizards of the Coast plans to use open play-testing to develop the next version of D&D. This is of course the model Paizo followed in developing the Pathfinder RPG from the D20 system OGL. According to some, including the CEO of Paizo herself, Lisa Stevens, it's outselling D&D. The trend shows no signs of abating since Paizo is doing everything in its power to lead the industry and, more far importantly, please its customers. Imagine that? Paizo has been making the right moves for years now, partnering with all the right companies, and most recently expanding into areas most gamers love, plastic painted miniatures, comic books, novels and even online gaming. Paizo is literally path-finding. So I can't for the life of me understand why anyone would continue to trust Wizards of the Coast to produce anything but another bastardization of the D&D brand.