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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 6236638" data-attributes="member: 59082">Its more facetious than cynical!I hear you, but its hard to imagine that there won't be further new editions of D&D. It is part of D&D custom to tinker with, house rule, and change the rules. While its nice to think of a simple core that could remain unchanging, I just don't see it. Now maybe WotC can get a few more years out of 5e than they did with 4e. If you think about it, 4e was really only active for less than four years (summer, 2008 to winter 2012), about half that of 3e.  1e was 12 years (1977-89), 2e was 11 years (1989-2000), and 3e 8 years (2000-08), with 4e by far the shortest. I'm guessing they hope to get if not 11-12 years, then 7-9 years. But who knows.The other part of this is if they are able to create a core game that can see minor edition changes, like 1e to 2e. When you played 2e you could still use a lot of 1e product fairly easily. This become more difficult with 3e and 4e being an even further departure. If they are really lucky (or crafty) then they can do minor updates and revisions and still call it "D&D." Yes. This is similar to what I was saying about D&D, as a tabletop RPG, being a loss-leader for the entire franchise. It could be a perfectly viable business decision for the folks at Hasbro to say "We don't need to make a profit on D&D the RPG, as long as we are making a ton on multimedia."Some good speculations there, but they're just that: speculations. What we do actually know is that the game is being released in 6-8 months or, if we want to be technical about it, 6-9 months as summer ends in late September. But I think it likely that we're talking GenCon or a month or two before.How close to finished does the game have to be for it be on your FLGS in 6-8 months? Pretty close to done. As I've said before, the bulk of the text, layout, and art could be 95% done even if the rules were 70-80% done. Most of the text is explanatory and fluff. Where I would speculate tweaking might still be occurring is in the math - a little too loose here, a little too tight there. But again, to make that 6-8 month deadline, the game really has to be off to the printers by February or March - maybe sooner (in another thread I think the low-end numbers were 3-4 months turnaround from off-to-the-printers to on-the-shelves). So we're talking about maybe a couple months of further tweaking.All that said, I can't help but feel that WotC wouldn't have announced this unless they were absolutely certain they could have a finished - and polished - product to us in the summer. They could have waited another month or so to announce but they must have reached a point where they felt confident enough in their progress to announce. For me this point is "almost done with just a few tweaks" not "a mad scramble to finish the rules."See above. I rally don't think they would have announced in mid-December unless they were very confident that they could pull it off. This leads me to believe that either 1) They're a lot further along than you think, and/or 2) they're going to hold off on publishing a lot of the sub-systems and modules until "Player's Handbook 2: Gonzo Munchkins & Kewl Powerz." So this would be my prediction for a main reason that people will be disappointed with the summer release: it doesn't include their modular option of choice. My guess is that we'll get the core rules and maybe some gently implied modules, like "how to play with a battlemat," maybe skills, and options within classes and such. But we won't get 3e-style detailed customization or 4e-style powers and tactical combat. Or maybe we will, but it will be the "basic" version.This is probably as it should be. Later on they can release Gonzo Munchkins and Kewl Powerz and any other number of modules. To be honest, I want a minimum of that in the core rulebooks; I'd rather see a nice array of a dozen classes with a few sub-classes and half dozen races with sub-races. The core should be core - that is, what is core to the D&D multiverse. I'd love to see a later book cover 4e-style powers and alternate rules, but not in the first Player's Handbook.But that's just me! But I think the point is that it is easier to go forward into complexity from simplicity, than to start off complex.</blockquote>

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