WotC James Wyatt is on the Dungeons & Dragons Team Again

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I came into the game with 3.x in the mid-Aughts during College, and we were slippery about whether the game was 3.0 or 3.5. I honestly suspect in hindsight that my friends were still importing 2E assumptions.

It's really hard not to. I've been playing since 1E, and there's lots of times I have to catch myself when I'm DMing and realize that a rule that seems clunky isn't actually a 5E rule, but just a 1E one that's refused to vacate the premises.

 

[Hatmatter]

Yeah, I hear you. That was the path Chaosium took. Every time they wrote a new RPG they just tweaked the same basic core rules, and then eventually extracted them and called it BRP. TSR interestingly avoided that path entirely, though I cannot say either company was more or less successful.

Anyway, it is just hard to build a lot of games on D&D, which assumes a very strong power curve where you start weak (almost normal human) and then ramp up to almost godlike. It works well for the genre, and maybe for GW, but imagine Call of Cthulhu where your PCs are 12th level and slaying Shuggoths and whatnot? It is definitely NOT what people play that genre to get! Or a supers game, nobody wants to start their supers game as a normal human, they're super heroes, from day one. At best they might play an 'origin story' or something. So we see that D&D, as a framework, is not all that applicable to these games.

This is also why 5e will never be extended into this sort of 'universal system'. WotC tried it with d20 Modern. The rules WORK, it is certainly quite feasible to build the mechanics, but the tone and other aspects that d20 Modern promotes are not really suitable for a lot of games. Or you have to get rid of a lot of the D&Disms, like levels (or many of their effects anyway) at which point one must question the value of the entire enterprise. So, I could imagine a

Oh, yeah, they have a lot of talent. It has been a LONG time though since WotC seemed interested in any game except D&D though. They allowed their Star Wars license to lapse and Saga was the last non-D&D RPG WotC has tried, unless you count the 4e version of GW (I guess that does count, though it was not a very ambitious effort overall). Honestly, since acquiring TSR WotC has really not done much outside of D&D. They put out d20 Modern, but didn't do a ton with it, and that was way back when at this point. Prior to that you have to go all the way back to Everway, which was a pretty interesting game in some ways but died pretty quickly.

It would be interesting to see what they could do, but I'd be very surprised if they put their own people on anything like that. I could see them perhaps farming out a property to a 3PP to do an 'official' version of something or other. Beyond that they have seemed pretty content to leave the experimenting to others.

Well, not to get bogged down when discussing making new role-playing games (given that it was an example of a larger point), I would just reiterate that I agree that I would like to see the creative folk at Wizards expand the game and the hobby and community in new directions over the next couple decades. The idea of their talent being deployed on another PHB and another DMG, etc. seems like the wyrm biting its tail to me. But, then again, I have lived through all of the edition changes. Perhaps younger players who have not are not so fatigued with purchasing books with the same titles over and over again.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, not to get bogged down when discussing making new role-playing games (given that it was an example of a larger point), I would just reiterate that I agree that I would like to see the creative folk at Wizards expand the game and the hobby and community in new directions over the next couple decades. The idea of their talent being deployed on another PHB and another DMG, etc. seems like the wyrm biting its tail to me. But, then again, I have lived through all of the edition changes. Perhaps younger players who have not are not so fatigued with purchasing books with the same titles over and over again.

Same here. I don't think 5e is particularly 'broken' or 'needs fixing' in any significant way. POSSIBLY there could be a few changes in class design philosophy, and thus details of how they work, but that wouldn't particularly need to be incompatible with anything in the game now. I mean, 5e is not my favorite, at all, but it is hard to say there's anything worth rewriting it for. Better to go on to exciting NEW stuff.

 

[JEB]

There's definitely an audience for a Nentir Vale sourcebook, including the World Axis cosmology, 4E-flavored player content and monsters that have a "bloodied" state.

I honestly didn't like 4E, to include the World Axis overwriting my beloved 2E/3E lore... but I would happily buy a Nentir Vale book with some 4E-inspired optional rules. Everyone should be able to find something for them in the current edition.

 

[Eltab]

I think it would be incredibly difficult for Hasbro/WotC to leave money on the table by not coming out with some sort of "anniversary edition" in 2024.

Something inspired by Basic D&D, using Keep on the Borderlands as the basis for its intro adventure. Middle school and high school students: get your friends together and teach yourself to play - no adults necessary !
Fully compatible with 5e rules (which are the 'advanced' version you step up into).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Something inspired by Basic D&D, using Keep on the Borderlands as the basis for its intro adventure. Middle school and high school students: get your friends together and teach yourself to play - no adults necessary !
Fully compatible with 5e rules (which are the 'advanced' version you step up into).

I think it'd be hard to beat the Starter Set in that regard, although maybe they could refresh it with the Essentials Rulebook and sturdier materials.

But I also think the larger market for anniversary swag is the existing player base. I think something beyond a starter boxed set (although, I agree, that seems likely, given the way they're rolling out multiple starter sets over the past few years) is likely.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Or, at least, that's my conspiracy theory. Not saying that the edition itself or the lore created for it is somehow lesser or undeserving because of this, just that I think that much of 4e came about because of upper management being paranoid and mucking around where they shouldn't have been. I think that the D&D creative team did the best they could with the commandments from above (even if it alienated me and others like me—water under the bridge and all).

As others have said this is a pretty wacky conspiracy theory, but at least you called it what it was. The idea that Hasbro, of all people, were so peeved by the OGL that they were doing stuff like asking for a revised setting or rules seems pretty far-fetched, to put it mildly. That there was some suggestion that the OGL had to go though seems a lot more plausible. Everything else is better explained without resort to conspiracies. Plus, there's just no way someone who used to work there at the time wouldn't have mentioned this by now, given how much 4E was discussed.

My example was simply one that suggests that there is a way that the D&D chassis could be used to develop new games with their own unique elements but that would integrate with D&D with far less difficulty then, say Call of Cthulhu would with D&D or what have you. Then, those games could leverage the success Wizards is enjoying with D&D to get the word of those new games out in ways that other companies may not be able to do.

WotC has already tried this though. Multiple times in 3E. They both had the close-to-D&D Star Wars, and d20 Modern.

The D&D chassis, and 5E is arguably worse for this than 3E or 4E, is just not good for many (if any) other genres or styles of RPG. We've seen this over and over again. Even if you went relatively narrow and made a game specifically that was less-difficult to fit to that chassis (probably planetary romance or something similar, which is not a popular genre in 2021), it's hard to see how that would make D&D more successful, rather than merely causing some small fraction of D&D's existing audience to swap to the new game.

If WotC make another pen and paper RPG, I'd expect two things from it:

1) It'd probably be Mass Effect-adjacent science fiction - i.e. science fiction but towards the more psychic powers and anti-grav exist kind of end of the scale. This very broad genre is both popular with and accessible to a large audience (including some who don't like fantasy much). They'd likely have some random concession to hard SF to make those people who love to go on about how they love hard SF and then reveal that they're massive Expanse fans (which left the realms of "hard SF" before the end of the first book/season, let alone later ones) keen on it (if I had to guess, it would be some kind of attempt to not have anti-grav despite having inertial dampers or something).

2) It'll use an entirely different system to D&D, but one very much learning from what works with 5E and other modern RPGs. I'd also expect it to be medium crunch and with significant narrative elements. By using a different system they can potentially sell even more stuff, and appeal to an audience who might not love D&D's "Levels and HP" approach (and it's those two elements which mess with D&D's ability to do most genres). I also expect they'll look at how D&D encourages longer-term engagement than some TT RPGs with the particular way levels, magic items and so on work. I don't think they'll replicate it exactly, but I'd expect a low-granularity advancement system and items/equipment that changed how characters worked and so on.

Archetype Entertainment are WotC's ex-Bioware guys (including the lead writer of ME1 and co-lead on 2) and whilst their primary goal seems to be to make a CRPG (and given they have like 28 people, that's likely 3-5 years away), I'd unsurprised if the setting, lore and perhaps most importantly art were used to also create a TT RPG based on it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Something inspired by Basic D&D, using Keep on the Borderlands as the basis for its intro adventure. Middle school and high school students: get your friends together and teach yourself to play - no adults necessary !
Fully compatible with 5e rules (which are the 'advanced' version you step up into).

I feel like you're really underestimating kids. I had an eight-year-old girl complaining to me that she couldn't get at the Spore Druid sub-class because I hadn't shared things properly on D&D Beyond, and when I was 11 I was running AD&D 2E in it's full glory and had absolutely no difficulty with RPGs of that complexity. 5E is more accessible and easier to grasp than 2E by a mile, and I think the idea that a "simplified" version would be necessary for middle/high school students is really wild.

What would benefit them, I daresay, isn't simplified rules, but rather a really kick-ass initial adventure which was extremely easy to run, and lead directly into other adventures. That's the tougher bit with D&D - running it. It would be helpful it gave the DM some choices too, like maybe really basic ones, but ones that let them customize the adventure a bit, make it their own, and thus got them thinking about how they could change or create stuff. If you just give people fully pre-built stuff a lot of them won't really learn to change it.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I feel like you're really underestimating kids. I had an eight-year-old girl complaining to me that she couldn't get at the Spore Druid sub-class because I hadn't shared things properly on D&D Beyond, and when I was 11 I was running AD&D 2E in it's full glory and had absolutely no difficulty with RPGs of that complexity. 5E is more accessible and easier to grasp than 2E by a mile, and I think the idea that a "simplified" version would be necessary for middle/high school students is really wild.

What would benefit them, I daresay, isn't simplified rules, but rather a really kick-ass initial adventure which was extremely easy to run, and lead directly into other adventures. That's the tougher bit with D&D - running it. It would be helpful it gave the DM some choices too, like maybe really basic ones, but ones that let them customize the adventure a bit, make it their own, and thus got them thinking about how they could change or create stuff. If you just give people fully pre-built stuff a lot of them won't really learn to change it.

also an proper explanation on how to do things.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As others have said this is a pretty wacky conspiracy theory,

The problem with conspiracy theories is they aint much of a conspiracy if anyone knows about them. The conspirators are clearly incompetent! The conspiracies you should be worried about are the ones that you have never heard of. Chances are all those conspiracy theories you have heard are just a smokescreen to conceal the real conspiracy.