D&D 5E The Real Question About 5th Edition

[mcmillan]

While I can't seem to find it right now, I seem to remember seeing somewhere Rich Burlew making pretty much this exact point in response to this question about why he wasn't intending to explicitly switch to 4e.

Found the news post from when 5e was announced, which links to his earlier 4e comments(scroll to Jan 12) .

Just so I can get ahead of this thing and not be dodging this question for a year and a half like I did when 4th Edition was announced: No, I won't.

The reason I can say that with confidence is that my decision has nothing to do with the content of that still-unwritten ruleset. Everything I said about my decision not to make a wholesale switch to 4th Edition still stands: It would be an enormous amount of exposition for very little benefit, and it would likely change some of the characters in ways that would be difficult to reconcile with the story I've been planning. Further, this story is now three and a half years closer to its conclusion than it was when 4E was released, and it will be yet another year and a half before these new rules are widely available. The halfway point of OOTS is in the rearview mirror, and at a certain point, it just becomes an issue of not changing horses midstream (or at the very least, dancing with who brought you).


Plus I barely even reference the 3.5 rules anymore, using them just to determine what sort of spells or class abilities a character might have and then ignoring them the rest of the time. I'm certainly not looking to drive this narrative backwards to a point where I'm more chained to a ruleset over which I have no control. No, as an author, I'm more interested in deciding what happens in my world than I am in ceding that power to others.

 

[TDarien]

I'm really hoping that Rich will do something like this again. He's not going to switch to the new edition, but I hope he pays homage to it in some way.

Note: he may have already done this; I've not kept up in my reading.

 

[n00bdragon]

If anyone hadn't noticed OOTS isn't really beholden to the rules of the game, not 3.0 or 3.5 or anything else. It's a comic strip. Things happen because they are dramatic or funny, not because the rules of some third party game allow them. I'm sure if Mr. Burlew came up with a 4e joke that was just too good to pass up things would just be 4e for just long enough to tell it and then go right back to normal. So it will be with 5e, or 2e, or basic, or Dungeon World, or Pathfinder, or GURPS, or what have you (I'm pretty sure I've seen at least one World of Darkness joke in that strip though I couldn't be arsed to cite it for the life of me).

Besides, the strip is coming to an end soon anyway.