NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6090559" data-attributes="member: 6680772">I've mentioned this before, but it seems to me that DDN is being designed to complement all other editions, not replace them.Heretofore, the basic WotC model has been "New edition totally replaces old edition", without even easy conversion.  I'm not exactly sure why they chose that model, except that perhaps they thought people would happily buy an entire new library of core rules, splats, and adventures, and that would make them the most money.  But 5e is not about that.  They have the reprints now of every major edition save Classic D&D, and something's probably coming out there.  They've re-released their entire library of PDFs, and are going to be reprinting certain historical products.  WotC is essentially allowing, nay, encouraging every other edition to compete with the new one.If 5e were a total stand-alone edition, a la 3e or 4e, this would be pretty stupid from a business standpoint.  But 5e is not being designed like that.  Nor is it being designed to re-create older editions (which I gather some people were expecting).  Instead, it's being designed to flexibly emulate different editions, and permutations thereof.  And what this does is allow them to maximize the potential of their entire product history.So let's say you're a fan of B/X.  WotC can come out with pdfs for you, but if their only new product is 4e adventures, you're SOL unless you really like extensive conversions.  But now they come out with Next.  Next can be configured to run a very rules-light, B/X-like game.  They can create adventures for that, with a much lighter conversion load to B/X, and then sell that to players of both Next and B/X.It's harder to see with, say, 4e because the game is far from finished.  But conceivably they could put out an adventure that designed around a granular tactical combat module, characters with more healing options and HP.  And such an adventure might appeal to those who've made the jump to Next, but also quite easily be converted to 4e.  So even if a 4e fan has no desire to switch over to Next, his preferred edition is still getting support.And in the meantime, by flipping some switches and adjusting some dials, a Next group that prefers a 4e-ish type game can take that B/X style adventure and use it for their group.  The B/X-style Next players can take the 4e-style adventure and use it in their group.  Essentially Next gives them an adjustable benchmark for which they can create products used by a variety of players of different editions.  PDFs and print-on-demand lets them provide older product without costly overhead.  Webtools allow them to provide easy-access conversion rules.  They can build on the Monster Builder to create a creature converter that lets you take a Basic monster and turn them into a monster that better fits Standard or Advanced rules, or vice versa.  Next and their online tools suite allows them to support all editions in a way that was never before possible.</blockquote>

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