Audio EXP: #162 – One D&D announced as WotC takes Dungeons & Dragons after computer games and out of edition wars

Welcome home.

This is Audio EXP for the 20th of August 2022, and the title of this episode is “One D&D announced as WotC takes Dungeons & Dragons after computer games and out of edition wars”.

[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #162]

[Also on Stitcher | Spotify | Apple | Google]

Izegrim Creations is in the spotlight this month, as voted for by Patreons.

The interview with Rod Waibel of Izegrim is live on the site. You can find links from the show notes and transcript.

I asked Rod what he thinks makes for a good RPG, and I think he has an unexpected answer, but not a silly one. Rod believes the main thing is that the writer enjoyed writing it. Why? The quality will show through if they have.

I wonder if the Wizards of the Coast team have enjoyed working on the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons so far? That’s not D&D 6e but One D&D, which was announced this week along with the official playtesting.

We’ll talk about that in just a bit but before I forget, let me remind you that there will be no podcast next week, and that’s the first time in over three years.

Why not? I’m out from Friday to late Sunday at a gaming convention in the heart of Scotland. It’s Tabletop Scotland, and while I’ll have my old Microsoft Surface with me, a few nights alone in a hotel room, I won’t have a microphone.

However, I want to see what, if anything, I can do live during the weekend and with the stuck-in soft-launch Geek Native Discord in mind. Expect pictures, at the very least, down the Events channel.

I’m looking forward to it; for the last two weeks, I’ve been doing both Geek Native during ZineQuest and Gen Con, and my Edinburgh blog during the festival season, and I’ve been back at work this week. I’m shattered.

Yeah, so, Wizards of the Coast will announce their big news. I fed it into AI to try and summarise it but it just warped the words a little.

Here’s my distil.

The next edition is One D&D. It’ll be backwards compatible. It will be a tidy-up and will expand the game. The game will expand with options, and I take this to include better and improved diversity. It will also broaden digitally, and D&D Beyond, for which Wizards of the Coast paid many millions, gets a big part.

One crucial and likely to be a very popular aspect of D&D Beyond’s new central role is physical and digital book bundles. We might be paying more for each book, but we won’t have to buy separate game instances and will likely save money.

D&D will also have its own official digital play area, and Roll20 and Fantasy Grounds will have seen this coming.

Dragonlance is coming too, as we knew, with Shadow of the Dragon Queen on pre-order from November.

The next five D&D books have also been announced, and they are;

• Q1 2023 – Keys from the Golden Vault
• Q2 2023 – Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants
• Q3 2023 – The Book of Many Things
• Q3 2023 – “Phandelver Campaign”
• Q4 2023 – “Planescape”

I’ve actually managed to swap emails with a new PR agency contact for Wizards in the UK. Whether this leads to anything helpful remains to be seen, but I’ll try my best.

I also aspire to dig into some further thoughts on One D&D but don’t want to add too much to the echo chamber of speculation.

Right now, though, I will say that the naming convention is akin to the trend we see in computer games. One D&D is a very different name from D&D 6th edition.

Wizards want to move gamers onto a subscription model and do away with the start buying/stop buying cycle of editions. There shouldn’t be a D&D 7e because D&D 6e should be infinite.

That’s why Xbox got out of numbers fairly early and even used the same tactic with the use of ‘One’ in the brand. Destiny 2, the computer game, is likely to be Destiny 2 forever until Bungie can just drop the 2.

I think it’s a good move, I suspect some old-school collectors might feel a bit frustrated if they ever notice, but I think it’s more important to keep the economics of the game healthy and the community of players engaged.

Confidently, D&D got the most buzz this week but I don’t actually think it was the big news. Why not? Well, for a start, we already knew a new D&D was coming. What else did we learn? Sure, we learnt some stuff, but not a whole load more.

In contrast, this next bit of news is already connected to some of the most impactful RPG headlines of recent years. It’s Lord of the Rings.

The Saul Zaentz Company had the rights to pretty much everything Lord of the Rings related except the print books they’ve sold. Games Workshop has the war game rights, Amazon the TV and Sophisticated Games the tabletop rights, but all through The Saul Zaentz.

So, who are the new owners? It’s a Swedish computer game giant called Embracer. Weta and Take-Two just announced a new Lord of the Rings computer game, but it’s easy to speculate it’ll be one of the many Embracer studios that makes the next announcement.

Embracer also owns Dark Horse, so I imagine we might see Middle-earth comic books.

Embracer owns Fantasy Flight Games and other tabletop model makers, so I’m sure Games Workshop have already forecast the loss of the license from their future plans.

Embracer owns Edge Studio, the company that publishes the Star Wars roleplaying game, well, in theory, and Legend of the Five Rings. What does this mean for Sophisticated Games and Free League Publishing? I guess time will tell.

There are many associations and speculation, and the next bit of news is the opposite.

A small publisher called Wizard Tower Games is keen not to get caught up in TSR’s drama and insists they’ve nothing to do with the forthcoming Dungeon Crawl from the unpopular company.

By TSR, I don’t mean the original TSR, but one who bought some claim to the name on the basis they did not know any other game maker using the name. They’re currently in court with Wizards of the Coast; bizarrely, it was a fight they started.

I’ve seen the Wizard Tower Games logo on TSR and Dungeon Museum stuff before, so maybe there was a relationship in the past, but Wizard Tower Games say there is none now.

Recent communications from TSR seem to say there is, but these have been blamed by TSR on their accounts being hacked. It’s a familiar excuse.

Flipping to the other side of the business, Wyrmworks has released a small but effective teaser of Limitless Heroics called ADHD Preview, which previews their ADHD rules.

Needless to say, you don’t have to use these. If these rules don’t feel realistic in a fantasy world with two-headed trolls, then that’s okay. However, if you are curious, or want a game in which you can see heroes similar to yourself, then they’re there to look at.

First Contacts have also been published. This is the seventh in the free Brief series for Star Trek Adventures the RPG.

It’s surprising, in hindsight, that we’ve gone so long with an official Star Trek game without a first contact expansion. But, there we are.

Before we get onto the bundle deals, as it’s nearly midnight and I need to wrap, there’s a whole series of Scion quick reference guides from Riley Ponton.

This Scion fan has been kindly compiling rules across the primary rulebooks into single Storypath Nexus supplements and making all that hard work available for free. It’s kind and cool.

In the Bundle of Holding, there’s a Treasure Trove of indie RPGs like Girl Underground, Hunt the Wicked and Mage to Order. It’s a good deal.

There’s also a deal on a game I hadn’t heard of before from Wet Ink Games called Never Going Home and it’s about demons invading the Battle of the Somme and offering corrupting power to soldiers.

Over at Humble, there’s a deal from The MIT Press of books about game design, theory and history.

Lastly, Paizo has hundreds of dollars worth of Pathfinder 2e titles on Humble, with a cut of the money going to charity.

On that note, beware the witching hour and see you next week after next. If you’re at Tabletop Scotland, track me down, you say hello, and I’ll buy you a beer.