Although I started playing role playing games in high school, I was never all that fond of the original Dungeons & Dragons rule set. I tried several other rule sets, but ended up “rolling my own” based on a simple combat and magic ruleset from Steve Jackson Games Metagaming (The Fantasy Trip, based on the Melee and Wizard hex-and-counter minigames). I worked at one of the biggest gaming stores in Canada at the time, so I had lots of access to RPG resources. What mattered to me was the role-playing, not the ultra-fine distinctions between different kinds of pole-arms.
Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the D&D franchise, are struggling to make the game relevant again:
True believers have lost faith. Factions squabble. The enemies are not only massed at the gates of the kingdom, but they have also broken through.
This may sound like the back story for an epic trilogy. Instead, it’s the situation faced by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, the venerable fantasy role-playing game many consider to be the grandfather of the video game industry. Gamers bicker over Dungeons & Dragons rules. Some have left childhood pursuits behind. And others have spurned an old-fashioned, tabletop fantasy role-playing game for shiny electronic competitors like World of Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls.
But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, announced that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.
