D&D’s big 6th edition revision has a problem that goes beyond the OGL

Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast kicked off 2023 with a series of troubling controversies. The leak in January of an unfinished draft of the Open Gaming License, an edict intended to place new restrictions on content from third parties, led to open rebellion by some of its loudest fans. In April it was discovered that Hasbro’s parent company has had a relationship for many years with Pinkertons, an American private security firm with a history of violent crimes. Consumer sentiment is down, resulting in a loss of a decade’s worth of goodwill that the tabletop roleplaying game has earned.

Turns out that D&D’s missteps go back even further. In August 2022 the team inadvertently rebranded its seminal role-playing game’s next version to One D&D. Even a lavishly produced video was used to reveal the new logo. But One D&D was never meant to become the new name of the franchise, representatives told Polygon. It’s still just called “Dungeons & Dragons,” and earlier this month during a private press briefing in Seattle (for which Polygon declined Hasbro’s offer for travel and lodging accommodations) marketers and developers alike attempted to course-correct.

Wizards of the Coast

“[The design]Team never used that term. […] They’ve got codenames,” said Nathan Stewart, vice president of marketing, said in a group interview. “And so from our standpoint [One D&D represented] what they were doing, plus it was the things we were seeing the D&D Beyond team do for access and accessibility related to the digital and physical being more integrated [as well as the in-development virtual tabletop].”

Stewart was referencing parent company Hasbro’s recent acquisition of D&D BeyondThe officially licensed digital toolset for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Since it was brought into the fold a little over a year ago, it’s effectively become the primary point of contact for consumers who want to learn more about the D&D brand. It’s also slowly helped to acclimate consumers used to purchasing physical books to receiving their new monsters and magical items digitally as well. One D&D branding was intended to ease that transition.

“We don’t care if it’s a book, if it’s a virtual tabletop, if it’s a digital download,” Stewart said. “They should all put the player at the center and think about things from the player’s point of view. […] One D&D was really more of a marching cry towards that.”

So what about ‘6th edition D&D’?

Part of the reason for the confusion over the One D&D branding is that for the better part of two years now, the company has been casting about for what to call that next “iteration” of Dungeons & Dragons — a revision that was officially teased in early 2022, and which is now slated for release in 2024.

Since its inception, Dungeons & Dragons has been released in a new edition every few years — first edition, second edition, third, then 3.5, fourth edition and in 2014, 5th. Those new editions have traditionally included new versions of the game’s three core rulebooks — the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s GuideAnd the Monster Manual. Wizards announced that fans can expect to receive updated editions of the three novels next year.

What they won’t be getting is a 6th edition of D&D.

Wizards of the Coast

“One of the reasons why this word ‘edition’ is loaded is currently it has two different meanings,” said Wizards’ game design architect Jeremy Crawford at the event. “In broader publishing, edition is a pretty neutral term that simply means ‘a new version of the book.’ Now, in D&D the term has over the years gained much greater weight, because the term also came to mean a new version of the game.”

Then editions — those new Versions of D&D — have always been fractious for the larger D&D community. Folks like to keep using the rules that they’re familiar with, and with every new edition of the game Wizards has left a significant portion of its player base behind. You can see this in the change from D&D 3.5 to the fourth edition, which took place early 2000s. The transition from D&D 3.5 to fourth edition was a clean break with almost nothing but lore shared between the two systems. That huge change greatly splintered the player base, giving rise to Paizo’s Pathfinder And other new competitors. The fact that fourth edition played more like a tabletop miniatures game than a traditional RPG didn’t help matters at all, but the damage to the larger brand was not fully undone until 5th edition’s incredible surge in popularity prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wizards has stated that 5th Edition will remain in place despite the fact its rules are being revised.

“We are releasing new editions of The books,” Crawford emphasized. “We are not releasing a new edition of The game. And so that, I think, is a really important distinction — that it is still 5th edition, but yes, we are releasing revised versions of the books, which anywhere else in the publishing world would be called new editions.”

What is the proposed solution to distinguish between the 5th Edition and whatever comes after? To append the year of publication to the end of the core rulebooks’ names. Wizards explained that going forward, there would be a Player’s Handbook2014 will be the year of both a Player’s Handbook (2024). Crawford explained that while they are two fundamentally distinct books, they could both be used in the same way. They will also be compatible with all previous 5th Edition books.

“The other books aren’t changing,” Crawford said. “These are new versions of these three books. It’s the same game.”