D&D has a messaging problem that goes beyond the OGL controversy

Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast kicked off 2023 with a series of disturbing controversies. In January, an early draft of the Open Gaming License (OGL), an edict intended to impose new restrictions on third-party content, was leaked, sparking an open revolt from its most vocal fans. Then, in April, it was revealed that its parent company, Hasbro, has a long-term relationship with the Pinkertons, a private security company with a legendary history of violence. As a result, consumer confidence has taken a dive, hurting a decade of hard-won goodwill for the oft-stigmatized table-top role-playing game.

Turns out D&D’s missteps go back even further. In August 2022, the team mistakenly renamed the next version of its groundbreaking role-playing game as One D&D. It even commissioned a new logo that was introduced with a lavish video reveal. But One D&D was never intended to be the franchise’s new name, representatives told Polygon. It’s still just called “Dungeons & Dragons,” and earlier this month at a private press briefing in Seattle (before which Polygon declined Hasbro’s travel and lodging lodging offer), marketers and developers alike attempted to correct course.

“[The design] team never called it that. […] They have code names,” Nathan Stewart, vice president of marketing, said in a group interview. “And so from our point of view [One D&D represented] what they were doing plus it was the things that we saw the D&D Beyond team doing for access and accessibility in terms of the digital and physical being more integrated [as well as the in-development virtual tabletop].”

Stewart was referring to parent company Hasbro’s recent acquisition of D&D Beyond, the officially licensed digital toolset for the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, since it was launched just over a year ago, it has become the main point of contact for consumers wanting to learn more about the D&D brand. It has also slowly helped consumers get used to buying physical books to receive 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 all have to put the player first and think from the player’s point of view. […] One D&D was actually 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 the company has now spent nearly two years looking for what should be called the next “iteration” of Dungeons & Dragons – a revision that was officially teased in early 2022, and now scheduled 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 traditionally include new versions of the game’s three core rulebooks: the Player’s Handbookthe Dungeon Master guideand the Monstrous manual. Wizards confirmed that fans will also get updated versions of those three books next year.

What they don’t get is a 6th edition of D&D.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

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

That editions – those new ones versions of D&D — have always been difficult for the larger D&D community. People like to keep using the rules they’re familiar with, and with each new edition of the game, Wizards has left behind a significant portion of its player base. For a ready-made example, look no further than the transition to fourth edition that took place in the early 2000s. The transition from D&D 3.5 to fourth edition was a straight-up break with almost nothing but shared knowledge between the two systems. That massive change greatly splintered the player base, creating Paizo’s scout and other emerging competitors. The fact that the 4th Edition played more like a miniature tabletop game than a traditional RPG didn’t help matters at all, but the damage to the larger brand was only fully reversed when the 5th Edition’s popularity predated the COVID-19 outbreak. pandemic increased enormously.

For those reasons, Wizards said, 5th Edition is here to stay… even though the core rules change.

“We are releasing new editions of the booksCrawford emphasized. “We are not releasing a new edition of the game. And so, I think, a very important distinction is — that it’s still 5th edition, but yes, we’re putting out revised versions of the books, which would be called new editions anywhere else in the publishing world.

So the proposed solution to differentiate between the 5th edition and what comes after? To add the year of publication to the end of core rulebook names. That way, Wizards said, there will be one in the future Player’s Handbook (2014) and one is coming too Player’s Handbook (2024). While they’re fundamentally different books, Crawford said, they can both be used to play the same game. And, most importantly, they will both be compatible with any other 5th edition book that has come out before.

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