The announcement of 5th Edition of Dungeons & Dragons has a conciliatory tone that's focused on bringing fans of all editions back into the fold. Robert Schwalb, a designer on the development team, shared how they plan to accomplish a grand unification:
"Our primary goal is to produce a rules set that speaks to every incarnation of D&D. So if you are a diehard BECMI/Rules Cyclopedia enthusiast or have embraced 4th edition, loved 2nd edition, 3rd edition, or never moved on from 1st edition, we’re creating this game for you. Imagine a game where you can play the version of D&D you love best. And then imagine everyone plays at the same table, in the same adventure. We aim to make a universal game system that lets you play the game in whatever way, whatever style, with whatever focus you want, whether you want to kick down doors and kill monsters, engage in high intrigue, intense roleplaying, or simply to immerse yourself in a shared world. We’re creating a game where the mechanics can be as complex or as light as you want them. We’re creating the game you want to play."
What might this look like? There are plenty of modular toolkit role-playing games; the Generic Universal Role-playing System (GURPS) and HERO system have already trod the same ground. It seems Dungeons & Dragons is planning to become a similar modular game, a toolkit flexible enough to accommodate any style of play.
Of course, we had this with the D20 glut of games that appeared in the past decade. The difference was that third parties were responsible for the expansion of the rules rather than Wizards of the Coast. As the role-playing game market continues to shrink, Wizards is once again interest in errant gamers. They can't afford to ignore them, both for the future of the hobby and to achieve the aforementioned goal of $50- to $100-million in annual sales.
This design philosophy means Dungeons & Dragons will likely be a skeletal framework with different "edition rules" to add on. The first and foremost of these is the elimination of a battle grid as a requirement. None of the early editions required battle maps, so it will be necessary for the game to be gridless in order to accommodate gamers who prefer a more freeform play.
Probably the group most at risk of not transitioning to the new game are 4th Edition players. The recent admission that Wizards designed 4th Edition with the eventual goal of launching a massive multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) is indicative of what happened with the launch of 4th Edition: the most previous edition pales in comparison to the launch of the new game.
But really, this is as much a consumer shift in mindset as it is a marketing strategy. The Old School Revival (OSR) has already proven that you can reverse engineer an advanced rules set to achieve a more streamlined form of play reminiscent of earlier editions of the game. Wizards has certainly taken notice and plans to do the same. The question is, why should players make the jump to this latest edition?
The answer is in support. Just as Paizo Publishing continued 3rd Edition fans interest with Pathfinder, if Wizards wants to draw fans of other editions in they will need to pump out products for each edition. Creating a toolkit alone will not be enough; GURPS has proven the value isn't in just the universal rules set but in publishing in-depth world and rules supplements.
Can Wizards really pull this off? Fan response has been tepid so far; it's unlikely that older edition fans will be interested in the game until the publication powerhouse that is Wizards start generating product that appeals to them. When that happens, it may well destroy the market share of publishers of older editions – and that means Paizo Publishing is firmly within Wizards' sights.
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