Worldwide D&D Game Day

This Saturday, May 23^rd, is the second annual Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day. Follow this link to the Wizards of the Coast page detailing the event to download a list of participating retailers. If there is one near you, every player takes home the character sheet and a miniature of the pregenerated character they portrayed; DMs also get the adventure. You can get a sneak peek of the adventure at the link above.

This is all to promote the release of Monster Manual 2 for 4^th-Edition. Yes, there is now a 4^th-Edition; Gary Gygax is probably rolling over in his grave now, poor guy...

Interestingly, players currently running 3.5 are saying the same things we all did before the 2^nd-Edition came out. More or less, they're wondering why WotC is trying to "fix something that ain't broke," and why they think gamers who have already shelled-out hundreds of dollars on previous versions' books, adventures, settings, and supplements should have to do so again.

Some of them noted that WotC said the 4^th-Ed. was a "streamlining" of the copious rules for 3.5 and fewer books would be published for it. DON'T BELIEVE IT! They said the same thing of 2^nd-Ed. and it had far more books than 1^st; that's why I never bothered with any of the later versions. And, reading others' comments as to that, it seems there were far more rules and "clarifications" for those than for 2^nd; after all, why was there even a version 3.5?

Right now, I am simply trying to make sense of a few things between the first two editions. After all, WotC (then TSR) made sure to put anything that was in a single 1^st-Ed. book into five or seven Handbooks. Unearthed Arcana was basically the AD&D Companion book and it contains all sorts of stuff for campaigning in general; every piece of that book was handled in just under 10-12 different Handbooks. I've mentioned before how harangued I was when I spent hours, even days, porting my favorite races, classes, rules, et.al. from 1^st- to 2^nd-Ed., only to find out TSR had already covered it in a Handbook I didn't have; I'm not willing to go through that again.

Furthermore, WotC would get huge props from me if they were to provide conversion charts between systems/editions. By this point, far from hurting their sales, I think it would only help them! After all, it would be the perfect way to show just how streamlined the new edition is; prove to me that this new edition is worth shelling-out over $100 for - just for the very basic books needed - and I'll certainly consider it. So they take a small hit on the hundreds of supplementary books they have planned? They would damn sure sell more core books than they have before!

© C Harris Lynn, 2009