D&D and souvenir games are set to collide in 2024, and I’m here for it

I currently have six copies of Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition in my house Player’s Handbook – one for me, one for my 13 year old daughter, and four for the other kids we play with from time to time. But there is only one copy of it Dungeons Master’s Guide. In fact, after the first reading, this book saw no use in the hall house at all. This is likely to change in 2024, because dmg A radical facelift is performed.

D&D Wizards of the Coast publisher has been talking about revised versions of the three core rulebooks for a long time now. The length of that promotional period is due in part to the ambitious quiz list which has already garnered nearly 500,000 written responses. Good reviews are hard to find, and when you get them in volume, it’s even harder to make use of them. Of course, the duration is also because Wizards got the original announcement wrong and spent a good portion of 2023 making their intent clear. But the D&D publisher seems to have a real drive to make the books better – so that it’s easier for players to find what they’re looking for, with richer guidance for each skill level. Clearly, the book that needs the most work is it dmga fact made clear during a special press event in Seattle earlier this year.

Photo: Wizards of the Coast

“I don’t know if you remember,” rules architect Chris Perkins said at the time, “but the first chapter of this book is about building a campaign, and one of the first things you’re told is the difference between a meritocracy and a plutocracy. It’s like, Yes. I’m a new DM. Is this the most important thing I want to know about my campaign? no. […] The second chapter is all about D&D cosmology. Here are the outer levels and the inner levels. and she is like, Is this the first thing I need to know to be a DM?“

This is the response my 13 year old got the week before Gen Con. She said, “I want to be a DM,” and my heart kind of skipped a beat. So I handed her over dmg. I found her drooling after a few hours. So when I ran into game design engineer Jeremy Crawford at this year’s Gen Con, I wanted to know: how’s that dmg Going? This is when things turned a little philosophical.

“Why do people DM?” suppose Crawford. “What keeps them in place as direct messages? What might cause burnout? What will excite them to be managers longer?” He said these are the most important questions to be answered, and those answers should be what fills in the new dmg.

When you open the next version of v5 Dungeons Master’s GuideYou can expect regulation to be much better, Crawford said. You will learn how to roll the dice, for example, in the first chapter, and not in the eighth, as now. The book will also be slightly longer than the original. You can also expect that you will need to fill some of this space yourself.

“Working papers [are a] Something new in our previous book Dungeon masters guides said Crawford. “We know that for many DMs, creating the world, creating adventures, creating NPCs and magical items and backstories — it’s a one-to-one game, and we want to make sure that these Dungeons Master’s Guide Really supports this experience. That’s why they contain worksheets.”

Image: field notes

These worksheets will be available for download, Crawford said, so players don’t have to write inside their books if they don’t want to. However, I can see a lot of people wanting it.

I write inside RPG books all the time. It started when I was playing 4th edition, carefully manually updating core books based on typos. This practice carried over into the Fifth Edition, and now my books are filled with highlighted passages, commentaries, and other footnotes. It makes me more efficient to have everything in one place — not on my tablet or phone, not scattered among a bunch of different books. I basically just load on my own order PHB And Tasha’s cauldron for everything For the latest Artificer Rules, I’m good to go.

But that may change for me with the new one dmg. If it’s full of worksheets, well, I’m going to fill out those worksheets right there on the page. And when I’m done filling out those worksheets, and hauling my new campaign to the weekly games with my group, I’m going to need new ones dmg So I can start over.

“You don’t have to buy a new book,” she told Crawford. “But I can.” he laughed.

“I actually didn’t think of kind of writing directly into the book,” he admitted. “But it’s a fun idea.”

I think it’s more than just a fun idea: I think it’s an opportunity for other creators in the space to make something amazing.

Photo: Nicole Carpenter/Polygon

What if, instead of boring old fill-in-the-blank pages, the creators converted a dmg Its something different – something like a souvenir game. Memento games are a small niche in the larger role-playing design space of the moment; The experience of playing it can range from individual diary experiences to group role-playing exercises that eventually become physical works of art. Content creators like Jeon shimAnd Shing Yen Khorand Tim Hutchings have spent years exploring this design space with keepsake games like A field guide to memoryAnd were you okayAnd A thousand-year-old vampire. What if we got people like this with world-building expert Avery Alder, creator of Quiet year? What if we invited Gabe Hicks and Elise Rezendes, creators of the soon-to-be-released movie Session system zero, to help build our party of heroes? What if they teamed up with the inspiring artisans at the heart of Deernicorn, my publisher winter city? What if all these souvenir game lovers showed up at Beadle & Grimm’s doorstep with the goal of creating the most popular and inspiring game Dungeons Master’s Guide all times? What if he was neutral in the system? What if the world you were building could become fuel for the next TTRPG? Or for the fans? Or just for the fun of making something new and unique?

Through what I’ve seen of the care and commitment from the team at Wizards of the Coast, the next edition of Dungeons Master’s Guide It should have more staying power than the old one. It could easily become as indispensable Player’s Handbook is today. But it could also be a paradigm shift for the entire industry. Those books we carry around with us are quickly replaced with digital copies, and that’s okay. But what if these books become artifacts of the worlds we play in together? What if, after years of making fun of your friends at the table, you had something tangible to put on the shelf as a memory of your time together playing pretend? Maybe, just maybe, we might create something worth leaving behind for the generations of backgammon fans who come after us.

My daughter might say one day, “This was my dad’s favorite D&D campaign.” “It’s a whole world we made together. Let’s take it off the shelf. Let’s explore it. Let’s play it. Together. Again.”

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