 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and I've been talking about D&D for a long time. I've been playing D&D for longer and I've gotten pretty intimate with the history of D&D so that I could make a video acquainting you with the history of D&D. So when the boys in the lab announced during their D&D celebration, which they didn't invite me to, that they were going to be showcasing the next evolution of D&D in 2024, you can bet my eyebrows were raised. New versions of the Holy Trinity were announced and fans began to murmur that this could herald the coming of a new edition of our favorite fantasy dice game. Well, as a newly christened historian and long-time keeper of D&D lore, it is my duty to tell you how wrong you are. And in order to do that, we have to take a trip through time and talk about how and why TTRPGs go through their metamorphosis every few years. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion. So if you're not a 5D chess player like me, who knows that what this announcement really means is that we're getting 7th edition, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So to understand why I'm firmly in the camp of status quo, we have to be on the same page regarding the causes that led up to the 5th edition of D&D. You may have watched my history videos on the subject, and if you have, good for you. You're ahead of the class. But the short answer is that D&D has only ever changed editions because it had to. Back when it was just plain old D&D, every once in a while I needed to change a rule that didn't make sense, and over time those rules got so numerous that Gary decided he was going to compile them into one big book that they called Advanced D&D. Now, AD&D was not a new edition. It was treated like a new game, and it was updated alongside the original D&D because they wanted a version that would appeal to normal customers, and a version that would appeal to number crunching rule monkeys. Then, in 1989, Gary had some problems with his company, got kicked out, and when the new lady stepped in, she ordered a new edition be made so that Gary would no longer be able to collect any royalties. This was 2nd edition, and it wasn't made because 1st edition was dying, it was made to be fiscally responsible. A decade later, in the year 2000, Wizards of the Coast bought D&D, and they ordered a new edition again for the exact same reason. They wanted their own version of the game that didn't have somebody else's name on it. Now you may notice that 3rd edition is the only edition that has a middle-of-the-road .5 half-edition thing going on. And that's because having a half-edition, despite the success it gained, is not really a good thing. 3rd edition had to rebrand because its rules were so unwieldy, and so many supplements and source books were being released for it that it bloated within 3 years and Wizards was scrambling for a fix, so they shaved off all the excess nonsense, slapped a .5 sticker on subsequent books to say, hey, this isn't the same bloat as before, and breathed a sigh of relief. Until the exact same thing happened 3 years later, and they had to scramble again. 4th edition got made because 3.5, for all its fun, was also an unwieldy fuster cluck that released 20 books a year, each one further fostering the cluck. 4E ended up doing… poorly. So 8 years later 5E came out, and that is the abridged story of the D&D editions. None of them happened because of a vague The Time Feels Right, they happened as a direct response to something threatening the bottom line. And even with 4E, they waited 8 years to make a new edition because they knew that doing that invalidates all of the old books, and they wanted to try getting the water out of the boat before cutting their losses and jumping ship to a new one. Rebranding is a terrifying thing, because you might find success, or you might bomb completely, and you can prepare all you want, but there's no guarantee. So why do so many other game companies do it? It seems like White Wolf is always coming out with New World of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu is on its 7th edition as of 2017, and yet still Mutants and Mastermind stands in stark defiance of publishing trends by refusing to change editions despite having rules that would be complicated for Ultron. Even Gygax was working on his own D&D 2nd edition way back in the 70s until Williams took over the company and released it herself with heavy changes. And he was publishing updates in his Dragon magazine where he talked about how D&D could have a 2nd edition, a 3rd edition, or even dare say a 4th edition. But the place that D&D was at back then and where it is now are two completely different situations. In the before times, Gygax was in a rising company that was looking for any way possible to publicize his brand. He was doing movies, TV shows, his co-managers were unearthing 17th century shipwrecks. It was a wild ride of throwing things at the wall because the company lived or died on the back of this one IP. That is no longer the case, and it hasn't been since the turn of the millennium when Wizards of the Coast bought it. Now, D&D isn't the only thing keeping the company in business, it isn't even the flagship game, that's magic. D&D is a product owned by a company that is owned by a company that owns God and sells it back to you melted down with a pink pony face. All D&D has to do is not piss it off, and honestly, that's what 5e's been doing. Whereas 4e's lifespan was a financial disappointment, 5e had seen record sales since 2015, and profits have only increased every year since. D&D got mainstream, and the scariest thing they can do is confuse customers by changing the numbers on the books, regardless of how badly the nerd world wants to see the numbers move. Other companies don't have the luxury of mainstream appeals, so the strategic placement of addition changes have to come sooner to keep people interested. As for D&D, the numbers show that people are still interested with what they have, and more so every day. It may be that the stonk warlocks working under the soulless one have estimated the interest to dip around 2024, which is why they scheduled their new books to be released then, but being honest, Wizards is kind of slow to the roll when it comes to trends, and it's more likely that they just started working on the books now, and it's gonna take three years to finish, because writing books takes a lot of time. They just wanted to keep their product buzzing, so they gave a very sneaky next evolution tagline without actually giving so much as a name drop. It could be anything, but what it's most certainly not, is 6e. It could still be 5.5 though, just not in the way you think. When we consider 0.5 editions, we have to acknowledge that this means an addition that shares the same core rules as another edition, but with an emphasis on distancing itself from the previous versions for one reason or another. If advanced D&D came out during this time, it probably would have been called 1.5 or something, or maybe not because that name didn't work for the Lion King and it's not gonna work here. More likely, it would have been called Revised, or Essentials, titles granted to major rulebook updates within 2nd and 4th edition respectively, which did the same thing, and can generously be called the 0.5 versions of their own games. In my opinion, Wizards is just looking to rebrand the core rulebooks with a new moniker like 5e Enhanced, or 5e Turbo Mode, so that it can use the hindsight that it gained over the decade to fix the things that don't work with the current core rulebooks, like how they clearly expected short rest to be a very common thing, but didn't expect players to have a hard time not moving for a whole hour mid-dungeon, or how exhaustion was designed to be a minor annoyance, but instead it became a never-ending debilitation. Or, you know, anything about the ranger. Who knows, considering the recent push to have adventures that don't involve any combat at all, maybe they'll add some social dynamics to the classes that don't already have them. So yeah, a 5e Colin Revelations book probably isn't going to shake things up as hard as people think. I would be very shocked to find out that anything they do with the updated core rulebooks would invalidate anything else that 5e's put out, besides, obviously, the old core rulebooks. The most likely scenario is that they change a bunch of spells and abilities that supersede the old rules, and then some obscure text in an adventure suddenly has to be home brewed over because it no longer works the same way. Current fans don't have anything to fear, new fans don't have to worry about learning a whole new system, and unfortunately, old fans will probably not be swayed into picking up 5e books if they weren't already inclined to. It'll be like the patch notes for a game, and my only hope is that they refine all of the classes like they did in Tasha's so that I never have to make a ranger joke again. Buuuut that'll about do it! I hope you enjoyed this video, be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can have my own turbo mode in the future. But yeah, Dabby out.