 When we last left off, we were in a place that we will soon know all too well. The soulless one wanted money. The third edition of Dungeons and Dragons was doing well, but expansion after expansion had broken the game beyond repair, and Wizards of the Coast wanted to start on clear level ground with a more simplistic game that was more rigid in its rules, thereby making it harder to break accidentally. Bill Slavisek, the director of role-playing, knew that changing editions was always risky play, so he called on the big guns of Rob Hynesue, a man who had been playing D&D since he was 10 and had been making Forgotten Realms content for Wizards from the moment that they got the IP. Rob, in turn, summoned both Andy Collins and James Wyatt, and together they formed the 4E Force, a superhero team dedicated to making the new edition not suck, and when they lit the beacons of Gondor, they called forth a bevy of designers from across the land, including David Noonan, Mike Murls, and Jesse Decker, who all acted as Rob's flywheel design team, meaning he would chuck rules at them and they'd give their immediate feedback. In the future, this role would be taken over by 14-year-olds on Reddit, but for now, this was the squad. The first order of business, get people hyped for the new game. In 2007, they released two Compendium books known as Wizards Presents Classes and Races, and Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters, which, as they sound, gave fans a first taste at how the game was going to play out, first in terms of character creation, then regarding world building. They also talked about the design philosophy of their new game, and as they were released at a time when the internet was first figuring out how to enslave people, this generated a lot of buzz. Such a large amount of keyboard warrior energy raised the eyebrows of Wizards of the Coast, who saw an additional path to victory in the World Wide Web. They soon announced Dungeons & Dragons Insider, which some may recognize as the precursor to today's D&D Beyond. DDI granted access to 4 e-books on a subscription-based model, and it also provided the catalog of D&D magazines, as well as a barebones tabletop simulator and a character creator, which didn't come out right away so the fanbase got angry. The attempt at a concise community system was there, but Insider was a lackluster service, and if anybody tried to make custom API tools to help improve the experience, Wizards Code Monkeys would get offended and start flinging feces filled with cease and desist orders. Still, DDI would survive for the lifetime of 4e, which, back in the present day of 2008, was finally ready for launch. Rob Hynesu hit the big red button, and 4e happened. Oh boy, did it happen. The point of a new edition was meant to appease fans who had found the third edition to be bloated and oversaturated, so Wizards expected a standing ovation for their efforts. But what they got instead were cries of terror from players and hobby store owners alike. The first and most glaring issue actually had nothing to do with the game itself, but it had everything to do with timing. See, us modern D&D fans look at the release schedules between 3rd to 4th and 5th edition, and we see that they're only 6 to 7 years apart, which makes us think that it's normal for a single edition of the game to only last less than a decade. But, as you've hopefully learned through watching the series, games don't just go up in edition because the time feels right, they usually only change because something important is making them change. OG D&D lasted for 15 years, or 12 years if you're going off of the advanced D&D. 2nd edition lasted for 11 years, but 3rd edition had only been out for 7, or if you consider 3.5 to be its own version, the game had only been out for 3 and a half years. If you were someone who was getting into D&D in 2007, it would be a slap in the face to buy up all the books for a relatively new game, only to hear that the company making it is dropping support and working on this other thing now. And if you were a hobby store owner who had loaded up on D&D material, you didn't just get slapped in the face, you got slapped in the face with the soulless one's ass cheek, and then offered the other cheek in the form of buying more books for the next edition. This is honestly where a lot of the ire for 4th edition comes from. Yeah, the game was changed heavily for the 3.5. Things were oversimplified to the point where the classes were indistinguishable mechanically, half of the expected classes didn't even come out in the core rulebook, and the game played more like an epic battle simulator than the world's greatest role-playing game, but that was just the icing on the ass cheeks. Even worse, one of the biggest draws for 3.5 was the open gaming license that it was built on, which allowed for 3rd party creators to just go ham on whatever homebrew material they wanted to make, and they could take from pretty much every part of the main game if they wanted to expand on something. 4E, however, was looking to tighten that leash on the developing community, and that only further fueled the rank core that the community had for the game. One particular group of people got so offended, in fact, that they decided to fight back the only way they knew how. They'd make their own D&D edition with Blackjack and Hookers. Enter Pathfinder. So, this isn't a history of Pathfinder video, but it's impossible to talk about the 4E era of D&D without bringing up Pathfinder. Pathfinder was a TT RPG just like D&D, created by Paizo, a company that had once worked for Wizards of the Coast writing dragon magazines, but Wizards chose to stop working with them, and because of that, along with the changing of the open game license, Paizo retaliated by using their intimate knowledge of D&D's design process to create their own game, which did fantastically at launch and almost immediately overtook 4E in popularity, becoming the top-selling tabletop game from 2011 to 2014, and even then, it only dropped down to second place afterwards. This continued the long-standing D&D curse of screwing over friends and creating enemies from within, and it was perhaps the biggest example since Lorraine Williams. Pathfinder only exists because the open gaming license of 3.5 was so open that Pathfinder was able to copy almost whole sale what Wizards of the Coast was doing, and this isn't an insult. It was a design philosophy. Paizo intentionally wanted to create a game that was incredibly similar to D&D so that they could capitalize on the Hindenburg explosion that was 4E. They wanted to create a game that would get in on all the buzz of a new D&D edition without making something so different that it would spook the core fanbase, and with a lot of people feeling betrayed that they had invested their time into the mechanics of 3E, they were more than happy to jump ship onto a game that was just like 3E but was still getting support from the company. Pathfinder was even nicknamed 3.75 by the design team because it felt so much like a tightened rules update, and with the power of hindsight giving it all of the advantages over D&D, Paizo spent the next half decade rocking Wizards of the Coast right out of their seat to become the new premier TTRPG company of the early 2000s. Fourth edition would spend its lifetime not only competing with Pathfinder, but also competing with its past lives because people who didn't want to make a switch just didn't. And even when 4E was in its heyday, little 14-year-old me ended up getting introduced to D&D via 3.5, and I was told not to touch a 4E book lest it steal my crops and run off with my children. It seemed like nothing could stop the brand assassination that 4E was tainted with, and the soulless one was becoming frustrated with all the money it was burning away. So in 2012, just four years after 4E was launched, Wizards of the Coast began scrambling to work on a new edition to save the company from obscurity. The soulless one had known that tampering with the affairs of mortals often leads to disaster, so it pulled its black tendrils away from the production of 5E, but gave Wizards of the Coast an ultimatum. Make money, and we will leave you alone. Stop making money, and you will spend all eternity in the pits of Shior. With this bargain understood, Wizards put together its two best men, Mike Morales, who had been heavily involved in 4E's rise to fame and definitely hadn't been secretly assisting an abuser in tracking down their victims behind closed doors, and Jeremy Crawford, the first openly gay D&D designer and king of the deep ocean. Together, they got to work on what they hoped would be a more popular edition of Dungeons & Dragons, and holy shit was it ever. In 2014, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, codenamed D&D Next, was released to an unsuspecting audience, and the world lost its shit. Not all at once. At first, D&D Next was faced with apprehension from a fanbase that had seen what could happen when editions change, but the rules of this new system seemed to bode better for the future. The mechanics were simple, yet deep enough that they didn't become boring, and most importantly, they made the character creation process so easy to understand that people who were originally put off by the number crunching min-maxing fun of 3.5 now had a new chance to try out this dice thing that everybody's been talking about. And because it came out at a time where everyone was trying to pretend that 4E didn't exist, the normally polarizing nature of having a radically different rule system didn't hurt 5E as much as it did 4E. Players who wanted simplicity were elated, but those who wanted a more mechanically minded game already had one in the form of either Pathfinder, which was still being updated, or 3.5, which still had a dedicated community that no longer gave a shit about what edition D&D was on anyway. For one full year, 5E took baby steps into the fandom's heart and tried not to rock the boat. Then, in 2015, everybody actually lost their shit. It started with a man named Vin Diesel. You may know him for his increasingly surreal action series about what was originally street racing, but is now about battling supervillains with cars that can only be fueled by family members. Mr. Diesel went on the YouTube podcast Geek & Sundry, wherein he played a quick one-shot with an obscure voice actor named Matt Miller as a means of drawing publicity onto their channel. In this video, Vin Diesel played the mighty witch hunter and showed to the world that it was possible for a musclebound jock, a straight himbo of a man, to also be a fucking nerd. This was a big revelation. Vin Diesel is a powerhouse, whose reputation is so untouchable that even I am too scared to use his real name, like I do with everybody else in these videos, and his status as a role model for meatheads that wanted to roleplay as an elf wizard made the message loud and clear. D&D is for cool people. Troves of people flock to 5E, and seeing the barrier of entry so low created an entirely new community of normies that now wanted to get in on the action economy. Not only that, but Matt Miller gained notoriety for being the dungeon master of that game, and his own podcast, which he had just started with his friends, got hit by a wave of newcomers that boosted it to new heights until it became a household show. Its name was Critical Role. Between the lightning rods of Vin Diesel and Critical Role bringing in new people, and then those new people having an easy time figuring out how the game worked, D&D was in a renaissance. The core books seemed to be flying off the shelves, and normies would invite other normie friends until it seemed like D&D, a niche game that was only spoken of in whispers, was becoming mainstream. In fact, with the advent of the internet, geeks and gunks were finding solidarity in hundreds of things that they once thought were only for outcasts. In the greater cultural zeitgeist of the mid-2000s, it was becoming normal to like weird things, and against all of the boomer cries of no, you have to stop liking things that my parents forced me to stop liking, a lot of those weird things were nerdy childhood nostalgia, and there's nothing more nerdy and childlike than pretending to be a wizard. Especially the wizard. 5e had caught the perfect wave of publicity, from podcasts, celebrities, and the entire culture of the internet shifting to embrace the game, but there was still a problem. The core books were selling like hotcakes, but all of the adventure books, as well as the sourcebook for Feyru, known as the Sword Coast Adventures Guide, seemed to be getting noticed less and less. The reason for this drop in sales was immediately obvious. Everything after the core rule books was being released through Green Ronin Publishing, a third-party company not unlike the type that had pumped up mountains of content for previous editions. However, with a new mainstream fanbase, came a new mainstream perspective. They couldn't just release content in hope that things worked out anymore. Not only was that the mindset that nuked 3e, it would also shock and alienate their new audience, and they'd lose this crazy wave that they were in. So they reigned in the quality control and started doing every book in-house, under the direct supervision of the project leads. The first book released like this was Curse of Strahd, which, as of this video, is still considered to be the best 5e adventure. Over the next few years, Wizards of the Coast has been mindful of its place in the world. Jeremy Crawford has tried to use his Perennaprop powers to appease a growing neurodivergent community to very lukewarm results. Mike Murrells, on the other hand, has since been outed for that whole knowingly aiding and abuser thing, and after quietly being shuffled on to other positions within Wizards of the Coast instead of being fired, he finally left the company in 2019 and awaits the day that the internet forgets about him. In 2017, Wizards released D&D Beyond, a website that, as Sam Riegel will tell you, is your one-stop-shop for any tools and resources your Dungeonie heart desires. It fully embraced the online nature of the current nerd world, and since 2015, they've also been releasing playtest articles called the Unearthed Arcana, with the intention of getting player feedback on any weird or quirky ideas to see if they would be good for an official release before they're codified in the sourcebook. Overall, Dungeons & Dragons has been down a long road. It started as a tiny idea created as a joke supplement by a guy in his basement, then evolved into a tiny game made by two friends. Then, it became the smash hit of the 70s, and practically invented its own genre. And then it passed into the hands of so many people and companies that it took one man weeks to come up with all of the history because people in the 20th century did not record game very well. Surely, there will come a time in the future where more history must be orated to you in a tongue-in-cheek fashion and narrated by the eloquence bard himself. But for now, that'll about do it. Thank you all so much for watching. Be sure to share this video with all your friends, hit that bell so that you get the proper notifications, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can be the next Herodotus. But yeah, Dabby out.