Making sense of Wizards of the Coast's recent and somewhat bewildering Creator Summit

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Originally published at: Making sense of Wizards of the Coast's recent and somewhat bewildering Creator Summit | Boing Boing

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For a recap from people who were actually there watch this, it was so so much worse

Also it will not be called 6th Edition, WotC is trying to both have their cookie and eat it now so they are just calling it 5th Edition…yes seriously. The company is in freefall…

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They should just do what they did for the update to Third Edition: call it 5.5 and be done with the gymnastics, especially if there’s no major changes to the rule engine. And if there are? Keep with tradition, call it 6th Edition, and move on.

One has to wonder if they are going to try and slide another attempt to corrupt the OGL through, though.

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They’ve been harping on the VTT element (notably wanting to control and monetize VTT) since 2007, when the launch of 4th Edition included advertisements for a very ambitious VTT project that never came together for a variety of reasons.

Since the pandemic, a lot of people have indeed moved to playing online, and all the tools and tech that helped online meetings be less horrible have done wonders for the online TTRPG playing experience.

WotC probably saw that a fair chunk of their Magic: The Gathering playerbase was so suddenly and easily monetized through their Arena client, to the point that many MtG players don’t bother playing with paper cards anymore. And they probably thought they could do that with the uncaptured segment of D&D as well. Thing is, it’s probably been a lot easier to play D&D online for decades than it was a trading card game, and there’s whole tools and ecosystems dedicating to supporting people doing that without involving D&D’s owner.

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Seems like product differentiation might be an issue, since the current edition is called the 5th Edition.

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Just read that they’re (maybe) calling it “a 2024 Revision to the 5th Edition,” although that’s still pretty horrible. (To be fair, the Twitter thread I’m pretty sure I originally saw that on was from a virtual participant at the Creator Summit, but that tidbit has been lost in complaints about how virtual participants couldn’t participate fully. So consider this only-maybe-official.)

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