Before you ask, yes, they finally gave cats darkvision, folks! However, by opening this article, you accidentally triggered a trap. You hear a pressure plate sliding beneath your feet as a metric ton of brand new information about Dungeons & Dragons begins to emit from slits in the walls. Roll for initiative, adventurers, and prepare yourselves for what may potentially be a lot of psychic damage depending on how well you deal with change!
In early August, Wizards of the Coast opened a portal to Avernus in Indianapolis, IN. Not simply to summon a horde of demons – we presume – but to give press and Gen Con attendees a look at everything they’re working on for Dungeons & Dragons.
Big Anniversary, Big Changes
The world’s most popular tabletop role-playing game is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. I have been playing it for at least 25 years, which makes my bones hurt more than a CR 0 skeleton on the wrong end of a paladin’s greatsword.
But wait, there’s more — this also marks the 10th anniversary of Fifth Edition, the game’s current ruleset. And like a hill giant in the distance, there are some big changes on the horizon. Beginning in September, Wizards of the Coast are rolling up sprawling updates to Dungeons & Dragons‘ three core rulebooks, the Player’s Handbook, the Dungeon Master’s Guide, and the Monster Manual. Each of these tomes will clock in at a whopping 384 pages and offer significant updates to a game system enjoyed by more than 64 million players worldwide.
So should players be scrambling to make an intelligence check? What does the future of Dungeons & Dragons hold? While at Gen Con, I spoke with Dungeons & Dragons game architect Chris Perkins. A 20-year veteran of Wizards of the Coast, Perkins has had in everything from Dungeon magazine to D&D Fourth Edition to serving as the longtime Dungeon Master for Acquisitions Incorporated games at Penny Arcade Expo and beyond.
Perkins is keenly aware of the scrutiny placed on Wizards of the Coast, especially in light of 2023’s contentious handling of the Open Gaming License. However, he and the rest of the team are focused more on making sure they’re giving the players what they want.
“This is a game with a long and storied legacy, and we are just the current stewards,” Perkins explained. “Our role is really to be listening to what the community wants, trying to gauge what is the best play experience for the most people possible, and not losing sight of the fact that we’re not building it in a vacuum.”
When it comes to redesigning Fifth Edition, Perkins said, “We have to be very mindful about the choices we make about what we present, how the rules are framed, and everything to make it as welcoming and accessible to as many people as possible, and with the understanding that it’s the community that really shapes the game, not the people who work on the game.”
A Decade in the Making
The process of designing and developing this massive update to Fifth Edition started long before the 50th anniversary. According to Perkins, it began “literally the day after we sent the 2014 books to the printer.”
For Perkins, this is the culmination of a design philosophy and passion sparked decades prior by the eye-catching artwork of a little game called Dungeons & Dragons. Specifically, the first edition Monster Manual, the game’s beastly bestiary full of all manner of ferocious fiends.
“I picked it up, started flipping through,” Perkins said. “I was totally captivated by the monster illustrations inside of it and the numbers or the statistics that were next to each monster. I said, ‘Oh, I have have no idea what this is, but I love the pictures. I’m going to buy it with my allowance and take it home,’ and [had] no concept that this was part of some greater game. So I just sat and read it cover to cover.”
In the beginning, Perkins had no idea how to play the game, opting instead to memorize the stats and stage epic monster battles. Months after buying the Monster Manual, he discovered it was actually part of a larger game system and began playing with his next-door neighbor.
“I was the DM, and he played all the characters, and so, for us, it was the joy of just rolling up quick characters,” Perkins said. “I can’t remember which adventure I used, but it was great, because it was liberating. I don’t think either of us really still understood the game very well, so we were just kind of making it up, and I was killing characters and he was killing monsters, and we had a great time.”
While many rules lawyers out there are probably grinding their teeth into a fine powder, this is the beauty of D&D. There is no wrong way to play; the sourcebooks are there to help provide guardrails and structure to the collaborative story you tell.
“There was never any concern that we were doing it wrong, and I think that stuck with me,” Perkins explained. “Even all these years later, I feel like everybody kind of makes the game their own.”
Those childhood games and the sense of anything being possible inform Perkins’ design philosophy to this day. It’s a philosophy that carries over into the highly anticipated updates to Dungeons & Dragons‘ core rulebooks.
Isn’t This Sixth Edition?
Like many fans out there, I was curious why these new sourcebooks are being positioned as an update to Fifth Edition rather than Sixth Edition or something brand new. Perkins acknowledged that they had conversations about potentially making an entire new edition of the game to coincide with its golden anniversary, but ultimately went a different way.
“And I think about maybe three years before the 50th, we’re like, ‘You know what? Fifth Edition is so popular. People love it. The sales of the game are still incredibly strong, year over year. We’re seeing even more sales from the previous year. It would be insanity, in a way, to burn it all down.'”
While the team at WOTC wants to create a comprehensive update to D&D, they don’t want to alienate players who have spent a lot of time, energy, and money on previous products. The Fifth Edition update is designed to be backwards compatible with much of the Fifth Edition material published between 2014 and present day. In a press conference at Gen Con, D&D lead designer Jeremy Crawford confirmed that “The new core books can be used on day 1 with the adventures and supplements you already have for Fifth Edition. The new core books replace the old books but not the other supplements you own.”
With that said, there are some considerable differences. One of the most discussed is a system coming in the Dungeon Master’s Guide known as Bastion Rules. This is an optional system DMs can use to allow players to build strongholds of their very own. While that isn’t exactly a brand new idea to D&D, the gamification is: Perkins and the team built a robust system of mechanics that will enable your player’s Bastion to have tangible effects on the campaign.
“First edition even had mechanics for [Bastions], but I think one of the things that was missing out was the idea of building a stronghold that is actually giving you something back, that is helping your character in some way, and also building a system whereby it doesn’t interfere with your character’s role as an adventurer,” Perkins said.
The key question for Perkins and his fellow designers to solve was “What can we do that’s meaningful to players, that would be a fun engagement activity for them, as engaging as making a character, basically, that they can own and it can be theirs?”
According to Perkins, “[We hit] upon this idea that there has to be an in-game payoff. In addition to the joy of just building something on your own, there has to be something that makes your character better, makes the party better. The other trick, of course, was we knew that this would be something that DMs would have to unlock.”
The system has previously been released in prototype form on D&D Beyond, the game’s digital marketplace, as part of their Unearthed Arcana collection, a series of playtest mechanics and materials for adventurous players to beta tests in their home games. The response was so positive that Perkins and the team were confident the structure was okay.
But what proved to be the biggest challenge from a design perspective? According to Perkins, they were threefold. The first was thinking of all three sourcebooks as one massive 1,000 page grimoire that works seamlessly together. The second was finding ways to make the Dungeon Master’s Guide feel more indispensable. The third was one that will likely have the biggest impact on players: class and subclass design.
A Class Act
The Player’s Handbook will boast 12 classes, each with 4 subclasses of their own, bringing that to a whopping 48 subclasses in total.
“We have very detailed information about what people are playing, and we have a lot of information about how popular, not only classes and subclasses are, but individual features within subclasses and classes,” Perkins said. “Some of the classes were basically falling way behind, In terms of their popularity and figuring out a way to level them up to make them as popular as some of the more popular ones. We know that the Rangers struggled, the Monks struggled, and the Druids struggled, and the biggest design challenge was how far can you basically blow up something or uplevel something and still have it be familiar?”
Many of these subclasses have been effectively rebuilt from the ground up so they feel more satisfying for players and enticing for people to actually run at their tables. As for which class Perkins is most excited for players to get their hands on? “I am very excited for people to start playing the new version of the Monk,” he said. “People have sort of kicked it around a lot and said, ‘This is not as awesome as it could be.’ And I just feel like the team killed it, just killed it with the Monk, so I’m looking forward to it. I hope that our belief is affirmed, that this is going to be one of the, no pun intended, most kick-ass classes.”
Back to the Beginning
While Dungeons & Dragons as a system serves as a blank canvas upon which players and DMs can paint the story that serves them the best, the Fifth Edition Update will also feature a complete campaign seting for players to use. And not just any campaign setting; they’re returning to Greyhawk, the first ever published campaign setting for D&D.
According to Perkins, “We had a lot of other things to put in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, so the combination of wanting something that was kind of lean and mean and skeletal, but also felt like it was a beautiful creative springboard.”
It’s a bold choice considering how dominant settings like Forgotten Realms have become in pop culture and the consciousness of many players. Created by Ed Greenwood in 1987, Forgotten Realms is the backdrop for mega-popular games like Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as movies like Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But fortune favors the bold and the connection to D&D‘s origins was too tempting for the design team to ignore.
“This also being releasing in the 50th anniversary year when we’re celebrating the legacy of D&D, it made sense,” Perkins explained. “Because we haven’t done anything with Greyhawk in the whole life of Fifth Edition to bring that back, to hit the nostalgia hammer. At the same time, we’re saying, ‘This is a platform from which you can now launch a new campaign and keep it true to the original Greyhawk that it is very spare, that it’s meant to be a skeleton upon which you now built.'”
Did they really give cats darkvision?
Meowth, that’s right.
Anyway, folks, that’s all the news coming out of Greyhawk so far. We will keep you posted on any other major developments in the world of D&D…unless we fail our perception checks. Speaking of which, make sure you turn all of your Beholder-like eyestalks over to Geek & Sundry, which is relaunching this September with a brand new actual play tabletop role-playing series, Sagas of Sundry: Goblin Mode!
Editor’s note: This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.