Wizards of the Coast held a press summit earlier this month to announce plans for the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop role-playing game for the next six months, which includes a revival of the Planescape campaign setting, as well as its efforts toward outreach, diversity, inclusion, regaining fans’ trust, and growing its audience.
The company held the summit at the Hyatt Regency in Renton, Wash., across the street from the building that will host its new corporate headquarters later this year.
The event featured panels from the internal D&D team, meant to discuss where D&D stands in 2023 and where it’s going in the near future, as the game approaches its 50th anniversary in 2024. Wizards also revealed data about its player population and talked about the hit film “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”
Speakers included game design architects Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins; executive producer Kyle Brink; senior brand manager and Dragon Talk co-host Shelly Mazzanoble; product managers Chris Lindsay, Natalie Egan, and Hilary Ross; VP of marketing Nathan Stewart; and Wizards’ diversity, equity, and inclusion manager Jontelle Leyson-Smith. Greg Tito, senior communications manager at Wizards of the Coast and the other co-host of Dragon Talk, served as an informal MC for the event.
Read on for a recap of all the announcements and discussion at the summit.
Call it a comeback
Naturally, much of the summit was spent on a discussion of the upcoming rules updates to D&D, which were initially announced in August as part of an initiative called “One D&D.”
Crawford clarified at the summit that that term “One D&D” was always meant as a marketing placeholder, and instead, Wizards now simply calls the same initiative the 2024 Rules Update. It still empathically isn’t a sixth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, however.
“One of the reasons why this word ‘edition’ is loaded for D&D is partly because it has two different meanings,” Crawford said. “In broader publishing, ‘edition’ is a neutral term. It simply means ‘a new version of a book.’”
He added: “In D&D, over the years, the term has gained much greater weight because it also came to mean a revision of the game. We are releasing new editions of the books. We are not releasing a new edition of the game.”
Under this initiative, the three base books for 5th-edition D&D, the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual, are being revamped and rereleased with new rules, better glossaries, and changes that result from a “decade of feedback.”
Crawford and Perkins both worked on D&D 5e in 2014, and according to Perkins, “started building [5e] 2024 as soon as [5e] 2014 went to the printer.” The original version of fifth-edition D&D was done on a comparative shoestring, with fewer resources and contributors than modern D&D has to offer.
Now, the team has used player feedback, constant content testing via methods such as Unearthed Arcana, and their own experiences with D&D to make a new, better-organized version of the game.
Many of the 2024 changes are aimed at new players, by virtue of making D&D as a game easier to learn. “Past books were more like the Dungeon Master’s Warehouse,” Perkins said. “This one’s a guide.”
The 2024 DMG features multiple sections that are meant to help teach a total novice how to run a game of Dungeons & Dragons. This includes terminology; how to prepare for a session; what to do about disruptive players; and how to deal with what’s sometimes called Matthew Mercer Syndrome: the expectation that your game should be as good as what’s shown in professionally produced live-play shows.
Other mechanical changes in the 2024 books include reworks to how characters are created, where your character’s background and origins figure more heavily into their starting stats than their race or class; a new system called Weapon Mastery that gives more power and flexibility to non-magical characters; and more spells that make reference to iconic characters from throughout D&D’s history, such as the Circle of Eight.
Multiversal adaptor
Planescape has a legitimate claim to being one of the most influential campaign settings in D&D history. Originally published in 1994, it serves as a guide to setting adventures in D&D’s elaborate cosmology, including the elemental planes, the various realms that make up D&D’s afterlife, and Sigil, the twisted city that sits at the center of D&D’s multiverse.
Planescape’s most enduring contributions to D&D as a whole are arguably the introduction of the tiefling, as well as inspiring the 1999 cult-classic PC game Planescape: Torment.
The fifth-edition rework of Planescape, scheduled for release on Oct. 17, is a reintroduction and continuation of the setting from where it left off in the ‘90s. It consists of three books: one about the setting, one that serves as a bestiary for the sorts of monsters that players might encounter out in the planes, and one pre-made adventure, Turn of Fortune’s Wheel.
Like most of Wizards’ recent first-party releases for D&D, Planescape will ship in standard and “core hobby” editions, the latter of which will only be available at dedicated hobby shops. That edition will include brand-new art by original Planescape artist Tony DiTerlizzi.
Other upcoming releases for D&D include:
- The Practically Complete Guide to Dragons (Aug. 15) is an all-ages, rules-free bestiary about the various kinds of dragons and related creatures that you can meet, fight, and/or befriend in the worlds of D&D. It’s intended as a sequel and follow-up to Lisa Trumbauer’s 2006 book A Practical Guide to Dragons. While the Practically Complete Guide is vaguely linked to D&D via its narrator, kender wizard Sindri Suncatcher, it’s intended as more of a non-fiction book about a fictional subject.
- Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants (Aug. 15) revisits the various kinds of giants of D&D with an eye towards broadening their mythology and ecology. It includes new magic items, monsters, character subclasses, and details about giants’ society, in an attempt to, in producer Natalie Egan’s words, “re-mystify them.”
- Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk (Sept. 19) is intended for fans of traditional dungeon crawls. It revisits the setting from the popular introductory adventure Lost Mine of Phandelver, but expands it into a full campaign that could take characters from 1st to 12th level.
- The Deck of Many Things (Nov. 14) takes its inspiration from the infamous campaign-wrecking magic item, which was originally introduced in 1975’s Greyhawk, the very first supplement for D&D; players can draw as many cards as they like from the Deck, each of which may provide a grand reward or sudden demise. The book has been designed as a “smorgasbord,” to quote product manager Chris Lindsay, where players can take as little or as much as they want from an assortment of adventure ideas and lore that surrounds the various versions of the Deck. When asked about the Deck’s notoriously destructive nature, Lindsay promised “we have not nerfed this on any level.”
Recovery mode
Both Dungeons & Dragons and Wizards of the Coast began 2023 at a disadvantage. In January, a leak that Wizards was considering plans to rework the rules surrounding third-party content for D&D caused a major controversy, which only came a few months after the last major controversy.
A few weeks later, that ended with Wizards publicly walking back any plans to change those rules, as well as releasing the basic rules for fifth-edition D&D for free, under a Creative Commons license. That didn’t do anything to mitigate the real anger that had arisen in the D&D community, some of which was directly unleashed on Wizards during a content creators’ summit in early April.
More recently, Wizards came under fire for another incident in April that saw the company hiring the Pinkertons, a private security firm that’s historically associated with anti-union activity, to retrieve a set of unreleased Magic: The Gathering cards that were mistakenly sent to a YouTube content creator. To quote a friend of mine, Wizards hired the guys who are the villains in every Western, including Red Dead Redemption II, to go get some cards back.
“We want this to be an ‘everyone game,’” Stewart said at the media summit. “Along the way, we’ve accomplished so many things, but we’ve also made mistakes.”
In addition to the January controversy, Stewart also cited Wizards “not listening to fans” for the entirety of D&D’s fourth edition, which ran roughly between 2008 and 2013.
“We took the negative feedback and we changed course,” Stewart said. “We learned, we adapted, we changed. We continued to create and steward this brand. We’re going to continue to learn and adapt.”
The ongoing reaction at Wizards includes an update to its cultural sensitivity reviews, with all future products from Wizards having at least two outside cultural consultants attached to them; creating more frequent opportunities for direct communication between contributors, creators, and Wizards (“we didn’t understand how much of an open dialogue had to happen,” said Brink); and “specific infrastructure” that’s being put in place at Wizards to help independent creators who’ve been subjected to harassment.
Other interesting reveals from the D&D media summit included:
- Mazzanoble discussed a series of new initiatives from Wizards that are aimed at providing official support for educational initiatives that support D&D, which includes after-school club kits. According to Mazzanoble, the resources focus on teaching collaborative storytelling and social-emotional learning, and were downloaded over 120,000 times between September 2022 and May.
- The upcoming D&D Beyond Educator Licenses were “on the verge of launching” during the media summit. Educators can apply for no cost to receive a free bundle that includes the three core rulebooks, the Dragons of Stormwreck Isle starter adventure, and 2021’s adventure anthology Candlekeep Mysteries.
- Due to rising print costs, the standard MSRP on physical editions of core 1st-party D&D books will go up to $59.95, beginning with Bigby’s Book of Giants. Books’ digital editions will remain at the same current price.
- A very early pre-alpha of Wizards’ official virtual tabletop (VTT) system was available at the event, where members of the media got to play brief hour-long adventures run by Wizards staff. Built in Unreal, the VTT is meant to allow players to construct virtual maps, mazes, and combat encounters for online play, but the project is at least two years away from completion at time of writing. The plan, according to Wizards VP Chris Cao, is to see how players use the official VTT before they figure out what they might do to monetize it.
- According to Wizards’ internal studies of the player population, 60% of D&D players are male, 39% are female, and 1% identify otherwise; 60% are “hybrid” players, who switch between playing the game physically or online; and 58% play D&D on a weekly basis.
- The player population for D&D is cross-generational, with the bulk of respondents (48%) identifying as millennials, vs. 19% from Generation X and 33% from Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012).
- According to Wizards’ surveys, the player population recently crossed a point where the majority of current D&D plans are those who started playing the game with the fifth edition. Previously, the most popular version of D&D was still the second edition, published in 1989. (“We actually built fifth edition as a follow-up to second edition,” Crawford said at the panel.)
- D&D will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2024, with what Stewart calls a “year-long celebration of the brand,” but no one was willing to discuss any specific plans thereof.
- Perkins said when he and Crawford finished making D&D 5e in 2014, he said it would be the last edition of D&D he’d ever work on. Since the 2024 update isn’t intended as a new edition of the game, Perkins said “I’m glad that’s still true.”
- Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves made $200 million at the international box office this year, and was briefly the No. 1 movie in the world.
- Fans have noticed that neither of D&D’s original creators, Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson, were given any sort of acknowledgement in HAT, such as being listed under “special thanks” in the film’s credits. According to Stewart, this was an omission by the film’s production team at Paramount.
- “If you can imagine a way to play D&D, somebody plays it that way,” said Kale Stutzman, one of the lead designers on Wizards’ virtual tabletop system.
