New Dungeons & Dragons is a worthy hit
If you’ve stepped into your friendly local game store within the past few weeks, you can’t have failed to notice there’s a new edition of role-playing classic Dungeons & Dragons on the shelves. Even if you haven’t, you might have seen it flying high on the Amazon sales charts: the core “Player’s Handbook” surprised just about everyone by topping the bestseller list for several days.
Even if you don’t know your dragonborn from your tieflings, it’s not hard to see that’s a big deal for D&D fans. The days when role-playing games were only played by basement-dwelling, Cheeto-fingered nerds are long gone: now those nerds are grown-up, have families, and are looking for a dose of nostalgia. They’ll get it with this new edition, which is nominally the franchise’s fifth major release in its forty-year history, though in reality the game has undergone dozens of significant revisions and sub-editions over the decades.
The newest, though, is different from the others -- and to know why, you need to understand where it fits into the franchise’s history. D&D’s fourth edition, released in 2008, was divisive: its complex combat and magic systems meant players all but needed a scale map and a pile of models to make it work. That was great for fans of tactical miniature games, but not so good for the folks who just wanted to tell a cool story. Such players have been deserting the brand, gravitating to other role-playing games that better fit their priorities.
https://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/new-dungeons---dragons-is-a-worthy-hit-215420322.html
