D&D almost deradicalized me
The media events are a good overview, but without getting a look at the product I’m left parroting corporate talking points.
They got me, I typed into a Discord thread that would eventually reach 150 messages over the next 45 minutes, man down.
This was at the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons’ latest press event, where they showed off the new layout and structure of the three new editions of the Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual. Within just a few minutes of the start of the presentation, I was already deeply impressed. While D&D, with its inevitable and irrefutable insistence on medieval fantasy wargaming as a basis for its lore and ruleset, will never be my favorite game, this new version seems to have been fully overhauled in service of broad accessibility and appears to have smoothed out dozens of pain points in the previous Fifth Edition publications. It is a new book focused on stewarding people into a tradition of storytelling, rather than immediately beating them over the head with character creation, rules, and lore.
I pinged a journalist who I knew was listening to the conference as well. “It pains me to say it,” I sent, about halfway through the meeting, “but I think I want to play new D&D.”
