an open letter to WotC

By: Unknown on 07:56

Dear Wizards of the Coast,

Today it was announced that you are planning a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons and that you want fan input.

This is a good thing. D&D is the flagship role-playing game, virtually synonymous with our great hobby. A new edition that takes full advantage of the growing interconnectedness of the world sounds to me like a vision full of promise.

It would please me greatly for your new edition of D&D to succeed. I want it to be a fun game. I want lots of people to play it. And I hope you make a nice profit selling it.

I would very much like to participate in the process of shaping this forthcoming edition. I'd love to involve my home game group, my online campaign with 30+ players, the players and DMs of the growing FLAILSNAILS network, and the readers of my blog.

But I don't want to be involved if you are going to insist that my friends and I participate with one arm tied behind our backs. A new edition of D&D shouldn't be just about building upon the successes and minimizing the failures of the previous edition, it should about re-evaluating all the prior work in the field.

Therefore, I am asking that as part of this process you re-release the PDFs of the prior editions. If you truly want the feedback of the fans, then surely it makes sense that you would want feedback from well-informed fans? Additionally, making the PDFs available again would be a gesture of goodwill to the players of prior editions and would go a long way to showing us that you are serious in your desire to reunite the D&D community behind a fan-powered edition.

Sincerely,

Jeff Rients
Jeff's Gameblog