The Glade 4.0

True believers have lost faith. Factions squabble. The enemies are not only massed at the gates of the kingdom, but they have also broken through.

This may sound like the back story for an epic trilogy. Instead, it’s the situation faced by the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, the venerable fantasy role-playing game many consider to be the grandfather of the video game industry. Gamers bicker over Dungeons & Dragons rules. Some have left childhood pursuits behind. And others have spurned an old-fashioned, tabletop fantasy role-playing game for shiny electronic competitors like World of Warcraft and the Elder Scrolls.

But there might yet be hope for Dungeons & Dragons, known as D&D. On Monday, Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that owns the game, is expected to announce that a new edition is under development, the first overhaul of the rules since the contentious fourth edition was released in 2008. And Dungeons & Dragons’ designers are also planning to undertake an exceedingly rare effort for the gaming industry over the next few months: asking hundreds of thousands of fans to tell them how exactly they should reboot the franchise.

The game “is a unique entertainment experience because it’s crafted by the players at the table, and every gaming session is different,” said Liz Schuh, who directs publishing and licensing for Dungeons & Dragons. “We want to take that idea of the players crafting that experience to the next level and say: ‘Help us craft the rules. Help us craft how this game is played.’ ”

Dungeons & Dragons, created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, was the first commercially published role-playing game when it came out in 1974. In the game imagination is the playscape, assisted by graph-paper maps, miniature figurines of orcs and hobbits and a referee called a “dungeon master” who moderates an improvised story with a pretend fellowship of wizards, warriors and rogues.Players toss polyhedral dice and consult tomes of rules to determine outcomes. It has shades of the “Lord of the Rings” movies, except that in the game players assembled around a table get to be the characters.

“There is something fundamental to the D&D role-playing game that answers a need for people,” said Mike Mearls, senior manager of Dungeons & Dragons research and development — that need being telling your own heroic story. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s Dungeons & Dragons grew from a cult sensation into something more, surviving, even thriving, after unfounded accusations that it led teenagers to practice black magic and commit suicide. Since the game’s birth an estimated 20 million people have played it and spent $1 billion on its products. Many computer coders once dabbled in the hobby, which explains why so many video games today use a “run through a dungeon and kill monsters” premise, and borrow concepts — avatars, levels, open-ended stories, cooperative game play — pioneered by Dungeons & Dragons. The nerdy pastime has even become a badge of honor for hipsters and artists, with the likes of the film director Jon Favreau, the comedian Stephen Colbert, the N.B.A. star Tim Duncan and the actor Vin Diesel professing their love of the game, and the NBC comedy “Community” using it as a plot point in a recent episode.

But Dungeons & Dragons has slumped, buffeted by forces external and internal. The company does not release sales figures, but analysts and gaming experts agree that sales of the game, and all tabletop role-playing ones, have been dwindling for years. Ryan Scott Dancey, chief executive of the game company Goblinworks and a former vice president at Wizards of the Coast, said the overall market peaked between 1999 and 2003 and has been in steady decline since 2005. “My instincts are it’s slower than ever,” he said.

Electronic games have done the most damage, as entries like World of Warcraft and the currently hot-selling Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim let players (represented by tricked-out avatars) conquer acres of fantastically rendered digital landscapes without the need for hours of time spent writing the story line and sketching Middle Earth-like maps.

“If all you’re looking for is fulfillment of your wish to be an idealized projection of yourself who gains in wealth and power by overcoming monsters, there are lots of ways to do that nowadays,” said Tavis Allison, a game designer in New York who has made his own role-playing game, Adventurer Conqueror King. “In the ’70s Dungeons & Dragons was the only game in town.”

Edition wars have also wounded the game. Various rules systems have been released over Dungeons & Dragons’ 38-year history: Basic, Advanced, Advanced 2nd edition, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0. Devotion to particular rules can be fanatical. Hostilities about how to best play the game — for example, how a sorcerer casts spells — flare up among the core fan base.

A result, said David M. Ewalt, a senior editor at Forbes and the author of a forthcoming history of Dungeons & Dragons, has been a fractured fan base. The game is a group activity, he said, and playing together is tricky when players use different rules. “Imagine trying to organize a basketball team, if the point guard adheres to modern league rules, but the center only knows how to play ancient Mayan handball.”

When the N.B.A. adopted the 3-point shot in 1979, purists cried foul at rules changes, just as many D&D devotees dismissed the rules of the game’s fourth edition as dumbed down, overeager to mimic multiplayer online games like Warcraft — and favoring killing over the role-playing and storytelling roots of Dungeons & Dragons. Some began playing other role-playing games like Pathfinder, which won over disgruntled players. Miniature war games like Warhammer or Wizards of the Coast’s own trading-card game Magic: The Gathering have also diluted Dungeons & Dragons’ dominance.

With the new edition and the call for feedback, in a “hearts and minds” campaign, Wizards of the Coast is attempting to rally players to the cause . The strategy centers on asking them what they’d like to see in a new version and giving everyday gaming groups the chance to test new rules. “We’re really lucky that we have such passionate fans,” Ms. Schuh said, “and we anticipate they’ll roll up their sleeves and help us in this effort.”

Greg Tito, games editor for The Escapist, an online games culture magazine, will be one of them. “The long open testing period for the next edition, if handled correctly, could be exactly what’s needed to make players feels invested in D&D again,” he said.

The rule changes are part of several efforts to keep the brand relevant. Wizards of the Coast already publishes a steady stream of products set in the D&D universe: fantasy novels (by authors like R. A. Salvatore), comic books and board games. To combat the perception that the game requires hours of planning, the company organizes weekly drop-in sessions called D&D Encounters, run in game shops nationwide; they’re billed as an easy way “to fit your game in after school or work.”

Wizards of the Coast has also made previous forays into the digital realm. Dungeons & Dragons Online was released in 2006. Since becoming free to play, the game has gained over one million new players, an impressive figure for D&D but relatively insignificant compared to World of Warcraft’s 10-million-plus paid subscribers. A Facebook game called Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes of Neverwinter made its debut this fall. Also, a “virtual tabletop” product to allow Dungeons & Dragons acolytes to play online is being Beta-tested.

Still, a new edition could backfire, if the changes requested by hard-core fans can’t be reconciled or if players believe the company is merely paying lip service to their concerns. Nonetheless the company remains “absolutely committed” to the core tabletop game-play, Ms. Schuh said. “People want that face-to-face experience.”

Certainly committed players will remind you that tabletop role-playing games still outperform computer games in one key arena: improvisation. Video games have limits. Some dungeon doors can’t be opened because a programmer didn’t code them to open. Dungeons & Dragons remains a game where anything can happen.

So while Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Portal 2 may have their day in the sun, “they can’t compete with a live Dungeon Master for throwing thrills at the players,” James W. Ward, a game designer and former vice president of TSR Inc., the company that originally published D&D, wrote in an e-mail. “The fun of growing a character while your friends do the same thing around a table munching on M&M’s and other snacks is difficult to duplicate.”

Even if players increasingly bring their iPads, loaded with Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks, to the gaming table.

My problem is that everything d20 feels like.. d20. And on top of that, d20 is so preparation intensive nobody I know really wants to run it anymore. There's a reason an entire industry spring up to support d20 with monster compendiums, adventures, ready-made npcs, magic items, etc... It's a nuisance to build mid level humanoid enemies! It's character creation every time, and character creation was made in that system to be very fiddly.

My problem is that everything d20 feels like.. d20. And on top of that, d20 is so preparation intensive nobody I know really wants to run it anymore. There's a reason an entire industry spring up to support d20 with monster compendiums, adventures, ready-made npcs, magic items, etc... It's a nuisance to build mid level humanoid enemies! It's character creation every time, and character creation was made in that system to be very fiddly.

It would have been 8 years if there hadn't been a 3.5 reboot, but even then that's too soon. 10 years is really the bare minimum and it should be closer to 12. There wasa lot of room left for more work on 3.5. Tome of Battle alone could have spawned a good 3 or 4 sourcebooks to support it, maybe more.

That is one thing that 4e did very well was easy game preparation - pretty much one cheat sheet is all anyone needs to be able to throw together an encounter even on the fly in the middle of a session.

But then again, I actually like 4e enough to have spent thousands of dollars on stuff for the 4e campaign I'm running (fortunately almost all stuff that would carry over to 5e as well if it proves worth running).

Anyways though, from the sounds of it, it looks like an actual 5e release will be years out, because right now they're just trying out some things to test design and see what direction development is going to go.

See, i rather like the complexity and diversity of d20. Everything in 4e feels very...generic. I love the "building" portion of character and encounter design (although honestly, few NPCs or monsters need much attention other than simply grabbing their monster manual entry, possibly throwing a template on them or advancing them a hit die or two. That level of detail is reserved for PCs or possibly recurring NPC villains.)

That said, by the time it was done, I think I liked Saga's character design even better than d20s. of course, it was somewhat of a hybrid in between what D20 was and what 4e become. Some 3e fans hated saga because they saw it as a stepping stone in the direction of 4e's generic class design, but I saw it more along the lines of already incorporating the best ideas they had for 4e, but before they took the axe to the ability of players to customize and optimize.

This is a valid criticism. The other side of the coin is that with 4e it is not possible to customize characters enough. Ironically, I had this problem with 2e; before 3e came out I always wished there were more options to customize, although kits did help a lot.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

See, this is what I don't get. People say "4e is crap, just Tome of Battle melee classes!" -- and that's basically what 4e was working to do. The problem with Tome of Battle is it invented and forced the DM (let alone a player who's had more than one Tome of Battle character) to keep track of half a dozen ways to do similar things. 4e was an effort to do that while using similar terminology and structure to avoid the unnecessary complexity.

In any event, I don't think it's fair calling 3.5 a reboot. 3.5 was a glorified reprint with errata included. It was good errata, as evidenced by people bothering to re-purchase. But people forget that, and the backlash against 4e as being "too soon" is, IMO, subconscious resentment over having bought the errata now that enough time had passed to take for granted how good the errata was.

As far as 8 years being too soon; this is the information age. An edition might last 12 years when it's just a DM working out house rules in his basement, and only TSR is publishing content, and only maybe half a dozen friends cooperating as players to break the content without their DM noticing. But with OGL and the Internet, now you've got entire forums of DMs collaborating and offering advice and feedback on variant rules (you can't even call them "house" anymore, IMO, when they come off the collected input and brainstorming of the Internet), a cottage industry of indie PDF publishers cranking out content by the gigabyte, and an entire community of players competing to find the most ridiculously broken combinations of builds and content so they can coin the next fad build name and be famous (in their own minds) for creating the "diplomancer" or what have you. I'm surprised it lasted 8.

And, yet, how many times has your game gone on hiatus, or had guest DMs helping out? Not to take potshots, because I've done the same, but I think it provides a very good example of how preparation-heavy the game can be when you get to any crunchy bits.

I remember reading an account where they ran a campaign where nobody was allowed to cast spells, and Druids were still stronger than three Fighters combined.

Facism is not a school of thought, it is a racial slur.

3E had catastrophic balance problems that were all over even the core content, not just the ones you'll obviously get when you combine 25 different sourcebooks. They had to do something about that. If you play a Fighter in 3E D&D, you'll soon start to wonder what the point of your character is, you're so useless. I remember reading an account where they ran a campaign where nobody was allowed to cast spells, and Druids were still stronger than three Fighters combined.