Dungeons & Dragons basic rules pamphlets, circa 1981. Image by Jennie Ivins
Over the course of the past four weeks, we've been chatting with the men behind Dungeons & Dragons: Mike Mearls, Rodney Thompson, Bruce Cordell, James Wyatt, and Chris Perkins, to discuss their history with the franchise. If you missed the first few installments, go read about the group's favorite settings, favorite play experiences, favorite all-around products, and proudest accomplishments while working at Wizards of the Coast. Today, we'll conclude this series with a look towards the future, asking each of our interviewees about their expectations for the future of Dungeons & Dragons: D&D Next.
But they're not going to get off easy. D&D Next is being billed as a massive unifying effort, bringing together all roleplayers no matter which D&D edition they hold dear, and convincing them to drop the edition-speak entirely. Since a modular ruleset should allow players to combine their favorite aspects of past editions, we asked our panel exactly that: which two features of D&D's past they look forward to merging in future games of D&D Next.
Mike Mearls: This is an easy one for me. I can’t wait to use basic D&D’s speed and ease of character creation with 4e’s adventure design guidelines.
Back when I lived in Boston, I used to run a lot of pickup D&D games. It got to the point where I spent a day creating a set of eight player characters for my friends to pick from. If we wanted to just play D&D, it took an hour to make 1 st-level characters, or much longer to make a 3rd or 4th level one. By the same token, as a DM I had to either write up stuff ahead of time or draw from a set of adventures I had read beforehand.
I like that the 4e rules make creating a short adventure fast and easy. In Next I want to make it even easier by introducing the option to use
random tables for monsters and treasure that are built on a system like 4e’s.
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