D&D was ever a substrate, an agar plate for you to grow your own mysterious creatures. It used to be incredibly bizarre, baroque, and it's gotten increasingly more legible over time. More people are playing them than have ever played them before, which is cool. There's gonna be a new one I guess! That's what I heard.

I have two dads - Chris Perkins ("Cperk") and Jeremy Crawford ("JCraw)." These two men occasionally form a monstrous chimera known as Jerris Crawkins, but the rest of the time they are designing the newest - final? - version of Dungeons & Dragons. The joke used to be that the next version would be 6E, then they called it One D&D as a conceptual stopgap, the community recently began calling it 5.5E in a cool old-school nod, and I literally just now found out they were calling it D&D 2024. No D&D Infinite? Adamantine? Alas.

Tabletop RPGs are now their own beast, with its own influencers and dialogues and tensions, and I occasionally press my face to this glass to observe the Inheritor. There's something going on with Divine Smite! And some other stuff. Potions becoming a bonus action in the new edition - similar to Baldur's Gate 3 - makes sense for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that the Chris Perkins I mentioned before did all kindsa consulting on BG3, in a particularly fecund period of development on the pen and paper game. He's also an agent of absolute chaos; in the fullness of time we might find all kinds of weird hints in there. I have seen that mad glint in his eye. I can guess what it might portend, but it might not actually be possible to know.

What Gabe says in the strip isn't entirely true. He's weirdly obsessed with portions of the ruleset, but only so he can break them in very specific ways. His goal when running a game is to operate a kind of theme ride or roller coaster, using Dungeons & Dragons mechanics. I've shown him other roleplaying systems that do some of the things he wants already, or generalize enough to be ready for anything, but it's not really about mechanical elegance. D&D is like a ground floor, a set of assumptions and concepts and folkways and lingo. That's what's good about it. You can go anywhere from there.

That said… What my dad Jeremy told me is that Chris runs an amalgam of all D&D versions that have ever existed when he's behind the screen. If it's good enough for his house, it's probably good enough for yours.

(CW)TB out.