D&D 6E = 2E?

The latest rumors are that D&D is going back to AD&D 2E for D&D 6E.

They trained their audience to hate the game's creators, to laugh at THAC0 the clown, and to mock the old-school crowd.

D&D 5E is a death-free narrative game of "whack a mole" monster bashing, overpowered characters laughing at the feeble DM. There is no resource management or time management, and you can sleep off getting your face crushed flat by a warhammer.

The art and themes of the game are so far removed from the AD&D feeling that it has become another game entirely. The old settings are dead and abandoned, there is no fiction in these worlds worth reading, and the magic is gone.

If there is one "lost its way" franchise I can best equate D&D to, it is Disney Star Wars.

And they will never give up locking people into D&D Beyond with character sheets that are dozens of pages long and require tens of thousands of lines of JavaScript to function properly.

If they want to re-release AD&D 2E without messing it up? Great, thank you, please stop writing new editions and support the ones you have. Get out of the "new edition" business, please, and love and support the 50 years of games you have, rather than writing yet another Wizards edition of the game that will be replaced in 5-10 years.

We have had D&D 3E, 3.5E, 4E, 4E Essentials, 5E, and now 5.5E in just about 26 years. Three major and three minor versions of the game just for Wizards alone. That is re-buying the game every 4 years.

Stop making new editions and revisions. You can never get it right like they had back in the TSR days.

If they want to support, print, and preserve AD&D 2E? And open the AD&D 2E license and rules under a Creative Commons license? And begin to bring back the expansion AD&D 2E content under the same license? Maybe even reprint and support the AD&D 2E campaign settings?

Then, we are talking and making sense here.

Oh hell yes!

That would make me support Wizards of the Coast again and be a huge step in the right direction.

A New BX Game Coming?

Based on the rumors, we will get another game to replace the loss of Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. I get why people like this game. At times, Advanced Fantasy can feel like "too much" with too many divergent options for races and classes, and the game becomes muddled with "too much stuff."

Did we really need the Svirfneblin, Drow, Half-Orc, and the Duergar in Advanced? I get it —Advanced sold far better due to "more stuff" — but at some point, I want a more focused core set, with the rest supported in option books. Classic Fantasy lets you do that. If they do add rules and options to OSE Advanced 2026, I hope they fold in all the options found in the Carcass Crawler Zines, which would make it a very compelling game. It is sort of a "go big or go home" theory, and I would like to see a lot of those options in the base game if it is not going to be streamlined.

Even an excellent BX game like Dragonslayer adds the Cyclopsman, a variant race not part of the core experience. A lot of games come close to the idea experience, but many diverge in places and don't provide that simple set of options. DS is still a good version of the game, just a little different.

Classic Fantasy also kept it simple, with the classic options. Only Labyrinth Lord (Classic Edition) remains as the purist BX game, with a few White Box options around, but those are all d20/d6 games. Another great option is Basic Fantasy, a game many swear by as the true heir to BX gaming's legacy.

It will still be possible to play a "Classic Game" with the 2026 OSE rules, since they include an appendix that lays it out. However, it still means cutting most of the book and sorting through it to say "yes and no" to different parts, which is a terrible experience for new users and those who just want a simple base game.

Shadowdark should have taught us to keep our core book game experience focused and straightforward. And a lot of these Shadowdark expansion books, I just want to forget now, since they clutter up the game with too many options.

Do we need another edition of BX? With all the variants of classic games out there, why do we need another game? Is this something the community tells itself we need? There are so many versions of White Box, 1E, BXA, and 0E out there. Do we have everything covered with Labyrinth Lord Classic and Basic Fantasy still in PoD? Or do we need another game because we feel we don't have a standard-bearer now? The community will step up and give us another option, and then invariably re-create what we had in OSE Advanced.

I get the feeling mixing "race plus class" with "race-based classes" in OSE was a mistake. If I want a 2026 version of OSE Advanced Fantasy, get rid of race-based classes and standardize the game on "race plus class," and streamline the game around that. Let a pure "Classic BX Game" do the race-based classes, and pare your game down to the best "race plus class" options that only work one way.

Similarly, if someone does do a new version of BX, please keep it to race-based classes only. Don't confuse things or try to make a game that copies OSE Advanced. Also, any expansion material for this new theoretical BX game should stick with only race-based classes.

I am all for letting OSE be more of the BXA, race-plus-class game, and for any new version of BX to stick to race-as-class.

A great option to OSE Advanced is Swords & Wizardry Revised. This is 98% compatible with any OSE material and offers an AD&D Lite experience with greater clarity and focus, while keeping ability score modifiers under tight control. It is a strict race-plus-class game, but it gives me the perfect blend of 0E and 1E material, plus a wealth of expansion content in add-on books.

S&W can completely replace OSE Advanced race-plus-class and port in its best options, plus it gives me more in terms of supporting the classic bestiary monsters, demons & devils, illusionists & druids, and even two types of bards in the Options book (bard and troubador). We also get necromancers and warlocks in the S&W Options book as purely evil character classes. All of these are far better than their OSE counterparts, many with dedicated spell lists.

And we get a monster expansion book for S&W, with even more monsters and plenty of 1E favorites making a return. With the core book, Options, and the monster expansion, you get a game that clearly rivals OSE Advanced, provides far more options, and does so with a straightforward, easily understood set of rules that feels superior to the limited BX.

0E predates BX, and comes before 1E, when everything got overly complicated. 0E also supports the best options and provides forward-looking 1E options. BX feels pared down and simplified compared to a full-featured 0E game like S&W, and by the time you expand BX into a BXA game, S&W will still have more and unify the classes and system far better, while still keeping the core rules in one book and far more straightforward.

Also, S&W handles fighters far better than OSE Advanced, and it does not need all the fighter mods from the Carcass Crawler books to make them viable character classes and interesting.

A cut-down BX is like Shadowdark, a simple, core, focused dungeon game.

A full 0E game like S&W is more like AD&D to me, a full-featured roleplaying game that does a better job than an expanded BXA-style game with a mix of race-plus-class and race-as-class options, and it provides me with superior options when selecting races and customizing my world.

Where 0E crosses over is into 1E territory, and it becomes the easier version of a full AD&D, Adventures Dark and Deep, or OSRIC. For those games, though, they typically use the one-size larger hit dice for classes (d10 for fighters, d8 for clerics, d6 for thieves, etc.) and things like segments and weapon speeds. As a result, combats are more protracted and play is slower than a BX, BXA, WB, or 0E game. Play 1E if you like this level of detail. Play other games if you don't want to bother with all the minutiae. S&W keeps the BX hit points and speed of play, while still feeling like AD&D.

I am looking forward to this new "pure BX" game and the revised 2026 OSE Advanced.

Disney buys Hasbro and D&D?

According to rumors, Disney may buy Hasbro, and by extension D&D. Check the link, and I stress, these are just rumors; but they are loud enough to be covered on several sources, Google it for yourself and dive into the speculation.

Wow. If true, this would be the biggest shocker since Disney bought Star Wars, at least in our little corner of the hobby. Good or bad? I have no idea, it all depends on how open the company is with the fans and third parties. If good, it could lead to a new era of openness and roleplaying; if bad, it could be a failed resurrection saving throw. If true, I hope someone is put in charge that understands the 'RPGs as social' angle, and supports the community. Like Star Wars, there is incredible potential for coll stuff here, but also a real chance at a company locking up IP and doing it wrong.

What could it mean for the game? It could mean D&D's demons and devils could be exorcised from the game again, aka 2nd Ed D&D. Sorry guys, you just don't fit in with 'brand management' anymore, and any chance of seeing Orcus Prince of Undeath walk around at a theme park has just been squashed. There are serious ramifications and corporate decisions like this that may fall out from such a deal, or in fact, anyone who buys the D&D brand.

Another thought is that the IP in D&D has been pulled from so many sources, it's not really locking much up at all - Pathfinder has done much without much of the core D&D product identity. In fact, if the D&D IP were locked up, it may force real alternatives to emerge and blossom. If the game is opened up and established as the 'game of the community' this may not happen; if D&D is locked up it may force alternatives to appear. Even with locked up IP, good things may come of a Disney acquisition, it all depends on how it is handled.

As a sidebar, this is another reason we banned copyrighted IP from SBRPG. In D&D, if your big-bad is a beholder, that creation is owned by the parent company of D&D, and thus subject to support and branding decisions from the home office. Of course, real roleplayers will say, 'so what it's my campaign anyways' and play with the beholder, and even port them to different systems. New players in the next generation would most likely start playing with Disney:D&D, and miss out on the old stuff that was removed from the game, for good or bad.

With us and SBRPG, it's a principle thing, and we wanted you to create your own IP, create your own big-bads, and own everything in your game. Therefore, if some day you wanted to write a book about your game world, it would be a lot easier, since you started with everything that you created yourself. If we banned copyrighted IP, it got the creative juices flowing, and got you off to the right start. This was our choice, and in light of buy-outs and the pitfalls of playing with other people's IP, something I am proud we went with.

Back on the subject, the business of gaming just makes my head spin....