Is One D&D's Wealth of Content a Bad Thing, Actually?

 To save you the post if you just want to know my opinion, my answer is no.

But let's get into it:

With the next iteration of D&D, codenamed One D&D (much as 5th Edition was called D&D Next,) the intent is for all existing 5th Edition content to still be usable in future games, using the future rules books.

Officially, the core rulebooks that come out in 2024 will not be "6th Edition." WotC is retiring, at least for now, the concept of separate editions moving forward. The purpose here is to make sure that if you want to run Curse of Strahd with the new rulebooks, you should be able to without their having to publish an updated version of it or forcing the DM to go through the adventure and rebalance encounters and such.

Given how many D&D players got their start with 5th Edition - myself included - and how hugely popular the edition has been, and how invested many people are in 5th Edition books (I've got, I'm almost certain, over a thousand dollars' worth of D&D books myself,) this decision is meant to allow us to feel like our books haven't suddenly vanished into obsolescence.

However, from another practical perspective, this also means that One D&D is hitting the shelves with a ton of pre-existing content.

When I got started, Volo's Guide to Monsters hadn't yet come out, which meant that the character options, monsters, and subclasses were very limited. However, at this point, we've had a massive influx of new options of that sort. Monsters of the Multiverse came out both to revise existing options and to collect them in a single volume. Indeed, the Rules Expansion box set, which contained that along with Xanathar's and Tasha's, became the best option for new DMs who had the core rulebooks but wanted to expand to other options.

But beyond that, there are tons of monsters, races, and subclasses (though Tasha's republished most of the setting-specific ones we'd seen in previous books) that 5th Edition has accrued over the last 8 years.

I'm a pretty open-minded DM who likes to let players have a lot of options available to them. But I've seen complaints, or maybe just concerns, that the number of options available is getting dizzying and overwhelming.

There are some who wish that we were truly getting a 6th Edition, and putting the books published in the last 8 years fully in the rear view mirror.

Honestly, I want to try to see things from their perspective, and I can sort of understand the desire for a more curated experience, but I ultimately disagree emphatically with the argument.

First off, let's look at this from WotC's perspective. D&D makes money by selling books. Not exclusively, of course, but the main "product" that the D&D team produces at the center of the brand is its books.

The popularity of 5th Edition means that most of us haven't gone through an edition transition. And there have been times when that process seriously did not work out for WotC. I don't have any numbers, but the transition from 3.5 to 4th Edition saw a ton of players move on. Hell, this is how we got Pathfinder (not to say that competing fantasy RPGs is a bad thing, but again, I'm looking at this from WotC's perspective). While it never came together, a few years before 5th Edition came out, a friend of a friend offered to start running a game, and when I asked if it would be D&D, she said "well, D&D kind of sucks now, so we'll use Pathfinder instead."

Alienating players is a great way to lose business. And with so many more players than they previously had, I have to imagine that WotC's number one priority is to make the transition to One D&D as easy and painless as possible for those used to 5th Edition.

So that's why I cannot imagine that WotC would change tack on their overall One D&D strategy (it's right there in the codename, so that suggests a pretty strong commitment.)

But let's now address that feeling of being overwhelmed:

I'll confess that I have always wanted to gobble up the new and exciting additions to established games. I'm always eager to play the new class, the new race, whatever new option is available to me. So my general attitude is going to tend toward being very pro- "everything including the kitchen sink."

But I am sympathetic to players who are perhaps less comfortable with these kind of choices and decisions. They might feel like they're expected to memorize the differences between a Tabaxi and a Leonin or a Lizardfolk and a Dragonborn. And it's a lot to take in. There are like 30 races in Monsters of the Multiverse.

D&D's 5th Edition class design also strongly favors spellcasting - only the Fighter, Rogue, Monk, and Barbarian don't get spellcasting of some sort by default. Adding spells means that the decisions you make in building your character involve selecting a lot of spells, and as those lists expand, you have a lot of books to balance.

Do you want Chill Touch or Ray of Frost? Ray of Sickness or Ray of Enfeeblement? If we see more and more spells added, that's more and more variables.

So I get it.

But, I also think that this is where a DM can act to curate the list. For example, with my Sunday group dealing with our main DM being busy with work and the player who was running a Kids on Bikes game feeling overwhelmed with a lot of work recently, I volunteered to run a short, or at least episodic, Spelljammer game.

While my policy is that you can play what you want in almost any case, I pushed the players to take a look at the new Spelljammer races, and as such, the three people who have started working on their characters picked from those new races - we have a Giff Paladin, a Thri-kreen Artificer, and an Astral Elf Monk.

Now, if any of those players had told me that they wanted to play a Warforged or a Centaur, I'd have no problem with that. But by simply allowing that book to stay on the shelf and only bringing it out if someone is feeling a need to try something else, we can keep the options from feeling overwhelming.

Granted, this requires that one of the people in the group knows the vast breadth of options and can walk newer or at least less experienced players to walk through the choices.

For this reason, I think that ideas like the Rules Expansion Set are a really good idea moving forward.

5th Edition moved away from titles like "Monster Manual II" or "Player's Handbook III," in favor of more flavorful book names like Volo's Guide to Monsters or Xanathar's Guide to Everything. But I think that it might be wise of them in the future to make it clear that certain publications are meant as the sort of "primary" expansions.

I think a new DM could potentially be overwhelmed and feel like they've got to pick up every single book to run their game. (I'll admit this is sort of my impulse - I probably don't need to have all the adventure books given that I tend to run homebrew stuff). Let's say there's some 18-year-old DM who picks up the core 2024 rulebooks in two years, falls in love with the game, and wants to get more content for their players? I could imagine them thinking they've got to get all the books that came out since they were 8 years old. In fact, they're probably going to get enough to keep them busy for many years to come if they pick up the Rules Expansion Box Set.

So, what I'd like to see in One D&D is to have a clearer delineation between the books everyone ought to have versus those that are there if you want to, for example, run something in a particular setting or run a particular adventure.

For example, if someone were getting into 5E right now, and wanted to run games for their group (and no one had any of the books,) maybe after trying the Starter Set, I'd say start with the Core Rulebooks. If they want to run published adventures, I'd go for a tried and true one like Curse of Strahd or Tyranny of Dragons. If they want to homebrew, I'd next point them toward the Rules Expansion set. Then, I'd ask if they want to do their own world-building or run something in an established setting.

If they want a really detailed setting with tons of information about the way the world works, I'd then send them to Explorer's Guide to Wildemount or possibly Eberron: Rising from the Last War. If they want to do more worldbuilding homebrew but within an established space, I'd recommend Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, or if they're very, very homebrew focused, Spelljammer: Adventures in Space (something I have thoughts on for a later post).

I also think that Fizban's Treasury of Dragons is very cool if you want to run a very dragon-centric campaign. I'll be curious to see to what extent Glory of the Giants matches its model.

So, yeah, there are a ton of 5E books (and more coming). But the overwhelming content issue could be solved pretty easily by experienced DMs, and, I'd recommend, making a guide on the D&D website.

At the heart of this, though, is that it feels that choosing to make older books obsolete would be not only a bad choice from a business perspective and from a respect-for-players perspective, but it would also seem to require fixing a bunch of problems that aren't broken.

There's plenty in 5th Edition that needs fixing, for sure. But I think the iterative, evolutionary approach that they're using is going to work a lot better than upending the table and starting from scratch.