Wizards News

I wanted to include several announcements and links in here this post will cover a couple of different areas. First of all the June DDI update was released last week. There wasn't a lot of new material to include, and the usual smattering of bug fixes was always interesting to peruse, so I guess overall there really wasn't much to report here.

Secondly, Mike Mearls published a playtest update to list the feedback the designers have received so far from the DnDNext playtest. For what it's worth the list of items he discussed look very similar to the observations we made during our own playtest session, especially in the area of resting and healing. We do realize it was a work in progress, but it was still sort of validating to see that our questions and concerns were the same ones as felt by the rest of the DnD community. Mearls also said the next version release of the playtest rules would be "before the end of summer," but I'm still betting they will want an update released in time for players to use at Gencon in mid-August.

Thirdly the 1st Edition Reprints are due out on July 17, 2012. The release of these books were pushed back from their original April release date, so I am assuming they really will be released this time. One of the announcement links from that page states that these books will be a "hobby channel exclusive," and I can only find a mention of these books on amazon.com if I search by ISBN number, so if you want one I guess you really will have to go through your local gaming store. I have never owned a copy of these books, so I am at least mildly interested.

As a follow-up to that, you might remember when a hoax announcement was made several months ago about Wizards also releasing the DnD 3.5 core rulebook set reprints. Well, as of today it was no longer a hoax. Wizards has announced that they were indeed releasing 3.5 Edition Reprints and they are due to appear on September 18, 2012. I am somewhat less curious about the 3.5 reprints, but I really don't have a problem with them re-releasing older material. There was a survey attached to that page about what other 3.5 material you might be interested in seeing - I mentioned PDF's might interest me more, especially as a way to reduce printing costs, availability issues, and costs in general.