Almost four years ago when Wizards of the Coast began unveiling its plans for what would become the first major rules update to Dungeons & Dragons since the launch of fifth edition in 2014, the TTRPG publisher would only talk of it in hushed tones as “One D&D,” the future of the game that would incorporate physical tabletop play, online play, and a then-upcoming virtual tabletop experience. When that future brought with it a trio of updated core rulebooks for the 50th anniversary of the game in 2024—again, the first since fifth edition launched in 2014—Wizards of the Coast insisted once again that this was not a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
A year later, it’s telling you it’s a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Well, half of one.
Wizards has spent pretty much the whole time during and since not really having an idea of what to cleanly call the latest update to D&D, especially as the “One D&D” moniker faded out with the cancellation of “Project Sigil,” the aforementioned virtual tabletop platform. Sometimes it was the new D&D; other times it was 2024’s D&D. Now, in a changelog update to D&D Beyond (via Polygon), the publisher has decided that, at least on this internal level, we’re now in the era of Dungeons & Dragons 5.5e.
“We’re making this change because we recognize that there’s confusion when just referring to the year, especially when browsing your library and building a character,” the update reads in part, also strongly clarifying that the update does not make any current changes to gameplay mechanics or, perhaps more importantly for Beyond, changes to what people have purchased on the platform. “This term has also been picked up by the community to refer to the updated rule set, so it was the natural course for the update.”
Wizards is right there, as D&D fans have been calling the incremental update—which was built on the strength of being compatible with releases from the fifth edition of the game as a selling point, to not invalidate people’s collections of sourcebooks over the course of the game’s explosion in popularity since 2014—5.5e since it was initially announced, regardless of whatever the publisher said about the ruleset not being a new edition upgrade.
And really, that’s because D&D has had decades of precedent around edition naming and half-point upgrades like this—Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the second edition of the game, got its own second edition before third edition dropped the “Advanced” from the title—and third edition itself released its own 3.5e, three years after the edition’s initial launch.
But the change makes sense, especially on D&D Beyond, where players can still swap around and use base fifth edition rules alongside their 2024—sorry, 5.5e!—iterations, something Wizards only allowed after massive backlash saw it reverse course on forcing players to manually homebrew 2014 rules on the platform. Being able to quickly see a differentiation between a 5e rule and a 5.5e rule rather than, say, 5e and “2024” is much easier, even if it’s taken Wizards of the Coast a few years to come around to that way of thinking.
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