Iosue
Legend
This something I just have to get off my chest after watching too many D&D youtubers smugly saying, "WotC says it's not 6th Edition, but actually..."
In the RPG context, and particularly the D&D context, the word "edition" is a skunked term. It's skunking began with TSR's pretty drastic overhaul of the game in 1989, which probably should have been called something like "Revised Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", but no one knew at the time how tortured the term "edition" would become. WotC's initial strategy of planned obsolescence turned the word inside out. I can give them "3rd Edition", even though it was a good time to make a clean break with the "edition" terminology altogether. But "3.5" was a lexical abomination. By any normal definition of the term, 3.5 was really 4th Edition, but by combining the "edition" word with "version" numbers, the understanding of what an edition was became more and more muddied. Then 4th Edition came out, and the term was truly skunked. An edition was an entirely new game, not compatible with the one that came before it, an idea only reinforced with 5th Edition.
So now we come to the latest revision of the game. And there's confusion. No longer does "edition" have its straightforward publishing meaning of a new edit of an existing work; now it means "new ruleset." But does backwards compatibility mean it is 5.5? Is it 6th Edition? This by itself would be plenty of justification for abandoning the term "edition," but then there's the additional baggage the term brings from the "Edition Wars." Some of that baggage has been mitigated thanks to WotC releasing 5e and largely leaving it alone for eight years. But there's no benefit to bringing all of it back by grandly proclaiming "6th edition!"
Good-bye and good riddance to "edition" as some nebulous term of game design that only ever had any meaning as marketing pablum in the first place.
In the RPG context, and particularly the D&D context, the word "edition" is a skunked term. It's skunking began with TSR's pretty drastic overhaul of the game in 1989, which probably should have been called something like "Revised Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", but no one knew at the time how tortured the term "edition" would become. WotC's initial strategy of planned obsolescence turned the word inside out. I can give them "3rd Edition", even though it was a good time to make a clean break with the "edition" terminology altogether. But "3.5" was a lexical abomination. By any normal definition of the term, 3.5 was really 4th Edition, but by combining the "edition" word with "version" numbers, the understanding of what an edition was became more and more muddied. Then 4th Edition came out, and the term was truly skunked. An edition was an entirely new game, not compatible with the one that came before it, an idea only reinforced with 5th Edition.
So now we come to the latest revision of the game. And there's confusion. No longer does "edition" have its straightforward publishing meaning of a new edit of an existing work; now it means "new ruleset." But does backwards compatibility mean it is 5.5? Is it 6th Edition? This by itself would be plenty of justification for abandoning the term "edition," but then there's the additional baggage the term brings from the "Edition Wars." Some of that baggage has been mitigated thanks to WotC releasing 5e and largely leaving it alone for eight years. But there's no benefit to bringing all of it back by grandly proclaiming "6th edition!"
Good-bye and good riddance to "edition" as some nebulous term of game design that only ever had any meaning as marketing pablum in the first place.
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