Tavern Watch Podcast: D&D 2024 is dead, long live D&D 5.5e

On this episode of the Tavern Watch Podcast, the team gets a win — a win in naming things, it turns out, as Wizards of the Coast (in addition to finally announcing some products for 2026) also has started referring to the 2024 revision of D&D as “D&D 5.5e.” Considering it ended up being more a balance update than the massive revolution in tabletop gaming that we were originally sold, we’re all of the opinion this is for the better (and is easier to say, to boot). On top of that, Joe’s really, really excited about the Godzilla Roleplaying Game both due to a general all-abiding love for Toho’s kaiju but also because of some of the titans of the tabletop industry that are featured in its staff list now, Phil has been completely enamored with Cairn (and its creator Yochai Gal’s podcast, Between Two Cairns) as far as things in the OSR tabletop gaming space goes, and Liz has a thought or two about Wizards CEO Chris Cocks’ statement that they’re keeping generative AI out of some of their biggest product spaces — namely D&D, Magic: the Gathering, and video games — because the creatives and the audience don’t want it. Hopefully they can stick to that, though we’ve got bad news if you’re a fan of Peppa Pig as far as AI in your intellectual property space goes.

You’ll find all that and more on this week’s Tavern Watch podcast! You can listen to the podcast directly from this post or click on download icon in the upper right corner of the player below to listen on your own device.

Music from this episode is “Midnight Tale” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.

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