 There's a new version of Dungeons & Dragons that's coming. Actually, it's mostly here. It's called the fifth edition, which is a lot of editions, so why did we need so many of them? So back in the 1970s, this guy named Gary Gygax created a tabletop game called Chainmail. It was kind of like a medieval version of Risk, but pretty quickly he and his buddy Dave Arneson started messing with the rules and it turned into something completely different. It turned into a role-playing game and we call it Dungeons & Dragons. Back then, D&D was all about having a lot of friends around a table and telling each other stories about what their characters were doing in an imaginary world. There are all sorts of rules about how to swing a sword, creating fireballs, and figuring out key stats, which led to the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. AD&D was really cool, but it kind of caused a moral panic. Pat Robertson got on the 700 Club and he told Christians that D&D was demonic and dangerous. Tom Hanks made this movie called Mazes and Monsters where D&D basically drives him crazy and ends up crying harder than James Van Der Beek in Dawson's Creek. So they pulled out some of this demon stuff and cleaned up a bunch of complicated rules and they released AD&D 2nd Edition in 1989. It basically turned into a golden age of D&D. All sorts of people started playing and we got crazy new worlds to play in. There was a high fantasy world, vampire world, desert world. We had D&D in space with these creepy creatures called Mind Flayers who had tentacles instead of mouths. That was all great, but fast forward to 1997 and a new company owns D&D and they release a super complicated version and then another version that focused too much on tabletop play. Then a competing game called Pathfinder, which is actually based on older D&D rules, started to be more popular than D&D itself. So we get this crazy nerd fight that everybody calls the Edition Wars where gamers are all playing different versions of D&D or Pathfinder and just trying to find people who you want to roll dice with and kill some floating tentacle-eyed beholders is worse than arguing about iPhones and Androids. All of which is why we have this new 5th edition of D&D. It goes back to its roots with simpler rules and more creativity. It's trying to win back all those people who left during the Edition Wars. If they pull it off, it could be a resurrection for the franchise. Pat Robertson would be proud. �