D&D 4th Edition? Wait For It.

One of the big pieces of news out of this past weekend's Diamond & Alliance Retailer Summit (a big industry thing with tabletop gaming's two largest distributors) was the announcement that the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition will not be releasing over a three month period early next year (May, June, July 2008) as previously touted, but instead will now all be released in June. For players, this is good news (you get the whole game at once) and bad news(you have to wait another month), but for retailers this is quite a blow, essentially forcing stores to buy significant volumes of three hardcover books in one month instead of spread out over a three month period. Wizard's of the Coast's Sara Girard reiterated her statements at the retailer summit on ENWorld yesterday, saying, "Due to customer feedback, we made the decision to release all three core rulebooks in June. Keep on the Shadowfell releases in May. And the Special Edition Core Rulebooks release in October." I'll not get into rumor mongering or conspiracy theories here (though there's plenty of those too), but I can't remember the last time I ever heard a gamer offer the "feedback" that they want something later.

By the by. Isn't that Satan, the Prince of Darkness, on the cover of the new Player's Handbook? Good thing D&D doesn't have a long-standing stigma associated with it for just this sort of thing.