Editing Wizards of the Coast (section)

==The Life and Death of 5th Edition==
After seeing how much success Paizo had with its open playtests for [[Pathfinder]], Wizards did something similar with the new edition of ''D&D'', which got years and years of hard, careful work and testing put into it. Wizards promised to keep the best aspects of every previous edition, distilling a better product at the end.  Despite a frequently-skeptical response, it helped rebuild community confidence, and the eventual result, many years in the making, was ''[[D&D Next]]'', or, as it would inevitably eventually be known, 5e.

So far, 5e has been a roaring critical and commercial success. The game is fun, simple yet deep, streamlined without being dumbed down, and has combined the playability of the early editions with the mechanics of the d20 system and the best ideas from 4e. With the monthly community surveys and ''Unearthed Arcana'' articles providing anyone with an Internet connection with quality, officially-sanctioned homebrew content and a genuine system of feedback, Wizards has begun to reclaim the reputation they nearly lost after the ill-advised attempt by their corporate masters to chase the MMO dollar. Even Paizo had to step up its game to compete, as the best parts of 5e brought into contrast the worst parts of 3.5 in Pathfinder.

The company had also been centralizing a LOT of their publication. Up until about 2015 or so, Wizards subcontracted a lot of their writing and art duties to others, like some freelancers and authors who would work for them. However, after a rocky reception to the quality of the first five D&D 5e [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Books|books]], the company hired a bunch of new graphical designers, artists, editors, and even some of the players on the official D&D podcasts (including Kate Welch and Amy Falcone) to join their main crew in Seattle. After that, all but one of the 5e books has been radically better-received, even if the release rate of splatbooks is still far lower than what most fans like.

After that step, Wizards began branching out significantly, hiring Fandom, Inc and DriveThruRPG to create officially-licensed and branded websites to augment their own online offerings for D&D and Magic: The Gathering. With the full acquisition of D&D Beyond, players were able to create characters, sell adventures, track combat, design custom monsters, and otherwise homebrew material to their hearts' content, and even buy official expansions to the hardback D&D books that are legal at the table for Adventurers' League. The services also actually work, amazingly enough, although there is widespread fan [[rage|discontent]] over how the hardback books cost fifty US dollars but don't unlock their online content on D&D Beyond without spending another 25 bucks. This is in addition to the fact that many of their more recent 5e books have been seen as little more than cash-grabs; fairly low effort and lazy writing paired with barebones fluff (seriously, most of the new or introduced races like Owlin or Plasmoids have roughly a paragraph of lore at best) and debatably balanced mechanics pretty much only serve to justify the $50 price tags stamped onto their hardback books.

With the streamlining of their services, WotC has since been looking toward creating a unifying edition of D&D called "One D&D". ''Intended'' to be backwards compatible, One D&D is intended to feature a much grander implementation of online features into the core experience. This is intended to even include a fully virtual TTRPG with D&D Beyond integration for use with online campaigns.