Matt Colville, the famous Dungeons and Dragons content creator behind the MCDM YouTube channel and the Arcadia magazine, has just announced that he’s working on a new game. This new fantasy tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) is set to become a direct competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s Dungeons and Dragons.
The announcement comes on the heels of the biggest TTRPG controversy of the year: the Open Game License (OGL) 1.1 debacle. In short, back in 2000, Wizards created an open license that allowed third parties to use some of its content to create products. Then, at the beginning of 2023, during the preparation for the new edition of Dungeons and Dragons, a leak indicated that Wizards was planning to ditch its original OGL 1.0 license, something that would put hundreds if not thousands of creators in legal jeopardy in case they did not wish to follow the new draconian license. The D&D community has largely rejected the idea and proposed a boycott, and this opened up space for more games to rise.
Now, Matt Colville has told the world more about his upcoming Heroic Fantasy RPG in a new video. The original announcement occurred back in January, but players received valuable information this week. In the video, Colville revealed that the team has started working on the project, and playtest is already happening. Later this year, the goal is to launch a prototype adventure with pre-generated characters to test out the waters before starting crowdfunding. Interestingly, the development of the game is being live-blogged on Patreon, giving players “unfiltered” content from game development, meaning that the team will bounce around ideas with the public to see what sticks.
According to the creator, the new project will have tactical and cinematic gameplay, and it will “play the way movies look.” The idea is not to create a Dungeons and Dragons clone, but to look forward instead, all while following tropes and meeting expectations of the genre. Colville also claimed that he is not creating a system that tries to do a bit of everything, and fails at it, which is probably an attempt to poke fun at Wizards’ D&D, which is often accused of doing just that. After creating content for D&D 5E for five years, the creator of the MCDM channel believes that the most famous TTRPG in the world is too concerned with trying to protect its own D&D brand, inheriting weird design decisions and focusing too much on tradition.
Colville is far from the only big name in the TTRPG industry that has been outspoken about the need to replace D&D. Recently, Kobold Press, the largest third-party creator for Dungeons and Dragons, has announced its Project Black Flag, following Paizo’s similar move in 2008 to create a clone of the famous game.
Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is available now. Matt Colville's upcoming game is in development does not have a current release date.