Okay WotC, You Officially Have My Attention

I have to say that I am very pleasantly surprised by the news that WotC will be re-releasing the AD&D core books in April. Unfortunately, it is a limited print run that is only available through local game stores here in North America. This means I may very well be unable to give WotC money for one of their products for the first time in over a decade. The closest game store to me is over an hour away and with my commitments to both family and career that means making a special trip, something I cannot guarantee.

Personally, I hope that there are plenty of others that can purchase these, if only to prove that there is a demand for items in the D&D library that have long been out of print. I say this in hopes that the hobby will see WotC roll out other items in that library that I would make a special trip for. As others have suggested, I would love to see compilations of modules.

To be honest, my enthusiasm for this news is somewhat curbed by the choice of what to re-release. I do not play AD&D with any consistency when compared to those editions that came with soft covers. I still own good copies of all three AD&D core books and have no burning need to spend that kind of money for second (if brand new) copies. My various copies of those soft cover editions, however, are not in nearly as good a shape. As much as I love the various retro-clones (especially LL), I am always going back to the original B/X, Holmes and OD&D rulebooks to look at art, muse about original rules and otherwise wish that they were in good enough condition to regularly bring them to the table. For the purposes of giving the Hobby as a whole a tremendous gift, I hope these softcover editions could see their own re-release with hard covers to help preserve them for generations to come. One can hope. I would also be remiss if I didn't mention pdfs...

Having said that, I greatly appreciate why WotC chose the AD&D core books. They don't need to reformat, they closely mimic the WotC core book model (PH, MM, DMG) and of all the various editions to re-release, they can make the most money off of these three books.

In the meantime, I am now paying attention to what WotC is doing — something that I didn't believe would ever happen. Lets hope that this good will and good news continues.