In a section in R.A. Salvatore’s upcoming Dungeons & Dragons novel The Finest Edge of Twilight, a monk notes that “teleporting,” “dimension stepping,” and “misty stepping” are all different terms for quickly moving by traveling between planes. The language comes from the many ways that the magical effect has been referred to by the rules of the tabletop role-playing game, and is an acknowledgement of how much difficulty Salvatore has had keeping track of the changing game mechanics over the decades.
“That’s been one of the toughest parts,” Salvatore told Polygon in a Zoom interview. “4th Edition D&D almost broke me, not because I didn’t like 4th Edition D&D. I’m not making any judgments – positive or negative – on any of the editions, but the changes were so sweeping.”
The 2008 launch of 4th Edition proved controversial for restructuring all of the game’s character classes, giving each of them a set of powers that they could use a number of times per day or encounter. Wizards of the Coast also decided to move the calendar of the Forgotten Realms, the campaign setting where Salvatore’s books are set, forward by 100 years between 3rd and 4th Edition in an event called The Sundering. That decision shocked Salvatore and Forgotten Realms creator and novelist Ed Greenwood.
“Ed looked at me and says, ‘Bob, what are we going to do?’ I said, we’re going to figure out how we’re going to fix it because in about five years they’re going to come to us and say, ‘Bob, we got to fix this,’” Salvatore said.
Sure enough, Wizards added the Second Sundering to transition between 4th Edition and 5th Edition, which launched in 2014. Salvatore had laid the groundwork by mortally wounding his hero Drizzt Do’Urden in the 2013 novel The Last Threshold and then saving him in the book The Companions, where many of Drizzt’s closest are reincarnated to live new lives and try to save him. Their rebirth allowed them to rejoin the game’s new timeline.
Salvatore says he makes judgement calls when deciding how much to incorporate the current edition’s mechanics into his fiction, and characters sometimes draw on spells that date back 1st Edition. He still calls the energy that powers a monk’s special abilities ki instead of focus, a change Wizards of the Coast made in the 2024 ruleset. His new book primarily follows a half-elf, a species that didn’t make it into the latest version of the Player’s Handbook.
“They don’t argue with me because they know I’m doing something different than playing the game when I’m writing the books, and as long as the two things feed off each other, everybody’s happy,” Salvatore said.
There have been times where Salvatore was more argumentative about changes in D&D. He said he clashed with the game’s original owners TSR when they started producing supplemental rulebooks for 2nd Edition in the late ‘80s for different character classes and races.
“I said, I think you’re going in a direction that’s going to crash your game,” Salvatore said. “The beauty of D&D, when you’re bringing someone into it, is all they have to do is read a few pages of the player’s handbook and they can play. Like five pages, and they’re in. Now you’re adding all these things to the players instead of giving the dungeon masters the tools they need. […] I don’t think they listened to me. They also went bankrupt, so maybe that was their fault.”
The author and his friends take turns running a Sunday night D&D 2024 game, and Salvatore also plays with his kids and grandkids. He said he hopes Wizards of the Coast focuses on putting out good adventures, ideally ones that don’t require too much work to run. His favorite module is Gary Gygax’s “The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth,” which was revised in the 2024 anthology Quests from the Infinite Staircase. Salvatore also loved the adventure Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden even though it didn’t borrow much from his novel set in the region.
“I still want Dungeons & Dragons that I can plug and play anywhere because we often make our own worlds in my group,” he said. “I just hope that all the gaming companies put out good games so that I have fun playing them.”