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Published Mar 4, 2026, 3:41 PM EST
Don't call it a new edition!
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When Wizards of the Coast announced a new “One D&D” initiative in 2022 for the TTRPG’s 50th anniversary, it felt ambitious and new. Originally described as a backward compatible update to the 5th edition rules, the intention was to integrate One D&D with D&D Beyond and a 3D virtual tabletop eventually referred to as Project Sigil. When the new ruleset was released in 2024, Wizards insisted it was not a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. The publisher also never really provided a clear name we could all call this thing. Yet on Monday, Wizards announced it would begin labeling D&D Beyond content using the 2024 update as “5.5e.”
In the changelog update, Wizards stressed that calling the game’s 2014 edition 5e and 2024 5.5e are “clarity labels” that are not indicative of a new edition. Both versions remain fully supported and compatible on D&D Beyond and with each other outside the digital platform. Under the new labeling system, rules content from the original 2014 release of fifth edition will appear as 5e, while the updated 2024 rules will appear as 5.5e when browsing content or building characters on D&D Beyond.
“I really don’t know why, but I find this so funny,” reads one Reddit post reacting to the news. In 24 hours, the post received more than 1,400 upvotes. “They could have called it 5.5 from the jump.”
I have to agree here. Even in my capacity covering Dungeons & Dragons, I’m never sure what to call this update, though I often wind up saying D&D 5e (2024) — which is clunky and unsexy. And, as Wizards acknowledged in the post, a portion of the community had already been using 5.5e anyway. At least now I can, in good conscience, just call it 5.5e, even in the non-digital version of the game.
All of this is hardly a branding crisis on par with something like whatever has been going on with HBO streaming apps in recent years, but it’s remained a point of confusion since the 2024 rules were released with a new Player’s Handbook in September of that year. A lot of fan speculation about the light rebrand posits that Wizards wanted to move away from its highly lucrative fifth edition as little as possible. Launching a full-on new edition of the game would essentially make a decade’s worth of content obsolete. Particularly when there’s such a strong push to bring users into D&D Beyond, that would have been a huge mistake.
Whether Wizards likes the terminology or not, the canonization of the 5.5e label is now going to be the de facto name for 2024 revision both inside and outside of D&D Beyond.
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