New D&D Edition

I was thinking about pre-ordering Dungeons and Dragons: Fourth Edition on Amazon.com today, but there's really only one thing holding me back. No, it's not that I might not play it because I'm just too hip to play a game best left for stinky men in cloaks who live with their mothers: that really is a non-issue, man. I'm just as likely to make time with an elf as a real girl, so why not just go with it?

No, my problem is much more nerdy. I'm concerned that they'll whip out 4.5 edition right after fourth, just like they made 3.5 after third. I'd end up buying all the books, and then I'd have to buy all of them all over again for the half-dozen or so tweaks they throw in because they didn't playtest the shit properly.

Let this be a lesson to you, Wizards of the Coast. As the old saying goes, "once burned, twice shy." You'd be sitting on my pre-order dough right now if you just stuck it out instead of dropping that 3.5 edition stinker on me. I'm doubly shy because I actually waited to buy third edition and ended up going straight to 3.5, which turned out to be a very good decision.

Or, depending on whether or not I want to believe all that extra book-buying was intentional, it might be "Fool me once, shame on you...."