billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
See, for me, this is partly what an edition change should be for a successful version of the game. Incremental improvements here and there to collect the things you've learned to do better. A major shift is just a good way to risk losing customers on an unproven hope to gain more. It may be fodder for a separate game, optional module, whatever. Gambling on a major shift without something really forcing you to do so or being at such a low trough you've got little to risk strikes me as irresponsible.Yeah that's the interesting thing here - I'll be honest, when I heard about 1D&D having a playtest and so on, I expected to see a bunch of "OH YEAH!" ideas and "Of course! Why didn't we think of that sooner! D'oh!" as well as of course some "HELL NO".
But it's mostly been "Huh, kinda cool I guess", "Well it's an improvement, technically" and "That just doesn't seem particularly good". It's hard to care strongly about it. Especially as the only solidly "kinda cool" stuff I've really seen are things like the race/species changes, which would be trivial to backport to 5E.
At least with 3E and 4E there was some exciting stuff, whether you hated it or loved it. 1D&D a lot of it looks like change for the sake of change, combined with some minor improvements and minor questionable choices. Especially as the most potentially controversial and exciting change of recent years was actually fully negotiated before 1D&D, the ditching of default racial attribute bonuses.
This, to me, would be especially true for an edition timed for an arbitrary release date - a 50th anniversary - rather than hard data about sales in decline. I would have been perfectly willing to shell out money for a 50th anniversary D&D, very similar to 5e. For one thing, the art would be new, organization of the materials would (hopefully) be improved, and my current books are 10 years old and showing their wear.
...until they effed over their supporting ecology of 3rd party publishers, resources, and the thousands of people that will affect.