EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Frankly, I feel like the 4e/Pathfinder thing demonstrates that this would work, rather than that it wouldn't. There's a long-standing appetite for the kinds of things 3e offered, just...done better. Because even 3e's fans (mostly) agree that it was a deeply, deeply flawed game.
Meanwhile, the repeated things we've seen even here, on a forum that is, shall we say, leaning antagonistic to 4e and its design, indicate that there's a lot of love for the stuff 4e did, and that even if it wasn't universally popular, the feelings were strong--people who liked it loved it, generally speaking.
That is a ripe environment for serious, well-studied, genuine horizontal market segmentation. Which is not, at all, what the Basic/Advanced split was about; that was a quirk of history that survived well past its pull date. They were both games trying to be more or less the exact same thing, just with small differences in expression and growth rate, with the fig-leaf excuse that Basic was there to "teach" players how to play so they could "graduate" to AD&D, even though that whole concept was ridiculous from day 1.
An actual, principled approach, trying to make two games that are each BELOVED by half the fans (or whatever the ratios are; I don't care about the specific numbers here), as opposed to one single game that is overall mostly liked by most of the fans (as some have phrased it, "5e is everyone's second favorite"), could actually be highly effective. Especially since the current edition as it stands would continue to serve as a middle-ground for anyone who doesn't care for either of the more specialized games.
If I were in charge of making a project like this, I would actually use a threefold model:
1. "Legacy" D&D: The current 5th edition, with the 2024 errata and updates. No further splat books will be published for it, though new content may appear via sections of the adventure paths (which will be concurrently published for all three editions; conversions of all existing 5e adventure paths would be a long-term project.)
2. "Immersive" D&D: 5e retooled specifically to dispense with as much of the "it's a game, it has rules, don't think too hard about it" elements, while playing up the casual-definition "simulation" (the feeling that the rules communicate a "real," consistent world and map, as cleanly as possible, to the real thoughts, feelings, sensations, and choices of the characters and creatures in it). Balance is a distant secondary concern, and the rules work very hard to empower each group to "build their own fun," with the caveat that that explicitly requires a lot of patience and trial-and-error from the DM and players.
3. "Adventure" D&D: 5e retooled specifically to be as similar to 4e as it can without totally alienating folks who like the way 5e does things. Balance is a primary concern, and the rules work very hard to equip DMs and players with reliable, consistently functional tools and extensible frameworks--there will still be work, but it will be purely in the conceptual space, as the rules themselves will "have your back" as it were, with the caveat that that means changing the rules can have significant knock-on consequences, though those consequences should ideally always be highly predictable.
Legacy becomes the evergreen root, possibly with more of its content added to the OGL over time. "Immersive" D&D focuses on delivering the thing that people who think "balance" is a four-letter word want. "Adventure" D&D focuses on delivering what's desired by folks who want a game that works as advertised, out of the box, no assembly required. The three are sufficiently similar that it's pretty easy to translate characters between them, and adventures need only small tweaks (recalculating monster statistics by simple formulae, for example, or adding/removing certain keywords, etc.) to work in all three systems.
In effect, delivering the "modularity" they """"promised"""" back during the D&D Next playtest. (Note the quotes. They didn't technically "promise" it. But they bent over backwards to make people think certain things were going to happen and then waited until well after the playtest to let us know "oh yeah by the way literally none of those things are going to happen.") The three systems could thus be seen as "5e with no/few modules turned on," "5e with the Simulationist Module turned on," and "5e with the Gamist Module turned on." You couldn't play a character from one flavor at a table running a different flavor, but the conversion process would be relatively quick and simple, such that it would be feasible to travel between tables with a single character and still have things make sense.
That is, obviously, some serious demands to make of the game designers. But I think it would work. Even better, supplements could be made for the two lines back and forth, so that the audience is never feeling like there's book overload, but there's a closer-to-constant revenue stream as each sub-group gets its specialized content.
