Why do you assume that 5E won't be an evolution from 4E? As some have said, I don't see WotC going back to a "3.75," although based upon Mearls' nostalgia they are going to try incorporating elements from earlier editions that have been de-emphasized in 4E.
Yeah but, those elements haven't actually been de-emphasised- for instance, many fans of older editions say that 4e is more 'dnd-like' than 3e was, for them. In most cases, what has been de-emphasised has been bad design who's re-inclusion would make for an inferior game.
As an example: you can't actualy 'bring back vancian magic' or 'make the classes more mechanically differentiated' without screwing up what makes 4e a better game than 3e. And no matter how often people deny it, 3e was a less fun game for the poor suckers who played one of the many, many, many trap options in it's designs, which included entire classes, including the type of classes a new player was likly to try and play.
The claim that 4e is servicing various design goals less well is simply not accurate- it's not popular to say it, least of all around here, but 4e isn't actually more video gamey, or less door kickey, or less improvisational.
In reality, the main reason critics of 4e note differences in their play experience between 4e nd previous editions? The main thing that makes a difference to play content in those cases? Is that in previous editions various elements were so poorly designed that players and DMs would find excuses not to use them, or buffer them with endless fiat, improv, and what they define as roleplaying.
This actually caused problems for 4e- a lot of people played a lot of 4e combart when it came out, because hey, combat isn't a dumb chore anymore- and that got a bit much. OTOH, it really helped expose key issues, like the grind.
And all this is not to say there aren't failures of design in 4e- skill challenges continue to be at best, a poor first effort at making skills work. But contrary to what the rope use brigade insists, there was nothing lost in the transtion from 3e to 4e skills, but a lot of wasted effort that wasn't particularly fun.
Often, 4e players, upon finding this, heaved a sigh of relief and put all that extra effort into making cool stories and encounters together- with plenty of improvisation, roleplaying, and house ruling thrown in. All too often, 4e haters rebelled not because 4e had less roleplaying, or less improv, or less house ruling, or less anything particularly good, but because they wanted their ball and chain back.
The lost, lamented 3e skills were nothing more than a coat-hangers to suspend a bunch of fiat play and improvisation from, and while a proper skill overhaul would probably look a lot different from 4e skills, and might even include for instance, a single self-contained craft skill, it doesn't change the reality of those skills and their usage in actual play.
At the core of this debate is the notion that every criticism if 4e is a legitimate argument about design- either design directly, or design with regards to servicing play-style. I reject that assumption, and considering many of the mechanics that people defend, I have no doubts that my position is the correct one. Of course, stating such an opinion carries consequences on a forum like this, but that doesn't make it a less legitimate viewpoint.
But I think that one of the core design goals of 5E is/will be to fix the problems of 4E, especially the grind but also skill challenges, dissociation of rituals from play, non-classic tropes as core (e.g. wilden, dragonborn, etc), putting magic back into magic items, and so forth. The most encouraging thing--and I hope I'm not reading too much into it--was Mearls talking about the "complexity dial," which would theoretically please those who prefer a 15-minute combat and those that like 1-2 hour long highly tactical encounters. I'm particularly intrigued by the notion of being able to switch the dial within the same session, sort of like "blitz" option for combat that resolves easy combats with one or two die rolls.
This all sounds great, but it's based on the assumption that design is simply a thing we can do whatever we want with.
There's a myth about design as it related to play styles, which states, essentially, that all play styles are of equal merit, and hence, design is about servicing that variety fully. The assumption made here is that all play styles can be equally serviced by design, no matter what contradictions or incoherences they would seem to posess, from the position of logical analisis of competing goals.
But in reality, not only are all play styles not equally served by design, but all play styles do not have equal merit in any play. When we claim otherwise, we make assumptions without any legitimate reason for doing so, primarily because doing so avoids arguments and outrage from people who might take such criticisms personally. But if you're going to design well, and design well for actual play, you need to be up front about what design achieves, and what occurs in play.
And in play, the kind of design we see in 4e just plain works
better. Not IMO better, not 'just for me' better, but straight up, let's-wants-to-have-fun, let's-play-a-game-together-and-enjoy-it, better at being fun and hence, better at doing what design of games is intended to do.
Not all designs are created equal, and not all playstyles are equally legitimate.
Not all designs are created equal: people have limited time, enthusiasm, cognititive resources, attention, ability to schedual, ability to commit in various time frames, and so on, and on- there are real limits to play, so there are real limits to what design can achieve. Good design is about getting the most from the limited resources that people can bring to bear when playing a game- no matter how much time or self-agrandised brainpower people claim to bring to their tables, there are still limits, and issues, and problems that design needs to take into account.
Not all play styles can be equally serviced by design, or are of equal merit:
Somebody might claim that their super-mean killer gm retroclone is super awesome, but I garuntee you, a lot of proud killer gms are just power tripping jerks who drive people away- not just from their table, but from the hobby as a whole. The fallacy that such games are 'fair' because of various props like random rolls or uasi-realism is simply a crutch used when absing dm fiat. This leads to the classic scene of a GM with a bunch of random charts, who simply keeps rolling on the charts until they get the result they're after. Are many 'killer' gms just making fun for their players? Sure. Sure. Are you going to claim that you can design to service that play style? Good luck.
Somebody might insist that the GMPC they play in their iconic 20 year campaign is a vital part of the story, but if a newbie asks me about running a gmpc, i'm stilll going to say 'hell no' because, all excuses aside, gmpcs have a way of turning players into passive, deprotagonised doormats. Can you create a design where gms get to play a pc and be a gm at the same time, and not lose much of the benfit in play of seperating those roles? Possibly. But I wouldn't put money on it, and I wouldn't demand WOTC do so, either.
And the same goes for most of that the anti-4e brigade demands of 5e. they are, in short, demanding bad design. Wish lists that are about gratifying their assumption about play, not about gratifying their actualy players in actual play.
A 5e that tries to serve these kinds of play goals? That adopts that myth of equality of playstyles, and tries to service that myth with the compounded myth that design can simply service any style of play, any time? That's a great way to make a really crappy game.
And the idea that they can dial up and down these factors? So uh, at what dial setting do fighters turn into jokes again? What setting do we turn the dial to to remind ourselves how much worse 3e-style buff recalc was than 4e style grind? Is the old random prostitute generation chart a modular component, or just an optional house rule?
Now, I realise that you probably aren't after that stuff. But when mearls talks about that stuff, he's not aiming at either of us.
Even leaving aside the issue of preference and goals. I'd be cautious about any 'versatile' system, and i've played the best and craziest, that being the HERO system, extensivly.
Hero is a great game. But it's also a game where the gm basically has to co-build every pc from the ground up with the player, in a process that has much in common with game design, as it does with character creation. That is where versatility leads, and that is the only way it can reliably work. And i'm pretty sure . . . pretty sure that that is not D&D- although hero can make for a pretty cool fantasy game.
You might argue, hey, we can just add in a bunch of optional rules! But at some point, your game actually has to be playable, game by game, session by session. I honestly think a limited modular design would be a good idea, with modules for things like owning land, and grand rituals, but all those components would have to be balanced, and none of them are worth putting paid design time into, unless they service a reasonably large and marketable audience.
IMO, WotC should NOT try to "out-3E" Paizo. Pathfinder fans are too faithful, and I also feel that going backwards would be a kind of regression. 4E added a lot of good things to the game - it is just time to iron out the problems and maybe re-incorporate stuff that was left behind.
I honestly don't think that much was left behind. I mean magic items? Ok, need to be way better but. . in 3e it was just a matter of deciding what star to put on the top of your christmas tree. Earlier ediitions were frankly too archaic to draw actual design from.
People can talk about cool play moments, but demanding that 'cool memory/nostaliga=game design goal" is not good design.
But they can create a product that Pathfinder fans will like and spend money on. It doesn't matter as much if people defect from Pathfinder to 5E in order for 5E to be successful; what matters is that Pathfinder fans spend money on 5E products. WotC should focus their attention on pleasing existing 4E fans and bringing new people in - they shouldn't put too much effort into trying to get people back from Pathfinder.
I agree, and it's possible that there is a more reasonable cross section of fans available. But you woulnd't know it from reading a lot of forums, and i'm afraid it's the hostility to 4e that is driving design decisions at wotc. I mean it's not like opinions dissenting against that hostility get very good treatment, in most places on the net.
It's very hard to find discussions that aren't trampeled over by the idea that design and hence, D&D, can be exactly what everyone wants it to be, and that the only people who stand in the way of
My D&D being exactly what
I want are mean corporate jerks and 4ron edition warriors.