D&D 5E D&D New Edition Design Looks Soon?

WotC’s Ray Winninger has hinted on Twitter that we may be seeing something of the 2024 next edition of D&D soon — “you’ll get a first look at some of the new design work soon.”.

 

[Reynard]

New players. It's a continuation of the strategy to have a larger base to sell a range of product to. If you don't need the 50th AE edition to play the 4 other products they produce per year after it comes out, those products will sell more copies. The reason for the AE edition, IMHO, is to make it easier to acquire new players. Selling it to existing players is a nice bonus, not a requirement for the product to be successful.

That seems strange. They have quite successfully acquired many, many new players with the current core books. Why would they need to do anything besides put out a new printing with maybe a 50th anniversary cover/logo? If they are putting actual money into the design and development of new books, surely they want as many people to buy them as possible?

 

[Staffan]

I am the first to admit that this is a combat game but the fact that you can pick and choose what leveled spell you want to just make into a cantrip shows that spells are not even.

no one is going to let shield be at will, but mage armor is okay
no one is letting any healing... not healing word, not cure wounds, not even good berry be at will but speak with dead is

it shows that the magic system needs an overhaul.

That's because different spells care about different aspects.

Shield vs mage armor are fairly balanced when you need to cast them. Mage armor is a little better than wearing studded leather armor (AC 13+Dex, lasts all day long), and shield gives you +5 AC for one round and is cast as a reaction. One is a preparation spell, the other is an emergency button with limited charges (that it shares with other spells). But if you can cast shield at will, that's essentially a permanent +5 AC boost and that won't do. For what a balanced at-will shield would look like, see blade ward: one action to cast, resistance against physical damage for one round. A version that instead gave +5 to AC would be fine.

Healing spells are likewise limited as a resource, because otherwise you have infinite hit points as long as you survive the fight. The level on healing spells is there as a resource management detail: healing lots of damage takes up a lot of your magic power. Speak with dead on the other hand is primarily level-limited to keep it out of the hands of low-level characters. It's a rare occasion that you would need to speak with dead multiple times in a day. Speak with dead could probably have been a ritual, to be honest.

Speaking of which, that's a thing I'd love to see but recognize that I probably won't: a return to 4e rituals. Rituals and the healing/attrition model are the main things I miss from 4e. For those who don't know: 4e took almost all non-combat magic and turned it into Rituals. Rituals could be cast by anyone with the Ritual Caster feat (which clerics and wizards got for free, but not paladins or warlocks). Rituals would take time and cost money (in the form of components) to cast, and covered things like animal messenger, knock, teleportation circle, and so on. Long-term condition recovery was also ritual-based (like regeneration, cure disease, or raise dead). Rituals were split up into a few different groups, based on different skills (arcane/Arcana, divine/Religion, primal/Nature, healing/Medicine... I think I'm missing one), but not all of them required skill checks.

 

[Sacrosanct]

After stewing on this for a day, and looking at the design changes of D&D over the years, I see a pretty strong correlation. One that's immediately reflected by looking at art direction which is more often than not reinforced mechanically. Here's my takaway:

When D&D was created, the creators and expected players were fans of pulp fiction. Dark swords and sorcery. Violence, and unrelenting environments. The game, in mechanics and art, reflected this.

Then the satanic panic hit, Lorraine took over and gave direction to make the game more family-friendly (2e). She saw how a large part of the demographic were kids, and not just college-age or older nerds who were fans of Howard and Lieber, and tried to focus on that market more.

3e took over with a completely different art direction and mechanics. The core gaming group were older now, and wanted complexity. The art took on a DaVinci aesthetic (complexity) and the mechanics reflected that.

4e tried to tap into the new huge fad that was happening: MMOs (specifically WoW). The art style, with huge weapons and tons of armor more closely reflected the art style of WoW. Mechanics emulated some of those things we saw in video games, like nonmagical healing surges and recharging powers

By the time 5e came out, a huge part of the geek community grew up watching Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and the Marvel Franchise. Grit and sword and sorcery were long a thing of the past. Art depiction almost always had the PCs in a heroic pose (like Marvel) and never as a victim. PCs had powers like superheroes. Compared to the earliest editions, 5e is very much a superhero fantasy, which makes sense considering what all of these new gamers grew up on.

(Note, I'm not saying any of these preferences are a bad thing, just what the company was doing at the time).

The point of all this? So what's 5.5 going to look like? Look at the past 10 years of what is popular in nerd pop culture. I think that will drive some of the things we'll see in the future. And I think it's why in the past couple of years, the game has been presented much more colorful and diverse because that's what's been happening in our pop culture as a whole. Sacred cows and long-standing assumptions about who we are as people aren't inherently ascribed to any longer.

 

[Reynard]

By the time 5e came out, a huge part of the geek community grew up watching Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and the Marvel Franchise. Grit and sword and sorcery were long a thing of the past. Art depiction almost always had the PCs in a heroic pose (like Marvel) and never as a victim. PCs had powers like superheroes. Compared to the earliest editions, 5e is very much a superhero fantasy, which makes sense considering what all of these new gamers grew up on.

That doesn't really track with 5E's initial goal of bringing players back to D&D who had abandoned it during the 4E era.

 

[CleverNickName]

That doesn't really track with 5E's initial goal of bringing players back to D&D who had abandoned it during the 4E era.

Was this officially stated as a goal? I don't disagree with your post, and I'd like to think that it is true, but I wasn't sure that this was stated as one of the design goals of 5th Edition.

 

[Sacrosanct]

That doesn't really track with 5E's initial goal of bringing players back to D&D who had abandoned it during the 4E era.

That was for different reasons. 5e design, both in aesthetic and mechanics, seems clearly influenced by Marvel and Harry Potter and others. Just look at the art (PCs are almost always depicted as heroes). Almost every class has magic. Sure, there's the Hawkeye (champion fighter), but every other class has powers

 

[OB1]

That seems strange. They have quite successfully acquired many, many new players with the current core books. Why would they need to do anything besides put out a new printing with maybe a 50th anniversary cover/logo? If they are putting actual money into the design and development of new books, surely they want as many people to buy them as possible?

It's not about selling one book. It's about increasing the lifetime value of a customer and acquiring as many customers as possible. It's like a smartphone release strategy. You don't create this year's new Pixel in a way that makes all the apps you already own for last year's worthless.

As for the 2+ years development, we don't know if 50AE is taking up a large portion of WotC's resources to put out. They could be finished with the changes already or only spending a small percentage of resources each month over the next few years to make the changes as a marketing strategy, ie knowing that a portion of the existing base will be more likely to buy a book they don't necessarily need because of the 50th anniversary connection.

Of course I could be wrong on all this. They could be going for more of a strategy like video game consoles, where they are coming out with the latest 'hardware' version to sell to the existing base, but even with video game consoles, the latest generation was much more focused on backward compatibility (so that those previous-gen games could keep on selling).

Either way, I expect 50AE to be focused on continuing to grow the number of new players coming into the game, and allowing the existing product to keep selling.

 

[MockingBird]

I really hope it's fairly compatible. I can't really see WotC go full edition change but who knows. It'll be hard for me to buy in if it's radically different. 5e just got a lot right for me, it was super easy to get new players and teach the rules. 3e and 4e were the exact opposite in my experience. The exception being people who were already into RPGs or people really ready to dive in head first.

 

[Stalker0]

Rituals would take time and cost money (in the form of components) to cast, and covered things like animal messenger, knock, teleportation circle, and so on. Long-term condition recovery was also ritual-based (like regeneration, cure disease, or raise dead). Rituals were split up into a few different groups, based on different skills (arcane/Arcana, divine/Religion, primal/Nature, healing/Medicine... I think I'm missing one), but not all of them required skill checks.

I think the one issue with 4e rituals was the expenditure of "components". Components as a game mechanic is a poor price, as its extremely variable and fiddly. One group could have 2 or even 3x the gold of another. for one group casting a ritual could be a "big deal", and for another group rituals can practically be at will.

4e had the answer but didn't pull the trigger, healing surges. Healing surges are much more self contained and consistent than gold, while there is variability its not to the same extent. Its a resource that you can rely on. If rituals in 4e all required healing surges, I think they become a reliable and consistent part of the game. You could even add "gritty" variants where surges consumed by rituals take a week to recover or something. And if you want to ensure spammed spells is controlled, you can make it where each time you cast the same ritual again in a day, it costs 1 additional healing surge (so 1 surge the first time, 2 the second, 3 the third, etc). That keeps rituals from being spammed, keeps them special.

In 5e terms, you could use hitdice to power that, which makes ritual rates a linear progression of character level, which is a very nice and easy growth in power.

 

[Reynard]

Either way, I expect 50AE to be focused on continuing to grow the number of new players coming into the game, and allowing the existing product to keep selling.

I'm not willing to make any predictions one way or the other. I just would be surprised if the goal did not include getting current players to upgrade their core set.

As to growing the number of players: there is, somewhere out there, a saturation point. if all that data appearing from the TSR era should tell us anything, it is that there is a potential 5E crash coming as surely as there was an AD&D crash coming. At some point "all" the people that want to buy D&D PHBs will have done so.