D&D (2024) Hypothetical Direction Shift For 1D&D/6E

[Reynard]

NOTE: I am NOT saying this is going to happen. I am just curious about what people think COULD happen, not will happen. If you want to fight about the premise, make a different thread, please.

Let's say, as a hypothetical, WotC chose to drastically change the design direction of 1D&D in the fallout of the OGL debacle. What does that look like? What sort of design paradigm could WotC use to still "be D&D" and create a line of continuity with 5E, but be different enough to stand on its own?

Let's try and keep this discussion civil and focused on potentially realistic design choices for a hypothetical 6E.

 

[Reynard]

One thing I think they could do is trim the class list down to one per attribute, and broaden the choices at creation and during advancement. Your Warrrior could be a fighter, barbarian or monk based on your class ability choices.

Speaking of ability scores: going to just modifiers is a simple change that would nevertheless be "different" enough to serve as a shift.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

They could take the feedback I gave in the Cleric survey.

Reorient the Cleric subclasses around Holy Orders, and pare back the mechanical heft of Domains so that a character can have more that one.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

What sort of design paradigm could WotC use to still "be D&D" and create a line of continuity with 5E, but be different enough to stand on its own?

I mean they could have an actual design paradigm, based around a limited number of clear, overarching goals. At present they just seem to be going for random changes, some of which they respond to community feedback on. I think they had an overarching goal "reworking the role of race to seem less racist", which was a prime mover in making them unhappy with the current edition, but that only touches on some parts of the game system, and when they get to other things it seems pretty aimless. I'm sure there is a goal to support integration with online services, but I suspect the designers don't actually know enough about what those online services will look like to meaningfully do much with it.

I'm not saying there are no other goals currently being pursued, I'm just saying that if they picked a few of them like "making the game easier for new players" or "improving game balance" and made them clear priorities which "cool idea that designer wants to experiment with" gets rejected if it runs counter to, they'd have a much clearer design paradigm to produce a game that's not just a clone remix of 5e.

And no shade on clone remixes of 5e without much in the way of focused goals, I'm hard at work at one myself, but if I had the market position and resources of WotC it's not what I'd be making.

 

[Reynard]

I mean they could have an actual design paradigm, based around a limited number of clear, overarching goals. At present they just seem to be going for random changes, some of which they respond to community feedback on. I think they had an overarching goal "reworking the role of race to seem less racist", which was a prime mover in making them unhappy with the current edition, but that only touches on some parts of the game system, and when they get to other things it seems pretty aimless. I'm sure there is a goal to support integration with online services, but I suspect the designers don't actually know enough about what those online services will look like to meaningfully do much with it.

I'm not saying there are no other goals currently being pursued, I'm just saying that if they picked a few of them like "making the game easier for new players" or "improving game balance" and made them clear priorities which "cool idea that designer wants to experiment with" gets rejected if it runs counter to, they'd have a much clearer design paradigm to produce a game that's not just a clone remix of 5e.

And no shade on clone remixes of 5e without much in the way of focused goals, I'm hard at work at one myself, but if I had the market position and resources of WotC it's not what I'd be making.

Not really the spirit of the thread.

What concrete design directions could they employ to create a distinct new edition that would still feel like D&D?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

They could just take the open gaming content from A5E LevelUP and design around it. Would save them time to playtest and it would make @Micah Sweet happy.
And it would be a good game.

I am not sure if Morrus would be pleased though...

 

[Matt Thomason]

Let's say, as a hypothetical, WotC chose to drastically change the design direction of 1D&D in the fallout of the OGL debacle. What does that look like? What sort of design paradigm could WotC use to still "be D&D" and create a line of continuity with 5E, but be different enough to stand on its own?

They could do what I always wished D&D versions had done in the past:

Rewrite the rules at a mechanical level, while retaining stat block compatibility (arguably, AD&D 2e did take this approach, but we haven't seen it since)

For example - AC is AC, but how it actually gets applied in combat mechanics could be changed totally - such as having a roll to hit and then a seperate roll to penetrate armor. Not saying that example would be an improvement, just an example of how rules can change while keeping old stat blocks valid.

Another example would be changing the rules for learning/memorizing spells while keeping the spells themselves close enough mechanically that old ones would still work under the new system.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

One thing I think they could do is trim the class list down to one per attribute, and broaden the choices at creation and during advancement. Your Warrrior could be a fighter, barbarian or monk based on your class ability choices.

I mean that would be a direction that preserved the "feel of D&D" for some people. But as someone who primarily came into the hobby with 5e, an edition which downplayed logical taxonomic relationships between the classes in favor of emphasizing each more as a unique snowflake, organizational illogic, incompleteness, and disunity is a key part of D&D's feel to me.

 

[Reynard]

They could do what I always wished D&D versions had done in the past:

Rewrite the rules at a mechanical level, while retaining stat block compatibility (arguably, AD&D 2e did take this approach, but we haven't seen it since)

For example - AC is AC, but how it actually gets applied in combat mechanics could be changed totally - such as having a roll to hit and then a seperate roll to penetrate armor. Not saying that example would be an improvement, just an example of how rules can change while keeping old stat blocks valid.

Another example would be changing the rules for learning/memorizing spells while keeping the spells themselves close enough mechanically that old ones would still work under the new system.

For clarity I am explicitly NOT talking about compatibility. That's something you would want to avoid if you were trying to silo 6E against OGL etc.

 

[Reynard]

Finally dropping vancian magic would be a thing to do, too. Personally I would go for a skill based with consequences system like Earthdawn, but there are a million ways to do D&D magic that isn't D&D magic.