They need at least one rule-variant in any later product, just like set defense scores from Star Wars Saga Edition and Tome of Battle-maneuvers were for 4th edition.
So far, I haven't seen anything in Essentials that is that "revolutionary" or "evolutionary" apart from regular 4th edition.
Gamma World. And the new Fortune Cards.
To maximise profits, I would expect WotC to want any 5e to synergise the DDI with collectable cards. Fortune Cards are a start, but they'd almost certainly do better to get the power cards themselves into a collectable format.
So, in the next little while, I might well expect to see them do the following:
1) Ramp up the amount of DDI-exclusive material. There's already some (new feats and new powers in Dragon), but I'd expect to at least one entirely new class that appears only on the DDI, and
never makes it to print. Said class may well be a slightly better variant of an existing class.
2) A class (or classes) which doesn't have individual levels for its powers. They may well have a "power cascade" mechanic, where if you use a power of a given type, you may also use any other powers you have of the same type. (The initial class may be some sort of Elementalist or Wu Jen, so that the cascades can be easily understood, such as the Fire Cascade...)
3) Possibly a class that can take on any of the four roles, depending on the powers you choose. To maintain niche protection, the class would of course work better if you stick pretty solidly within a single role.
Then, I'd expect 5e to take a format similar to Gamma World:
- A boxed set, rather than hardbacks.
- A simplified ruleset, again as in Gamma World.
- They may or may not ditch classes. The advantage of doing so is that they'd only need one deck of power cards, rather than several. On the other hand, keeping classes allows them to offer only 4 in the starter box, with available as DDI exclusives.
- A level-based system, where level controls the number of powers you have. However, the powers themselves don't have levels (instead, using the cascading effects of point #2 above). This allows them to sell a single deck of powers used at all levels. (Otherwise, you could open a booster and get only epic-level powers that you can't use for months!)
- A starter deck of power cards, with more available in random boosters (or virtual random boosters on the DDI). Naturally, there would be Common, Uncommon and Rare cards, with the starter deck containing only commons. It's even very possible that the physical and virtual decks will have limited overlap (and possibly with the best cascades only available if you combine powers from both).
- Tie-in between the collectable power cards and the DDI - each card has a code used to unlock the power in the DDI.
- More flexible retraining rules, allowing players to essentially switch out their entire deck between sessions if desired. (Or... they could allow players to have a deck of any size, but have their level limit the number of cards they can hold in a hand at a time. Then, with each encounter, players can redraw from the deck. Hmm...)
Some good news for the DMs: I would expect monsters to not be heavily randomised. Instead, I'd expect to see a single Monster Manual/Monster Vault containing lots of monsters, with more regularly appearing. Mostly, this is because they need DMs to keep running lots of games, to keep players playing (and buying). That said, I can see them being tempted to do either random minis or random tokens, possibly with some monsters only being available in the boosters.
It's worth noting that I didn't sleep very well, and am feeling extremely cynical today. Hopefully, none of the above will prove at all accurate.
