I know that no one knows for sure and this will all just be speculation, but do y'all think the 6e (or 5.5e, etc.) will be mostly made of slight tweaks to 5e instead of more of an entirely new edition? I've been lurking all day and it seems most think it'll just be incremental.
I ask because I began playing a couple of months ago and I love it. I tend to jump in head first when I find a new thing I really like so, of course, I'm looking to buy some books, but I don't want to invest much money into 5e books if they are just going to become outdated. I know that WotC says 6e will be backwards compatible, but I'm still kind of worried about it.
I have already bought the alternative art Rules Expansion set. The artwork is super cool looking. What are the best campaign books for a newcomer, in y'all's opinion?
Thank you very much for any and all help, suggestions, etc.
It's likely that it will be more than absolutely pure incremental changes, due to some recent developments on top of long-running trends. But it's also
very unlikely to be a complete edition overhaul like the differences between 2e and 3e, 3e and 4e, or 4e and 5e.
Basically, I have a sliding scale of comparisons, using past examples (which probably won't mean anything to you since you're new to the hobby.) The stuff they've talked about is significantly bigger than the "not really an edition change at all" examples from the past. But it's also substantially smaller than the "really genuinely a whole new game" edition changes. Examples of relevant predicted/presumed/evidenced-but-not-explicitly-confirmed changes are:
1. They appear to be moving
heavily away from basing anything off of short rests. Instead, things are being shifted to a "proficiency bonus per long rest" system. Some mechanics will probably still require short rests (e.g. Arcane Recovery, Song of Rest, etc.), but they'll either be minor, or only once a day when taking a short rest, or in some other way reduced.
2. It's looking very strongly like Backgrounds are getting overhauled, and that future backgrounds will include the choice of a feat at 1st level (and possibly another feat later on). This is one of the biggest changes and makes a rather meaningful impact.
3. Dragonborn got rewritten, and it's pretty clear they'll want the new ones to replace the old dragonborn race, mostly because the old one
sucks and the new ones are at least decent. This also will include things like switching to "Ancestries," dropping the concept of subraces, and making ability scores flexible (though I'd be surprised if there weren't
suggested Ancestry ability scores.)
4. I expect some 3.5e-like tweaks and adjustments to spells and individual (sub)classes. E.g. many think that the Beastmaster Ranger is going to get rewritten because it's consistently polled so poorly. I also think they'll be tweaking Sorcerer, Monk, and possibly Warlock (depending on how they feel about Hexblade.)
In sum, these don't look anywhere near as big as usual
full-edition changes, but they look quite comparable to 3e->3.5e, where a bunch of stuff got
edited and revised, just not
totally replaced.
