EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
Naturally, this is 110% pure IMNSHO. If you disagree, awesome, but we're talking opinions here, not objective factual things--keep that in mind.
It will be designed to fight the last war, not the current one--as every edition has done, AFAICT. 3e went "back to the dungeon" and wanted to break free of the weird esoterica of being bound to all those subsystems (the legacy of 1e still felt in 2e). It ended up being the most baroque, broken mess of a system, but beloved for the perceived freedom and diversity of concepts.
4e actually made good on the balance 3e sought (and completely failed to achieve), boldly challenging traditions rather than clinging to them--except in a few cases, particularly with "traditions" started by 3e, like Fighters and Barbarians getting less skills. But its presentation was sorely lacking, and the bold new design elements (like Skill Challenges) were not properly worked out--and, on top of that, half or more of the official adventures written for it were garbage, despite it being a system specifically made to be easy to DM!
5e was made to respond to the presentation-centric backlash 4e received. So it went HAM on "flavor" (except for the Fighter and a few other things), and on "tradition" (which mostly meant "copy 3e, but slightly less broken"). In pursuing simplicity and a "fundamentals" attitude, particularly with its "math is easy" and "you're the DM, you figure it out" explicit design methods, it has run into a handful of problems, often due to trying to squeeze too many things into a single structure when they're fundamentally not compatible with doing that. Problems with the Hexblade (a rare high power example), Beastmaster, Purple Dragon Knight, the Sorcerer in general, and multiple Monk flavors all fit this pattern. The serious over-use of Advantage without any other bonus options is another chronic problem.
Likely, 6e will swing just a little bit back toward a 4e-like seriousness about balance, as complaints regarding the lingering caster-martial disparities and "broken" (good or bad) classes begin to pile up, particularly if the ubiquity of Advantage becomes more obvious with time. The encounter- and monster-building tools will probably be a major focus; if 5e was the "grow the base" edition, 6e will be the "make more DMs" edition, replacing 5e's honestly kinda lackluster tools with much better ones. Likewise, the desire to have the OPTION of more complexity is, I think, an ongoing sticking point that will make games like Pathfinder (and ENWorld's own "Level Up"/A5E) attractive even to current 5e fans, especially once sales start to wane.
In an ideal world, they'll also hire an ACTUAL STATISTICIAN and an ACTUAL SURVEY EXPERT, both to help crunch their numbers so they design the game's mathematics well, and so they can make surveys that actually reveal information, not just bloody push polls that (intentionally or otherwise) just rubber-stamp the approach they already wanted to take.
It will be designed to fight the last war, not the current one--as every edition has done, AFAICT. 3e went "back to the dungeon" and wanted to break free of the weird esoterica of being bound to all those subsystems (the legacy of 1e still felt in 2e). It ended up being the most baroque, broken mess of a system, but beloved for the perceived freedom and diversity of concepts.
4e actually made good on the balance 3e sought (and completely failed to achieve), boldly challenging traditions rather than clinging to them--except in a few cases, particularly with "traditions" started by 3e, like Fighters and Barbarians getting less skills. But its presentation was sorely lacking, and the bold new design elements (like Skill Challenges) were not properly worked out--and, on top of that, half or more of the official adventures written for it were garbage, despite it being a system specifically made to be easy to DM!
5e was made to respond to the presentation-centric backlash 4e received. So it went HAM on "flavor" (except for the Fighter and a few other things), and on "tradition" (which mostly meant "copy 3e, but slightly less broken"). In pursuing simplicity and a "fundamentals" attitude, particularly with its "math is easy" and "you're the DM, you figure it out" explicit design methods, it has run into a handful of problems, often due to trying to squeeze too many things into a single structure when they're fundamentally not compatible with doing that. Problems with the Hexblade (a rare high power example), Beastmaster, Purple Dragon Knight, the Sorcerer in general, and multiple Monk flavors all fit this pattern. The serious over-use of Advantage without any other bonus options is another chronic problem.
Likely, 6e will swing just a little bit back toward a 4e-like seriousness about balance, as complaints regarding the lingering caster-martial disparities and "broken" (good or bad) classes begin to pile up, particularly if the ubiquity of Advantage becomes more obvious with time. The encounter- and monster-building tools will probably be a major focus; if 5e was the "grow the base" edition, 6e will be the "make more DMs" edition, replacing 5e's honestly kinda lackluster tools with much better ones. Likewise, the desire to have the OPTION of more complexity is, I think, an ongoing sticking point that will make games like Pathfinder (and ENWorld's own "Level Up"/A5E) attractive even to current 5e fans, especially once sales start to wane.
In an ideal world, they'll also hire an ACTUAL STATISTICIAN and an ACTUAL SURVEY EXPERT, both to help crunch their numbers so they design the game's mathematics well, and so they can make surveys that actually reveal information, not just bloody push polls that (intentionally or otherwise) just rubber-stamp the approach they already wanted to take.
