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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8188075" data-attributes="member: 18">D&D has always had a "lot of ore in the mine", there's literally never been a time in D&D history where "ore in the mine" was the reason for an edition change. Edition changes happen because sales become slower, and/or companies see better ways to make money.And I strongly suspect the latter will be a major angle with 6E. Right now, however much WotC are charging DNDBeyond, DNDBeyond (and to a lesser extent others) are eating profit that WotC could be making itself. Setting up something like Beyond is not really particularly hard. You don't need particularly amazing experience, tech, or people. It's pretty much just a fancy website of a kind people are pretty experienced in making - even with a full-integrated tabletop it's still pretty much that.I very much doubt WotC will want to let those subscriptions, book sales, and so on go to a third-party in 6E, especially given they're expanding massively into the digital sphere, setting up AAA game studios and so on (those people aren't who you'd use for this, that's just an example). If they're smart, they'll probably let the other companies keep existing, keep licensing stuff to them and so on - that way, you don't massively offend a bunch of loyal customers - but when your own digital offering is slicker, faster, more integrated and so on, you're going to get people moving over.Of course WotC have been absolute boneheads before on this kind of thing, like with 4E using licencing to try to ditch or severely limit 3PPs at a time when really, 3PPs were their major competition but also a major asset, which was profoundly Not Smart.Combine that with desire to be more up-to-date rules-wise, more inclusive and long-term-popular with stuff like race, and I think we're a lot closer to a new edition than you suggest. As noted I think it's more likely to be a 1E-2E-type transition rather than a 2E-3E-type one, let alone 4E-5E, but I think it'll be significantly more than a 5.5E. I suspect it'll be low single-digit years. 5 would be my outside bet for hearing about something that is clearly 6E, even though WotC will probably just call it "D&D". I'd be very surprised if we haven't heard anything by end of 2024.Yeah less than 50/50 sounds about right to me, sadly. I do think they could come up with a better default, and simpler, more integrated mechanism than HD. I think again, if they do, people are going to probably squawk about 4E-ification, but that'll be further in the past, and I don't think it'll be as major of an issue.</blockquote>

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