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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ilbranteloth" data-source="post: 8075526" data-attributes="member: 6778044">I know this is an old thread but...A big driving factor is sales. As the game continues to sell strongly, there's little reason to make a drastic change like a new edition. The growth in this era is very different from the growth in the earlier eras. The closest analogy would be the OD&D to mid-2e/BECMI period because it was a growth game and growth industry that then started to plateau. But now D&D is cool, nostalgia is driving it in an older RPG generation plus the first adult generations that grew up in the video game era has created an entirely different type of market. New Editions were once a way to boost flagging sales (at least for a few years). That's not an issue now, and may not be for some time to come.Combine that with the fact that they learned a lot from how complex and unwieldy 3.5e became, they can avoid the need to replace the current edition as a 'do-over' to fix a bunch of design mistakes.While there are a lot of things that I would like to see different in 5e, they wisely designed it in a way that casual gamers, video gamers, and MtG-type gamers can pick up and start playing in an afternoon. I'm not a fan of the mechanical focus of the rules, where players want more options to design their character. In our day, the character was who the PC was, and while their race/class/alignment helped define that, most of what made the character a character was role playing and non-mechanical. But the mechanical approach makes it easier for the mass market/casual gamer to pick up and run with. It shares a lot of traits with building a MtG deck, for example, in that you are looking to combine a collection of mechanical traits into something unique and that represents your vision.So they ignored the path I would have taken, and instead designed something that allows a group of more casual gamers to buy a PHB and AP, pick a DM and play a game for a few weeks/months. Then they pick up another AP, pick a DM and do it again. I don't see it generating long-term campaigns like ours (running since '87), instead it's a bunch of stand-alone adventures in a loosely defined universe much like a very popular series of movies.So they've designed a system that allows them to focus on content (APs) which obviously won't need any new edition to work. The PHB/MM/DMG is the console to the APs games. But they are also a company that has all those years of experience in adding additional crunch in MtG without having to release MtG Second Edition. So I don't really see any reason why 5e won't continue on this trajectory indefinitely, with the only real probable time that they might consider a new edition is if sales start flagging significantly.</blockquote>

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