What if, instead of 5e (or in addition)...

[Stormonu]

It could only work if you could somehow strip out the "skeleton" of D&D and then present system(s) that you can further overlay on top of it.

You'd really have to get down to the bare bones, to the point I don't think it would sell by itself. You'd have to have at least one "skin" package to make it playable and at that point you'd be back where you were with multiple editions of the game.

It would be nice if you could easily mix and match editions of the game together without a fair bit of conversion, but the differences have been the fate of the game, for good or ill.

 

[Raith5]

I think the OP is an interesting idea but it is ultimately undermined by the problem that most people who are/or want to play earlier editions already own the material. So I am not sure what could be added.

I guess my response to Mearl's posts/5th editions speculation is that I hope that 5th edition or more likely a digital only line of renewed 4th edition offerings can learn from the problems of 4th edition. I am not sure the D and D fanbase can or should be unified.

 

[Dausuul]

Even if they figured out how to do it, it would hold little interest for me. For one thing, I hardly ever run prefab adventures; they don't figure large in my evaluation of any edition, and I know I'm not the only DM for whom this is the case. And even setting that aside--such a system could not do anything for me that I'm not perfectly capable of doing on my own. If an adventure says there's a fire giant, I can look up "fire giant" in any edition's Monster Manual and there are the stats ready to go; and from what I can see, this is basically all you're proposing. I mean, it'd be cool to have a widget that would handle it automatically and format it up nice, but it wouldn't make me radically change my buying decisions.

What it comes down to is, the parts of published D&D that can be easily and automatically converted, I don't need help converting. The parts that can't be automatically converted... can't be automatically converted. Most of the important stuff is replicated in each edition anyhow.