Meaning, they were successful with the game they designed, so should be hesitant to veer too far away from that, at least as far as the core rules are concerned.
Yeah I would expect changes of a 1E-2E level, not anything more. Basically very high backwards compatibility with adventures particularly.
I tend to think this is much milder among the total player base than it seems on the internet, and think WotC should be careful not to go too far in one direction or the other, and that any changes should always have "better playability" in mind (which is why, I think, the racial bonuses going away is fine, because it doesn't limit anything or stop DMs from still having them as an optional rule, but it opens up character creation so they aren't focused on race-class optimization; meaning, regardless of the politics behind it, it actually improves playability).
Given the age, gender, educational background and so on profile of D&D players, and that huge numbers seem to have come in from watching D&D on the internet, I actually think that the playerbase as whole is pretty clearly on one side of this, like the vast majority, and it's the side WotC are clearly leaning towards.
Anyhow, I think the time is ripe for 5E to take it up an octave. They've established a huge player base mostly (but not entirely) comprised of new players, a lot of whom have been playing for several years. While it made sense not to broaden the scope of D&D in the first half decade or so, I think some of these players will eventually want something more or different, be it non-traditional settings (which, since 2018, they're starting to get with the Magic settings) such as Dark Sun and Planescape, or alternate approaches to the game (modular options/complexity dials), even a new sub-edition that is a bit more bold.
Yup, though I think 1E-2E is more likely than a "sub-edition" approach because frankly people loathe sub-editions.
Yeah, I just disagree. I think there's excitement here for a new edition of D&D, but I don't think that same excitement exists more broadly.
I've been on the internet for 29 years now, and I've seen countless edition changes for various games and countless updates to TV shows and reboots and so on.
And without fail, there's always the anti-Cassandra who "just can't can't see it", who is absolutely sure that no-one is really interested in a change, who thinks Paris is a good dude and sending him to see Menelaus is definitely a good idea. But D&D is a game with a storied history of editions. D&D is a game with a young playerbase, mostly in their teens and twenties, perhaps very early 30s. A lot of them have never seen an edition change, but most or all of them will have heard about them, reading articles about the history of D&D, hearing about what Critical Role has been through, and so on. You can see this with people who are literally talking about how they just started D&D last year on reddit, asking about edition changes, and what they're like and so on, people who have only been playing D&D in 5E speculating about changes and excited for them. Why are they excited for them? Because they're young, and young people, on the whole, don't fear change, they hope for it.
What fewer people really likes is a change that invalidates everything they've paid for. But even then... you look at previous edition changes, and it looks in all cases like most people picked up the new edition, despite any amount of grousing. Player-bases typically grow on an edition-change. The sole exception was 4E and it took a monumental series of bad decisions, screw-ups, and frankly, what was basically a deus ex machina to fully create that situation, and the rules changes was easily the most extreme D&D has ever seen.
So I don't think we'll see that. Ever again. But I do think we'll see an edition change, because younger playerbase are excited by them, and as long adventures and preferably monsters retain broad compatibility (and maybe some crunch), they work well. For example, you could do an edition change like 1E-2E, and the only bits of VRGtR that would be fully invalidated might be the two archetypes. Everything else could retain broad viability (lineages might be hit, but likely a way that would be easy to convert).
Maybe you'll be the real Cassandra for once, but I'd be surprised, because they "it'll never happen" guys are always around before ediiton changes. I daresay they were before 1E-2E D&D. I know the edition warriors were, because one of the first things that happened after I started playing D&D was an older guy saying I was playing the "wrong" edition because I had 2E lol.
