Where is Mike Mearls? You know, the only guy with talent in the bunch...
He got moved off tabletop and onto the Baldur's Gate III team last year.
Reading between the lines in social media and in interviews. I think that Crawford, Perkins etc, didn’t particularly agree with Mearl’s vision for 5e, and were glad to see the back of him.
Notice how the increase in the book publishing schedule, and the changes in 5e lore, alignment, race, etc, all happened
after Mearl’s was replaced as the head of D&D…
Given 5E's success, though, I expect this time will look a bit different--more a 'double down on all the new fans and forget the old ones.'
They are betting that the ‘new’ D&D fans now overwhelmingly outnumber the grognards, and even if they do drop a good portion of the older player base, they’ll still be the number one RPG by orders of magnitude.
They have been wanting to drop the old guard since the 4e era, and they’ll never have a better chance than in 2024 to finally pull it off given 5e’s meteoric popularity.
I do disagree with Pundit on two of his points:1: 5e would eventually need a revision of some kind even with the core rules. With 1-20 level HP escalation, 5e runs into the same scaling issues that 3e did, just in a bit milder form. They did not iron out all the kinks during the playtest.
And once the game hits the wild, more issues would be revealed. So a revision to smooth/balance out known issues would be inevitable.
But that would not be too much of a change unless they started publishing splat books adding more feats, classes, and rules for doing different things. Which are also impossible to fully playtest before publication.
Which is exactly what WotC did.
2: I think that the 50th 'not-edition' will be a solid 5.5+ edition of the game.
As a follow up to what I just wrote: There are just too many small things that they want to change, and too many rules from splat books that they want to incorporate back into the core rules that they will have to go through and re-balance to make them work with all the other changes.
The accumulation of all these “small changes” will have a cascade effect that
will push them into doing a full on 5.5+ ‘not-edition’.
And that is completely leaving aside the fact that in the announcement video WotC has openly said they will do a new round of survey’s asking their ‘players’ how they can make the "Evolved" D&D Revision better…
IMHO they are relying on the idea of it being a “50th anniversary release” to give them the cover to do all this with minimal pushback from the player base.
And as I said in the: “It seems like we're really getting 5.5e in 2024” thread; everyone should take claims of “Fully Compatible” with a grain of salt.
Interestingly enough on other forums their is very little pushback on the 50AE ‘not-edition’. If anything it seems that people are exited that they will see various “fixes” being implemented…