To the surprise of almost no one, WOTC announced that the 5th edition of D&D is in development and will have some type of open playtest here: Charting the Course for D&D: Your Voice, Your Game. I got off the edition merry-go-round years ago and it will take a lot to get me to even consider getting back on. At a minimum, a new edition would have to have fast combat (averaging 10-15 minutes maximum), minis and battlemats would have to be entirely optional, it could not be built around the needs of organized play, charop players and/or rules lawyers, and it would have to be built on traditional D&D — a good measure of this would be that it could reuse all the modules published by TSR without a lot of reworking. A requirement for system mastery on the part of players or a requirement for 3.x level DM prep time need to be absent as well Publication under the OGL would likely make me more interested. Somehow, I doubt these are the directions WOTC is going with 5e, however.

Even if I don’t personally like 5e, I hope D&D 5e is closer to traditional D&D than 4e was. I also hope it is based more on the needs of actual players rather than what Hasbro thinks is the best way to maximize profits. Note that I’m not against maximizing profits, but the game system needs to be designed around what players need. I think 4e has shown that completely rewriting the IP and trying to require monthly subscriptions and the like hurts profits because it turns off too many players. As Gary Gygax and TSR pointed out in the early days of D&D, players really don’t need anything beyond the rules to play forever. Trying to produce a tabletop RPG where that is not true is probably futile.

What do you think of the announcement of 5e. What would it take to get you interested it switching from whatever you are playing now to 5e?