Community

Fascinating, really.  It's nice to see where this all began, and I agree with their stated goals.

Initial thought - hooray! I've wanted to see WotC state these core goals clearly for a while. I wish they'd posted these design goals along with the announcement of the D&Dnext project back in January - I think it'd have been helpful for everyone to know what was driving the new edition; instead, we've had a series of 'hey, wouldn't it be cool if...' L&L articles that have been harder to understand without a knowledge of the common driving force.

Obviously there's no mention of why WotC need a new version, but that's reasonably easy to guess. The release of Essentials confused the heck out of me as a 4e player (am I supposed to switch to it? Am I supposed to use it alongside 4e? Am I supposed to ignore it?) and the local hobby store owner told me that availability for the Essentials books was patchy, meaning that people couldn't get the Essentials books they needed to play. His group experienced scaling problems with 4e and switched to Pathfinder with a modified AC / agility / dodge system - and now the store features Pathfinder merchandise more prominently than D&D materials.

Goals 1 and 2 sound great to me, and I can identify with parts of goal 3, but the 'D&D in an hour' notion unsettles me. Allowing for smaller groups is good (some of the best RPG sessions I've played have been when there's been a DM and 2 players) and being able to increase speed of play over 4e would definitely be useful. However, I've generally found 'one-shot' adventures in other systems to be disappointing, mainly due to a reliance on very light plot and railroading to speed things along. Those one-shot adventures tended to be based on a four-hour session, too, so personally I can't at this point imagine a one-hour adventure to be satisfying.

I can understand that they want to lower the barrier to entry, but I would have thought that the (excellent) D&D board games that exist already serve that purpose. Regarding 1-hour adventures and 50-hour campaigns, I'd say that brings it in under computer-based RPGs such as Skyrim or D&D Online, which I'd find unusual.

Regarding the mechanics & maths, I just hope they're able to create a game with the consistency of 4e (meaning that the key rules are boiled down and defined once, rather like the programming philosophy of Don't Repeat Yourself) - there was definitely less rulebook-scuffling with our 4e games until we started hitting character sheet powers that were more ambiguous. Comparing the 4e books to Call of Cthulhu / Dark Heresy, I found them much easier to grasp and understand. I sincerely hope that adding the modular / optional rules system doesn't impact 5e's clarity.

Finally, I'd like to see a couple more goals added:

• Reunification through Education - I think WotC could do more to help players of different styles understand how others play (see the D&D University link in my sig)
• Reunification through Communication - I don't think WotC have mastered this yet, although it's clear that the Q&A panels / seminars seem to have the greatest positive effect, so I'd like to see more of those, and not just at gaming conferences. Internet forums skew the direction of conversations because of the way the most recently updated thread bubbles to the top and therefore gets most attention; divisive threads encourage quick black/white responses and therefore self propagate. However, the fact that Mike Mearls posted this design document is promising - I hope to see more of these in the future.