The new rulebooks coming out for D&D next year are, officially, still 5th Edition. 5E has been such a massive success for D&D that it makes sense they don't want to alienate people who are already fans by releasing a fully new edition and forcing groups to choose which version they're going to stick with.
And yet, I think there is going to need to be a choice made here.
About nine out of ten changes I'm seeing in the playtest documents are things I'm happy to see - Weapon Masteries, a lot of class changes (Rangers seem far more appealing now, for one,) and some of the subtler tweaks are great.
The new versions of each class, however, are presented as "options," the idea being that you should be able to sit a 2014 version of the Warlock next to a 2024 version and both should still be able to interact with the game world in the same way, even if they function differently (though I'm hoping that the 2024 Warlock looks different from the version we see in the latest playtest document - the Pact Boon changes are fantastic, but the spellcasting system and changes to Mystic Arcanum are, I think, a dealbreaker for me).
They're still trying out different terms - a video recently said that they'll be calling these the "2024" core rulebooks, though shortly thereafter there was a blog post where they said that they'll actually just call these the "Player's Handbook," etc., while designating the 2014 versions as just that.
Personally, I think the community will likely just call it 5.5, which is really what it is. I wasn't a player during the 3E/3.5 transition (which happened only a year or two after 3E first came out) and I'm given to understand that was perhaps a more serious transformation, but I think 5.5 will be a simple way to show that the overall system works basically the same - d20 system with proficiency bonuses to smooth out skills and weapons and such - while making it clear that we're using the newer rules. I suppose the only reason to avoid that is if, 10 years down the line, they want to make another not-quite-new-edition.
Now, I do think it's interesting that they're presenting the revised classes, species, subclasses, etc., as "content" for the existing 5th Edition rather than the basis of a new edition - I actually think that this is not entirely inaccurate, but I also think that the Rule Glossary changes we've been seeing are kind of invariably going to need groups as a whole, and not individual players, to choose how they're going to be using them.
One example is the new Exhausted condition. This is a pretty radical change from 2014's Exhaustion, but I think there's some potential in it because it's actually not as serious - which means as a DM, I'd be far happier inflicting it upon player characters.
Exhausted actually works very similarly to Stress in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, and I think you could easily even just name it that and make it a separate thing.
In most of these cases, I think it'll be best to just treat the new books as an update. But I also imagine that there will be some purists who want to stick only with 5E as it was prior to this turnover.
Still, I think the conservative approach WotC is taking in most aspects of this transition means that I doubt I will get much pushback on the use of the new rules, whatever it is we wind up calling them.
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