Next year, we know that they are planning to release new, updated, revised core rulebooks for 5E D&D. Despite next year marking a full decade of 5E, the plan here is not to come out with 6th Edition or even a sort of 5.5, but is instead meant to be a fully compatible update to the game that will allow even the 2014 core rulebooks to be used along with these ones.
I have mixed feelings about this decision:
Part of me think that it's a little overcautious. While the update is looking to fix a lot of quality-of-life issues and tune up some old classes and subclasses that didn't really hit their marks back in the day, and there's definitely some truly new ideas here that I applaud (I haven't playtested Weapon Mastery, but I'm very into it in theory,) there are so many things I could imagine D&D doing that this approach feels too hamstrung to accomplish.
One of my biggest disappointments is decision not to make the Artificer a core, PHB class. I understand some of the logic here: the Artificer plays in territories that exist outside of the core "medieval fantasy" experience that D&D is founded within. But I'll counter-argue that you could say similar things about the Monk. Naturally, this could open up a whole can of worms regarding Euro-centrism (and one of the efforts in the new books is to make the Monk less specifically East Asian, in an effort to make all the classes fit in worlds and cultures inspired by any real-world culture,) but I'll also cite figures like Daedalus from Greek Myth as precedents that can fit perfectly well within a medieval (or classical) fantasy setting without ruining anyone's immersion.
But setting that aside, I think that this part of me really wants to see D&D stretch its wings and fly into new and unexpected places.
However, taking a step back, I can see how the whole point of these core rulebooks, even if they are theoretically compatible with the ones from 2014, is to be the base, you know, core to the game. They're supposed to present D&D in its most quintessential, standard form. Not to mention that they want these books to fit within their bindings.
But there's another thing that's special about the Core Rulebooks:
These are the only books that any other 5E book expects you to have.
And again, there's an admirable goal here. If you are, say, a Critical Role fan who has never actually played D&D and you want to check it out, you might have heard about Call of the Netherdeep and want to run that adventure. WotC's ask here is that you buy three books in addition to that one - just the PHB, DMG, and Monster Manual - and you can start playing.
Now, as someone who has been a pretty thorough collector of the game's books, (I'm on the fence about the Book of Many Things but will probably wind up getting it, knowing me) I would think it kind of crazy not to get at least Tasha's, Xanathar's and Monsters of the Multiverse (which were, appropriately I think, put together in a box set).
However, the official policy is that a book can't be published if you're required to have any other book outside of the core rules (with the exception of the three volumes in each of the Spelljammer and Planescape box sets, which are functionally each a single product).
That's all well and good and friendly to new players.
But what it also means is that some ideas never really get to develop.
The Artificer being a clear example.
The Artificer did get a full re-publishing from Eberron: Rising from the Last War into Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, and even got a new subclass. But in terms of support, it has not gotten nearly as much as the other classes in the game. If you take even a class that has relatively few subclasses, like the Sorcerer, you're still looking at eight subclasses, while Artificers have four - just one added to the class since its introduction in ERftLW.
Now, one thing that was a little encouraging is that in Fizban's Treasury of Dragons, the spell Ashardalon's Stride, which is available to a number of classes, was also made available to Artificers. It wasn't much, but it was something!
And this brings me to my point:
5E has had a very solid core, and, if you'll forgive a metaphor, it's essentially grown to have a mighty, thick trunk. But all of its branches are stubby little things, barely growing out of that trunk before tapering off with a single leaf.
There's a lot of anxiety surrounding certain releases because the stakes grow very high: if you don't nail, for example, a campaign setting in its single release, that's all you're going to get about that place for a decade.
While I enjoyed what I read of the Dragonlance adventure, Shadow of the Dragon Queen (and certainly will make use of its high-CR undead stat blocks to have an undead army that feels like a real threat) I also imagine that if you've been waiting ages for a true, comprehensive Dragonlance campaign setting book, that was not it.
Spelljammer, of course, is the disappointment I don't think they're going to live down for a while, but the disappointment could have been blunted if we knew that there was going to be some kind of "So-and-So's Atlas of Wildspace Regions" giving us a clear picture of what you can find in Realmspace or Krynnspace, or whatever. Instead, it feels like we're just never (or not for another thirty years) going to actually get anything else Spelljammer-related.
5E has been massively successful. And I understand that that can, in its own way, breed a certain conservatism. You don't want to mess with a good thing.
But I know that as someone who has been playing for most of 5E's lifespan, I'm looking for something deeper. I think WotC should be able to afford expanding the capabilities of its team.
I had feared that Planescape's box set that came out last month would be a repeat of Spelljammer, but thankfully, I think that this set does actually lay out a foundation for a real campaign (the included adventure has interesting ideas but would need to be seriously fleshed out by the DM - it occurs to me I did my Sigil and the Outlands review but not the one for Morte's Planar Parade or Turn of Fortune's Wheel. Should get on that). Still, it's a foundation, but one that could really stand to be built upon. We need a good 5E book (or set of books) that actually details the various Outer Planes that a Planescape game should, in theory, have us traipsing between. The Outlands are great. Sigil is great. But the promise is of a whole wide multiverse, so freaking give it to us!
I love the universal books: Xanathar's and Tasha's added a lot to the game, and I think Monsters of the Multiverse did a good job of modernizing and consolidating the content of Volo's and Mordenkainen's. These are, truly, the kinds of books I get most excited about.
But they also can't make them all the time. Indeed, while the cadence of these books was pretty frequent earlier on, we've seen a move toward campaign-agnostic but still more narrowly focused books like Fizban's and Bigby. To a certain extent, you need to zero in on an idea and look for inspiration there lest what you come up with be too generalized.
But I think we've got a lot of starting points that could be further explored. Give us another Spelljammer sourcebook! Give us another adventure set in Ravenloft! Give us a Manual of the Planes!
(I'll also say that if they gave us a Bigby's or Fizban's style book about Constructs with new Artificer subclasses I'd be... I'd be very happy.)
And, then...
Give us some really weird stuff.
I'd love to see a book that explores something like Modern Setting D&D, or futuristic Sci-Fi. Try something new and unexpected and genre-bending, and see who's interested. Let's look into different styles of fantasy. Yes, that can come with different settings (Dark Sun obviously giving us that post-apocalyptic vibe) but I'd love to play around with official guidance on adding things like modern vehicles, computers, and even just, like electricity to one's D&D games.
The fact of the matter is that if you want to run a standard D&D fantasy game in 5E... all the tools are already there. We've had most of them since 2014. I'm very much in favor of re-tuning all that stuff to fit with modern design philosophies. I love having spellcasting NPC stat blocks that don't require me to track six different wizards' spell slots. And that's not a zero-effort thing to do.
But I think we're ready to branch out, get stranger, start playing in outside-the-box spaces. 5E has lasted almost a decade, and we, as a community, get it. That's great. That's an amazing opportunity. And now that we're in that position, let's get weird.
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