This year will see the 7th anniversary of 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. It's the most popular edition of the game ever, bringing in legions of new players (myself included).
The exact history of all the editions is a little complex, but my basic understanding is that you had the original first edition and then Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (a sort of revision to that first edition) that lasted from the 70s inception of the game through the 80s (the edition the kids in Stranger Things are playing is, I believe, AD&D) while 2nd Edition proper launched in 1989, and would be the "modern" edition of the game through the 90s. 3rd edition launched in 2000, with a heavy revision called 3.5 that came in 2003. Then, in 2008, 4th edition came out. This one I think was less popular, and so they announced their work on 5th edition in 2012, with a 2014 release.
Presumably, there will at some point be a 6th Edition. But I do wonder a bit about whether we're really itching for such a shake-up.
Indeed, we don't really know what a 6th Edition would look like - I've never gone through an edition changeover, but I think a fair number of systems can either be replaced or seriously changed. I see a lot of older players who often get tripped up by things like ability checks versus saving throws (something that in 5th edition look very similar to one another but are importantly distinct rules-wise).
Given 5th Edition's popularity, though, I don't think they're in a rush to move past it. But I do think that there are some new things they might need to look into when it comes to publications.
One thing I think we can expect to be constant is adventure books. While I've never been as eager to DM a published adventure as I have been to simply run my own, for many people this simply is how D&D is played - you run a character through the latest book and wait for the next or just run Curse of Strahd again because it's just so freaking good.
Adventure books are fun, and even as someone who likes homebrew campaigns in homebrew worlds, I'll often get them more for inspiration than anything else (also I feel like if I ever have kids, or perhaps ever become a cool uncle, I could dazzle some little ones with this treasure trove.) But, apart from some new items (that often play directly into the adventure's specific story) and monsters (likewise,) they don't tend to really add anything permanent to the game that could be used in other contexts.
The core three books are generalized to work for any setting - the DMG even has suggestions on how to build a setting that might be quite different from the Great Wheel cosmology that is the default. We've had four books that add to this.
Two are monster books - Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. For the most part, these can be seen as expansions to the Monster Manual. However, while the MM is perhaps the most straightforward book in the edition - it's monsters, monsters, and monsters, and not really anything else - these two also spend a lot of time on lore as well as throwing in some player options like playable races.
Two are more general rules-expansions. Xanathar's Guide to Everything and Tasha's Cauldron of Everything have less of a central focus. Probably the closest thing to a focus for them is the additional subclasses they add to the game (and in Tasha's case, reprinting a whole class introduced in the Eberron campaign setting book in a setting-agnostic format.)
If I were to advise an ambitious newcomer that had the same goals that I did when I started playing the game on what books to buy, I'd tell them to obviously start with the core three, and then get these four next (and, again, possibly Curse of Strahd as a suggestion on how you can build a campaign.)
The campaign setting books are my next-favorite releases, because of the broad possibilities they offer.
But I also wonder if there aren't some types of books we could see that would bring in something 5E is missing. What, then, are we missing?
The first, and most obvious, I think, is guidance on building adventures for high-level characters.
Mordenkainen's went out of its way to give us lots of monsters with high challenge-ratings. We got many Archdevils and Demon Lords who can serve as campaign bosses, but also plenty of more generic statblocks that nevertheless represent very powerful creatures - like a Drow Matron Mother, one of the most dangerous humanoid stat blocks that exist.
Still, I think that there could be better guidance on building adventures featuring such creatures. Consider, for instance, that a Lich is a classic main-villain. With a CR of 21 (or 22 in a lair), a Lich on its own is meant to be an appropriate challenge, according to Xanathar's encounter-builder, for a 6-player party of 16th-level characters.
But a Lich has, on average, 135 health. Yes, it's got spells like Finger of Death and Power Word Kill, but I guarantee you that if it rolls crappily on its initiative, 6 level 16 characters are going to tear this thing apart before it gets off any of those spells, even with legendary actions.
So rather than just throwing high-CR monsters at the party, having a book about strategy and building encounters and challenges that will make your villains feel like real threats without simply being overpowered stat-wise compared to your party would be really cool (in Descent into Avernus, when I played, our level 11 characters were able to beat Yeenoghu for real before we could be saved by cutscene magic, as is intended in the adventure.)
I want a book called Vecna's Guide to Villainy. Give us things like dynamic encounter spaces (I find that players really enjoy dealing with crazy fight locations) and even suggestions on how a villain can use suites of spells to give the heroes a hard time (Nystul's Magic Aura looks pointless from a player's perspective, but consider that your lich can cast it along with some illusion magic so that the evil-sensing paladin will think that the lich is just a friendly old wizard.)
Next:
I'd love to get some guides to planar adventures. This actually winds up working well as another "high level play" book, given how spells like Plane Shift, Etherealness, and Dream of the Blue Veil start to become available to higher-level players.
A 5th-edition guide to the outer planes would be a lot of fun (and allow a Planescape book to focus more on Sigil and the Factols). Likewise, I actually really love that the various D&D settings take place within the same multiverse - just as I'm trying to build up to a planes-hopping leg of my Ravnica game, I'd love to have some guidance on building an adventure that would, for instance, have the players travel between the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk and Dragonlance.
Overall, as I write this, I think the general vibe is that 5th Edition runs very well in tiers 1 and 2. When you get into tier 3, it becomes harder to challenge your party thanks to the power that becomes available to you. Unfortunately, I feel that the general response has been to have most adventures/campaigns end around those levels. But those high levels are supposed to be the reward for sticking with characters for so long - not that it isn't fun, but surely when you chose to play a wizard at level 1, you envisioned that character eventually commanding crazy, world-bending magic - the sort of thing that doesn't become available until the later levels.
With so many people playing and with years of familiarity with the 5th edition rules, I think that pushing things into higher-level play with some publications that help fine-tune such adventures would be really cool and welcome.
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