So, I probably should have been a Patreon backer rather than a Backerkit one, given that I am curious about the nuts and bolts of development. As such, I'm only able to glean what changes are happening thanks to the MCDM YouTube page and Matt Colville's Twitter account.
In other words, the stuff I'm receiving here might be a bit off, but I'll try to comment one what I understand to be the latest developments in the game, and this is your invitation to take this big old grain of salt with it.
One of the changes that I'm not sold on is the change to damage ranges.
The RPG (which still lacks even a working name beyond "the MCDM RPG") famously eschews attack rolls. In combat, you simply do an amount of damage based on your rolls, and monsters do so against you. The idea is that you shouldn't hit that feeling of "cool, I just waited ten minutes to get a turn and I accomplished nothing."
This idea in and of itself is one I have largely positive feelings about - I've had those turns where I don't land a hit and it feels crappy (that said, using the Shield spell to give my Eldritch Knight an AC of 27 felt really good - but perhaps not so great for my DM). The only concern I have about that is the way that this creates constant bookkeeping - when an attack misses, it's an opportunity to not have to adjust a creature's HP.
The problem that the folks at MCDM were having, though, was that they had to give everything boats of HP because the damage flow was constant.
The other issue they had was that everyone was doing the same amount of damage - the game is (was) built around a 2d6 roll - the most common dice roll in all of gaming, not just RPGs (well, maybe 1d6 is) - and you'd add a modifier to that to get the damage you dealt. The 2d6 basically acted as the game's d20, but also as its damage rolls, and that led to a difficulty in distinguishing between abilities different classes had and even abilities within a class.
I know that in some earlier iteration of the game at least, you had boons and banes - adding or subtracting d4s to these rolls - and impact dice - adding or subtracting d8s - so you might, for example, have some less powerful ability that only added your Might to the roll but also built up some resource, and then you might spend a couple points of that resource to add an impact die or two, and perhaps add another stat as well. This certainly allowed for some variation, but I can imagine that it starts to get limited when you want new features and abilities to allow your character to hit the cap of level 10.
The new idea they're testing does something pretty significant: your roll no longer determines the damage you deal directly. Instead, each ability has a damage range - on 2d6, you might deal, say, 3 damage on a roll of 2-6, 5 damage on a roll of 7-12, and 7 damage on a roll of 13 or 14.
I see big upsides and big downsides to this solution.
The upside of course is that you can really dial in the power of these abilities. Maybe you want a really reliable if not terribly powerful attack - a "Tactical Strike" for the Tactician. You might make the damage ranges very close to one other - just 4, 5, or 6 damage, so whatever you roll is going to be reasonable but you're probably doing it mainly to gain resources or some other benefit. But then, maybe you have a "Chaos Burst" on your... Elementalist or something, and you could have a really broad range - dealing 5, 10, or 20 damage. You could adjust the ranges as well - maybe there's some ability where you're much more likely to do the middle damage amount but on a very low or very high roll you get these extreme results, or maybe there's an ability where you've got equal chances to deal its various amounts of damage.
The biggest downside, however, that I see is that this is going to crowd the character sheet like crazy. And I think it will require far greater mental investment to understand an ability. A 5E Fireball deals 8d6 damage in a 20-ft sphere. That's straight off the dome for me at this stage. But if I had to remember that it could do 14 damage if you rolls a 4 or lower on 2d6, 28 if you rolls 5-8, and 42 damage if you rolled 9 or higher... that's a lot of mental real estate.
I suppose the question I have is this: why do we even need to have all of these abilities roll the same dice?
I get that you want to have a common selection of dice for your binary (boolean?) rolls, but if we're tossing out the attack roll, why do we even need to retain something like a d20 roll in combat?
Naturally, the removal of an attack roll in combat also removes the need for multiple attacks (sure, you'd like to have damage spill over if you down a foe, such as if you kill a monster with your first attack and then attack a second one - but that could be a particular attack or class of attacks) so you'll want these die rolls to go up as your character gets more powerful (I also think removing the notion of a generic attack in favor of class-based abilities - somewhat like in World of Warcraft where Paladins have Crusader Strike and Demon Hunters have Demon Bite - both of which are basic filler "this is to generate the resources for more interesting abilities" - gives you more leeway to change what dice you roll) but I don't see why we can't have fun with all the polyhedral dice that people have anyway.
If you want consistent, more predictable damage, you make something where you roll a bunch of d4s or d6s. If you want swingier damage, you use fewer but higher-capped dice. 2d6 has a bit of a bell curve where you're much more likely to roll a 7 whereas on a d12 no result is more likely than another.
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