As the topic title asks, will you immediately upgrade to 6E (One D&D), wait to see how it’s received or possibly to allow your own Campaign a moment to justify the changes, or will you even possibly sit this next edition out?

Maybe that last option seems ridiculous but I’d like to refer you to 4th Edition and how that increased Pathfinders popularity.  I actually have myself not been happy with the way I see the rules and general system evolving and am strongly considering just sitting 6E out unless it becomes as popular as 5e and shows itself enduring.  Personally I suspect that prior editions of D&D would have been as popular or more so if they had the same online support as 5e currently has, so I am automatically skeptical of whether or not there’s really even any need to upgrade.

Where’s a button for, “I’m going to reserve judgement until I actually see the thing a year from now”?

Quote from Xalthu >>

Where’s a button for, “I’m going to reserve judgement until I actually see the thing a year from now”?

 That would be “I will wait.”  There are a million reasons why someone would wait so I kept it simple.

It is still 5e, so I do not see it as switching, but I will run old and new rules at the same time, for example letting my players mix and match old and new races, classes, backgrounds, etc.

"I might actually sit this next edition out" is what I voted for. While a lot of One D&D (or whatever it's called) is rather exciting, I'm still sore from the decisions WotC have made and don't seem to be reversing. Once the campaign I'm currently playing is over, there's a good chance I'll only stick with the material I currently own and maybe whatever form the basic rules the next iteration of D&D take.

In order for me to purchase the next iteration of D&D's content, books would have to be far more substantial and I'd like to see more classes beyond those planned for 2024. Otherwise, I'm not that bothered. There's more than enough competition out there that scratches my RPG itch.

The latter option, but with reservations - let's face it WOTC has been "controvesial" one way or another over the past few years.
I'm gonna save my money and either plough it into DMsGuild content or "nice" vinyl.  I've got enough related hobby content to last a lifetime.

Quote from Appellion >>

Quote from Xalthu >>

Where’s a button for, “I’m going to reserve judgement until I actually see the thing a year from now”?

 That would be “I will wait.”  There are a million reasons why someone would wait so I kept it simple.

 I feel like there's a massive difference between "I'm going to wait until I know at least roughly what's in it before making a decision but could buy it at launch or very soon after" and "I'm going to wait a year or so to see how this plays out before committing".

None of your options seem to fit that scenario properly.

I'm going straight to One D&D. I am for hopefully better and cooler mechanics, as well as just more interesting and new options.

Also, why can you select multiple options on the poll? This definitely makes things a bit confusing because of the overlap in some survey options and a lack of that between others.

I voted "I might actually sit this next edition out" for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I've been thoroughly unimpressed with One D&D as a whole.  I couldn't even be bothered to fill out the surveys for the past couple of UA documents.  They already have one of the most successful iterations of D&D ever with 5e, all they had to do was fine tune some of the system's shortcomings and they'd be golden; they're instead trying to reinvent the wheel and make massive and pointless changes to the system that only make it more complicated then it really needs to be.  With how convoluted and all over the place the "updated" rules are, it's only become more and more clear to me that the current design team has no idea what they're doing with this game.  All things considered, my group has no interest in switching over to One D&D, and we'll probably just keep playing 5e for the time being.

Secondly, I no longer trust WotC as a company after all the blunders its brought us the past couple of years.  I've been very disappointed with the past few 5e books I've purchased from them, as they contain half-baked ideas at best and downright nonsense at worst.  Add in the OGL debacle and how they sent hired goons after a longtime Magic the Gathering fan over a mistake WotC themselves made and I simply cannot in good faith continue to support WotC anymore.  If anything, all of these things have led me to look towards other game systems made by companies that actually respect their customers, such as Old School Essentials and Savage Worlds.

honestly, I feel like I still have a lot to learn about 5e, even though I've been playing it for years now. since I'm a Dungeon Master, I want to know the game backwards and forwards, and cutting short all my progress to try and tackle a new edition sounds really daunting

I've only been playing D&D since 2018, so I've never experienced an edition switch like older players have. 5e is the only D&D I've ever known. switching editions seems difficult, maybe more difficult than it's worth when my players are accustomed to 5e too - but then again, I've never done it before. I'll wait and see for now

While I voted for "I will wait," I found myself nodding along with Soniti254 above.

I'm sure a lot of this is to justify/entice people to spend money on a whole new set of core books (and subsequent source/monster books). I was hoping for strategic but mostly minor tweaks to the rules and classes, fixing spells or combos widely held to be "broken," etc. I didn't expect or want the amount of significant changes to most classes.

In terms of lost trust: I also agree, in general, about the lack of quality in the official books. Especially the adventures, whether they be entire campaigns or anthologies. ALL of the full campaigns I've played or read often feel too safe and too generic, and weirdly (to me) focus too much on lore rather than giving the DM content that's immediately usable at the table. For instance, in BG:DTA, we get PAGES of info on Baldur's Gate, when what the DM really needs are good, well-formatted sketches (not literal drawings) of the major NPCs, extensive and interesting random encounter tables, and brief, evocative descriptions for a lot of city locations (ala the old City-State of the Invincible Overlord). I found the Candlekeep anthology fairly boring and so many of the adventures had huge gaps in their presumed narratives. 

The best book WOTC has put out, not counting the three core books, Volo's and Mordenkainen's, was VRGTR. Tons of great settings, all of them weird with potentially for even weirder stuff, none of them felt generic or sanded down, and they all gave tons of ideas of an entire campaign spent hopping through the demiplane. 

I was disappointed that WoTC did not rewrite and publish all the old TSR modules for 5E but instead let outside publishers do the hard work.

With millions of dollars behind them they could have found the best writers to do the work.

After years they are finally doing one or two but its years late and not timed right with the switch to ONE coming.

Definitely sitting it out. Just hanging around trying to absorb all the inspiration, lore and value I can from the Legendary Bundle ( and then some) purchased before the cluster got rolling. Master subscription expired.  I'll choose ttrpg content in book/pdf format going forward.

Live and Learn. 

But I hope it's fun for those that get on board. 

I’d love to see a revamped release of a 2nd Edition Adventure, Night Below: An Underdark Campaign.  In my opinion it wouldn’t need just the obvious updating of the rules but also massive story changes, almost along the lines of the Temple of Elemental Evil “sequel” from 3rd Edition, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil.

There is no reason to upgrade to 6E at this time.  Its not a new game, its moving players from Super Hero status to Immortal Status.  They are increasing the cognitive load on the DM and making players impossible to kill.  To me 6E appears to being developed as a choose your own adventure game where you always make the right choice.  5E was too survivable and when the WotC developers tried to remove monster crits - yeah no.  I believe WotC hired away half of Paizo's senior dev team sometime after that era of game preview stuff was put out.

I am extremely dubious of WotC's game development and leadership capabilities.  The last time I saw a basic level of competence was Mearls, every team since then has been increasingly more incompetent in content creation.  I've regretted every D&D purchase post Mearls.  Too many problems and too many shortcuts.  Its not changing in 6E, its going to get worse.

Quote from kayakingpoodle >>

Quote from Portential >>

There is no reason to upgrade to 6E at this time.  Its not a new game, its moving players from Super Hero status to Immortal Status.  They are increasing the cognitive load on the DM and making players impossible to kill.  To me 6E appears to being developed as a choose your own adventure game where you always make the right choice.  5E was too survivable and when the WotC developers tried to remove monster crits - yeah no.  I believe WotC hired away half of Paizo's senior dev team sometime after that era of game preview stuff was put out.

I am extremely dubious of WotC's game development and leadership capabilities.  The last time I saw a basic level of competence was Mearls, every team since then has been increasingly more incompetent in content creation.  I've regretted every D&D purchase post Mearls.  Too many problems and too many shortcuts.  Its not changing in 6E, its going to get worse.

 Well with chatgpt et al, and a vtt, who needs a DM?

Quote from kayakingpoodle >>

Quote from Portential >>

There is no reason to upgrade to 6E at this time.  Its not a new game, its moving players from Super Hero status to Immortal Status.  They are increasing the cognitive load on the DM and making players impossible to kill.  To me 6E appears to being developed as a choose your own adventure game where you always make the right choice.  5E was too survivable and when the WotC developers tried to remove monster crits - yeah no.  I believe WotC hired away half of Paizo's senior dev team sometime after that era of game preview stuff was put out.

I am extremely dubious of WotC's game development and leadership capabilities.  The last time I saw a basic level of competence was Mearls, every team since then has been increasingly more incompetent in content creation.  I've regretted every D&D purchase post Mearls.  Too many problems and too many shortcuts.  Its not changing in 6E, its going to get worse.

 Well with chatgpt et al, and a vtt, who needs a DM?

 Good luck with getting a cohesive campaign with a set of friends sitting at the table having fun and making lifelong friendships trying to use chaptgpt, we are 10+ years from having an AI model to write a good campaign, run it, voice it and do the maps.  What WotC is going to offer is going to be drop in and play a game and drop out.  We'll try to find you a spot in the module next time you play close to your last spot with a completely different group of players (half of which will be bots).  And its going to suck so much vecna's orbs of doom and they aren't smart enough to realize the cost and the loss they are going to get. 

The current game team are microsoft game developers, they are going to give us a drop in lobby, quick play and try to turn it into Halo or Diablo because the President and the Exec Producer doesn't understand their market (TTRPG, they understand Online Games as Service).  They are going to go with what they know (online video games) and they are going to alienate their consumer base.  It's going to be very very bad.

My company did something similar to that for their main product at a release of our convention, we went from being a leader in the industry to a laggard in 4 years, we shed 2/3rds of our customer base because our founder decided to release a product not related to our company using our companies name.

Everything I've seen press wise from Wotc shows they are going to push online play, their VTT and MTX.  I wouldn't be surprised if they don't even put in pay to play loot boxes (ie gambling) right from Andrew Wilson of EA.  It'll hopefully be cosmetics, but I can see them doing an "official adventurers league" with pay to play loot boxes with items to help you "complete the campaign".

I have a very negative view of WotC after giving them them the benefit of the doubt and they continue to break any chance I give them.  I've been a consumer of D&D since the 80's and they aren't getting a dime from me now.

Quote from BoringBard >>

I'm going straight to One D&D. I am for hopefully better and cooler mechanics, as well as just more interesting and new options.

Also, why can you select multiple options on the poll? This definitely makes things a bit confusing because of the overlap in some survey options and a lack of that between others.

 I didn’t realize that was the case.  Is there a way to edit the poll without destroying the thread or votes already cast?

Edit: Doesn’t appear so, can only edit the topic title.  Hopefully people will recognize and hold to the intended single option idea.

Quote from Soniti254 >>

I voted "I might actually sit this next edition out" for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I've been thoroughly unimpressed with One D&D as a whole.  I couldn't even be bothered to fill out the surveys for the past couple of UA documents.  They already have one of the most successful iterations of D&D ever with 5e, all they had to do was fine tune some of the system's shortcomings and they'd be golden; they're instead trying to reinvent the wheel and make massive and pointless changes to the system that only make it more complicated then it really needs to be.  With how convoluted and all over the place the "updated" rules are, it's only become more and more clear to me that the current design team has no idea what they're doing with this game.  All things considered, my group has no interest in switching over to One D&D, and we'll probably just keep playing 5e for the time being.

Secondly, I no longer trust WotC as a company after all the blunders its brought us the past couple of years.  I've been very disappointed with the past few 5e books I've purchased from them, as they contain half-baked ideas at best and downright nonsense at worst.  Add in the OGL debacle and how they sent hired goons after a longtime Magic the Gathering fan over a mistake WotC themselves made and I simply cannot in good faith continue to support WotC anymore.  If anything, all of these things have led me to look towards other game systems made by companies that actually respect their customers, such as Old School Essentials and Savage Worlds.

 Agreed. Our group are going to avoid WoTC new content for all the reasons above. We might still run the odd 5e campaign but we're moving to Pathfinder and other systems. We are about to restart a 40K Dark Heresy campaign put on hold a while back. 

The behaviour and breach of trust from WoTC is the final straw. The content has also been poor for a while, starting with Tasha's (Fizban's excepted), the content has been more about sanitisation and correctness, constant power creep and imbalance of subclasses etc, than about content that helps players and DMs, lack of work on crafting and economics to name but two areas that could've done with more guidance and framework. 

Quote from kayakingpoodle >>Well with chatgpt et al, and a vtt, who needs a DM? <read with sarcasm>

 
You know my feelings on AI as a tool, but for the sake of an experiment, punch the phrase "write Lore for 5e Spelljammer" into chatGPT and specify a word-count and setting of choice.

Try it and see!

BONUS: "Write Spelljammer ship combat mechanics for 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons".

/sarcasm - not aimed at you ;)

No, no no - I'm not poking fun at you - I'm poking fun at the fact that chatGPT  actually did write some Lore and then again, when prompted wrote some ship combat mechanics.

Something...  painfully light in the actual pamphlets/books.

* I asked for 5k words on 5e Forgotten Realms Spelljammer lore - and it's not at all "great" - it really does lack the human hand, but it did take into account actual existing Lore and go a way to updating that into 5th Edition.  Personally, would I pay for it?  No, not at all.