The D&D Community Advisory Group

So, D&D put together a "D&D Community Advisory Group" for what I guess is work on the next edition of the game. They did this to "discuss early product concepts and D&D Beyond tools" and likely as a sounding board for the work on the next edition.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/2180-introducing-the-d-d-community-advisory-group

They are about who I expect, with a few too many who seem to be "tone police" on the group, and not enough "old schoolers." It really doesn't mean much, except as a hype machine, which is why the D&D YouTubers were chosen. D&D YouTube needs a lot of help, ever since Google told a lot of them to stop making D&D content and move on to new content.

The algorithm no longer wants D&D, and I don't know how they can fight it.

I doubt forking money over to Google would help.

Still, the group is likely handling both D&D and D&D Beyond feedback, so even if there is a new edition, don't expect it to magically eliminate the complicated characters that require a live-service support model. I do not have much hope that the complexity issue that drove me from D&D 5E will ever be fixed, if they ever will, and my hopes for D&D 6E are nearly nonexistent.

BX is my game.

5E blew up for me in a live-service support model, a mess of digital DLC, and books I could not own the PDFs of. Even the games that let me do that blew up under live-service conditions due to character-sheet complexity issues. I doubt I am keeping many of the books. The game is too bloated and obese to survive.

And BX is now open-licensed and free of interference and threats. The future is bright for BX, and that is where my support is these days. BX will never need a live service model, nor will it ever disappoint me.

Still, I wish them well, and I hope they are listened to. They are not really a group I would pick for the job, but they are going to pick people they feel will help them with whatever direction they go in. Based on the group, it is not really a direction I am interested in. I am more neutral toward them than negative, but I am not seeing too many in that group that I follow regularly. Of the few YouTubers they have on there, I never watch more than the first few minutes of any, and I avoid a few.

I am over D&D YouTube, mainly because of the constant negativity there, and it no longer gets suggested to me. The algorithm has seen my choices, and it no longer delivers D&D to me much, and I do not mind. Also, bringing in a constant source of terrible D&D advice from the YouTube crowd seems like a huge mistake of committee-based design, and many terrible ideas will be added to the game.

There is a difference between a masterful, crafted, unified, and elegant design and a game-by-committee.

Still, the 5.5E playtest packets were more hype than they were for gathering feedback, so the track record of D&D and community feedback is pretty sad. 5.5E was an in-house game, and the playtest packets (I felt) were just used to bait-and-switch D&D YouTubers into giving it coverage. I do not have too much faith in the community feedback process.

In a way, D&D is too big to be cool, too big to survive, and too big to ever be compelling and a must-play game ever again. We are in the maintenance phase of D&D, where the MMO still has a huge player base to milk, but it will never be as big as it once was. Like World of Warcraft, we are post-prime and looking for new ways to monetize a shrinking crowd.

The committee will generate YouTube buzz, but YMMV, especially with YouTube being uninterested in the game. They have an uphill battle just to sustain interest in D&D Beyond, to keep the player base from slipping away further as people move on to games like BX, Daggerheart, Nimble, Pathfinder, Dragonbane, Shadowdark, Draw Steel, DC 20, and others.

While it is tough to be positive, I will give them the benefit of the doubt.

I hope they do a good job there.

But I don't have much hope.