The question most often asked by a DM in Dungeons & Dragons is: "What do you do?". But sometimes you get a convoluted answer about some very complex action a player wants to try which makes no sense to you at all. And then it is better to ask: "What do you intend to achieve with that?". Once you know what the player is trying to achieve, you can decide whether what he does is getting him there, or even point out an alternative. Wizards of the Coast, who now make D&D, should know that. But I still think they are asking the wrong question.

I think WotC's intent with D&D Next is relatively clear: They feel they did split their customer base with 4th edition, and lost half of it to Paizo's Pathfinder; so now they want to create the "one game to bind them all". And they try to get there by asking the players: "What do you want? What is D&D to you?". As Penny Arcade already pointed out in January, that is a stupid question. As I mentioned already in previous posts, your experience of a pen & paper roleplaying session depends only in part on the rules (which is the product WotC sells), and to a bigger part on the players around you. The more experienced players become, and the more free-form they play, the less rules they need. Those people most in need of WotC's product are not the veterans, but the new players. So not only is WotC asking the wrong question, they are asking it to the wrong people. Their question is backward looking, and so are the people they are asking, with the result that D&D Next ends up being "D&D Previous", a futile attempt to mix all the best elements from over 30 years of D&D.

Now I'm not saying that D&D 4th edition doesn't have flaws that couldn't be improved. So do the previous editions of D&D. But Paizo already did an excellent job of taking 3rd edition and making it better. I've seen Pathfinder been called D&D 3.75, and D&D Next 3.85, and that should make the marketing problem of D&D Next very clear: It will not reach it's intended goal. The players who wandered off to Pathfinder are not going to come back for something which is only marginally different. And in spite of WotC's attempts to pacify the 4th edition players and their promised modularity, it is pretty evident for anybody who played the D&D Next playtest that it is impossible to transform D&D Next into a tactical game even half as good as 4th edition by adding some modules.

I once proposed a different question: "How many arrows does it take to kill a level 1 wizard on average?", and pointed out how much a game changes when your answer goes from 1 to 5. You can't fix that with modules. And you can't fix the quadratic power progression of a wizard with Vancian magic (the kind where you have to memorize spells and "forget" them after casting) with modules either.

Instead of asking backward-looking questions, a better plan for D&D Next would have been to ask what kind of rules would be most likely to attract new players. 4th edition isn't actually all that bad in that, but they bungled the release and first released the complicated rules versions, and then the simplified "Essentials" rules and the introductory red box. If I would design D&D Next, I'd start with the "one hour (expandable) board game" version, like Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon provide for 4E. Then I'd publish rules on how to move that game "off board" with simplified rules for combat and skills and lots of emphasis on story-telling and help on getting into a role. D&D Next has some good ideas there with character backgrounds. The full rules for the veteran roleplayers would be released last.

The real question is "How do we get people to play roleplaying games for the next 30 years?", and because they asked the wrong question, Wizards of the Coast have the wrong answer for that.