5E Seems like the End of D&D

[Endarire]

Greetings, Min/Max Boarders!

Let me explain the title.  GNS Theory (Gamist, Simulationist, Narrativist) as it relates to D&D focuses on three aspects of the tabletop experience.

The gamist view is about participation and power.

The simulationist view is about creating, exploring, and interacting with a 'living' world.

The narrativist view focuses on what's best for the story.

I mention all these because D&D's first four editions (and their subeditions, like 3.5) cater strongly to these playstyles already.  (These are based on my experience, and the accounts of trusted sources.)

1E and 2E are more rules light, emphasizing the narrativist view.  The rules are largely suggestions to be heeded or ignored by the GM or group as a whole in favor of making a certain story happen.

Gamists and simulationists still have a place.  D&D is, after all, a game with a focus on interactivity.  Simulationists may get caught up in the grand fluff text and large variety of settings.

3.x and Pathfinder has a tremendous simulationist vibe.  One of the goals of the d20 system was to be able to plug in real world values and have a real world-like result happen.  3.x and Pathfinder are also far more rules-intense than 1E and 2E, meaning you're expected to know the rules before you sit down to play so you can do it 'right.'

Consistency is a big thing:  Having standardized XP progression across classes, saves, skill points per HD, HP, and so on makes things predictable for those who know what to expect.  Second, we finally got standardized rules for making items, even if they don't always apply!  Thirdly, WotC and the occasional third party publisher have already created pretty much everything you're expected to need (and then some!) as a character, player, and GM.

Gamists and narravists still have their place.  We're in a community that helps each other make characters (for power, as a pasttime, and for the lulz- I mean, the odd things possible within the game) and resolve power disputes.  Plenty of people still make their own worlds and stories, but railroading is very frowned upon.

Also, 3.x seems to emphasize making characters over making worlds.  (WotC realized there was more money to be made catering many books to 4-6 PCs and players than one DM with advice that's largely universal across systems.)  Faerun and Eberron were the most promoted 3.x settings with slight nods to Ravenloft, Oerth/Greyhawk, Krynn/Dragonlance, Planescape, and perhaps others.

4E took things to a very gamist extreme.  My initial impression of the 4E PHB was that 4E is a game that admits it's a game.  The world is mostly there as a backdrop to the action that is tactical minis combat.  Abilities were divided into at-will, encounter, daily, and ritual, with rituals having 'utilitarian' or non-combat use.  Other abilities were almost entirely for combat, be it the inflicting or recovering from damage or status effects.

4E also caused a massive rift with its sudden shift to a gamist perspective.  Simulationists were suddenly lacking rules that made sense.  (What, no flour in the PHB?  NPCs exist only to facilitate the PCs?)  Narrativists were split.  On one hand, there was plenty of room for DMs to add their own stuff, though rule 0 has always existed in some form.  On the other hand, if the world already requires so much disbelief to suspend, why will people go the extra mile to accept what I as GM offer?

And now 5E is on the way.  From its preliminary announcements, it plans to have modular rules for 1E-4E styles of play.  Even if it succeeds, I'm not sure where else D&D can go.  It's satisfied the 3 main types of fans over the past 30-40 years, and each can claim his favorite edition, usually the one he grew up with.

D&D, however, is profitable.  If it's profitable enough, people will keep making it, buying it, playing it, and changing it into something I don't yet know.  The very definition of what makes D&D feel like D&D is personal and up for debate.  D&D, to many, is synonymous with tabletop gaming or RPGs.  It was a major innovator in its inception, but how else can it innovate enough to warrant an entirely new edition?

[caelic]

1E and 2E are more rules light, emphasizing the narrativist view.  The rules are largely suggestions to be heeded or ignored by the GM or group as a whole in favor of making a certain story happen.

You think?  I think 1e was hugely simulationist, and a reaction to the more freeform and organic OD&D.  (The whole point of AD&D was that Gary wanted a set of standardized rules as opposed to the balkanization of the original system.)   I don't think there's ever been an edition of D&D that was predominantly narrativist.  (Of course, GNS is an oversimplification, which is why it's largely been supplanted by the Big Model.)

3.x and Pathfinder has a tremendous simulationist vibe.  One of the goals of the d20 system was to be able to plug in real world values and have a real world-like result happen.  3.x and Pathfinder are also far more rules-intense than 1E and 2E, meaning you're expected to know the rules before you sit down to play so you can do it 'right.'

Again, I disagree: I don't think you could find a more gamist system than 3.5.  Rules mastery isn't just useful; it drives the entire game.  As for "real world values" and "real world-like results," we've got monks running at faster than the speed of sound and Hulking Hurlers throwing planets around. 

And now 5E is on the way.  From its preliminary announcements, it plans to have modular rules for 1E-4E styles of play.  Even if it succeeds, I'm not sure where else D&D can go.  It's satisfied the 3 main types of fans over the past 30-40 years, and each can claim his favorite edition, usually the one he grew up with.

I don't think WotC is sure where else D&D can go. 

D&D, however, is profitable.  If it's profitable enough, people will keep making it, buying it, playing it, and changing it into something I don't yet know.  The very definition of what makes D&D feel like D&D is personal and up for debate.  D&D, to many, is synonymous with tabletop gaming or RPGs.  It was a major innovator in its inception, but how else can it innovate enough to warrant an entirely new edition?

It's not nearly as profitable as you might think.  D&D, the tabletop RPG, hasn't been the most profitable part of the D&D license since the mid-90's or earlier.  I agree with you that 5e is likely to be the end of the line for D&D as a traditional, tabletop RPG; I said it when they announced 4e, and I haven't seen anything to make me think differently.   They failed to shift to a monthly fee-for-service model with 4e, and that left them with the "Book-A-Month-Until-Saturation-Then-Hit-Reset" model...which, IMO, is not indefinitely sustainable.  4e pushed them to the breaking point, and a lot of their customers who stayed loyal in 4e are seriously torqued off about the abandonment of that system after only a few years.

Likewise, I think many people are (very reasonably) asking themselves "If I buy into fifth edition, will they abandon THAT three years down the road?"

[RobbyPants]

I've never been a big fan of GNS theory. It's always struck me as a bunch of buzz words and platitudes that don't really mean anything.

That being said, I don't see 5E as being successful. 4E fractured their base, and I think they're trying something weird to fix it. With PF out there as "the fix for 3E", they have an uphill battle to get their PF players back.

Everything I've seen in the playtest rules show that they don't understand what a RNG is or how it works and that their general approach for stuff is MTP and the DM makes stuff up. You don't need to buy rules to do that, and I doubt it will make their 4E players very happy, either.


It strikes me that if they made 5E to deliver on what they promised for 4E back in 2007, they might do a good job. Basically, take 3E, remove the Magic Christmas Tree for items, make everyone useful out of combat, and try to keep things as simple as possible. Also, they should take a note from 3E and earlier editions and let powers affect the world outside of combat and give the players narrative control of the game.

[Bozwevial]

I've never been a big fan of GNS theory. It's always struck me as a bunch of buzz words and platitudes that don't really mean anything.

Yeah, the fact that within literally a single post of the topic being created someone disagreed with an interpretation of which flavor of ice cream a game system is does a lot to point out how subjective it is. It's also really divisive for that same reason, things like making an attack roll could easily fit under all three categories, and it doesn't actually do anything to help you make a better game. It's just sort of there.

That being said, I don't see 5E as being successful. 4E fractured their base, and I think they're trying something weird to fix it. With PF out there as "the fix for 3E", they have an uphill battle to get their PF players back.

Everything I've seen in the playtest rules show that they don't understand what a RNG is or how it works and that their general approach for stuff is MTP and the DM makes stuff up. You don't need to buy rules to do that, and I doubt it will make their 4E players very happy, either.

I'm sure if you pressed them on that point they'd say that this is just a playtest document and certain rules were omitted for space issues. I am also sure that when the hard copies of the Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide hit they won't contain too much more than what already exists. The extra space will be fluff text.

It strikes me that if they made 5E to deliver on what they promised for 4E back in 2007, they might do a good job. Basically, take 3E, remove the Magic Christmas Tree for items, make everyone useful out of combat, and try to keep things as simple as possible. Also, they should take a note from 3E and earlier editions and let powers affect the world outside of combat and give the players narrative control of the game.

I honestly don't trust Mearls enough not to botch that. Not after the Wooden Doors Forever fiasco and this little gem:

That probably also explains why my #1 pet peeve is a player who quotes rules to me. Think the rulebook has all the answers? Then let's see that rulebook run a campaign!

Which gets about ten times funnier when you remember that 4th edition literally had rules for doing just that.

[whitetyger009]

i don't belive 5e will be successful simply because of who is in charge of it.  WotC.  WotC has a very successful game in Magic the Gathering.  they put out millions of cards and other stuff for that game and make a killing off of it.  as such it is sustained only by making older stuff out of print and newer stuff manditory to play.  the way i look at it they are doing the sam with D&D.  i understand putting out new sourcebooks, and putting out something every once in a while is fine.  i would ask them to look at 2ed and how many years that was alive.  the path they took with 3.x and 4e is bound to crash.  they gave no consideration to how long the game would stay alive just about producing another product to be bought.

i personally think they should just stop and let pathfinder have its run.

[SneeR]

I playtested pre-made characters in early June 2012. There definitely seems to be a shift towards utilitarian abilities, but I have noticed an injection of flavor as well.

What I mean by utilitarian abilities is this: the halfling has an ability to hide behind bigger creatures, and the dwarves have underground GPS. These abilities are wildly useful, but strangely more specific than previous edition's versions of these abilities. Take it as you will: I have never seen these abilities so spelled out and specific.

There are background options like those seen in other RPGs that give additional abilities. I'm unsure how this relates to class abilities, but...

Speaking of class abilities... the fighter still sucks. They give every class a cool ability except the fighter: he gets a +2 to hit. Fantastic.

The human also didn't appear to have any special qualities, but that may be made more clear when character creation is revealed.

All of these things point towards catering to all parts of your school of thought. I feel that a few good steps can make 5e exactly what everyone was hoping for, even if it makes many missteps! I remain paradoxically hopeful but jaded.

[snakeman830]

Speaking of class abilities... the fighter still sucks. They give every class a cool ability except the fighter: he gets a +2 to hit. Fantastic.

Considering there is no more scaling BAB (or really AC), this is actually a really big deal.  It means the Fighter is actually the best at fighting.

[RobbyPants]

i would ask them to look at 2ed and how many years that was alive.  the path they took with 3.x and 4e is bound to crash.  they gave no consideration to how long the game would stay alive just about producing another product to be bought.

I think you could argue that 2E had its run in part because there wasn't a 3E out yet, not because it was so good or run with a good business model. After all, TSR went out of business during 2E's time in the spotlight.

3E sold a lot of books and was a pretty big success. I think there are a lot of things they could have done better, but it was all in all, a very solid edition.

i personally think they should just stop and let pathfinder have its run.

Yeah, now that PF has gotten a very strong foot-hold, they have a strong contender to deal with. I don't know how badly it will hurt them, but it will hurt them. If they don't make their game enough like 3E, PF can simply say "Hey, look! We fixed 3E. We're the game to play.", and if they try too hard to make the game like 3E, they'll be trying to cut into an already established market.

[FlaminCows]

Yeah, now that PF has gotten a very strong foot-hold, they have a strong contender to deal with. I don't know how badly it will hurt them, but it will hurt them. If they don't make their game enough like 3E, PF can simply say "Hey, look! We fixed 3E. We're the game to play.", and if they try too hard to make the game like 3E, they'll be trying to cut into an already established market.

On the other hand, "trying to cut into an already established market" is a very viable option in itself. Pathfinder was successful partially because WotC stopped selling 3.5 (thus making any new people going into 3.5 go to Pathfinder instead), but also because it offered some changes and updates over 3.5 so as to get people who already bought 3.5 to buy Pathfinder as well. While WotC wouldn't have the former, it could easily do the latter — Pathfinder is very, very flawed. WotC would also have access to all their copyrights and all their non-open game material, meaning they would have the advantage of publishing popular, recognised settings and being able to base their new edition on the best parts of 3.5 while also taking the good bits from Pathfinder (open one way, open the other). Indeed, if WotC tried to, it could very take enough of a market share from the "3.5-like" niche that Paizo would be forced to stop supporting Pathfinder and start making sourcebooks for WotC's game.

Of course, WotC isn't going to do that. They have made it clear that they are starting from scratch again with Next, and the articles and playtest make it obvious that the next edition isn't going to be much like 3.5 at all.

[caelic]

The thing is that WotC's in a situation with which they have no experience: entering the race in a place other than first.

Up until now, D&D has always been the best-selling game on the market, simply by virtue of being D&D.  The fact that that's no longer the case is, to me, a clear indicator of how fundamentally 4e failed.  It's like McDonald's falling into second place as far as fast food franchises go--possible, but they'd have to screw up significantly in order to lose their spot at the top.

Thus, for the first time, WotC's going to have to figure out a way to market their game in a manner other than "It's D&D.  You know you're going to buy it."  That's simply no longer a guarantee.

[Zionpopsickle]

Honestly, I think the problem with D&D is the same problem that the comic book industry has: the people doing the production are not chosen because they are the best at production but because they are the biggest fans.  You can see ample evidence of this in things like Skip's rulings or SKRs run on pathfinder.  You have people who simply do not have the skills the continuously improve the product because they lack the basics necessary to do so. 

In many ways 4th edition was not a bad game.  The problem was that it wasn't D&D in the same way that all previous editions had been.  It was D&D skirmish, a game designed to get you from multi-hour battle to multi-hour battle.  This isn't bad but it definitely didn't have the feel of D&D 3.5 which had extensive out of combat abilities and often revolved around advancing a campaign in non-combat ways.  And the thing is that the design staff obviously didn't have the theoretical grounding to balance such a thing and thus we ended up with 4.0 which was mathematically well balanced for combat but didn't have this balance for RPing. 

Frankly, I think WotC should have just brought in a whole new team to make 5.0.  Instead of trying to rehire the designers who failed with 3.0 (necessitating 3.5) they should have picked up some European designers, some dudes with math degrees and let them work the mechanics while letting the English majors of the old editions be in charge of fluff instead.  WotC has proven able to make some awesome design teams (M:tG R&D are incredibly good and Pokemon had a great design team as well) and they really should have just said fuck you to the grognards who want guys like Monte Cook and just made a team that can churn out awesome RPG books.

[caelic]

Doesn't really work out so well in practice, Zion.  There's a world of difference between balancing a closed-parameter card game and balancing an open-ended roleplaying game.  4e is about as close as the game's likely to come to the approach you're advocating--and the reasons why 4e wasn't successful have been discussed ad nauseam. 

"I'm good with numbers" isn't enough to make someone a solid RPG designer; I've got shelves full of "revolutionary systems" that were actually quite good in terms of mechanics, but failed abysmally as games.

[veekie]

Balancing open ended games is actually simpler in some senses. You establish your goalposts, and never deviate from them, not even for super special snowflakes. From the outset, you define maximum, mode and minimum stats, which again guides design in that you can only stack things up to a certain limit. Likewise with special effects and abilities, along with the variety of non-statistical abilities a given character possesses.

Of course, multiclassing throws all this off, but it means you start within known bounds and know exactly how much a given class gets at what levels. It means you cannot disguise yet another raw number boost as a class feature.

[Unbeliever]

Reading the above posts, which I mostly agree with (though I think it takes far less than a math degree to grasp the numbers at work here, it's all simple probability calculations), here's what occurs to me.

In a lot of ways 3.5 D&D set the gold standard.  It is, however, a deeply-flawed game.  But, it is a deeply-flawed game that came out about 10 years ago.  And, one that was revolutionary -- for D&D at least -- in a lot of ways and that also had some very sound fundamentals, e.g., the intuitive d20 system that became dominant in the marketplace.  That's a little bit of a tough act to follow.  But, I think Zion is onto something in that the 4E and 5E designers' approach has not even really been the right one for doing that.  They've been obsessed with the wrong things. 

[Complete4th]

Doom and gloom! The End is nigh!

D&Ders have been saying this with every single edition change. I suppose even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but it isn't likely to be right this time. Though I'd love to think that 5e will fail, it won't. Even if it's lacking in innovation, it's a new mix of classic ingredients that some group of D&Ders will be sure to love.

As gamers' general dissatisfaction with the GNS theory demonstrates, there is no finite number of 'bases' for D&D to cover. It's all subjective, so whether a new edition is a radical change or linear improvement, it will have fans. For example if I had to choose a simulationist edition I'd choose a TSR edition over either WotC edition...marginally though, because the little man in my head does a face-plant every time I hear someone suggest that any edition of D&D is simulationist.

Anyway I agree that it's fun to imagine D&D crashing, but the reality is likely to be much less dramatic.

[caelic]

D&Ders have been saying this with every single edition change.

Not really.  Certainly not to the same extent.  Prior to second edition, the general sentiment was positive, though that was certainly tougher to gauge in the days prior to everyone having Internet access.  Certainly, the general sentiment towards third edition seemed to be "It's about time."  Sure, there are always a few naysayers--but the people currently saying "D&D is in serious trouble" comprise a lot more than a few naysayers.

Though I'd love to think that 5e will fail, it won't. Even if it's lacking in innovation, it's a new mix of classic ingredients that some group of D&Ders will be sure to love.

I'm in the exact opposite position.  I don't want 5e to fail, but I think it will.  I didn't want 4e to fail, but I believed that it would--and it did, in precisely the way I thought it would.

See, the thing is that there are different standards for "failure."  By the standards of most of the RPG industry, 4e would have been a solid success.  By the standards of WotC, which is answerable to Hasbro, it was a failure.  It didn't shift the profit model to a more sustainable structure; it didn't grow the market the way it was supposed to. 

As gamers' general dissatisfaction with the GNS theory demonstrates, there is no finite number of 'bases' for D&D to cover. It's all subjective, so whether a new edition is a radical change or linear improvement, it will have fans.

...but it doesn't just have to "have fans."  It has to have a LOT of fans.  It has to have more fans than 4e; it has to have more fans than 3.5.  If either of those games had had enough fans to satisfy Hasbro's profit benchmarks, they wouldn't have been discontinued.

Anyway I agree that it's fun to imagine D&D crashing, but the reality is likely to be much less dramatic.

No, actually, it SUCKS to imagine D&D crashing.  Even though it's battered, D&D is still one of the main pillars of the RPG industry.  If it falls, there will be a great deal of fallout.  Companies will go under; people will lose their jobs.  A lot of those people are friends and acquaintances of mine. 

Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything yet to make me doubt the predictions I made when 4e was in the works.  Up to this point, they've been accurate.  It's a case where I would love to be wrong...but I don't think I am.

[caelic]

Balancing open ended games is actually simpler in some senses. You establish your goalposts, and never deviate from them, not even for super special snowflakes. From the outset, you define maximum, mode and minimum stats, which again guides design in that you can only stack things up to a certain limit. Likewise with special effects and abilities, along with the variety of non-statistical abilities a given character possesses.

...and, oh, does the portion in bold ever throw things off!  It's easy to balance things, right up until you get to the point where you're no longer simply crunching numbers for attack, defense, and damage, and are actually getting into things that can't be rigidly numerically quantified.

What numbers can we put on flight to make it balanced in all situations?  How about teleportation?  Shapechanging?  Any of ten thousand other possible capabilities that might interact with one another to create a synergistically disproportionate advantage, be it tactical, economic, or otherwise?

This is where the "open-ended" part becomes a problem.  The designers of 4e tried to deal with that by removing most of the abilities that can't be crunched down to hard numbers, or at least making them very rare--and the result was a game that was generally seen as dry and overly-mechanical.

Again, I'll point out here that 4e did exactly what people are calling for when it comes to balancing the systems and making the math work, and it succeeded.  It's unified, it's well-balanced, it doesn't have a lot of whacky overpowered loopholes.  But it failed as a game nonetheless.

[Zionpopsickle]

Balancing open ended games is actually simpler in some senses. You establish your goalposts, and never deviate from them, not even for super special snowflakes. From the outset, you define maximum, mode and minimum stats, which again guides design in that you can only stack things up to a certain limit. Likewise with special effects and abilities, along with the variety of non-statistical abilities a given character possesses.

...and, oh, does the portion in bold ever throw things off!  It's easy to balance things, right up until you get to the point where you're no longer simply crunching numbers for attack, defense, and damage, and are actually getting into things that can't be rigidly numerically quantified.

What numbers can we put on flight to make it balanced in all situations?  How about teleportation?  Shapechanging?  Any of ten thousand other possible capabilities that might interact with one another to create a synergistically disproportionate advantage, be it tactical, economic, or otherwise?

This is where the "open-ended" part becomes a problem.  The designers of 4e tried to deal with that by removing most of the abilities that can't be crunched down to hard numbers, or at least making them very rare--and the result was a game that was generally seen as dry and overly-mechanical.

Again, I'll point out here that 4e did exactly what people are calling for when it comes to balancing the systems and making the math work, and it succeeded.  It's unified, it's well-balanced, it doesn't have a lot of whacky overpowered loopholes.  But it failed as a game nonetheless.

I don't mean to single you out Caelic but this is a pretty good example of an argument from incredulity.  You don't know specifically how something is done so you assume that it can't be done.  But frankly, dealing with qualitative vs quantitative properties is something that anyone with a Bachelors in math or physics has done extensively.  Additionally, one of the most common game design methods is to make up a set of base rules and then to specifically add abilities that break these rules with a weighted cost of how powerful breaking said rule is.  Games like Race for the Galaxy, Cosmic Encounters, Puerto Rico, Arkham horror, Shadows over Camelot, etc. all work on this basic principle.

Let's examine one of the things that you said is unbalanced; teleportation.  How broken is teleportation really in D&D?  Well, tactical teleportation isn't broken at all, hell its so unbroken you can get it on a 1400g item.  Really, only long range strategic teleportation is broken and not because of mechanical abilities but because it disrupts narrative flow.  And the solution to this can be as simple as not allowing long-range teleporation to work on places you haven't actually physically visited before.  Otherwise require physical LOS to the location you wish to teleport to.  Bam! No more using Teleport to end run around the adventure. 

Most other things are similarly easy to balance because it just isn't as hard mechanically to balance qualitative differences as you make it out to be.  As long as the associated cost is correct it will balance fine, the big problem in 3.5 was that many of these abilities had too low of opportunity costs for certain classes and too high for others. 

Again, not to single you out specifically but I think that kind of thinking is part of what caused 4th ed to be so boring to most 3.5 players.  There was an over obsession with quantitative balance and a design staff without the prerequisite abilities to balance the qualitative differences that 3.5 players enjoyed.   

[darqueseid]

(click to show/hide)

D&Ders have been saying this with every single edition change.

Not really.  Certainly not to the same extent.  Prior to second edition, the general sentiment was positive, though that was certainly tougher to gauge in the days prior to everyone having Internet access.  Certainly, the general sentiment towards third edition seemed to be "It's about time."  Sure, there are always a few naysayers--but the people currently saying "D&D is in serious trouble" comprise a lot more than a few naysayers.

Though I'd love to think that 5e will fail, it won't. Even if it's lacking in innovation, it's a new mix of classic ingredients that some group of D&Ders will be sure to love.

I'm in the exact opposite position.  I don't want 5e to fail, but I think it will.  I didn't want 4e to fail, but I believed that it would--and it did, in precisely the way I thought it would.

See, the thing is that there are different standards for "failure."  By the standards of most of the RPG industry, 4e would have been a solid success.  By the standards of WotC, which is answerable to Hasbro, it was a failure.  It didn't shift the profit model to a more sustainable structure; it didn't grow the market the way it was supposed to. 

As gamers' general dissatisfaction with the GNS theory demonstrates, there is no finite number of 'bases' for D&D to cover. It's all subjective, so whether a new edition is a radical change or linear improvement, it will have fans.

...but it doesn't just have to "have fans."  It has to have a LOT of fans.  It has to have more fans than 4e; it has to have more fans than 3.5.  If either of those games had had enough fans to satisfy Hasbro's profit benchmarks, they wouldn't have been discontinued.

Anyway I agree that it's fun to imagine D&D crashing, but the reality is likely to be much less dramatic.

No, actually, it SUCKS to imagine D&D crashing.  Even though it's battered, D&D is still one of the main pillars of the RPG industry.  If it falls, there will be a great deal of fallout.  Companies will go under; people will lose their jobs.  A lot of those people are friends and acquaintances of mine. 

Unfortunately, I haven't seen anything yet to make me doubt the predictions I made when 4e was in the works.  Up to this point, they've been accurate.  It's a case where I would love to be wrong...but I don't think I am.

I feel like most of what Caelic is saying in this post is right.    Although I hate to say it, it seems like they are on the wrong track in creating 5e.  And if it crashes and burns your gonna end up with some major consequences.   

What they really need to do is create the core system of rules without customer feedback, and then have a core group of accomplished gamers (the brilliant gameologists maybe? )  have a crack at it, and see if they can really crack it.   Create focus groups out of optimizers, play-test with some actual experienced gamers, and get their buy-in, and get their honest feedback.   An elite core of say 50 people could give better feedback than the thousands of crappy ones they have to sift through currently.

Its the same as if a security admin had an ethical hacker try to break into his system, the hacker finds the holes so the admin can plug them up. 

But to start you have to get a good core rule set in place.  The core testers may say go back to the drawing board once they get their hands on it, but if that's what you have to do then that's what you do until you get a playable system, THEN you start creating classes, adding variation, etc etc.

[Zionpopsickle]

Darqueseid, that is what tends to be known as destructive playtesting and really is something that should have been done.  And WotC has a good track record in that regard post 2000s.  I am betting that some destructive playtesting was done for 4th (although someone correct me if I am wrong).  The problem is not destructive playtesting itself but the philosophy of what you want to result from it.  It seems that the 4th edition staff wanted nothing broken or even hinting at being broken (although they evidently weren't that great at it) but the problem is that a game without anything that stresses the system a bit tends to be really boring.  For a M:tG example compare Urza's block to Masques block.  Urza's block had broken things everywhere, whereas Masques was pretty ok once Lin-Sivvi was banned.  Urza's was a hell of a lot more fun though because a thing people often overlook is that broken things can balance each other out whereas if nothing is broken the mechanically superior choices always win.

Mainly, I think the big thing that D&D has needed for a long time is designers with a good handle on how games work at fundamental mechanical levels.  Not just someone who can do the simple numerics (because that is really high school level math) but people who understand how game systems can handle rules exceptions and open ended mechanics.  There is a difference between the rules of a game being tight and the system itself being tight and a big problem with 4th is that to make the rules tight they tightened the system as well, which was totally unnecessary since 3.5 had a functional rules set that allowed for a very loose system, it just needed better numerics applied and a bunch of hotfixes.