Yesterday the public beta of D&D Next, the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, started. There is a partial NDA, which prohibits me from sharing the playtest materials, but allows me to voice my opinion on D&D Next, which is what I’ll do here. Of course the first thing to remark is that a beta test of a pen & paper game is inherently strange. As the people I normally play with aren’t signed up for the beta, I can only “play” D&D Next with myself. Which maybe actually isn’t the worst thing to do, because in a pen & paper game the overall experience very much depends on the players, while the rule-system only plays a minor role. But even weirder than beta-testing a pen & paper game in the first place is the nature of D&D Next.To explain, let’s make a detour to Everquest, which as it happens also plans a future edition called “Next”. The Wikipedia entry for Everquest Next cites the developer’s intentions. So what would you think if Everquest Next had level loss on death, naked corpse runs, 15 minute forced breaks for meditation between fights, forced grouping, 20 minutes waits for boats, and all the other features of the original Everquest? You’d probably wonder why the game is called “Next”, and not “Previous”.D&D Next is very much a D&D Previous. It rolls back most of the innovation Dungeons & Dragons had with the 4th edition and reverts to a mix of rules which much more resembles previous editions of D&D. Gone are the powers for players and monsters, gone is the tactical combat and the battle maps, gone is the concept of all character classes having equal amounts of options in combat. There are promises that some of these things might be reintroduced as optional, but they are gone from the base rules.What we are back to is spell-casters with X spells per day, and character classes without spells just using their basic melee or ranged attack most of the time. That is somewhat softened by spell-casters having minor spells they can cast without limits, so they don’t run out of things to do, and all classes gaining “benefits” with levels which increase their options. Nevertheless the class balance of 4th edition, where a fighter had as many powers as a wizard, is gone. Non-caster classes like fighters are back to a more or less constant damage output, whatever the length of the fight. Casters are back to the situation of being powerful in shorter fights, and then “running out of spells”, albeit not completely anymore, because they now have minor spells as their own form of “basic attack”.What I like even less is that monsters are back to not having powers either. That is, there are a lot of vanilla monsters which just have an armor class, hit points, and a simple attack dealing some damage. In 4th edition the fight against different monsters of the same level could be very different, because they had different powers. In D&D next the fight against different vanilla monsters of the same level will feel more similar.What is undoubtedly true, and presumably the wished-for effect, is that D&D Next feels a lot more like “classic D&D”, while 4th edition was a huge step away from “classic”. Wizards of the Coast got a lot of flak for 4th edition being so very different, and they “listened to their customers” and went back to how it was before. I believe that to be a horrible mistake. Their competitors Paizo will be laughing all the way to the bank. WotC released 3rd edition and 3.5 under an open gaming license, which enabled Paizo to launch a rather successful game system called Pathfinder, which is basically an improved D&D 3.5. Now Wizards of the Coast with D&D Next is doing more or less the same, releasing a rule system which will appeal more to the fans of 3rd edition and even earlier editions, while leaving the fans of 4th edition standing in the rain. Why would somebody want to spend a lot of money on buying D&D Next rulebooks, if he can have a very similar game experience with either the old pre-4E D&D rulebooks or Paizo’s Pathfinder rulebooks he already owns?D&D Next is not at all backward compatible with 4th edition. It would be very easy to convert adventures or other game materials from 1st, 2nd, or 3rd edition D&D to D&D Next or vice versa. In fact the playtest adventure is an old adventure from 1979. But it would be very hard to use either 4E game materials for D&D Next or the other way around. I don’t know in how much optional rulebooks for D&D Next will be able to change that, I don’t think you can easily graft a more tactical combat system onto the D&D Next base rules without creating two very different versions of D&D Next. As I subscribed to D&D Insider for the support the website gives for my 4th edition dungeon mastering, I am somewhat worried whether that support will stop with the release of D&D Next.In making D&D Next “classic”, Wizards of the Coast created a rule system which is basically a rehash of previous rules. Even if that ends up being a “best of”, it mostly remains old rules, not unlike what a group of players using old rulebooks and some house rules could have cooked up on their own. The only “innovation” I could find was a new rule for combat advantage using the best of two dice instead of a +2 bonus. There is a good reason for not calling the new system 5th edition, because it feels more like 3.75.Pen & paper rule-systems are different from MMORPGs in that nobody prevents you from playing previous editions if you want to. While I personally like 4th edition better than previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons, I would be totally okay with Wizards of the Coast reprinting old rulebooks, maybe with some errata or even added optional rules. But I don’t see the need to create a D&D Next rule-system which isn't much different from what is already there. I would have wished for a true 5th edition which is forward-looking, introducing a lot of new things, instead of backward-looking and basically reverting D&D to how it was in the “good old times”. I believe that nostalgia is a trap for game design, as it wasn't the old rule-system which made the good old times so good, but other factors like youth. You can’t bring the 80s back by making a new D&D rulebook with the rules from the 80s. I have some ideas how the flaws of 4th edition could have been addressed without reverting to what D&D was before, but I guess I’ll keep that for a separate post.So in summary I am very disappointed with what I've seen up to now from D&D Next. I simply don’t see anything “Next” about it, it appears very much as a “D&D Previous” to me. And as there is already a ton of old rulebooks for D&D, I don’t see the need to make yet another version of D&D which isn't much different from 2nd or 3rd edition. I’ve been playing D&D since the 80s, and this will be the first time that I will NOT make the move to the new edition when it comes out. It would be a move back, not forward.