WotC announced that a "new evolution" of D&D will be coming in 2024. Is it too soon to pose and answer questions about it?
For instance, an answerable question might be, "What did we learn in 2021 about the next version of D&D?".
But maybe it's too soon.
My suggestion would be to stick to first principles:
Back when the D&D 5e playtest came out, and then when the new edition was properly released, we had a consistent quality problem with questions about it; see: Why Are Our 5e Questions Terrible?. The main obstacle we faced was question seeding: people were asking trivial low-research or low-quality questions just because they weren't already asked, because it was basically a gold rush for reputation points. Lots of stuff got closed, lots of people got told off for posting trivial self-answered questions that didn't represent a real problem anyone would have had, and the community at the time was just generally pretty fed up with all the junk filling up the site.
Question seeding happens as a result of our Q&A site design working too well. Points are nice! We want points. Our monkey brain wants the shinies and the acknowledgement and the serotonin. The gamification leverages that desire way too effectively in this circumstance and has people doing obviously low-quality stuff they wouldn't do otherwise if points weren't motivating them to do it.
My advice would be aim to not repeat that mistake. Stick to first principles and avoid the monkey brain siren call to push the button a bunch for points.
If you think it's too soon, then it might be the case that you know there's nothing to really answer, or that all we know is trivially found via google search, and it's low quality stuff we shouldn't be asking yet. But if there's a real concrete problem that you're asking for reasons beside monkey brain wants points, go ahead and ask.
This site is a repository of lasting knowledge, a collection of useful questions with useful answers. In general, news about an upcoming game is a different type of information than the information we are looking to host. Such information has very limited longitudinal utility. As the next iteration of D&D is still in development, information they reveal today can expire as early as tomorrow. It is only really relevant the moment it is released, and subject to change without notice. If you want news about Wizard of the Coast, they have a website for that, and there are any other number of media outlets dedicated to documenting such announcements. This just isn’t that site, and that’s okay.
Just stick to what we know works: expert problem solving. If you’ve got a problem related to D&D 2024 that requires D&D expertise to solve, it may be on topic and it may not be, today’s date doesn’t determine that, but wondering about the recent news is not that kind of problem. It doesn’t take an expert to navigate to the Wizards of the Coast website, to search D&D on Kotaku, or to browse any of the sundry D&D subreddits for news.
Even I will admit that some topics, e.g., alignment, are likely to produce bad questions which themselves generate bad answers.
But overall, we should be judging questions on their own merits, not on the merits of whatever (possibly ill-defined or overlapping) categories they belong to. And generally, we should be using the downvote option rather than the vote-to-close option when possible.
In this case, that's even more important, because the status of whatever is coming in 2024 will be in flux (up to and including scrapping it or changing the release date to 2025 or later) – in rapid flux, by the standards of this stack. By the end of the calendar year, the status of the project will have undoubtedly changed quite a bit.
Do you have a question you want to ask? You have almost 20k points; you should have a pretty good feel for good questions, bad questions, and borderline questions.
If you think you have a good, answerable question, then ask it.
If you have a borderline question, shop the question itself here, not the whole category.
I would like to add a point of view that is not explicitly about the next DnD but applies to all products equally:
I think we should only entertain questions about products that are publicly available.
While we do not all have the same access to products, because maybe it's not available in the respective country, or not translated into the respective language or maybe just because it's expensive, we should at least have theoretical access. Asking "the public" questions about material not available to the general public because of artificial restrictions by the publisher is pointless. If one is a member of a private club and has exclusive privileges, they should keep their question to their private club. That obviously is how it is meant to be going.
We should answer questions when everybody on the site has the option of getting access to the materials. So for example I would be fine with questions about the first public playtest material. Or the first release. But our site was not made to handle private Q&A. How would we upvote or downvote something, if we are artificially kept from knowing whether it's useful or not?
