Why I Hope Type V Succeeds

I'm an Old Schooler. I'm immensely uninterested in most new-style games. I like quickly generated characters,  sandboxes, the possibility of failure and having to be creative to survive. As a referee, I also place great value on games I run being rules lite.

My players have been swayed in some areas by the Old School gospel I keep preaching to them, but, at heart, there's a part of them that will always be New School. I accept that. I'm willing to play New School, rules heavy games but I am not willing to run them. My players accept that and still play in my games because we're all friends and they have a good time.

Wouldn't it be great if we could all have our way? Wouldn't it be great if I could run an Old School game, more or less, while they played a New School game, more or less? That would be worth buying.

That's the goal I hear WotC setting for itself. Frankly, even having read the Legends and Lore columns that foreshadowed this particular goal, I'm not sure how they're going pull it off, or if they'll be able to. I do know that that's a worthy goal and that I hope they succeed.

Despite my promise to give 5e an honest shot at becoming my go-to game if WotC releases the PDFs for free, I do doubt that 5e, or any one game, honestly, will be able to unseat what I'm running now. If WotC is successful, however, in achieving this goal (but not with becoming my exclusive version of D&D), that will merit adding generous doses of it to the mix of Swords & Wizardry, LotFP, Arduin, Delos, Carcosa, Majestic Wilderlands, ACKS (when it comes out, I've already decided to include it), systems taken from the blogosphere and systems of my own making that I run (or will be running when I get ACKS, to be more precise). And that, by the way, will probably make it worth buying some 5e books.

(I will have serious reservations about buying WotC books if they don't at least make the PDFs for sale and if the license for 5e is closer to the GSL than the OGL, but that's another matter.)

So here's hoping that 5e is a success, because that will make my game better.