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I'm really liking what I've seen so far of DDN.
There's basically going to be
1. A Basic version in a box. Like the old-school Red Box, it's going to be straightforward: 4 races, 4 classes, no skills (you apparently get a skill-equivalent bonus on attribute checks for the prime requisite of your class), and a fixed feat ladder is folded in to the abilities your class gets, with an emphasis on not being fiddly or requiring advanced tactics to use. Supposedly the box will cover 10 levels and have an adventure the scope of ToEE inside.
Basically, roll your abilities, pick a race and class, and go.
I think the idea is that if it's successful they would release follow-on boxes like BECMI so that if you like the simplicity of Basic, you can stick with it.
Apparently the goal with monsters for Basic will be to do things sort of 4e-style, where the monsters in the manual are all drop-in-and-go, and you don't ever have to configure spell lists, apply templates, etc.
If they execute on this properly, it could be a great game.
2. A Standard edition. This presumably comes in the core-3 books. You get a wider selection of races and classes, and each class has multiple builds. Backgrounds organize skills and specialties organize feats -- the idea is that players who want to choose their character's abilities based on fleshing out the story of the character (rather than choosing based on mechanics) have straightforward support built in. But if you want more control -- or have a character concept that the built-in options don't support -- then you have the latitude.
The game mechanics add some additional rules as well, though it's not clear how many at this point. I think they're going for compact even in the standard rules, just so that the gameplay doesn't get too bogged down.
At this level, monsters will be set up to be more configurable rather than purely predesigned.
3. There will also be Advanced rules, but those are all TBD. This might be where all the splat books go, for example.
One thing I like about the scalability is that supposedly you can play Basic and Standard characters side by side in the same party, and the goal will be for there to be balance. Likewise, if you want to adhere to all the Basic rules except that one player wants to play a druid, that will be straightforward too.
A lot of this is definitely reminiscent of the Pathfinder Beginner Box and such (which in turn is reminiscent of original Red Box D&D), but somehow it seems even more promising to me at this point -- the consolidation of skills, saves, and other stuff down into a consistent set of ability checks seems like something that adds real clarity to the game. I also like that abilities can only be raised to 20 before they max out, which will hopefully lead to more balanced characters and fewer munchkins. And at the Standard level there seems to be a lot of care put into creating different build paths within classes (sort of like 2e kits) and creating feat ladders that provide limited access to another class's abilities, so you're less likely to need need to use the multiclass system as your character build engine.
Sorry for the superlong post, I just find the whole evolution of the system really interesting.