D&D won't be slain by MMORPGs. It will be found lying in a pool of its own verbiage with a Bananagrams bag sticking out of its back and coughing up Story Cubes.
The next big thing won't be D&D 5e. Very soon, it's going to occur to someone to do to D&D what Bananagrams did to Scrabble: take out the wait time and accounting, give it that new car smell, and market it to a general audience as if the game it's based on had never happened. Ever played Bananagrams? It's Scrabble on meth. There's no board and no math, and all players go simultaneously instead of waiting for their turn. Right now it's #11 on Amazon. Scrabble is #428. What's #1? Rory's Story Cubes, "a pocket-sized creative story generator" which also showed up in my kid's Xmas stocking. So, right now, people, go take D&D, remake it for the masses, sell it to Gamewright, and I promise you will make a fortune. Quick, before someone else does it first.
Since you asked (Didn't you? I could have sworn you did)...
... if I were D&D's product manager, my goal would be to put an entry-level D&D boxed set in every back hall closet in America, sandwiched between the ubiquitous dogeared copies of Risk, Scrabble, and Monopoly. Let's stop trying to make D&D cool. D&D will never be cool, no matter how many tattooed elves we include or how many WoW-isms we slap on it. Hell, WoW isn't even remotely cool anymore. We need to distinguish cool from classic. Cool is ephemeral. Classic is forever.
I'm not talking about reprinting Homes or Moldvay word for word, but dammit, just make an evergreen edition of the game that combines the charm of Holmes and the scalability of Moldvay and be done with it. And sell it at Target next to Stratego and Life and Sorry!, dice and a few plastic minis included. Emphasize family play, with mom or dad as the DM, and kids as the players. Trade on older players' love for the game -- "the classic adventure game you loved as a kid is back, and it's easier to play than ever!" Have the boxed set include several short, thematically linked adventures that can be played in one or two sittings each.
Additional boxed sets would be self-contained adventures or campaigns, with relevant plastic minis and dungeon tiles. If you wanted to slap the D&D brand name on some new-school product, like WotC's recent slew of D&D-based boardgames, go ahead, but D&D the classic game would remain its own thing, apart from the D&D brand.
I've seen WotC groping at this idea, with the retro red box set, but there's a difference between retro and classic. It won't work until they stop trying to please the hardcore gamers (because there's no pleasing them ever) and go after a mass audience of lapsed gamers in their 30s and 40s who want to share a classic pastime with their kids.
Confession: I nearly always tip my players off to the presence of a secret door, even if the dice say otherwise. Secret doors that remain secret are boring -- they add no value to the narrative and provide no suspense. But I use them often. Why? Because they evoke a sense of mystery and suspense when they're found. As I've opined about traps in a recent post, I also feel that DMs who focus on the mechanical value of secret doors are missing the point. The point of a secret door as a dungeon element is as a road sign that someone wants something to remain hidden. It's a chance to pause at the threshold and wonder what's so important behind there that it merits concealment. It gets interesting when you open it.
The only time I make a secret door hard to find is when the players have been tipped off to look for one. Then you can make finding it (and possibly unlocking it) a part of the narrative. Case in point: in an adventure I'm writing, the PCs are told that in a certain room there's a secret door that will allow them to sneak into the bad guys' lair. The adventure becomes about figuring out how the door is concealed and how to open it, rather than a matter of rolling dice until it's revealed. The best kind of secret door is like the Gate of Moria, when you know where it is, but have to sweat a little before you open it, and hey, what are those ripples coming from the pond?
