My Short Experience With D&DNext

Last week I had the opportunity to play a game of D&D Next, or rather what I thought was D&D Next.
It was actually, I think, a game of D&D Encounters using the D&D Next rules (or it could be D&D Next Encounters…I really don’t know).
I played a level 4 dwarf paladin for this single fight, one-hour long session.
Since it was only an hour long I don’t feel I have a truly fair impression of it, but what I did experience was nothing special.
Let me first get this out of the way – the DM and other players were perfectly fine and these comments should in no way reflect upon them.
Since I expect 5E to not be out until late 2014 or early 2015, I assume that what I played will not be the final version.
I’m not sure what I can and can’t say, but what they changed about the game did very little to actually speed the game up:
- The advantage/disadvantage rules make things simpler than figuring out all of your +/-‘s every single turn. So that’s a plus.
- The skill system is simpler, but it’s neither better nor worse.
- Powers (other than casters’ spells) have reverted to earlier editions (Vancian style magic). So that’s a plus.
- Attacks of Opportunity…they still exist, though you can only do it once in between your turns rather than every person’s turn. This is a very minor change that in fact makes things more complicated since now you can game the system by trying to trigger targets to use their AoO’s on harder to hit targets so softer targets can slip by.
- Everyone has specials they can use, but it’s still just modifiers that add time to combat length.
- Combat chess is still alive and well. There are supposedly rules that make a battle-grid optional, but the system stills seems pretty focused on a grid being needed.

In my opinion, what I played was just an altered version of 4E. And anyone who’s read this blog for the past 5 years knows my opinion of 4E (it’s a piece of shit).
I guess what I’m saying is, fire the D&D developers, and start anew. Because if things don’t change I’ll be waiting until 6E comes out.