First Impression of 5E

Recently I had the opportunity to buy the 5E PHB and read a large amount of it.
Prior to that I’d read little on ENWorld. What I read barely interested me. I would mainly just skim the headline and think “whatever” or “meh”. I was still too irritated by 4E to trust anything from WotC.
I had also been to a playtest on a Wednesday night. It did absolutely nothing to impress me. The DM was good, but I was playing with 13-18 year old kids for two hours and all I saw was a battlemat and no role-playing. It reminded me of 4E with a few changed mechanics.

4E destroyed D&D for me. And from everything I’ve heard, the people who made 5E made 4E and Eberron. The direction D&D was heading was not for me.
4E created a schism in the D&D rpg world. It brought in a lot of new players, but older players (like me) did not see 4E as D&D at all, but instead as some miniatures game dressed up in a D&D skin.
I had bought the Pathfinder core book, but it didn’t do anything for me. It was 3.5 updated and smoothed out, but it didn’t fix what was wrong with 3.5 – it still breaks down at higher levels.
By the time we dropped 3E as a group, we were truly done with it as we had explored it pretty thoroughly. We’re not a group who just changes campaigns every few weeks and we like to hit the higher levels.
4E was supposed to fix all of that. It not only didn’t do that, it made it worse.
Now they’re saying 5E will fix that.
I’m sure you can understand my skepticism at such a claim.
But money talks, and Hasbro wants their money. They hosed up 4E and thanks to some legal issues, they stopped printing books a while ago and allowed Pathfinder to grab the lion’s share of the market. So 5E has to please the 4E people and lure back both the Pathfinder players and the grognards who abandoned D&D entirely.
And that leads to the 5E PHB. I really wanted to just give the finger to Hasbro and find something else to play, but there is nothing really that interests me and interests others.
I’m not going back to WoW, that’s for damn sure.
A lot of people were saying how 5E fixed things, and not all of them were fan boys of 4E. So I figured that I need to at least take a look at 5E and give it a fair shake.
I was going on a weeklong vacation, with plenty of opportunities to read, and the PHB was released the day before that vacation. The alignment of coincidences was perfect.
I read through it and, well, I was a tiny bit impressed and not irritated with what I read.
Nothing jumped out at me that screamed awesome, but they definitely have put the effort into the books to bring back pre-4E D&D while keeping the one thing 4E did well (balance).
There appears to be no front loading of classes, which makes “dipping” style multiclassing less desirable. Multiclassing appears to be mostly the same as 3E, but you often get less value from multiclassing, but not so little that it would be stupid to do it.
An example from 3E: you make a fighter, and then add some barbarian levels to get the rage ability, and the rest are all fighter levels. This nets you a barbarian with a lot of feats, in spite of mostly being a fighter.
In 5E, fighters get multi-attacks and barbarians don’t, so if you had a fighter who took some levels in barbarian to get rage, you get your multi-attack a little later in levels. It’s about an equal trade.
That way you could do it for role-playing reasons, but not be crippled in combat because rage is nice, but perhaps not as nice as bonus attacks a few levels later.
Melee classes have subclasses that have spells built into them, rather than having to cripple themselves to get a little of both.
Pure caster classes appear to be able to mix without watering down their abilities, or have to add in hybrid prestige classes.

Also, every two levels you don’t double in power like in 3E. You definitely do get more powerful, but it’s not exponentially so. That should make balancing combats less of a nightmare for the DM. 3E combats were often either perfectly balanced, boring pushovers, or TPKs. There were no shades in between.

Combat on a grid is no longer required, but there are enough rules there that you could if you wanted.
Grid combat is a slippery slope.
When you start playing D&D, you don’t need minis or a map, until something happens that forces you to.
We’ve all had that player who could magically be anywhere immediately. Then there’s the argument that stems the miscommunication of who was where.
So you add a simple map to represent generally where people are.
At some point the map becomes less vague and more exact.
The next thing you know you’re planning combats on a grid and somehow the role-playing and storylines take the back seat to the combats.
At that point you’ve stopped playing a role-playing game and are instead playing a combat simulation game.
And I was very guilty of this. I slowly transitioned into it during 3E, and was fully fledged doing it during 4E.

I disliked 2E pretty harshly for all the worthless junk it had released but I had some of the best memories from the 2E era because of the role-playing done then.
I hated 4E for turning the game into a pure miniatures game and nothing more.
I grew tired of 3E for the math and rules bloat.

5E has to somehow not publish a ton of pointless junk splatbooks, lure players back, reduce the math, make the battle mat purely an option, keep options open, and open it up to role-playing again.
And from what little I’ve read so far, the potential is there.
You’ve got my interest again WotC.
Now try to keep it.