It is out - at least the Basic Rules. I am going to try to put up a comment a week at least - starting with general comments.
1) I like the basics of the game. It's familiar enough - it's back to the main stream of D&D, everything looks like Editions 1-3x, same mechanics and so on. It's managed to streamline things - much simpler than 3.5, simpler too than the older versions - all the years of rationalization had helped. It feels very nimble - character creation is straightforward; combat is very fast; the game gets out of the way. Now, this might not all be golden - sometimes, it seems to have gone a little too far for simplification - though it's hard to tell from the existing material. The basic rules, and what I have seen of the Starter Set, seem to be missing a lot of what you would expect in the full game. There are references to things - feats, multi classing, multiple class options, and so on, that aren't in the preliminary rules. When they come out, hopefully they will restore some of the options. The simplicity is good - but as it stands, it might be too much. A lot of the fun, especially of 3.5, is the amount of personalization the rules allow - you can create characters in many shapes and forms, lots of options, etc. Losing that would be a shame - so I hope it comes back.
2) As for play - combat is very quick, and feels pretty fair. Part of the speed comes from returning the game to the lethality of earlier versions - characters are back down to one hit dice, with weapons and monsters able to drop a character in a single round. It becomes very fraught at first level - a hit or miss here or there, a bad damage roll, can be the difference between life and death. I suppose that was true in 4E, too - it just took you 2 hours of rolling to get there. Here - it comes or not in a couple rounds, which pass quickly. I like it, generally - the combat system worked well. It did play quickly; it left you with enough options to keep interesting; the rules were simple to understand and interpret. Again, though - some of this comes because there are fewer options - at first level - and in general. There aren't a lot of choices to make - magic users and clerics have to choose which spells house (and when) - fighters and thieves, mostly just get into position and whack. I don't particularly miss 4th edition's array of options, and certainly don't miss the complicated rules surrounding all the options you had in 3.x - but I hope some of it turns up again. The game still has a shove and trip option (which are now the same mechanic), and a grappling option - both are handled elegantly and simply, and convincingly, I think. I hope they bring in some of the other options - charges and bull rushes and sundering and disarming - and use the same straightforward mechanic. I see no reason why they can't. Those options were interesting in 3, but the rules were intimidating; they were incorporated into powers in 4, but that illustrates the problem with 4 and its powers: what if you just wanted to trip someone? Again - I wait for the full rules, but I like what I see so far.
I also played around with higher level characters, writing up a party of 9th level characters and fighting them against a couple fire giants. This was also encouraging - still went pretty quickly, went about the way you would expect it to: a fighter got 0'd out, but the party took the monsters down... It did reveal a couple things I will come back to - let's just say, the wizard took out the monsters while the rest of them avoided death... But again - in general, it looks like the combat system will continue to work pretty well at higher levels - it's very quick; it could use more options and variation, but it seems to work well.
3) Magic? I like the new magic system - you still have to prepare the spells you can cast, but you can cast any of them, as long as you have the spell slots. This makes sense. It feels right. At first level, not surprisingly, this leaves wizards needing to be very careful about how they expend their powers - but at higher levels, this starts to turn the other way. Those 9th level magic users (clerics too) have a ton of spells - 13 a day; since you can scale spells up (casting 3rd level spells with 4th or 5th level slots), that gives you, say, 7 lightning bolt or fireball attacks a day. Lightning bolt (useful in my test against fire giants) does 8d6 points of damage, against multiple targets, half damage with a save: that can be brutal. Now - playing individual encounters like that warps your resource allocation - you're not going to be so cavalier with big spells if you know you have to do this 5 more times before dark - but still: you can do a lot of damage. I don't know how this is going to play out over time. Spells in general seem to do a pile of damage - first level area spells doing 4d6? And those are scalable - cast them at a higher level and do more damage - which makes a lot of sense, I admit.
4) Healing - this is also done well. The cleric spells are nicely designed - strong touch spells (cure spells); weaker spells you can cast at a distance (healing word spells); all scaleable. Characters are also able to heal themselves, between battles - a version of the healing surge of 4E - you get to bring back your hit dice basically. You do this between fights - but it's a nice mechanic.
5) As for some of the new rules: I think I really like Advantage/Disadvantage. It provides a very good way of handling things that give you, well, advantages and disadvantages. It's simple - it's quick and easy to remember - it's something that probably lends itself to on the fly rule-making. Things not in the rules - you can give advantages and disadvantages - it's a lot easier than trying to figure out DCs and the like. I can think of a number of good uses for it.
So - okay: what about the areas I have reservations? I will say - all of these, I think, might be completely because of the state of the rules - when the full rules come out, many of these questions might be dispelled. But I am not sure - and for now, they look dubious.
1) Fighters seem very weak at higher levels. That 9th level experiment - the wizard is putting down 8d6 points of damage (or half that); the cleric does 4d6 with guiding bolt, the updated version of lance of faith; even the thief, if he gets a sneak attack, adds 5d6 damage. The fighter - gets d8+8 (this one did, anyway). He gets 2 attacks, sure - meaning if he hits twice, he gets 2d8+16. Against one monster (unlike the area attacks the others had.) And so on. Now - fighters have some advantages - AC, hit points, hit rolls - but these are not all that dramatic, not as big as you might expect. I don't know: this is an area where the more advanced options might prove very telling - feats and builds could well bring in new ways of adding damage, improving your hit bonuses (not likely, though, as the game seems to be trying to flatted out hit and AC modifiers), getting more attacks, or being able to have other effects with attacks (knocking people down, moving them around, that sort of thing, which 4E had plenty of, for good or ill.) I don't know. I also don't know how this plays out in real dungeons - when you have to play a series of encounters in a day - the fact that a fighter is the same at the end of the day as at the beginning might make a significant difference there. We shall see. But what I see - fighters are life savers at first level - they are noticeably weaker at 9th.
2) I am not so sure about "bounded accuracy" - the decision to try to keep the success and failure rolls fairly consistent. Thus - low ACs, with few means of getting past 20 or so - limits on hit bonuses - limits on abilities - things like that. The idea makes sense - differences in levels are put into damage and hit points, rather than hitting and missing - but I don't know how it will play out in fact. It makes a lot more sense for most skill checks - if it takes a 20 to open a door with brute strength, obviously the fighter's 18 should be more successful than a wizard with 9 - and that shouldn't change just because the wizard is 12th level. But I don't know about attacks. The idea of a red dragon with a 16 AC (which comes from the play test info, so might not be in the final game) seems off. But this is something you definitely need to see played out. The truth is, by itself, it didn't seem all that disruptive in the 9th level fight I played - so I may just be wrong about it.
3) Critical Hits - I have been thinking about this, especially in relation to the fighter damage. You roll the dice twice - reasonable enough. Though again - your poor fighter has just that one dice - adding another d8 isn't going to make a huge amount of difference - especially compared to the thief, doubling up his sneak attack, etc. D&D has gone through a lot of systems for critical hits - I can't find the real rules for 1st edition, but I remember doing double damage on a 20, dropping your weapon on a 1; by 3, you had to roll again, and if you hit again you rolled extra damage. 4E did max damage if you rolled a 20 (with some weapons having expanded crits), and magic weapons doled out extra dice; 5 is back to the extra dice (without a second roll.) In the earlier versions, the doubled dice or damage seemed right - partly because fighters had so many attacks at higher levels. 4's max damage worked well enough, and the extra dice from magic items could be devastating. In 5E - again, compared to the amount of routine damage magic seems to do - seems small again. That fighter - I dunno. 2d8 every 20 rolls seems low, especially since you don't get all your damage bonuses doubled. This is one I think I could come up with a better rule for - better than any of them. If you roll a crit, you get an extra attack, at advantage (maybe) - every 20 you roll - you get another roll. Or maybe you get to choose - max damage or extra attacks. For characters with high damage roll bonuses, this could be a lot more useful than another weapon die.
4) Opportunity attacks and flanking. I'll lump them together, because they seem to have been changed for similar reasons. This has been highly simplified in 5E - flanking is gone, at least in the rules so far. Opportunity attacks have been reduced - they only take affect when the target leaves the reach of the opportunistic attacker. The attacker uses a Reaction to make an opportunity attack - can make one in a round. The target can also avoid opportunity attacks by using the disengage action. All of this is simpler than 3 or 4 - though it's hard to see the advantage of the change. Flanking can be complicated, especially with large creatures - but it seems excessive to eliminate it. YOu want the game to reflect something like the real world it is representing - and getting both sides of something in a fight is going to give you an advantage. This is something I hope they bring back in the full rules - some version of it. It lends itself well to the advantage/disadvantage rules: you could treat it like they treat ranged attacks in melee in 5E - you make ranges (or spell) attacks at disadvantage if someone is next to you. Makes sense.
But opportunity attacks - one of my pet peeves with 4 was that they changed the rule to only allow opportunity attacks against characters moving out of an adjacent square - and specifically, eliminated the idea of being able to make opportunity attacks against anyone within reach of you. 5E sounds like they have gone back to the 3.x version - but really haven't. They've just moved the zone you can attack out one. But you have less control over those spaces than you had in 3. Take those fire giants - they have a reach of 2 (or 10 feet in 5E) - in 3E, they got to hit you when you left that square 10 feet away - when you charged the giant, for instance. In 4 - they lost that: they only got to hit you when you broke immediate contact - or when you cast a spell or shot an arrow directly adjacent to them. 10 feet away - they could hit you on their turn, but not when you shot at them. All this is still there - I don't like it. I think opportunity attacks should be available against any threatened square - and I don't see the advantage of letting characters move around at will once they are inside the other one's reach.
There's some suggestion that it allows for more movement in combat, makes combat less static - maybe, but I'm not sure. It seems to me that eliminating the ability of a character (or monster) to control the space around it makes tactical movement less important. Where you go - and the powers (in 4E) or abilities and actions (in 5E - like disengage) that let you move through threatened squares - matter more in 3E style games. Thieve's Cunning Action in 5E looks very interesting - but its value(being able to disengage as an extra action in a turn) is diminished by this reduction in the times it is needed. We played 4E by 3E's rules for years - and I think tactical movement was always more challenging and interesting playing by those rules. The 4E rules made it easy to get next to monsters and just stay there - it may have made movement easier, but it made it less useful. 5E seems to be continuing this, possibly expanding it. This is another one I am hoping I am reading wrong....
All right - that's enough for now. Next time, I will try to write more about the actual adventure we played. Both from a rules perspective, and from the perspective of the game, and how to design adventures.... For now - this is enough.
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