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A disclaimer.  I played the first round in good faith.  While there were things I found acceptable, overall, after playing it, I found it left me turning cold on D&D all around, in any edition.  It showed me the weaknesses of 4e, but it showed me there was no future coming that I wanted to see, yet I decided to wait and see. 

Then I read this second round rules set.

There are not enough words for me to describe how unappealing this thing is on its face. 

To me, the whole point of an adventure RPG is to *be able* to adventure.  Rules should lend themselves to the ability to be heroic.  These do nothing of the kind.  With microsized hit points, players become cowards, and DMs have to hold back to avoid TPKs around every turn, or else even 1 hp of damage becomes something to be feared.  This game as written encourages DMs who like to terrorize fragile characters.  Players have low hp, no magic items, few spells, picayune progression, and uninteresting gear.  That's not fun for me.  I would have to work so hard as a DM to fix the problems I see here I might as well rewrite it myself. 

Playing 4e taught me one thing: spending several low levels with weenie powers you can only use infrequently, puny hp, and negligible gear is not only no longer fun for me, and its needless in game design.  You can start people humble, that fine, just not fragile, mechanically.  It's not fun to experience as a player, and I don't enjoy DMing games with such feeble character builds.  Players (in my groups) usually enjoy playing and fighting rather heroically, and I've come to believe that game rules should lend themselves to that.  They don't need to be superheroes, but they should be basically *able*.  These characters are not.  Their hp are too low, the advancement appears poor, and the overall scale is overall strongly disinteresting to me, and that's just the first few items I care to mention.  FWIW, I'm not such a fan of 4e I don't think 4e couldn't be toned down, and would prefer streamlining it, but this edition is way too weak to approach what I feel is fun or reasonable to saddle DMs or Players with.  To me, this set of rules reads like it was designed by an overbearing DM who wants his players to hide or run from anything scarier than a housecat (which, once again, the wizard who loses init to the housecat will also have a good chance to get killed one one hit from one).  If you don't ambush and kill everything in one round, half your party is at risk of dying in every encounter in *one* round.  That's not heroic at all, its tragic.  It concerns me dramatically about the thoughts going into this game.  So much so, I don't feel like any degree of feedback is going to fix where this seems to be going.  The things I didn't like about round 1 are still here in round 2, in some cases, worse.

The list of problems is long, too long to go into for what is basically a rage quit post.  Long story short: Good luck with this.  I'm out...."window.parent.tinyMCE.get('post_content').onLoad.dispatch();" contenteditable="true" />
I'm sure folks will disagree with me.  To each their own. Yes, I'm well aware I'm not being helpful, and can easily be considered to be being unfair by not trying it out at least once.  From my perspective, tho, what's to try?  Been gaming for twenty years.  Don't need to play a game to know that the rules are uninteresting to me to play or DM with. If this is your style of game, great, enjoy.  You'll have one less player and DM while doing it if you are using these rules. 

Extremely disappointed and frustrated to see D&D going this way.  Too much so to watch it go further. 

Welp, guys, it was nice to discuss this with you.  I guess you'll be going back to your original editions of D&D then?

I'm confused as to what the complaint really is. If you want the players to have more stuff and magical items, give them more stuff and magical items. If you want the players to be more powerful all around, start them out on a higher level. I have a bunch of power gamer friends that like to start their characters at level 10 so that they can heroically wipe through monsters and collect hordes of treasure. The low levels are still there in case you want a game with more challenge and perhaps realism. I know they don't have higher levels available yet but they will, which means that DnD next isn't going to be any worse according to your argument. It just doesn't have enough options for you quite yet, give them some time. I do agree that your characters health begins rather low. 1 or 2 good hits can take out a level 1 wizard. Just have the players gain Max HD+Constitution score on 1st level, and then additional amount of health = 1/2 HD every level thereafter. This would prevent players from getting hordes of health at later levels, making them maneagable, while preventing players from being insta-killed on low levels.