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My apologies if a lot of this has been said before, i recently returned to these boards due to the new edition news.  i drifted away after 4e came out.

I'm seeing a lot of comments about balance.  I think the finely tuned balance is actually one of the factors that drove me away from 4e.  But, I think it's actually the way in which the balance was acheived - the homogenization of the classes.  I know that the 4e classes do indeed play differently from each other, but it's also easy to come away with an initial impression that every class is "the same,"  especially if you only look at PHB 1.  So here's some of the things that I'm looking for to bring me (and my local gaming group) back to D&D:

Classes that use differnet subsystems, but are still balanced.  I want fighters to play differently from wizards.  I want them to be different play experiences ala 1e/2e, but be balanced with each other over the spread of levels.  I want wizards that can cast wish and so forth, and fighters that can do equally impressive things with weapons. But I don't want fighters to have "maneuvers" which are just renamed spells or all classes to have "powers."

I like retraining, but it should not be required to advance your character.  Your 15th level character should not have to forget his low level abilities in order to even learn high level ones.

I want combat-time useful utility magic back.  Sometimes you can win the fight with meld into stone and you should be able to cast it in one round.  I'm just not a big fan of rituals except as a potential way for non-spellcasters to have acces to some magic.

For the base game to "feel like D&D" to me, it will have to have humans, halflings, gnomes, elves, half elves, and dwarves.  It will also have to have fighters, clerics, wizards, rogues, paladins, rangers, druids, and illusionists.  And those names will have to mean what they did in previous editions - part of what drove my group away from 4e was how "fighter" now meant "melee" and "wizard" now meant "blaster."  I want to be able to convert 1e/2e worlds to 5e with minimal reality upheaval, which means the underlying assumptions about how the world is built have to stay the same.

I'd like to see reduced emphasis on magic items.  IMO, both 3.x and 4e requires characters to have way too many items, or in the case of 4e, to just give them the bonuses without having the actual items. Magic items should be special, not necessary.

I'd like to see less emphasis on grid/miniatures.  I'm fine if the game supports them, but i don't want to need them to play.

There's some more stuff, but I don't want to ramble on too long.  I'm also not implying that any of the stuff I don't like is bad, just that it's not something I look for in my D&D experience.

I just hope it's easy for new people to get into. I haven't played for a long time but I remember it being very complicated. I remember I needed help just making a character. 

May 17, 2012 -- 2:18PM, Mand12 wrote:

What I find most frustrating is that most of your perceptions about 4e are superficial and inaccurate.  I do wish people in general had more tolerance for initially off-putting things to actually get down to what the system's really about.

"wizard" now meant "blaster" - Completely untrue.  Some wizards are blasters, sure.  But you could do that in prior editions.

"fighter" now meant "melee" - If by this you mean that the ranged variant of fighter is gone, then that's valid.  If you meant that fighters don't have a unique spot to fill like the one they did before...I'd disagree.

"things are the same" - Putting all the Stuff People Do in the same statblock format does not make them the same.  Actually playing the game teaches you this.

Balance drove you away - Yeah, not much to be said about that.  Those of us who didn't like sitting on the sidelines while the wizard ended the fight in one round while never having the opportunity to do the same are not going to ever come to terms with your viewpoint.  And given that, the solution is to start with a balanced game.  It's vastly, vastly simpler for you to houserule your game to be unbalanced than it is for me to houserule my game to make it balanced.

I will admit that my 4e play experience comes from the playetest and the original release, so I'm not familiar with anything after the initial 3 books.  But, I saw no way to, for example, create a wizard who doesn't use direct damage to fight.  Nearly all the wizard powers in PHB 1 do damage.  That's what I mean by "blaster."

I did mean that the ability of fighters to be either ranged or competent switch hitters was gone.  The common reply of "just play a ranger" is exactly what I mean about redefining words.

It isn't so much that balance drove us away as the exact method by which balance was acheived.  I'd a like a more dynamic, complicated balance.  I don't want fighters to feel useless, I want them to feel awesome - sometimes.  I want everyone to feel awesome - sometimes.   "Everyone awesome all of the time" rapidly becomes "everyone meh all of the time."  Each class needs moments where it can stand out and be the spotlight.  Not everyone needs to have something important to do each round.

One more thing I'd like to see is a revision to monsters.  I'm not talking about the math intensive 3.5e way (although that is fine), but I'd at least like there to be some sense of where a monster's stats are coming from other than abstract game mechanics.  One of the things that demonstrated 4e was not for me was when I was putting together a basic goblin lair to demo the game for some friends.  I decided to put some magic armor in there, and in fine D&D tradition, decided that the goblin chief should be wearing it.  I then spent about half an hour reading books trying to figure out how in the world to adjust the cheif's AC to account for the new armor, before finally realizing that his AC was based on his level and role, not his equipment.  Ugh.

All I'm trying to do here is explain why I drifted away from D&D in the first place.  It seems to me and to my local group that 5e is an attempt to regain some of the players who quit during the 4e era.  I am one of those players, I moved on to other systems after more than 20 years of playing D&D.  4e was the first edition I didn't convert to because it was the first time I felt that conversion, while maintaining the spirit of the old system, was impossible.