I like that you can have the ability to replicate powers ala 4e in Next, but your abilities seem limited. I really disliked how in 2nd and 3.5 spellcasters were the only ones who had really significant decisions to make and who really had a wide variety of feasible, sensible choices to make, especially at high level.

Despite the much bemoaned ‘WoW’-ification of 4e; which, I must comment, I was highly skeptical of, I found once I played it it really worked well, and was fun. Unlike in previous editions, higher level classes other than spellcasters could feel quite powerful.

I fear there has been a rollback of this in Next. Sure, they can pick paths which situationally can be very powerful, but it still seems that spellcasters can overall just plain do better in more situations.

All that said, I really appreciate how much playtesting and just plain effort is being pit into Next (Or 5e or whatever). I really like the advantage/disadvantage mechanic and I think the next campaign I’m in will be Next (I’m running a 4e campaign designed to go into easily epic tier, assuming it lasts that long. They’re level 6 right now but all seems to be going well. I was ‘influenced’ (blatantly stole) some parts of Chris’s campaign, especially the beginning, but now things are wildly different, assimilating the ‘Critical Hit’ stuff and many elements from ‘Thursday Knights’ along with, of course, my own interperations. Annnyway…)

At the end of the day, I think what system you are running is largely inconsequential. Just had a discussion on G+ about alignment in D&D and how some people were saying how horrible alignment was and was the reason they’d never play D&D again. To me, that’s like saying they’d never drive a car again because they drove a car once that had air conditioning vents that didn’t blow the right way. The point is how you play is largely rule agnostic. It might affect a few minor things, but if you are doing it right, it won’t stop you from ebing what you want to be.

But, that still leaves tons of 4E innovation that isn’t being tapped. Everything related to monster, terrain, and encounter design is largely being ignored. And these were aspects that made the game vastly easier to DM and vastly easier for new and casual DMs to pick up. That’s a real loss of innovation. Monsters in Next at times show hints of this, but in most cases the monsters look a lot like earlier versions and discard almost everything that was found in a 4E monster book.

Underpinning the encounter/monster design was the concept of everything having a level. Magic items, attack and utility powers, terrain – these all had a level to ensure balance. With that gone, we are seeing the same arbitrary swings in power we had previously. Utility spells, for example, vary widely in how situational they are. A great example is the level 1 spell lists for classes. Once a PC becomes higher level, some are nearly useless while others are incredibly strong (and therefore spammed). This varies by class, making some classes more powerful at others _at_certain_levels. One level the fighter is strongest, the next the wizard, the next the barbarian… all very swingy. And because things aren’t balanced, choices can again be clearly “bad”.

Of particular note is that the relative power of each class is strongly tied to the length of the day. Some classes are nearly the same strength all the time, while others can really pack a punch with a few limited uses (spells, special damage features, etc.). This causes certain classes to dominate when the day is short (most non-delve adventures written today) and then strongly fade and become lackluster during a long dungeon crawl.

Healing was massively changed in 4E. While the combo of high hit points, leader classes, second wind, and short rest healing was a bit too much, the return to ‘must have a cleric’ and level 1 PCs dying in the first round is a complete undoing of all the innovation. We see low level fights where the PCs can’t revive a fallen companion, so the player sits out (or a TPK slowly develops through attrition). We see the cleric forced to heal every single round, event though that player wants to be able to do more.

I could go on. I’m overall very pleased with a lot of what D&D Next offers. I do at the same time find that 4E’s innovations have been unnecessarily discarded, to the detriment of D&D Next.

We’ll, that and easy reflavoring.

SO PLEASED to see the voyage continue!