This is great insight from someone that’s been playing a long time. Thanks for the tremendous feedback!

I stared with back when it was just D&D. you could play or or a fighter or halfling blah blah. The came along advanced D&D. Now you could play your favorite race and be class! Woot woot super exciting stuff, but wait level caps for non human W** is this garbage? Then 2nd edition came along. lets fix some things and break others shall we? Speed factor for example and and lets make archers and throw weapons all but useless when other people are engaged in melee combat with them. *bangs head against wall* Now comes along 3rd edition the birth of D20! Exciting new rules that can seem to work but get little confusing at times and the whole grid thing.Player:”Wait you mean I have use miniatures now to play this game?” DM ” Well we don’t have to but it will help.” pauses for second after reading an example of combat “I take it back yes we have to miniatures now.” Along comes 3.5. Let fix some of these classes so they work better. Yes you still must use grids. Then Pathfinder. Hey we are sick of working for you guys we are take your rules set improve all the classes and combat maneuver system and outsell you! Ha! D&d counter well we make 4 ed rules and turn D&D into a Warhammer miniature MMO. In sense this opened table gaming to a new generation of people who had played on PC. To us old school gamers it was like pissing in Gary’s coffee cup. Which bring us to 5th.

5th edition is a step in the right direction for us old school guys but the optional use of grid system won’t scare away those that only played 4th. The idea of actually have to role play out encounters rather them just be rolled is a breath of fresh air. I like this advantage/disadvantage mechanic. I’m high up a grassy knoll with bow/crossbow I had advantage. Rather than trying to figure a whole bunch of numbers to plug target is prone/target is moving/ ext ext you either have advantage or disadvantage sure there are things that still affect this like cover. But talk about way simpler math. Skill system refined. No longer crazy DC of 30 making it nigh impossible to make said skill checks. (I haven’t quite finished reading this part of the rules but I’m hoping they put a 1 always fails on skill check and 20 always succeed. This way even the most skilled person can fail if they get unlucky or even the most unskilled person could get lucky).

Classes: Really liked this part. No class truly outshines the other. As one my favorite reviewers wrote: Bards no longer die horribly in dungeons while singing. Mages (and by mages I mean anyone can use magic wizard, sorcerer ext ext) now have at least one cantrip that combat offensive always available to them if they chose one. No longer at first level well guys I have used my magic missile I need to rest for 8 hours before we can any further or else i’m pretty much useless for the rest of this dungeon. Nope Nope now I can do as many Firebolts as I want! You have lots of great options when making and choosing your class your class. Heck they even followed pathfinders and fixed hit dice for classes. Which by the way giving everyone starting max hit points is wonderful. No longer the 1st level wizard tripped on stick and is dead.

I could go on and on. but my advice is give 5th edition a try and I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Well done Wizard of the Coast, well done.

Well said! How are you liking 5E so far?

I was introduced by 2nd Ed, played it for most of a decade, and then switched to 3/3.5 and never looked back. Well, that’s not strictly true – I look back occasionally and shudder at the flaws. The major one was trying to use flavour and role-playing fluff to provide a balance for the asymmetric crunchy mechanics – Paladins were incredibly powerful, required an unlikely set of rolls to qualify for the class, and had a binding moral code – that was largely irrelevant in any sort of dungeon-crawling scenario – so either you got lucky with your initial rolls when generating your character and then strolled through the game as an armoured tank with high damage output and healing abilities, except when the DM decided to throw some role-playing encounters at you; or you only rolled well, and ended up as anything else.

Any time I start getting too nostalgic for 2nd Ed, I just remind myself about high-level Druids…

In other words, not everyone sticks with whichever iteration was their first.

Very true. I am the same – I was introduced to it with 4th as well, so these changes really excite me as well. Can’t wait to see how the campaigns evolve!