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Comment by lakkal | Hacker News Reader

WotC has been dead to me since 4.0. I stayed on 3.5 and switched to Pathfinder for some new games.

I don't particularly want to learn 5.0, but I'm feeling I might be forced to if I want to join/start any current games...

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As someone who played and liked BECMI, AD&D/1e, AD&D/2e, D&D/3e, D&D/3.5e – and thought each had their strong and weak points, and wouldn’t mind playing any of them again though the gratuitous mechanical complexity of AD&D/1e is a bit over the top – but rejected 4e, I find that 5e is (while incorporating and furthering in some areas the mechanical simplifications of 4e) much more in the spirit of the pre-4e versions than it is like 4e, and it fairly quickly became my clear favorite version.

One of the awesome things about published content is that you are never forced to do anything if you can form your own group. And even then, there are lots of people in many cities and online willing to play just about any system out there.

My friends and I still play AD&D (run by a couple of the guys), or OSR systems if run by myself and the other guys. I've played 5e and 4e, but never felt like it was forced on me, because, you know, I own books for other systems and so do my friends. And since I didn't enjoy 4e, I just dropped that game. I haven't played 5e since the playtest days, but with OSR systems out there that already covered the same terrain, it held no appeal to me or my group.

Yeah - and I get the impression that 5.0 isn't anything like 4.0, so maybe it wouldn't be as unpleasant as I've been fearing. I had been with two very long-lasting gaming groups (~35 years each) which both dissolved in the last couple of years, so maybe it's time to modernize.

D&D 5e basically acts like 4th Edition never existed, and you will find it very familiar as someone who ahs played 3rd Edition.

Mechanically at its core, 5e is has a very close similarity to 4e with encounter powers becoming recharge on short or long rest and daily powers becoming recharge on long rest, and a few similar translations; it's much closer to 4e in that regard than to any earlier edition. And the catalog of classes, and other options, and their design doesn't throw out 4e heritage entirely, either.

But it manages to avoid, IMO, the super-metagamey feel of 4e.

I get where you're coming from here, but the basic crunch of it is delivered on a 3rd Edition base. If you look at a 4th Edition Wizard, they have at-will, encounter and daily powers, just like any other 4e class. If you look at a 5th Edition wizard, they have... spells, broken down by spell level, in a way that feels very familiar to 3rd Edition players. Some of the spells feel like they haven't changed at all from 3rd Edition.

Here's 3.5th Edition magic missile: https://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicMissile.htm

Here's the same spell in 5th Edition: http://5e.d20srd.org/srd/spells/magicMissile.htm

Very similar. The 5th Edition version is a bit simpler to read/understand, but frankly if you sit there at the table and think you're casting the 3rd Edition magic missile you will get it right 8 times out of 10.

And then on page 20 of this quickstart rules, you can see the 4e magic missile, which is a very different spell altogether: https://issuu.com/biggerstaffhosting/docs/quickstartrules

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