On Fifth Edition And Why It'll Suck

I don't actually think Fifth Edition will suck. I do, however, think that I won't enjoy it.

This is specifically a 3.5e blog, so probably you can tell which edition of D&D I prefer. Everything 3e and earlier is too unrefined and clumsy. 4e is too much of a departure from what I find fun. Pathfinder makes too many changes and too few improvements and isn't as backwards-compatible as it pretends to be.

So maybe you're wondering what I think of about 5e. (Actually, probably you aren't, but I'm going to shove them down you anyway.) I haven't taken advantage of any opportunities to playtest 5e, and what little I gather from the people who have tried it (they having signed NDAs and thus not talking very much) is that it's modular and at least one of the modules is "like 3.5e".

To which I say: if I want to play 3.5e (which I do), I'll just keep playing 3.5e. 5e needs to give me something new to make me learn all the new rules and switch to a barren new edition, beyond merely being like 3.5e.

And the only thing I don't like about 3.5e? Unbalanced classes.

One of the biggest things I like about 3.5e? The vast number of options available in supplements and splatbooks.

Any new edition loses that benefit, so for me to want to play it, it'll need to fix the class balance problem so well as to make it worth it.

Give me something that's basically 3.5e with perfectly balanced classes, and maybe I'll switch. (PF improved class balance very slightly, but pretty much left the tiers and all the attendant problems intact.) Try to give me anything else, and it's not worth it.

Buuuuuut at least it'll give the internet a new thing to complain about for the next decade.