Anyone looked at 5e yet?

JackGM

Has anyone looked at the players handbook/starter set yet? I'm considering getting them if they're more straightforward than previous editions. Does it lean more towards 4e or Pathfinder? By this I mean how fast is the gameplay. On a side note what monster manual edition works best with the character stats for 5e?

Bob Bob

Working through the starter set at the moment, will be getting the PHB Saturday. Quite enjoying it so far. The Starter Kit has everything you need to dive in, including a heap of monster stat blocks. There is another published adventure out too “Hoard of the Dragon Queen”. Also they plan on having a free to play version downloadable that gives you everything you need to play, though each of the books will greatly expand your options.

If I were to sum it up relative to other editions I would say it’s a stripped back 3.x with a good dash of 2nd ed thrown in. Combat definitely moves faster than 3.x

Gone are things like prestige classes and are instead replaced by 'Paths' that you lock into sometime around level 1-3 (depending on class). Each class calls them something different and usually have 2-3 choices per path with clerics and wizards having more due to domains and specialist casters. Each can almost be considered a separate class as they can radically change how you play the base class in similar fashion to the way prestige classes did. So giving you 40 odd classes in the phb.

Casters are still powerful, though not as world shatteringly so and non-casters get a lot more tricks (though arguably not enough) to play with.

There are still of course lacklustre class choices (Eldritch Knight) and rules abuses (Animate Dead) but that’s to be expected.