5e is the best edition without question
they've actually made feat, you know, FEATS, and not simple "+1 to hit with a specific weapon" bullshit that 3e has turned them into.
That's because you're not looking at splatbook feats. You can turn into a dragon and grow distended long arms with splatbook feats.
95% of feats are still quite boring. When you consider you have so few and have to spend them on normally useless shit to get into prestige classes, that can be a pretty big issue, especially if you just want to play a relatively simple game where you are not dumpster driving though 40 books to find the interesting stuff (or if you don't have the 40 books to drive though). I don't know much about 5E (As much I would love to test it out, none of the people I play with have any interest in it.) But if they made ALL feats as interesting as the small minority of good feats are in 3.5, I'd consider that a big step forward.
I'll take Tawarochirs response in a few parts.
I like 3.5 better partly because there's none of that "powers" nonsense (Heck, Tome of Battle was better. Powers sucked because everybody got them. Wizards didn't have spells, oh no, they had powers. Fighters got to hit people extra hard once a day for no real reason. It goes on and on
I actually like this, although the system itself is obviously inflexible, a flaw, and doesn't allow interesting out of battle actions, another flaw, at least it's interesting and fun to actually play. Like, I disagree that tome of battle was only good because they were the only ones with that system, the system was good, far better then what other melee classes use, and yes, it's limiting that that is the only option now, but it's a limit that I accept for all classes to actually be fun. Wizards having powers instead of spells just seems pedantic, and also untrue considering that wizard powers are spells.
4th acts like everybody's playing a dungeon-crawling sword & sorcery game where all the players are Stupid Good. They removed all the most interesting alignments. They didn't have rules for anything that broke from the norm--You have to be a murderhobo, because there's no house prices. You shouldn't be evil, because monsters are evil. You can't minmax at all beyond taking a race that boosts your primary stats. There's also the fact that the books act like you're using a published setting with premade adventure modules.
Except the minmax thing and the alignment thing, these all seem like fluff concerns that are not only pretty much very easily fixed just... By playing the game in some other way, but also issues that it shares with 3.5. Actually, I'd say the crossover between fluff and mechanics in 3.5 is far worse, at least in 4E it's ridiculous enough and omnipresent enough but ultimately generic enough that it's pretty much the default option to ignore it, unlike in 3.5 where so many interesting options are also intrinsically tied to some setting specific fluff element (or more rarely a setting specific mechanical aspect) that doesn't even exist in your game world, so you have to consider every time if you add it, disallow the option, or change the option.
You're right on the alignment that. That's stupid. (although pretty minor.)
The minmax thing you are right on as well, although that's the point, you are giving up customization in exchange for smoother and more interesting gameplay.
There's also terrible crap that makes it feel like an MMO or a fantasy movie or something--you add your level to your AC (and, if you're unarmored and smart enough, your Intelligence, of all things) for some absurd reason. Gandalf here never gets hit, not because he's dextrous or anything, but because he's killed a lot of monsters and he's smart. The check penalty for wearing full plate armor is a whopping -2, compared with your friggin' +7 AC. Everybody knows that just swimming training is enough to not only entirely offset the weight of fifty pounds of metal strapped to you, but to still come out with a bonus while you, say, swim up a waterfall or something. Wizards get like 20-some odd hit points at first freaking level, while longswords still deal 1d8 damage, which isn't even a third of their HP. All the races in the handbook have +2 to two stats, no minuses. It's not a tactics simulator, because you need to try if you're going to die.
Level is a direct measure of power and experience, it seems to make sense to me to add it to your ability to avoid damage, it also smooths out the issue in 3.5 where at low levels you can't be hit and at high levels (unless you stack of huge number of ways to get more AC) you can't avoid being hit. Clearly you've not watched those Sherlock Holmes movies to see how int can help you dodge things. Being able to swim in fullplate is silly, but you could do that in 3.5, and a bit of sillyness seems okay considering you are playing as medieval superheroes. Having a lot of health to start is actually a good thing, since it avoids the lower levels just being a game of rocket tag. How you fluff hits is up to you anyway. I don't see what your point is with races only getting bonuses, perhaps it's a bit less interesting, which is sorta fair, but it's not like it's a big deal ether way.
As for the game being too easy. It's funny, last time I argued with someone about 4E, his big issue seemed to be that 4E was too hard. And I'll tell you what I told him: Monster vs Party balance is solely within the realm of the GM. No matter what system you are using if the fights are impossibly hard or stupidly easy, that's because your GM is bad*. Both in the published adventures I've played and in homebrewed content I've made and played for fourth edition, the balance was fine, and frankly I've found it easier to balance then 3.5
*Well, that's not the only choice, if the players are doing stupid things that they shouldn't (such as that story someone just mentioned of them attacking a big tentacle god monster thing), or if the GM is doing the "living world" thing where the world is mostly made already and the players are going to the 'wrong' areas, the balance can suffer there as well. But if it's consistent it's almost certainly the GMs fault. Another option is that the system is just totally broken, and it's impossible to deal with.
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Topic: Any ideas for some shenanigans a Paladin in 3.5? (Read 29069 times)