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[Spehss _]

Wanted to get some opinions on this. I've always been interested in trying D&d but the need for all the different (and generally expensive) rulebooks just to be able to try to play with other people always threw me off. Not only would it be a hassle and expensive to find the rulebooks I was looking for, but there'd be no guarantee I'd find anyone to play with.

I've heard 5e has been streamlined down so that "collecting" all the rulebooks isn't necessary for just playing (DMing has more requirements obviously), and I've been thinking of going to a local game store to see if I could find a group there. So the only thing I'd need is a player's handbook for 5e.

Opinions from more experienced DnD players?

[Flying Dice]

5e is great for balanced play. 4e is great for brand new roleplayers and people who don't care about gameplay. 3.5e is great for absurd, superhuman play that gets up to near-Exalted level shenanigans, exploiting little tricks and features from a dozen+ splatbooks to create the perfect machine for... whatever you want to do, really.

So, in brief, 5e did a lot to solve the problems of prior editions without fucking up too much in the process. It doesn't have perfect asymmetrical balance, but it's better than 3.xe, and it's not the boring dross that was 4e. If you're just getting into DnD, 5e is an excellent place to start -- all you need is the PHB and someone with a copy of the DMG, and players can technically get away with using the freely available Basic rulebook. It's set up so that just about anything can be decently viable without relentless optimizing.

By the same token, nothing in 5e can be broken to the same exceptional degree that a lot of 3.xe could; the Concentration mechanic prevents the old 3.xe style of massively layering buffs, debuffs, and CC on top of a more flexible casting system with reduced "depth" of power. In short, martial, skillful, and secondary caster classes have had their kits generally made more coherent, while primary casters have been reined in, made simultaneously less overwhelming and more reliable on the low level with things like at-will cantrips and ritual casting.

tl;dr: 5e is good.

[Cthulhu]

4e and 2e are the best versions, accept no substitutes.  4e is a great tactical wargame with a persistent RPG attached.  If you need hardcoded rules for skills and shit to RP then 4e isn't for you and also you're a bad person.  2e is what 3e wants to be.

[Flying Dice]

If you're relying on skills and shit to substitute for RP, you're a bad person. They're there to create interesting situations, not to let the player be lazy. If you're negotiating with a dragon and you say, "I roll Dip, +17," instead of actually talking, yer doin' it wrong. 4e edges waaay too close to freeform RP for my tastes where it's all down to DM fiat and players can be as Sue-ish as they want. Rules are good for that, because someone playing an introverted, hideously scarred asshole character as if they were a charismatic politician and getting away with it is just as bad as someone who substitutes rolls for real conversation.

If you have 6 Cha and no points in Dipl. or Bluff, the DM can call you on your shit. If it's handwaved, it turns into arguments. That's why 4e is good for RP -- it doesn't even pretend to be an RPG. Same as Paranoia; nobody has to give two shits about RP being realistic or whatever when the party is explicitly just there to kill shit and make references.

[Bauglir]

Everything I've seen indicates that 5e is the best edition of anything since God added breasts in Man 2.0. It's like a streamlined (in terms of character creation and actual gameplay), better-balanced 3.5 without splatbook fever. I've not played the full version, but what I've heard about it suggests that they learned all the right lessons from the playtest (which looked promising to begin with).

[wereboar]

I started with 2E. Rules were somewhat moot and there were lots of design flaws usual for older games, but overall it was great fun.
3E corrected a lot of problems 2E had but introduced new ones. For example, rules became much more detailed but the game became perhaps a bit too complex for casual play. It did allow for crazy and flexible builds, but eventually playing as a party of swiss army knives got old.
4E was not much of D&D at all. Combat resembled WoW boardgame. You basically had to position yourself correctly and push several available action buttons in correct order to be effective.
5E feels really close to 2E but with improved, sleeker game design. It took good features from all previous editions (inculding 4E, it wasn't ALL horrible) and threw in some original ideas. I actually quite enjoyed it.

[NullForceOmega]

Everything following 3.5 is not D&D.  It is mass-marketed garbage that attempts to replicate WotC's success with Magic in RPG form.  4 and 5 are soulless cash ins with no respect to the original material and a strong bias towards MMORPG children who have no concept of what the term 'Role-playing' even means.

[Sensei]

If you like 3.5's crunchiness, but want something better balanced, you might try pathfinder as well.

Unless you're introducing your friends to RPGs, I'd recommend finding a group to play with, and playing whatever game they play. That matters more than what ROG system you want to play. You might not have to buy hooks at all, lots of people share them.

[scriver]

It's not the best, it's not perfect, but it's allright. Most of it's big problems are stuff DnD suffers from over all the editions.

[MrRoboto75]

I don't understand how "there's no splatbooks" is a major factor.  The edition isn't old enough to gather any splats yet.

[Criptfeind]

It's pretty good. I'm not sure how many cases I'd recommend it over 3.5 or 4. Since it's sorta a little bit of, not having the good bits of ether, on the other hand it has less of the bad bits of both. But I mean, if the choice is between 5E or nothing, it's certainly a fine game in it's own right.

[Flying Dice]

I don't understand how "there's no splatbooks" is a major factor.  The edition isn't old enough to gather any splats yet.

It's because 5e was designed from the ground up to avoid the problem with 3.xe where you had ten bajillion splatbooks. The PHB and DMG collated what would have been the PHB, DMG, and 3-4 splatbooks from 3.xe.

Everything following 3.5 is not D&D.  It is mass-marketed garbage that attempts to replicate WotC's success with Magic in RPG form.  4 and 5 are soulless cash ins with no respect to the original material and a strong bias towards MMORPG children who have no concept of what the term 'Role-playing' even means.

Calling Poe here. If you were serious, you clearly haven't even bothered to read the 5e rules -- they went back to much of what made earlier editions good while avoiding most of what made them bad. Unless needlessly complex and obtuse rules were good, or you liked either the blatantly broken balance of pre-4e or 4e's "everyone does the exact same things with different names slapped on" idea of balance.

[Sergarr]

I don't understand how "there's no splatbooks" is a major factor.  The edition isn't old enough to gather any splats yet.

Except it totally is old enough, considering the god-awful release schedule on the core three books (lol delays), and considering that every other edition had those things.

D&D 5e has a major problem with it called "bounded accuracy" which means that you will always be threatened by hordes of low-level mooks with ranged weapons, no matter how high your level is. So the best strategy is to go necromancer and summon a shitload of skeleton archers (since necromancy spells are not concentration-based, you can keep many, many skeletons around you). Or, barring that, just hiring a lot of Commoner armed with shitty bows. There's no flat DR in D&D 5e (it's 50% now), so the individual arrow's power doesn't matter, as long as you bring in enough of them.

[NullForceOmega]

I have played every edition of D&D starting with the original hardcover AD&D originally released by effing TSR.  I know D&D, it is one of the very few things that gives my life any joy whatsoever in this miserable, 'take your assfucking like a good little slave' world, and NOTHING WIZARDS HAS PRODUCED IS D&D.

[Cthulhu]

Everything following 3.5 is not D&D.  It is mass-marketed garbage that attempts to replicate WotC's success with Magic in RPG form.  4 and 5 are soulless cash ins with no respect to the original material and a strong bias towards MMORPG children who have no concept of what the term 'Role-playing' even means.

3e I think is the worst of the editions.  I played 5e once and it wasn't bad but it wasn't good either, it didn't stand out.

4e is great when you're looking for over the top action.  4e is the kind of game where you punch a god in the face and have shadow of the colossus battles on top of living terrain.  A good GM can make the game really sing but if it's just 25 foot rooms with goblins then the hyper-lean system will get boring.

3e is great when you're looking for low magic conan the barbarian lol just kidding 3e is awful.  3e is stuck in a transitionary period between 2e and 4e with all the bad and none of the good.  If you're into being a terrible munchkin then it's great because it's a mess of splatbooks with no oversight between them and ain't nobody got time to hire a D&D lawyer to go over your character sheet and make sure you're not pulling bullshit (example:  Pun-Pun is not actually legal in game because it uses monster feats.)  Outside of munchkinry 4e also has the problem that it halfway adheres to the 2e framework of high lethality and experience differences to balance classes.  Casters start out useless but quickly outpace all but the most carefully optimized fighters.  This would be balanced by their early game weakness but the game isn't as lethal as 2e and they now level up at the same speed.  As long as you don't get killed by a housecat or a skinned knee at level one you're probably good.

2e is what 3e wishes it was.  Obviously it's old and it shows its age but it's still great for playing the kinds of gritty low magic games that 3e sort of wants to be but also sort of doesn't.  Mages are still really strong but the vast majority will end their careers as red paste so it sort of balances out.  Also they level up much slower which makes sense.  Being as good as you can be at fundamentally altering reality is much better than being as good as you can be at swinging a sword, but you'll reach the latter years before the former.