I'm playing a vengeance paladin currently in a game that runs every week or so.
What I've found out from this edition is that there has been a shift of complexity from pre-game planning to in-game planning.
Can you say more? I only played a preview or two of 5E, and have perused a little bit of the books. But, when I was playing an Elven Ranger at some event I had the opposite feeling. I just had essentially 0 options. I had to pick up a shield to even try and give myself some level of meaningful tactical choice, at the expense of sacrificing the defining aspect of my character's abilities (two weapon fighting).
I would probably judge 5th edition harshly if I had spent my time playing a ranger. Ranger is easily the worst designed class in 5th edition.
I'm glad to see that my assessment isn't totally crazy. When I did the playtest/preview/whatever I remember, I deliberately chose between the Ranger and the Fighter to see how the new system handled that. And, it felt very much like, yet again, casters rule and warriors drool. Specifically, as I indicated above, I had a paucity of interesting things to do. Chucking d20s was pretty much my only option with the pregen, which didn't bode well as both of those concepts have been with D&D for a long, long time.
My basic impression is that 5E is very much in line, spiritually, to AD&D/2E. Basically, you can see it in the fundamental game structure: class + race is the main decisions you have to make at character creation. This falls into ymmv territory, but that kind of structure is actually what steered me away from AD&D back in the halcyon days of my youth. Although, honestly, Pathfinder very much has that structure, too, and somehow I've gotten sucked into playing PF. So far it's been fine, as the game has enough new classes and combos to keep me interested for a while at least.
My ideal is to not start off thinking "I'll play a Cleric" but to have a character concept that naturally steers me towards a particular class, combination, etc. Although, again, ymmv.
More on topic, though, the damning thing from my limited experience, and what prompted my question, was the lack of in-game options, at least with that pre-gen character. Not that 3E was necessarily brilliant about this -- you rarely tripped or disarmed unless you were built to do it -- but I was hoping that 5E would be a marked improvement in this regard. I mean, that's what a later edition is supposed to do, isn't it?
