next session, I finally have a moment to share my thoughts so far about 5th edition. Character creation was a little slow (since we only had one book to go through everything) and that took up most of the time, but even still it wasn't too bad of an experience. I could see if you had a character type in mind it really would just consist of you filling in a character sheet and making a couple stat decisions, otherwise every character seemed a bit prepackaged. If you wanted to be a Dwarf Barbarian with a Soldier background you would just fill in the items, gold, and skills from those parts of the book and with some stats and HP you could be ready to go.
Since the group I'm playing in has people who haven't really played much before I decided I'd balance out the group however was needed. As a result, I ended up being a Human Light Domain Sage Cleric of Lathander. For those who haven't played 5th edition, this basically means I'm a Human Cleric with Lathander as my deity (who in turn opens access to Light Domain spells) and my background is that I am a sage which gives me a certain set of equipment and some skills. The rest of the party is a Dragonborn (Gold) Paladin, a Water Genasi Wizard, and a Human Monk. In the first encounter it kind of played out that the Paladin and Monk will be the tanks and the Wizard and Cleric will be more ranged/support (as expected).
My Initial ThoughtsOther than the fact that it seemed to take a while to build characters, it imagine it doesn't get too bad once you're used to this setup. Every race has some benefit of being that race now, but it still seems like you get the greatest benefit from being a Human still.
In terms of classes, there seems to be a pretty good balancing for the classes so everyone has the potential to do a good chunk of damage at any level. There are some abilities looking ahead that seem very powerful (almost broken), but I haven't looked much at the Monster Manual to see if there's a way to balance that.
One of my favorite additions is that any character has unlimited Level 0 spells (cantrips) that they can cast at will. I always thought it was odd that spellcasters who are innately magic would just all of a sudden run out of magic and couldn't do anything, not even a simple card trick (prestidigitation). Now, there's a nice spread of beneficial and damaging spells that scale as you level up so you have options of how you can attack and you don't force wizards to have bows when their magic runs out. Another interesting part of the spells is that some of the spells are more auto-hit spells where you cast it and it will hit, but the opponent can still save for half damage. While it would be broken if they were all this way, it seems to be balanced out well with the magic attack modifier that allows you to cast ranged magic better if you have a poor DEX -- prior you had to put points in DEX as a spellcaster so you could use your ranged weapon better, now you can focus on your class skills to make your spells more potent.
For the skills, it's great how they condensed it down and how they simplified the skill point rules by introducing the proficiency bonus instead. This system basically goes off the idea that your innate ability to do this means you can do better than others at this, but it also makes it so you don't get a bunch of players with obscenely high checks at later levels (will they happen still yes, but not every skill will be a +16 at level 13).
When it came to Feats, I was a bit confused at first because instead of giving you ability boosts and feats you only get one or the other at every 4 levels. At first, I thought you had to choose one or the other and then you could only choose that option through leveling (for example, you take your ability score boost at level 1 so you can only take ability score boosts as you level). Luckily, that got cleared up and you can take either a boost or a feat at those times which is pretty neat because you can really boost your skill checks with feats or you can pad your stats up a bit more with ability score updates. At level 1 I took an ability boost, but I'll probably end up taking a feat at the next upgrade because some of the feats give you bonuses in addition to an ability score boost.
Finally, while I was helping the DM figure out how the Challenge Rating system works, I discovered a site called Kobold Fight Club which is a great tool to build encounters to see how beatable they are and how much XP the party splits after victory. Overall, the XP system seems much more clear especially since monsters are listed by their XP values rather than an otherwise arbitrary challenge rating (CR) number.
Overall, I like how a lot of the rules have been condensed down to be much simpler than 3.5e, but it still plays like 3.5e does. In two weeks, I'll be playing the second session where we'll get a little more into character development since really only my Cleric and the Monk have interacted a bit, we found the Dragonborn at a job board and got a job with him and then the Wizard showed up and kicked butt at an encounter. Overall, it's worth looking into and I don't really have any complaints yet, but to be fair I've only been playing for just over 2 hours.