In the D&D Next Playtest we can already see the fighter having problems with power balance. The Warpriest with one casting of Crusader’s Strike and equalising stats, weapons, and themes, hits about as hard as the fighter. And is within one Healing Word of the fighter’s hit points. This means to put things very simply the Fighter is not best there is at what he does. He’s merely a rival for it - and a very clear design goal for the War Domain was to be as good at fighting as the fighter.
This is simply not true. So, yes, a Cleric who worships the
God of War can, for one hour, become about as good as a Fighter in damage output. Not in accuracy, just damage, and he does so by using a once-per-day ability. And uses
another once-per-day ability in order to have as much HP as the Fighter.
The problem here isn't that the Fighter isn't the best at Fighting, it's that for some reason, people love ignoring the fact that (in any normal game) there will be more than one fight in a day. Yes, you can
almost match me in damage and health (but again, not accuracy, which is
huge in a flat-math system) for an hour. When that hour's up? When your spells run out, I'm
still a raging badass.
When the wizard gains spells he gains things like Charm Person, and the clerics things like Command and Silence. The fighter gains … nothing. They just gain the ability to Kill More Stuff. (The Rogue at least gains night vision which is a good start).
First of all, again, limited uses per day. Yes, the Wizard can Charm Person... but not only can they only do it once, they can't do it without pissing off whoever they did it to; you'll note that the target of Charm Person knows they were charmed. So yeah, the Wizard
could simply Charm the merchant... but if you don't want to be chased out of town, you might want to let someone with a social Background use Diplomacy instead.
Which brings me to my second point; flexibility doesn't have to be given purely in activated class features. Everybody has flexibility, because everybody has ability scores and skills. If you're playing a Fighter, you're doing so because the main thing you want to do is hit things. Gaining the ability to "Kill More Stuff" is
exactly what a Fighter wants. Beyond that, if the only thing you use to decide what your character can do is specifically written-down class features, then that's your fault, not the game's. You have skills, you have an imagination, use it. The Wizard being able to do lots of unique things is mechanically balanced against the Fighter's combat prowess. In-game, you don't need special abilities to do things other than attack. You simply say "This is what I'm doing." The flat math and ability/skill system is designed specifically to make that easy. Flat math means that anybody can try anything, and have a non-zero chance of success.
And besides... how much "flexibility" does the 4e Fighter have? All of their powers equate to "Kill More Stuff" or "Be Hard to Kill", just like the Fighter from any other edition. How is this a new thing?
D&D Next does not appear to have this level of clarity. Mike Mearls himself has said they are not sure what to do with the fighter - and they are working on the idea of a second theme. The Guardian theme doesn’t focus on the how at all, to the point that both the Guardian feats use the same form of action and therefore can not be used together.
There's a big difference between "I don't know what the Fighter is supposed to be." and "I know what the Fighter's supposed to be, but I'm still working on figuring out the best way to implement it."
As for the Guardian theme... the Fighter in 4e has dozens (maybe even
hundreds by now) of abilities that use the same type of action. Why is this somehow a bad thing? It's called opportunity cost. "If I use ability A, I can't use ability B at the same time, so which one is worth more to me right now?"
In D&D Next, there seems to be precisely one ability made explicitely to assist your allies - the Guardian’s Shield Block. Also there is one spell in the preview (Battle Psalm) that buffs the whole party. Beyond that, literally every other ability a character has is ‘selfish’. Teamwork, especially focus fire, may happen. But you aren’t encouraged to play a group of people who can bring more out of each other than they would bring to the party themselves. The fighter does his thing (bashing) as the wizard does his. And so far there’s no group skill challenge mechanic to encourage players to work together that way.
Well, there's also the aid action. And the fact that you're not seeing all of the spells out there. For one, there are already great teamwork options; the Wizard has Invisibility, for example... but doesn't have the Stealth skill or Dexterity to make good use of it. If you read it, you'll notice that it doesn't remove the need for sneaking, it just allows you to attempt to sneak when you normally wouldn't be able to. A Wizard trying to sneak, even while invisible, would still have a horrible Stealth check, and probably get caught. So what's the best option? Make the Rogue invisible. Bam, teamwork.
There's also the fact that, again, you don't need abilities that specifically say "Give this bonus to your teammate" in order to use teamwork. There are going to be tons upon tons of special abilities and spell in the game. Not only will many of those be teamwork oriented (Mearls has already talked about the Bard, for example), but there will be dozens of ways to combine your abilities to work as a team. You don't need an ability that says "Hey, work together." All you have to do is say "Hey guys, working together makes things go much more smoothly. Let's do that."
And if you don't work together? You'll be less effective. That's the way it works, and trying to enforce teamwork is artificial and boring.
In D&D Next, the fighter just hits people. The rogue just stabs them (no exploiting Acrobat’s Trick and Acrobatics to show off with ‘Death From Above’ as in my example). One cleric mostly bashes enemies, the other mostly radiant lances them. Same old, same old. This is, quite frankly, tedious after 4th edition - and given the number of enemies in the Caves of Chaos and the escalated hit points, it’s grindy.
Okay, right... repeat after me: "
Play. Test." Do you really expect a full complement of options and abilities in a very early Alpha playtest? Of course not. However, there have been very specific talks about what's to come; like special combat maneuvers for the Fighter, different abilities for the Rogue. It was states long ago that the designers
specifically chose to use the low-option, simple version of the Fighter. Y'know, for the people that like playing simple characters (which you can't really do easily in 4e).
And you know full well you won't need to worry about the options that Wizards and Clerics will have.
Also, remember that this is level one. Level one characters in 4e are reduced to spamming their at-wills just as much, and it gets just as boring. And you wanna talk about inflated hit points?The weakest kobold in 4e has (if I'm remembering right) about 24 HP. Most normal kobolds in Next have 1. The strongest normal kobold? 10. If you're talking about the boss monsters...
they're boss monsters. Even the boss of all the Kobolds only has 44 HP. The Ogre has 88... and is the equivalent of a 3rd or 4th level boss enemy. Of course it has tons of hit points, because it's meant to challenge a party of triple the party's level. Wanna take a look at the average solo in 4e and talk about hit points? Especially if you're fighting a solo of 3-4 levels higher than your party.
D&D Next returns to a long spell list, with the spells not on the character sheet. This can, of course, be fixed for the PCs with appropriate software. But will cause a lot of trouble for the DM with short statblocks.
Have... have you actually played the playtest? "Ease of play" is the thing that people are shouting their praise for all over the internet. I'll admit that not listing spell effects in monster stats is an issue... and so did a lot of other people. And guess what? They listened, and said that they'll work on improving that issue. As for keeping track of player spells... you don't need software, you need your book on hand. And again, we'll look at 4e... 3-4 pages of power cards for
every class, even at mid-level? It's impossible to play a "simple" class in 4e, and you want to talk about "ease of play".
D&D Next doesn’t give me quite such good generic guidelines (this can easily be fixed). The monsters are just plain dull so far - with the idea of giving all the interesting abilities to the ultra-tough leaders making taking out guards a snooze-fest, and almost every fight revolve round tactics of either “kill the leader” or “ignore the leader and defeat in detail” - neither being half as interesting as 4e. Without regular forced movement I need the interactive terrain to be active in its own right to be memorable and pivotal - a much harder proposition. Which means that the only part of interesting combats from 4e D&D Next hasn’t crippled is the narrative hook for the fight. The one that isn’t dependent on the rules.
This is another "we're in playtest" problem. DM guidelines are not something mechanical that needs to be tested early, so they can be included once the rules themselves are hammered out.
Oh, and for your "terrain" and no forced movement... do your players never improvise? You don't have to look at a character sheet to know that a normal person can try to push another person around. All it is is a simple contest; I used Strength vs. the higher of the target's Strength or Dexterity. Now, I'll admit, a few guidelines for adjudicating improvisation like this are warranted. But if your players really can't just look at you and say "I want to push him into the pit.", then maybe they shouldn't be playing a tabletope game. 4e trains players to look at their character sheet what they can do. We need to get away from that, because it is limiting by nature.
As for monsters... yes, the average, run-of-the-mill mook doesn't have much special about it. They're mooks, that's the point. Now, I will admit that Caves of Chaos is not the best adventure to showcase interesting monsters; it was designed with tons of rather plain monsters. The sheer number of enemies can make this seem like a much bigger problem than it actually is. In addition to that, it's already been stated that they're going to move to having leader type monsters add special abilities to their mooks. So yes, taking out the leader usually becomes a priority. Taking out leiutenants isn't a joke, because unless you take out the boss first, they have a special ability or two in addition to being somewhat tougher than normal.
In addition to that, the fact that just about
every 4e enemy has a list of special abilities to keep track of is horrible. When you've got a good half-dozen or more enemies, each of which has two to three limited-use abilities that have to be tracked separately and one or more always-on features that have to be remembered, it becomes an nightmare to run.
Monster statblocks in D&D Next generally appear to be ‘Small sack of hp’ (kobolds, rats), ‘Medium sack of hp’ (goblins), ‘Big sack of hp although smaller than a 1st level PC’ (orcs, hobgoblins), ‘Big beefy grunt’ (ogre), ‘Leader’. There’s almost no sense of solving the monsters strengths and making them play to their weaknesses (other than a ray of frost kite of a big monster). It’s all about powering through the enemy - you can’t neutralise the Kobolds advantage except by killing them, there’s no way to prevent Orcs from charging, or even the Hook Horror doing its thing. So D&D Next combat is a lot less interactive and just boils down to “kill them before they kill you” rather than "outsmart them to kill them more easily".
How many ways are there to easily prevent 4e monsters from using their powers? I'll give you a hint; not many. Certainly no more than in any other edition.
You can figure out how to exploit a monster's weakness in Next just as easily as in 4e. Lots of kobolds? They're very weak, so use lots of area attacks. Ogre? Heavy damage single target effects. Dragon? Figure out what element it resists, then hit it with the opposite. There is no more or less of this in Next than in 4e. Using tactics and cunning to overcome enemies is just as useful in either edition.
