I'd agree with [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] here, although with the acknowledgement that it's partly my fault.
The game being unfamiliar to you was entirely the game's fault (the designers knew full well they were writing for a core fanbase who had been playing the game since the fad years of the 80s) - witness 5e succeeding brilliantly in being familiar to us long-time D&Ders.
You talking the game down in spite of knowing that the facts contradict your talking points, that's entirely your fault.
I think this attitude really peaked in 4E and that is when the backlash started.
There was a backlash against 4e, but it was more - ultimately - about the feel, balance, and (lack of) familiarity with the new ed than about the playstyle it engendered, which was less RAW and player-Entitlement focused than 3e, and even a little 'troupe-style' in character (I saw Storyteller snobs who wouldn't touch D&D before take to 4e, for instance, because it didn't cramp their style).
"Feat taxes" were a 4E concept. Yes, 3e had feat chains required for getting seemingly superior feats like whirlwind attack (really not that great of a feat)
They were a flaw in both systems, but a rampant one once 4e got rolling and the designers, for some reason, even though they were issuing errata constantly, got the idea that they should add feats to paper-over shortfalls in their designs rather just fix the designs, and leave feats free for character customization.
You paid a steep price in 4E if you didn't take feats as the whole combat was balanced around rolling 10 or better to overcome a challenge and you could only do that by selecting certain feats.
That was wildly over-stated. The whole 'math error' and the Expertise feat-taxes to fix it were a pretty lame reaction to a pretty lame complaint. The campaign I played in the longest (am still playing in, in fact) has gone to Epic without the DM ever approving the Expertise feats, let alone the amped-up Essentials versions. Yeah, the PCs hit some monsters on a 13, some of the time. OTOH, they crit like mad and blow dailies in ever fight. The game just played /differently/ at different Tiers. Slap in the 'fix' and the numbers stay on a more consistent treadmill, and the game can get a little too easy at Epic.
taking a suboptimal character like a Halfling wizard or dwarf paladin was a big problem for certain builds. That thought process has carried over. Just look at the regarding penalizing attributes and you will see people arguing that no race should be treated as suboptimal
The gap between optimal & sub-optimal in 4e was narrow. Against-type characters worked easily - Half Orc wizard? there's one (Staff/Blood Mage/Eminence, for those in the 4e know) in that Epic campaign I mentioned, no Implement Expertise, no +2 racial to INT, no problem). Perk of a more-nearly balanced system.
5e isn't as neatly balanced among classes, but BA mutes the effect of a sub-optimal (numbers) build to an extent, not because you don't feel each missing +1 even more keenly with smaller numbers, but because it never crosses the line of overwhelming the d20 - the hardest-hitter in the party can still miss, you can still hit - the Expert can fail a check that you still have a shot (maybe a 1:10 shot) of making.
The lingering obsession with system mastery from 3.x/PF - the peak of the RAW-uber-alles/optimization phenomenon - meant there were plenty of folks who publically obsessed over optimization in 4e and still are in 5e, but the impact was lessened in the former because it was more robustly balanced, and in the latter because it's much less bloated. But it is a lingering obsession that's on its way out, and will probably stay that way for the foreseeable future unless 5e starts releasing player-facing supplements faster than it has been.
Nope. That's what people think. DMG pg 82: "When any creature is brought to 0 hit points (optionally as low as -3 hit points if from the same blow which brought the total to 0)."
So you did stop at zero unless you wanted to use an optional rule that could put you at -3.
Hmm... different interpretation than I'm used to. I recall seeing it read as, when brought to /exactly/ 0, or optionally 0 to -3, you start dying. Thus -4 was instant death. I rarely saw anyone stick to that, rather, they let you have a few rounds of 'bleeding' even if you dropped to -4 to -9 (I'd even let a player dropped to -10 have one round before dying, if I was in a good mood).
Negative con score instead of -10 wasn't an un-heard-of variant, either. But the whole damage-past-zero is 'wasted' thing? New with 4e, in a de-facto way, because of heal-from-0, AFAIK. 'Official' (you still counted negatives in 4e, they just rarely killed you and didn't matter for healing purposes) in 5e, unless you're knocked to negative your max hps in one shot, you're just at 0.
The desire to create an "effective build" was already there in D&D's culture. The desire for rewarding "system mastery" was already there. The genre of "rogue-like" games are essentially old school D&D games: you died trying to do a dungeon crawl so you would make another character and repeat the process. Repeat enough times and the optimization strategy comes out on top. There was a lot of early D&D, by most accounts, of being incredibly player vs. GM focused.
All truthy enough, though pre-internet (heck, pre-BBS), the community was a lot less monolithic, so, y'know, sounds truthy to me, given my neck of the woods.
Of course, it wasn't 'system mastery' back then, it was 'skilled play' or 'player skill' or whatever, and 'build' was mainly a function of spells known, or if, for some reason, you weren't playing a magic-user, magic items obtained, neither being much under your control...
However, I was just startled to see what may be a new player buying into the idea that you can't play a half-orc wizard or whatever. That just seems so limiting!
It certainly seemed limiting back in the day when it was a hard-and-fast rule.
But, a /new/ player might have that attitude because he's read some on-line optimization guide (the things have been around since the early days of 3.5, if not 3.0), or because he thinks "wizards aren't uruk-hai, wizards are maiar." In the former case, bad on the system for making orcs sub-optimal wizards, in the latter case, good on the system for the same thing...
The suggestion seems to be that this it is too risky! Too risky?! So your paladin never takes chances to save people either? Or your thief doesn't dare steal because he might be hit with a trap?
One of the open secrets of D&D is that it's an Heroic Fantasy RPG where the mechanics make 'heroic' actions, like fighting an ogre or navigating a trap-laden tomb, comparatively safe, for the PCs. Because heroes survive such things through author force, but PCs need the rules on their side.
