I put down "meh," but I'm an optimistic "meh."
Right now we're getting a lot of talk about the "feel" of the game. Well, talk like that is useless. There's something called the "mind projection fallacy" that everyone should be familiar with. Its when you perceive your own feelings about something as if they were actually traits of the thing itself, instead of your own traits in relation to the thing. For example, you might feel that beets "are gross," as if "are gross" was a trait of beets... but in reality "perceives beets as gross" is a trait of YOU, and the beet just has actual objective traits like chemical composition.
Well, I want less about how it "feels," which is just an attempt at influencing my emotions, and more about what the next edition IS.
What few meaty things I've heard have been a mixed bag. There are some matters of game design where there are objective answers, and I'm not sure they've gotten the few we've heard about correct. For example, rolling your stats is good design in a game with throwaway characters (it would be fine in Paranoia, for example), or in any game where rolling low stats gives you compensation in some other area of your character (you have crap stats, here's a ton of fancy equipment, or something similar). But if neither of those are the case, and if the game is designed so that you hopefully run the same character for several years of gaming, then rolling for stats is just objectively bad game design. There's a reason that no one I knew rolled for stats back in 3e- they "rolled" for stats, where "rolled" in quotation marks means rolling over and over until you and the DM agree that the outcome is fair.
Still, other things have been positive. They claim that you no longer will just have a face character with a sky high bluff skill who does all the talking, and will instead send the person who's thematically appropriate for the job. Well, that would be awesome if it works. And apparently saving throws are more granular, which is probably for the best, although I hope that they're still 4e style duration checks and not earlier edition style defensive rolls. Finally, we've got a constant insistence that things will be modular, and customizable. Again, this is AWESOME if it works. But if it doesn't work it will just spread out the focus of the game until its an incoherent mess. There's a lot to be said for doing a few things very well, instead of a great many things in a mediocre fashion.
I guess what I really want to hear right now is this: What are the BIG IDEAS of 5e? In 3e it was the standardization of math, the OGL, and the idea that character levels could work like legos you could mix and match. In 4e it was the mainstreaming of a tactical combat style that had been growing in popularity in 3e, an effort at stopping rulebooks from being 80% spellcaster materials, and an effort at standardizing mechanics while maintaining flavor through the use of style guides instead of mechanical subsystems. Regardless of what you think of these goals, the games had them, and I think that's admirable. Necessary, even. So what are the big goals of 5e? I guess I'll have to wait and see.
Honestly, I'm probably focusing too much on minor issues, and I'm probably doing it because so little meat has actually been released. Instead, we're just seeing a bunch of marketing material aimed at people who didn't like 4e because it didn't "feel" right to them. Which is fair. Everyone gets marketed to. But I DID like 4e, so all this talk about the "feel" of the game seems just as amorphous and vague and self-oriented as it did half a decade ago. I want meat.
