TL/DR - By all means play what you like. I'm unconvinced.
I'm snipping, rearranging and bolding where appropriate to make myself more clear.
- Characters will be modular but balanced. You can have a character with a lot of different options or one with fewer options and still have them both balanced against one another.
- The tactical rules module will reflect the sort of tactical play from 4e, with shifting, sliding, pushing, and pulling. It will also not be required on an encounter-to-encounter basis so I can run one encounter in the 1st Ed theater of the mind style and the second in a grid-and-minis 4e style with the same group of characters.
- I can build my encounters with a strict encounter budget and set it up in an episodic manner like 4e, or run something more like the Caves of Chaos adventure in the playtest document that's more fluid.
- Monsters will be both plug-and-play in 4e style where I can easily build an adventure as well as giving me options for leveling monsters up or down to give a different and unique challenge.
All of these things point to me getting exactly what I want out of a new edition
Then may I recommend
playing 4e?
You seem to enjoy many aspects of 4e, of all which made it into 5e (or are at least discussed) but it doesn't really ring true of older edition material. Balance was the driving goal of 4e. Slipping and sliding combat minis are a main feature of 4e. "Plug and play" monsters, as you call them, are a feature of 4e that many enjoy. I don't enjoy having the boss/solo/elite mindset when making monsters, nor the minion/lacky/1(2hp) design either. I see both in 5e so far. A lot of what you seem to like and what you say the designers are talking about sounds like 4e with new math. It doesn't sound like 5e with modules for 4e, and different ones for 3e, or 2e, or 1e.
- the ability to play the game how I want to play it and how my players want to play it with very little debate. They can make the characters they want, and I can write the style of adventures I want to write. And from the way they talk about it, this is exactly how it is in the in-house playtest.
So far we have seen very few options for players in the playtest, we have heard other ones are somewhere in development but so far in the playtest we have remarkably few options. I don't see how they can "make the characters they want" in any respect with the playtest material we have so far. I doubt we will be able to make the characters we want, a la 2e kits and PF's achetypes and 3e's multiclassing/prestiges, at all. Instead I see backgrounds and themes flooding out of core books and splatbooks to try and make up the breech - which won't do me or mine at all.
It isn't the rough edges that bother me or make me skeptical. It is the overarching assumptions and goals of 5e.
5e needs to make a game that will interest as many people as possible. To get there they would do well to not alienate anyone they have and they would do well to get players they have lost.
It doesn't necessarily track, however, that they need to incorporate all aspects from the history of DnD. It doesn't track either that newer is better. Better is better. Cleaner is debatable better. This is just new. For example, advantage/disadvantage seems like a good idea but has created a whole slew of new issues. I like the innovation but then they turn around and continue the assumptions you listed above, with 4e creations and goals of "balance".
Also, as others have said on other threads, if they are going to do modularity then it needs to be something they do from the outset. If they are going to balance it they have to make sure that it is balanced with those modules in thought from the beginning. That isn't happening. I'm glad it is working for you, it isn't working for me. And so far you haven't really given me a reason why you think it will work for your fractured player-base.
So yes, I'm optimistic. Because everything I've seen about the game is exactly what I want and need. Easy to run, easy to play, easy to customize. What more can you want from a roleplaying game?
What we have seen so far isn't much. What we have seen so far is pregen characters so the "easy to customize" kind of goes out the window too.
I understand they need to focus on a lot of areas but it seems like they don't really have a firm goal of what they want to accomplish before starting and that I think is a mistake.
When retroclones start out I doubt they try to reinvent everything from the ground up all at once. They more likely try to address the most glaring issues and move onto the other parts from there. Deal with a small issue then expand dealing with that consequences also helps.
They partially had to do that when they introduced flatter math and ability saves. But since introducing these they haven't innovated or re-examined the core system hardly at all. They especially haven't made it "modular but balanced". And they haven't given me any reason to think this is a better edition to try out. Nor am I seeing this to be a better edition for anyone, except people who seem to like the new and shiny.
Three things from the playtest document itself. First, the core rules are simple and clear. Attribute checks, contests, and saves are very simple to rule. Second, the characters feel heroic out of the gate while still being mortal. Third, they've got the feel of 1st/2nd edition down.
The core rules are simple and clear because the how to play document is 31 pages. What happens when we have hundreds of pages for the core books, then hundreds more every few months, culminating in thousands of new pages every year.
Yes, as always, the new material will be optional. But if they keep the 4e mindset that everything is "Core" then ware going to encounter issues of clarity very shortly. Leading to a 6e in only a few years time.
The same goes for simplicity.
I
don't really like my characters feeling heroic out of the gate. You do and that's cool. But I have yet to see any real options to alleviate this. The infamous issue of perfect healing in a night, HD for self healing, more HP (in general) and weaker monsters all add to the feeling of invulnerability. I like my PCs to feel tough but I would also like to have a level of suspense and mortality as a default throughout the game unless I choose to make them feel immortal.
Caveat: The only option I have heard of for "less heroic" feel is to cut the themes/backgrounds. That doesn't make them feel less heroic, it only makes them feel kneecapped by lack of abilities. Removing the +3 on diplomacy isn't going to help with the feelings of heroics.
They have the feeling of 1e/2e down.. is debatable. The playtest is faster, I'll give you that. But it also lacks a lot of the roughness, exploration and excitement of 1e/2e too. As I recall I had much fewer HP, for example, as a 2e character than I do as a 5e character - of any class. Monster HP seem to be the same though, except the ogre. There is a lot of codification, an aspect which I liked of 3e but often discarded, but that doesn't strike me as particularly 1e/2e either.
Another caveat: I haven't played any 1e and not much 2e, so I will grant that my feeling may be a little skewed.
From what others have said, more so than what you did, I can see that they re-captured at least some of the long lost feeling of 1st and 2nd editions. Add in the rules and assumptions of 4e, points made by you.
My question still remains, what about 3e players? How about your PF players, what is there for them to be excited about?
