A lot of these "dealbreakers" seem kind of superficial to me. Case in point:
Mistwell said:
seti said:
A save is not a defense. The target rolls a 'save'; I prefer the attacker to have to roll 'to hit' against a 'defense' target number, like an AC (or FORT, REF, and WILL
Preference for who roles is not the same as whether or not it is a defense. Of course it is a defense.
So, [MENTION=6688142]seti[/MENTION] is free to consider anything he/she likes a dealbreaker. It's a free market, there's no fun police, and he/she's under no obligation to buy 5e for any reason. So if he/she wants to say that having a Wisdom +5 instead of a Will 15 is enough to break the game for them, it's fair enough.
But it's such a minor thing to change "PC's have dynamic defenses" to "PC's have static defenses" that this seems to me like a pretty minor gripe to hang a "dealbreaker" on.
I dunno, there's a lot of good versions of D&D out there (3e, 4e, pathfinder, 13th age, a dozen OSR games, and the older editions themselves), some of them have more problems for some people than others, and 5e's entering a crowded marketplace where it's bound not to meet all the expectations that people have for it, and where
lots of folks are used to being disappointed in some way by WotC in the last few years (either because they launched 4e, or because they stopped 4e). It's easy to hang dealbreakers on minor things because they don't have the benefit of the doubt from most of their most potentially loyal target audience, and they don't have much that you can point to and say
this is frickin' incredible! There's not a killer app, so to speak -- minor things are dealbreakers because, really,what is someone who doesn't play 5e missing out on? Unless they're a D&D loyalist (which, as mentioned above, is a diminishing number), what's 5e offering? If someone's happy with 4e or Pathfinder or ACKS, what's it going to do for them?
Adaptability is great (necessary, even!), but someone who is a big 4e fan, say, has most of the adaptability they want already -- whatever they can't do they probably don't have a big interest in doing. There's gotta be something else, something that they
want to do, but don't really know they want to do, with their D&D game.
I imagine WotC has considered this question and has "something else" in mind (maybe doubling down on the "brand experience?" maybe adventures?), but that's where the real dealbreaker for me I think is going to be: if that "something else" isn't something I want, I might just stick with Frakensteining 4e. If there's nothing more than what 5e has shown so far....I don't know if it'll be enough. I think there will be more, but it's hard to tell what that's going to be or look like from here now.
