To me what 5e does excellently is in that it takes a low amount of effort to get pretty good results, especially on the player side. Can I create more vividly mechanically visualised characters in either 3.X or 4e than I can 5e? Yes. But I'm pretty adept with all three (or five if you count 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder 1e separately) systems and find it easy to create vivid characters. On the other hand the 5e class, subclass, and background choice is strong, thematic, and evocative - and easy both in terms of actual mechanical choices and especially in terms of system mastery required to make them. (Just not needing to pick feats is on its own a huge time and effort save, especially for newbies) In the past I've described 5e as producing 80% of the results for 30% of the effort.
For DMs it's similar. 5e is a pretty basic system to run - I dislike it because it gives me little back. But it's easy, especially conceptually. Setting DCs is easy. Picking monsters is easy. The monsters are evocative with 4e style abilities. If you ever don't know what to do you can have a rest while fighting. "Rulings not rules" never tells you you're doing it wrong and gives you little to remember. The rules are clean with very few modifiers. DMing is not easy - here I'd say it's 80% of the results for 60% of the effort.
And when you're putting less effort into the rules and mechanics you've more left to put elsewhere.
5E is easier to DM. Eliminating little modifiers and making the core lean, using rulings not rules simplifies the DMs job.
Here I couldn't disagree more. To me it wasn't perfect but
4e was the DMs edition - and one in which about half the players I played with were also DMs rather than having to actively hunt to find one.
4E is a more involved tactical experience than 5E...but Fire Emblem is even more tactical on the Nintwndo Switch.
Honestly, not in my experience. Fire Emblem's tactics revolved at least in part round keeping synergistic death balls together and in part round mission objectives. 4e's tactics revolve around the use of the current specific environment and round the tension between grouping up for focus fire and spreading out to avoid AoEs.
What is 4e like round-by-round? I find 5e combats get boring after about 3 rounds (max) unless something changes in the environment.
The majority of 4e characters have a mix of single target and AoE attacks, of which some require five minute rests to recover so exact positioning matters a lot more, and the majority have some forced movement abilities so any terrain you can push the enemy in/on/off (like that pit trap that would normally just be something to walk round) making almost all non boring environments more interactive.
This means that bad 4e is like 5e combats that last one round longer and where even the fighters sometimes suffer analysis paralysis. Good 4e on the other hand has even static environments continually feeling dynamic as your relationship to them changes and teamwork to push people where you want them (either in pits, back through their own summoning portals, off the edge of docks, or into the area the wizard's about to drop an AoE).
It has been my experience that the tables that work, work because the group at that table have the ability to make it work. No matter the system. System is secondary in RPG.
Agreed-ish. System is secondary but not irrelevant.
5e is great if you like the mythic-medieval mosaic that it presents, sophisticated D&D mechanics, and expansive character development arcs. I've played campaigns of 70+ contiguous sessions with characters levelling 1-15 and the system has opened up more to characters all the way through. Few other games are even close, in blending streamlined rules with long mechanical character-development arcs.
5e allows rather than encourages character arcs. I've had more and tighter unplanned arcs in six session Apocalypse World campaigns than I have in thirty of D&D. But an Apocalypse World campaing burns out after about ten sessions.
