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Theme could play a big role here. A Slayer Cleric, or Slayer Rogue, might be near baseline Fighter (one with a non-Melee focused Theme) at toe-to-toe fights, but a Slayer Fighter would have a significant leg-up. While Mystic Clerics and Lurker Rogues would want to avoid toe-to-toe fights.

An RPG published by whatever entity legally owns the trademark "Dungeons & Dragons".

No, that's why the Wizard is getting at-wills. I'd be perfectly fine with a Fighter who can only do crazy awesome stuff 9 times a day, and do regular sword swings all day long. Break it? No. Make it ridiculous and cumbersome? Yes. As has been borne out in every pre-4E high level Wizard...

I honestly perceive very little difference in the art and feel of 4E vs 3.5. Other than, you know, non-casters actually being awesome, finally in line with classic fantasy literature. I understand perceptions are our own, but I object to the assumption that people who like 4E like it for the...

Walking around unprepared for battle, assuming you'll have 5 minutes to prepare before any battle, sounds like a pretty big risk to me. Not seeing what the problem is here. And again, it's two spells, at most. Those per-day higher level spells are still the bigger guns. I'm assuming that...

Basically, they replace the dozens of lower level spell slots. They serve a similar purpose of having less powerful spells to use throughout the day, that are still better than at-wills, without having to track dozens of slots. Well, I hate traditional Vancian because I think it's a lousy...

A 3.X Wizard does not "memorize" or "forget" spells. They start casting them, with the aid of the spell book, during an hour preparation time, leaving a final trigger step for later. And having some spells with 5-minute rest times, and some (most, even) with 6 hour rest times still involves...

At-will spells are an even greater deviation from Vancian, but everybody seems to be OK with those. By your standards, 3.X is not Vancian-style magic, because it isn't fire-and-forget; it's prepare after resting, and complete to fire. If we tweak the spell progression so high level casters...

If the latter is knock at 4E, I have to wonder what the heck you are talking about. Seriously. The assumed setting and style of 4E is really not that much different from 3.X. If you look at Fighter powers and can't see anything but Dragonball Z craziness, that's your own perception. That's...

Incidentally, I've been working on a homebrew RPG with pretty much exactly that goal: take a lot of what campaigns in original D&D were about, and make a modern, well balanced ruleset that tries to be geared towards those kinds of campaigns, and without being beholden to D&D design traditions...

"Encounters" have always existed in DnD. You know those monster descriptions that had a "Number Appearing: 4-40" in them? That's an encounter. 5E doesn't have to internalize encounter-based design as much as 4E did, but it wouldn't be DnD without encounters. What is wrong with a spell that...

I don't like Vancian either, but if we have to have something that looks like it I'd like to see something along the lines of this: Spell Slots Level Encounter | Daily 1 0 | 1 1 2 0 | 1 1 1 3 0 0 | 1 1 2 4 0 0 | 1 2 2 5 0...

It wouldn't be appropriate for DnD, but I do have some interest in seeing RPGs designed to be run by a DM at a laptop, or with a tablet, and really embraces the possibilities that brings, even at the expense of pure PnP play. In my group, when people DM it's almost always from a laptop, instead...

But if the summary ever omits actual mechanics, like yours does, then I have to read the full text to make sure I got everything, anyway, so nothing is really gained. The other problem is that including both is just begging for accidental contradictions between them. It happens all the time...

But ultimately, you're not breaking the game, because there's no actual game to noticing powers, or using illusory dragons to intimidate enemies. You're trying to "break" a "game" that is entirely subject to DM discretion to begin with. If there aren't rules for it, then there's really no game...

If the re-fluffed Scorching Burst is having a mechanical effect other than what the stat-block says, it's not just re-fluffed anymore. It's a different power. In this case, one with a potentially convincing illusion associated with it. An essential requirement for re-fluffing is that anything...

4E-style descriptions all the way. Clarity is everything. I'm a big fan of reflavoring, so the officially printed flavor doesn't matter much to me anyway. If someone is a big fan of reading the flavor, and skips the flavor line, seems like that's their own mistake... Perhaps it could be...

I do not want to play a game that has rules for everything including how the DM should act. That would be impossible in any game with the flexibility and open-endedness of RPGs. What I want is a game that the DM doesn't have to fix. The game should be balanced, by its rules. The DM should...

Sounds like extra attacks as you level up will be a part of 5E, so the easy thing to do would be to have an animal companion essentially cost one of those attacks, taken from the progression of the class. Supposing a basic Fighter gets an attack every 5 levels, a Beastmaster Ranger might...

And what's wrong with using a term that emphasizes the totality of the class, instead of a single feature? There's no simple, non-jargon word that quite means what Leader means in 4E. Ergo, take a word, that doesn't already have baggage from previous editions, and give it a jargon definition...