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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6781971" data-attributes="member: 996">Speed is what saves it from being as boring as you might expect just from looking at the relative lack of options.  And, you really should be seeing that difference, because it's prettymuch hardwired in.  Attacks hit more often, saves fail more often, damage is higher, spells more powerful, and hps, at low level, anyway, are a lot lower.  A turn may or may not go faster depending on who's taking it with what character under what circumstances, but there should simply be fewer rounds in most combats.Obviously, you should be playing a full caster.  How short of choices can you feel with a character who chooses mod+3 dailies to 'know' vs at most 2 or 3 and casts 2 or 3 three of them vs 1, while still getting multiple at-wills?  You still get to choose a Background, too.  And, though you don't get a feat at 1st level, you aren't paying any 'feat taxes,' either.  It seems like, as long as you want to play the right concept, you have a lot of choice relative to 4e.  Nothing like 3.5, but that's not where you're coming from.By 3rd that should really be tapering off noticeably.  Give it to 5th, if you don't see a complete turn-around by then, something's wrong.  But you do bring up one way that 5e combats can drag on a bit - and it's familiar to the point of nostalgic to those of us who played AD&D.  1st level characters are so fragile, and the new backgrounds/traits so encourage players to invest in their characters, that just letting them die like flies doesn't sit well with every DM.  You can't just dial down encounters to the point their 'safe,' that'd not just be comical, it'd give far too little experience.  What 5e does leave wide-open is 'ruling' in favor of the PCs' survival ('fudging') and that can make a combat that should have ended swiftly in a TPK drag on quite a bit.My players had a lot of fun with vicious mockery - it probably accounted for most of the mechanically-inspired fun they had, at 1st level, now that I think of it.   But, yeah, focusing on the responsibility of the band-aid role will not provide you with a lot of fun.  Cast spells like you would dailies in 4e if you had that many of them:  whenever they'd be particularly helpful.  Use Cure Wounds only if getting someone back up is critically important at that moment.  Not only will it leave you more actions to have fun with, it'll run the party out of hps faster, so they'll rest sooner, and you'll re-charge your dailies.You're definitely not managing your slots optimally.  Healing is best used to bring an ally up from zero, when their next potential action after you revive them will be vital to the party's success.  Anything less than that, and you can probably find a better use for the slot.  That's fine, casters are supposed to be melee-shy.Not sure I follow the parenthetical, there...  Staying engaged includes staying interested in the whole battle, including what everyone else is doing.  Though some groups can handle just playing on their turns, that's usually what gives a player a sense of combat being 'slow' or 'boring' (that and having to wait longer for their turn because everyone is having an individually-interesting turn).  If you can enjoy the whole game, not just your 1/4th or 6th slice of it, it's less boring.  In 5e, party composition matters.  If you're all playing complex 'interesting' casters there'll be more time between your turns, if you've got some quick-turn classes in there, you get a larger share of play time in proportion to them.Coming from 3.5, you should be accustomed to compensating for comparatively rough CR guidelines.  The key is not to trust them, and to go ahead and adjust on the fly, since no amount of pre-planning is going to be perfect.  5e frees you to do that, since it seems to have effectively undercut the Cult of RAW that gripped the 3e-era community.  It is, indeed, like the olden days.  More a matter of feel than numbers.Then they've always been a failure, for you, of course.  iserith is very much a storyteller, I doubt he has any entirely-un-planned deaths in his campaigns, and don't doubt that the body count is little-impacted by edition.  5e certainly gives a DM more lattitude to play in that style than 3.5 did, or rather, community attitude now vs then, thus.Of course, in 1e, saves got genuinely easier as you leveled up.Ooch. Not a great choice.  Level 1 is really, strangely, not for beginners - it's where the game is tough/gritty/deadly/frustrating or however you want to couch it.  Level 3 is a better place to start all around.  A little overwhelming to jump into a full caster at 3rd, maybe, but there are a few simpler (sub-)class choices.And playing RAW 5e is almost a contradiction in terms.  The RAW tells the DM to ditch the RAW and make rulings, instead.5e really did 'Empower' the DM, but that does mean that the success/failure/excitement of the play experience is more on his shoulders than the system's.  FWIW.</blockquote>

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