When I started gaming it wasn't on AD&D, it was West End Games Star Wars, TSR Star Frontiers, Top Secret, Shadowrun 3rd Edition, Werewolf the Apocalypse, Vampire the Masquerade. It wouldn't be until about 4 years into my gaming tenure when my grandmother would purchase the blue and red box of original DnD for me complete with the crayon to mark the dice with. Having begun my RP experience with systems that offered generous character options and variability. I disliked the limitation of AD&D where humans only actual benefit was they could progress through a class for a bit, then could restart progression in another class, and there was no limit to their progression, however, no group I ever played with followed that proscription, and for every 40th level Human 20 rgr/5 fgtr/ 5 rogue/ 5 mage/ 5 cleric there was a 40/40/40 Elven multiclass that shouldn't have ever been allowed. I didn't get into DnD until 3rd Edition where some of Ed Greenwood's characters in his novels finally made sense statistically. And I adored 3rd edition, it allowed me to create the fantasy character I wanted to play in an easy to delineate manner. Then came fourth edition which eliminated everything great about 3rd Edition but tried to turn the system into a tabletop World of Warcraft, a system I promptly demonstrated the idiocy of its lack of thought with by building a fey aspected warlock with a cape of the mountebank which let me basically deal damage and teleport, the damage and teleport, and when the GM tried to be clever and isolate me then I used the cape to teleport me back behind the line the party had formed, the whole system was stupid, not to mention the abject horror they turned the Forgotten Realms into.
Then I bought the 5th Edition players handbook, It seemed to actually streamline the 4th Edition and make it less a tabletop MMO while bringing back the simplicity of the old school blue and red boxes. However what drove me to ignore the rule set was that fundamental lack of variability that 3rd Edition actually offered. It seems like I'm pretty much stuck in the class I began the game in and I can either choose a mediocre stat bonus where I used to be able to alter the standard progression path by taking a feat, and the stat bonus would come later which demonstrated a focus in a differing area of my character's priority.
So, why should I play 5th Edition? It eliminated the wonderful options a player could take his character and even it's weak multiclassing can't portray the most famous characters of our favorite DnD novel characters. I mean, stat out Elminster the way he should be in 5th Ed, or even Mirt the Merciless.
