FitzTheRuke
Legend
I might be an old salt, but I never forget about new players. I've taught somewhere in the neighbourhood of a thousand people to play D&D over the years - I run a learn-to-play monthly. For decades.You're implying that complex is the one true way. We're all old salts here and forget about new players.
I prefer TTRPGs to be simple. 5e is a little too complex for my personal tastes, but it's my best bet to sell product, so it's the game that I teach most often these days.
But IMO threads like this make it sound like if 2014 5e is a 6 (on a scale of 1-10 complexity) then 2024 is a 9, when it's more like a 6.05, which rounds to a 6.
IMO, they're so darn close that it's effectively the same thing. Sure, there's some added complexity here-and-there, and there's also some taken away. Like everyone keeps trying to point out (and are often misunderstood) - The specific make-up of the party makes more difference than the 14-24 change does. A "pure" 2014 party that includes a Wizard, a Druid, a Battlemaster Fighter, a Warlock, and a Cleric, for a random example, is going to take far longer on their turns than a pure 2024 party that has a Barbarian, a Monk, a Rogue, a Cleric, and a Paladin - or many, many, many other combinations of Classes, most prominently dependent on how many pure spellcasters there are in the party.
That's all the "Wizard vs Weapon Master" argument is trying to say - sure, if you compare a 2014 to an otherwise exactly-the-same 2024 party, Weapon Masteries might be a noticeable change, in particular if that party has a lot of classes that use Weapon Mastery, and those Weapon Masteries are the most complex ones - but under most circumstances, with the party made up of various random combinations of features from 5e - I really can't see how WM stand out as anything particularly noticeable, far or less an egregious affront.
Even to new players.
And I played with 5 new players YESTERDAY. And I will do so again soon enough.