I kind of like your description of things. It sounds pretty old school, and I am really down with that. I wonder how much of it has to do with the rules themselves and how much of it has to do with your DMing style though. This is just my impression, but it seems like you ignore a lot of the rules when they are inconvenient, which is perfectly fine; I ignore inconvenient rules as does any good DM. But it has me worried the D&DN might have a lot of these "inconvenient" rules that need to be ignored. At any rate it looks like the wilderness exploration rules worked well for your group, and that is good news. D&D hasn't had a good set of wilderness exploration rules in a while.
I've been DM'ing and sometimes playing off and on since 1982, so I guess I'm fairly old school in that respect, but I don't think of myself as really old school. I'm notorious for buying into the latest edition of D&D and so I've run BECMI, AD&D, 2E, 3rd, 3.5, 4th, 4th Essentials, and now finally D&D Next.
As far as the mini's vs theater of the mind approach, I tend to use whatever I feel appropriate for that "scene" or encounter, whatever you want to call it. With the fight against the hobgoblins I plopped the mini's on the kitchen table and used some dice to mark difficult terrain and simply described the scene. For the fight with the roc, I chose not to use mini's at all...with only one or two monsters it was easier to just use the theater of the mind approach. For the escape from the oasis, I chose to bring out some dungeon tiles of which I own far too many, and used lots of vampire miniatures for a very tactical 4e'ish approach.
I don't think I purposely ignored a single rule though. I even roll all the dice in front of the players, no DM screen for me, and I never fudge die rolls.
To be honest, the rules performed well for us and that's why I haven't commented that much on them. I read the combat rules and class information before the session. During the session, we looked up and used character creation rules, class abilities, feats, the exploration rules, healing, surprise, reactions, disengage actions, grappling, the note about damage against multiple targets, and various rules on combat. The only thing I felt really that slowed us down was that I only had one print out (I didn't feel like having my laptop out as it tends to take my attention away from the players.) I did have it in a nice ringed binder with dividers and that helped.
The only difficulty I've had with the actual rules so far, (and keep in mind I haven't run this much at all) has been a few minor things:
- there was at least one unfortunate overlap between the ranger class abilities and feats. The brute hunter's weave through the fray is exactly the same as Tumbling Movement, so he took Weapon Mastery instead of that feat. They should change that so that the class ability either just gives them the feat or does something else. I don't know if there are more conflicts between class abilities and feats, but it seems likely.
- I'm unclear whether all magic items need to be attuned, or just special ones that the DM picks. I assumed the latter.
- As mentioned above, I obviously failed to remember the new initiative rules, so I didn't handle that correctly.
- I know that this has been discussed at length...but I didn't like that hit points automatically heal after a long rest, as it seemed odd that the fighter could heal right back up without much magical healing from the mauling she took from the rocs, but I didn't slow the game down by reading the optional rules for slower recovery or the experimental rules for rest and healing; I might try those next time.
Certainly not a comprehensive playtest, I know. And I'm not advocating Next over any other system yet, but I was very pleased with that session. I especially liked how quick and easy the character generation was. I didn't feel like I needed an electronic product to speed it along.
