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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7934727" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I think it’s important to consider the perspective of folks who haven’t DMed, or even played, every edition of D&D. I, for example, started playing with 3.5. I found the immense volume of rules and subsystems and exceptions and situational whatnots intimidating even as a player. I pushed through it because I really wanted to play the game and that was part of the buy-in to do so, but I would never have dreamed of DMing it at the time. I had a hard enough time just building a single character, there was no way I would have felt confident enough to run the game. When 4e came along, I appreciated how much more usable it was for me as a player, enough so that I decided to dip my toe into the DMing water. But, the precise balance and tight guidelines gave me constant anxiety that I was going to do something wrong and the game would be ruined because I didn’t give the players the right magic items at the right levels, or the encounter I designed was too hard or too easy, or I put in too many encounters or not enough, or I forgot some important rule. I DMed mostly because none of my other friends would, but I didn’t enjoy doing it.But when the 5e playtest came out and I convinced my friends we should try it out, it was a night and day change for me. All of a sudden, I didn’t have to worry about all this precision that I thought I needed to have. There just weren’t that many rules to memorize, all I really needed to do was get comfortable with the core resolution system, which was easier than ever thanks to all the miscellaneous situational modifiers being consolidated into advantage/disadvantage and setting the appropriate DC. All of a sudden I felt free to improvise, and I loved it. Now I vastly prefer DMing over playing. 3e and 4e may have said I could change things however I wanted, but it never felt true there. It felt almost like a “change things at your own risk” warning rather than actual permission to change things.Now, to someone who had DMed TSR era D&D before, 5e was probably nothing new. Those folks I’m sure had long since learned and internalized those lessons, and were confident enough in the DMing fundamentals that they had no problem applying those skills to 3e and 4e, and 5e may have felt like a step back (or a return to form, depending on their opinions of 3e and 4e). But to folks like me who had never experienced that less-structured form of D&D before, it was a revelation. A major paradigm shift. At least, that was my experience.</blockquote>

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