1. Benchmarks for Fighters at each tier (5th & 11th levels).
It does look "meh" when presented like this... multiple attacks by themselves don't sound exciting. But it all remains to be seen what the Fighter can do with those attacks, depending on what feats/class features/subclass features she gets.
Clearly, if the published core books have only the options currently in the playtest packet, or only a little more, Fighters will suck big time due to lack of options. It won't be enough to say "supplements are coming".
OTOH, there is indeed a lot of room to make the Fighter rock, using additional options:
- maneuvers that only the Fighter can get, time to let go of the idea "if the Fighter can learn it, why can't the <insert class> learn it too?"; let's think of it with a real life analogy, "if a kung-fu black-belt can learn a somersault flying rotating kick of death, why can't I?" is answered "because if you haven't practiced kung-fu for 10 years first, you don't know all the basic skills required for the advanced feature"; therefore, stick some excellent stunt under Fighter's subclasses features
- there can be feats granting some supernatural powers, for those who like near-magic stunts, and Fighter gets more feats than anybody else
- emphasize that a Fighter is not only about attack but also about defense, and not just defense against weapon attacks! In the old editions, the Fighter was described as the only character who could single-handed a dungeon, go there alone and survive! How come we ended up that the CoD is? Boost Fighter's defenses to make it nearly unstoppable at 20th level... abilities to cheat death, shrug off spells ("Indomitable" is a truly simple but good example, but then how about a chance to break a spell duration shorter), increased perception, great initiative, better movement capabilities... some of these can be folded into subclasses, others can be standard for all Fighters
Spellcasters have already been toned down in 5e, so the
2. Running a business in D&D Next.
Don't know why this is a popular request... sounds like material for a secondary supplement to me. There isn't really room for much about this in core.
3. Natural advancement of ability scores capped at score of 20; other kinds of advancement may exceed that cap.
Sounds fine.
It's definitely something I think 13th Age got done right and Next needs to take a page from if its at all serious about having a functional game into those tiers.
Generally speaking, I think D&D should stick as much as possible to its tradition and make things work better
within that tradition, rather than copying games which copied D&D. It might work, but if it strays too far from its roots, it ends up like previous edition.
