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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6736184" data-attributes="member: 996">We can have different opinions on how laudable novelty is, but either way, coming up with new stuff never seemed like a major 5e goal, while capturing the feel of the classic game was a biggie.  Even so, new - or new-seeming - stuff stands out.From watching folks play avengers in 4e, and getting advantage in 5e, it's pretty solid.  I'm not even worried about 'spoiling' it by pointing it out.Nod.  It's rather like the effect minions had.  You can have 'lesser' monsters in a combat, and they're not strictly just scenery.  The 'numbers porn' or 'treadmill' is just on the hp side instead of the attack/defense side.  It's a workable enough way of making both 'lesser' and 'more powerful' monsters available regardless of level, just one that minimizes the creation of monster stat blocks by the developers rather than the effort of designing an encounter. There's a range where it works out.  Enough encounters/day to make casters careful in managing their spells, enough straightforward combats to make DPR the way to go some of the time, enough non-combat challenges for those who didn't focus on combat, etc...  Some DMs naturally tend to run in that range.  Others need to remind themselves to now and then.There's not that many unique spells for each class.  The Wizard and Cleric are tops, with 33 and 27, respectively, followed by the Druid and Bard at 17 each, after that it's single-digits until you get to the poor Sorcerer at 0 unique spells to it's name.  Then you consider that that classes with the most unique spells are all neo-Vancian.  Yeah, not a lot of differentiation, at all.  Contrast that with the vast spell lists 3.5 eventually accumulated, or the unique list of 'powers' for each 4e class (and each monster tending to have a couple of more or less unique abilities).  5e does deliver familiarity that way, which is a plus for it's prime target audience, though, so it's not all bad.  That's verisimilitude, yes.  The world is familiar to the players, through their characters.  There's consistency.  The NPC wizard may be statted more like a monster, but he casts magic missile.  PC casters share many of the same spells.  It's less magical, but builds a more specific feel of the world.Lol!It's a danger of the way D&D has always been designed - with long lists of things (classes, spells, items, monsters, etc), and the only way to do something new is to add to the lists.  Eventually they get to long.  I'm glad that, this time, they seem to be adding things more slowly.</blockquote>

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