I'm still confused as to its purpose in 5E, given:
1. By RAW, the meatgrinder levels go by quickly and very little game time is spent there.
2. Unlike AD&D where save or die, level drain, and other gotcha effects were a thing even at higher levels, those meatgrinder levels have a definite expiration date in 5E.
3. There is a bit of a disconnect due to the contrast between those first few levels and the rest of 5E. It's like there are two almost unrelated games.
Sure. IMHO, it points to an intent to evoke the nostalgia factor of the meatgrinder, but not to the point that it stops being fun (which'll obviously be different for different players, but just, y'know, in general, probably based on those polls we all filled out during the playtest - y'all filled out those poles, didn't'ay?).
4. What are the early meatgrinder levels supposed to mean to players who have no experience with traditional AD&D?
Just speculation on my part, but I have a sneaking suspicious that the idea is to establish that the game is 'deadly'/dangerous/exciting early on, so later level cakewalks don't seem boring.
No one is requiring you to like 5e;
No one's /requiring/ it, but a goal of 5e was to broaden it's appeal, not merely shift it away from existing fans of the then-current edition. Every fan we lose is a very real failure, so I'm glade Mr. Oblivion, here is at least giving it a chance, and venting his frustrations rather than not trying it at all and edition-warring against it. (At least, I hope that he's honestly trying it - it's not like no one ever /claimed/ to try a new ed while maligning it in ways that showed they'd clearly never cracked the book.)
if you do not like it for what it is, that's totally fine! Despite 3e and 4e, many people continued playing 1e and OSR. This isn't Fahrenheit 451 where all prior editions are burned; if it isn't working for you, just play another edition, or another TTRPG.
Quite aside from 4e books actually being burned and the videos posted, the ongoing support for past editions and the styles associated with them does vary. The classic game has the whole OSR thing going, that's still pretty significant. 3e is immortalized via the OGL and it's current mortal avatar, Pathfinder, is still going strong. 2e, of course, is the single edition most strongly reflected by 5e. 5e, for it's part, in addition to being the current edition, is also covered by the OGL and has a limited SRD, so it is at least a demi-god compared to 3e's outright immortal status, even when it's day in the sun eventually ends (assuming it doesn't turn out to be the last edition of D&D).
Wow, could our group (and others) be an anomaly... I've had people survive from 1st level to 10th/12th
No, it's nothing unusual, even in 1e when the deadly first-level of play was drawn out by the much higher exp targets for level 2. Back in the day, we often used
variants house-rules to increase survivability to get there. But, then, as now, the DM could always tweak and soft-ball encounters and generally help you get through to 3rd or 5th level or so when your characters became viable on their own. We have lots of experienced DMs out there who know how to preserve fun and PC lives through low levels. The anomaly, perhaps, is the player who suffers through it all 'RAW.'
Well in 4e when I chose to be a Swordmage I was great at damage mitigation and sucked at dealing damage and there was no easy way to mitigate it without expenditure of resources... and even then I couldn't hit like a striker.
Formal 'Roles,' balanced classes, yep.
The only Defender that could get close to striker numbers was the fighter and that was because by the end of 4e the class was a bit overpowered due to how much support had been heaped upon it...
The 4e fighter was a respectable secondary striker from the PH1, not because of the support it, like all the PH1 classes, got over the edition's brief run. Every class had at least one secondary role, some called out explicitly, others not so much. The Swordmage shaded into Controller, with some AE attacks, more variety in typed damage and conditions than the fighter, for instance.
In the end selecting a class in 4e was a constraint in that you wouldn't be as good at some of the other roles as other characters were.
As opposed to a Tier 1 being better at everything than some other, benighted Tier-5 class was good at, sure. 'Balance,' again. An anomaly in the grand sweep of D&D history, I suppose, but not an unpleasant nor entirely unlamented one.
Now as far as your "awesome" goes it seems from this and previous posts... you want a character that can't be hit or hurt but also that does massive damage in combat... and the problem is that 5e's mechanics are making it difficult for you to attain combat superiority in attaining both of these things without investment of resources.
He seems to have felt he got the level of 'awesome' he needed from 4e, which certainly didn't feature characters who couldn't be hit or hurt, let alone while dishing massive damage. So, no, probably not that, at all. I think he's just having a rough time with the random-quasi-lethality of 1st level 5e (and, perhaps, the way the 'awesome' of melee types might not kick in until they get extra attack), and will get into it more as he enters the 'sweet spot' towards the end of apprentice tier.
... perhaps join in on the game once they've reached 3rd or 4th level.
An excellent idea. The game plays very differently at low level than at mid.
When somebody is absolutely determined to hate something it's pretty hard to talk him out of it.
If you'd suffered through the edition war - as thecasualoblivion did, BTW, and suffered, IIRC, quite the change of heart with Essentials, too - you'd realize just how tragically true that statement is. But, I don't that's where he's coming from. Really, I have seen very little of that kind of attitude with 5e, which is refreshing.
I was able to achieve my definition of awesome while playing a tank in both 2E and 4E. The tools to do so are absent from 5E.
5e fighters don't seem much less DPR-tastic than in 2e. What's missing?
The 4E Swordmage was a very weak Defender and a very weak class overall, and a very poor example of playing an awesome 4E Defender, even in the hands of an optimizer.
Seemed pretty awesome in one campaign I ran. It was certainly less-supported, as a Campaign-setting rather than Core class, but didn't fall through the cracks as lamentably as, say, the Seeker.
As for dealing damage, that wasn't just a Fighter thing. I could build a Defender who can reach the bottom end of Striker-tier damage with Fighter, Paladin, Warden, Battlemind, Knight, and Berserker. Damage isn't the only form of offense however, there is also control, which 4E Defenders tended to excel at.
To be fair, the Berserker actually switched modes to Striker when it raged, and the defender brand of 'control' should not be confused with the actual Controller role.
4E defined being awesome as something you didn't have to sacrifice in order to take one for the team. You got the full Defender package just for choosing a class. Healers primary resource was separate from their attacks, and healing or buffing was defined as something you did in addition to your attack, not instead of.
The 'team' contributions could very well be the 'awesome.'
5E is a big step backwards.
Not that big - though, yeah, as a 'compromise' edition trying to evoke the classic game, inevitably, it was going to be a step back from the latest edition. Healing Word, for instance, stayed in, so you can stand up an ally and still make your attack that round, for instance.
I'm not a fan of low level 5E, but to me that's a completely separate issue.
You have only just tried first level, so far, though, so I hope you'll keep an open mind. I've seen much better results at 5th-8th.
2. You didn't get less than a role. You were good at something. With 5E, you start out not particularly effective at anything, and if you make poor decisions you stay that way. Also, the roles in 4E were mostly balanced against each other(Controllers a bit less so), while in 5E they mostly aren't.
There aren't formal roles in 5e, so that's the wrong place to look for balance. Balance exists mostly in the resource schedule, over a 6-8 encounter/2-3 short rest 'day,' and is a very dynamic 'spotlight' style thing largely under the auspices of the DM. It's not something you'll find just in examining the mechanics.
5E is harder to houserule than 2E. 2E mechanics were generally isolated. If you changed or removed something, it rarely affected anything else. 5E was designed at a system level, and different mechanics were designed to interact with each other.
I have to disagree. It's easier to house-rule a system with a single, simple, resolution system (d20) as a foundation than a heterogenous one. Though there's less need to issue formal (let alone written)
variants house-rules in 5e than in 2e, because 5e lends itself to introducing all the tweaks and adjustments you need through in-the-moment rulings.
As for 3E, I avoid making too many generalizations on play. In my experience, play varied between tables in 3E to a degree not seen in any other edition, and the culture of 3E tended to be more hostile towards low level play than any other edition.
E6 seemed pretty popular.
