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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ChainSawHobbit" data-source="post: 5771247" data-attributes="member: 6686908">This is my opinion on what aspects of each D&D edition so far should be incorporated into the upcoming fifth edition. Please share your own ideas.Basic D&D: The minimalistic philosophy concerning character options. Dungeons & Dragons doesn't need a massive bloat of items, spells, powers, feats, races, classes and themes to be fun. Getting the options right is much more important than frantically churning them out. Sure, there should be enough to give your character a distinct feel, but do they really need dozens of new powers to choose from at every level? A handful is enough, so long as those powers are crafted with care.AD&D 1e/2e: Being a hero. One of the things that irks me about Fourth Edition is that there are several races that are only really playable as dark, brooding anti-heroes that walk the line between light and darkness. Races such as tieflings, shades, other shades (called "shadar-kai" or something), and drow. I'm okay with a bit of that stuff here and there, but it seems that dark characters are getting more attention than shiny ones as of late. It explicitly states in the new Red Box "Dungeons & Dragons is about being a hero", but WotC isn't really living up to that.The art. One thing I loved about old AD&D - especially late 90s AD&D - was the art. Adventure covers looked like the covers of those awesome old fantasy and sci-fi novels, and brought to mind things like Conan the Barbarian, the Hobbit, and Forbidden Planet.The lack of focus on balance. Some character classes are harder to play than others. Some have a harder time staying alive. Suck it up. I'm not saying there should be intentional power gaps between classes, but the game feels more real when more attention is paid to making the classes interesting and believable than evenly powerful.AD&D 3.0/3.5: Miniatures and grids being optional. One of the amazing things about 3.x was the fact that one can play equally well with or without using miniatures and grid maps. Sure, grid maps made the game a tad more realistic, but everything worked perfectly and confusion-free without them. I understand that Dungeons & Dragons is made by people who play A LOT of tactical miniatures games, which is why they should make an extra effort to make miniatures optional.The multi-classing system. It was great how classes could be layered on top of each other, used to build characters like lego-blocks. One could play a tenth-level character who was a Barbarian/Druid with an extra focus on greatsword use and combating undead (Druid 4/Barbarian 4/Fighter 1/Paladin 1) without too much messing around. It was fun to construct new classes by combining existing ones.AD&D 4e/Essentials: The minimalistic skill system. One of the things I used to dread about 3.5 character creation was assigning skills. One had to first figure out how many skill points they had (which took longer than it should have), then decide where they would put them, then apply ability modifiers, then calculate synergies, then realize that they screwed up early on and have to do most of that again. Fourth Edition fixed this.The monster design. I think 4e monsters stuck around a little to long in battle, but besides that, monster design was near-perfect. Monster roles were great, sub-roles were even better, and making homebrew monsters was as fun as it was easy.</blockquote>

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