I pretty much love everything they've done with this edition save for one thing: Very little support for new DMs.
As a person who has been DMing for 15 years, I love how much control and freedom I get with the system. No more pages of charts to flip through to know exactly what every check should be. If failing the task doesn't change the plot in any way, I can tell the players they succeed even if they need to climb a cliff with heavy armor. Advantage and disadvantage are wonderful tools that make it easy to figure out how to reward or punish players. Overall, the mechanics of the game get out of the way of the important thing, telling a good story with all of your friends playing the main characters.
That said, I can't imagine picking this up as my first role playing game and being able to run it. The vast amount of responsibility placed on the DM to arbitrate everything would be paralyzing. In this respect, I think WotC might have miss stepped by catering to their fan base at the expense of bringing in a new generation. It would be nice if every new player got to play with a skilled and experienced DM, but lets be honest, bad DMs probably outnumber the good ones by far, and a game like this is only going to exacerbate that weakness.
As a person who has been DMing for 15 years, I love how much control and freedom I get with the system. No more pages of charts to flip through to know exactly what every check should be. If failing the task doesn't change the plot in any way, I can tell the players they succeed even if they need to climb a cliff with heavy armor. Advantage and disadvantage are wonderful tools that make it easy to figure out how to reward or punish players. Overall, the mechanics of the game get out of the way of the important thing, telling a good story with all of your friends playing the main characters.
That said, I can't imagine picking this up as my first role playing game and being able to run it. The vast amount of responsibility placed on the DM to arbitrate everything would be paralyzing. In this respect, I think WotC might have miss stepped by catering to their fan base at the expense of bringing in a new generation. It would be nice if every new player got to play with a skilled and experienced DM, but lets be honest, bad DMs probably outnumber the good ones by far, and a game like this is only going to exacerbate that weakness.