The stealth discussion is concluded, but this stupid book is still here, so I'm gonna try to finish this review in one setting and then hopefully someone else can do the DMG.
Chapter 8: Adventuring
Random grab bag of stuff. We get preferred units of time, movement rules, travel pace, special movement, a section on marching order that only serves to take up space, and more attempts at having rules that don't actually function. Want to navigate? Why, make Wisdom(Survival) checks "when the DM calls for it". When might this be? Who the hell knows! Rules for tracking and foraging are supposedly in the Dungeon Master's Guide (which notably wasn't out when this book was released). We get some special senses and movement, food and water, and the social interaction rules.
So, Vaegrim earlier in the thread wanted to make a comment about how these rules don't exist, so I am going to sum them up here.
There are NPCs. They are friendly, indifferent, or hostile.
Mearls and co wrote:
Friendly NPCs are predisposed to help you, and hostile ones are inclined to get in your way.
That's it. You'll note there is no actual description of how far they're willing to go (will they sacrifice their lives? Give you money? Bear your children? Or just step out of the way at the supermarket?) or what they're willing to do. But how do we change this, you ask?
Well...
a) Magic Tea Party (literally, there is a page and a half given to roleplaying and different styles), and
b)Ability Checks! What ability checks? We don't know. We're given two examples - a rogue with Deception trying to convince a guard to let them into the castle, and a cleric with Persuasion negotiating for a hostage - but here's the actual advice:
Mearls and co wrote:
Pay attention to your skill proficiencies when thinking of how you want to interact with an NPC, and stack the deck in your favor by using an approach that relies on your best bonuses and skills.
Get that?
The problem with this outlook is that it basically devolves arguing with the DM until you can use whatever skill you're good at. This isn't even limited to charisma checks, the book outright states you can use any ability score at the DM's discretion. So if you have craft(basketweaving), you get to argue for 5 hours that you can hand out decorative gift baskets to convince NPCs to do your bidding.
This would be a bigger problem if the book didn't emphasize that you don't actually make checks if the DM wants to just magic tea party it. In fact, magic tea party is the default ruleset.
Remember the three pillars of the game from the introduction? Exploration, social interaction, and combat? This book costs $50
and doesn't provide rules for 1/3 of the game.
Starring Wally as Mike Mearls
The rest of the chapter is the totally realistic healing rules grognards demanded during the playtest, the rest times (in which we learn a short rest is an hour), and various downtime activities such as crafting nonmagical fluff items, practicing a profession, resting to heal up, research, and training to learn to use new tools. Most of this is magic tea party disguised by gold rates. And that's the chapter!
Chapter 9: Combat
There's really not too much different from 3.5, however, the first thing that really jumps out at you is the lack of "if your DM allows it" after every sentence. Certain actions no one ever used (such as total defense) have been renamed, actions are the usual standard/move/swift but they now have new names to disguise them, the search rules are a paragraph of using either intelligence or wisdom, aid another is advantage instead of +2, yadda yadda yadda. Grappling was mentioned earlier in this thread and doesn't really care about, trip attacks and knockback are combined into one attack which causes a strength opposed roll, etc. The underwater combat rules are one paragraph for what weapons you can use, and strangely no rules for how to move underwater at all.
New to this edition is that everyone gets Spring Attack for free.
And this brings us to Part 3: The Rules of Magic!
Chapter 10: Spellcasting
We get the traditional explanation of how spellcasting works. There are, however, a few big differences.
The first is that all the former preparation casters work someone like Dungeons and Dragons online, where they get to rechoose spells known each day but use their spell slots like 3.5 sorcerers. The rituals from 4e reappear in the form of ritual spells, where you can cast the spell out of combat (takes 10 minutes longer) but you don't expend a spell slot. You will always do this. The last major difference are the concentration rules.
Each spellcaster can concentrate on one spell at a time. Many (but not all!) of the spells require you to concentrate to keep them going. Now, concentration doesn't eat actions but will end if you die, take damage and fail a constitution check, or cast another spell that requires concentration. Most actually decent incapacitating spells require concentration, as do most buffs. Now, every spell that requires concentration calls this out in its spell entry, and this ends exactly like Pathfinder's "fixing" wizards by nerfing glitterdust - not well at all. Yes, web might require concentration, but animate dead does not, so you can have a big army of friendly skeletons at pretty much no cost.
Now I can see where they're coming with this. Until 4e (maybe even then), D&D has always had this weird delusion that wizards are balanced by being extremely easy to kill...and handled out powerful defensive spells that made them more durable than the fighter. The problem here is that any kind of actually useful spell you'd want to use in a fight - remember, the 3e paradigm of status effects > damage is very much in play here - is usually tagged with concentration, so you can't really defend yourself. Ok. But where this mechanic really falls flat is in the individual spell tags. Animate dead and contagion (to use a few examples) are really powerful in combat and bypass concentration entirely, making this limit more of an annoying hindrance than an actual hard cap on spellcaster power. Furthermore, the designers couldn't be troubled to actually mark concentration spells in the spell list, so you are once again stuck dumpster diving through the entire spell section. Speaking of,
Chapter 11: Spells
It's the big list of spells for all classes. Now, I'm not going to go through all the spells one by one because that would drive me absolutely insane, so I'm just gonna point out some observations.
First, some 4e core powers made it over to the spell list in 5e. Granted, most of them are on the warlock list, but I find it strange that anyone actually cared about them enough to include given the boringness that was 4e powers. Did we need a power that began as a half-assed attempt at summoning from the cleric list ported into this edition with real summoning spells? No. Did anyone actually give a shit about the named "deals damage" powers from 4e introduced for that edition? No. Is this solely in here to attempt to pander to the 4e fans in a desperate, failed attempt to reunite the fanbase? Yes.
Spells are basically what you would expect to see from Mike Mearls ripping off Pathfinder. Save or dies have basically been nerfed at this point to deal damage or have some dumb limitation (flesh to stone requires concentration for a minute, wheres actual medusas instant stone you) and usually give a save every round. That said, this is just like spellcasting in every other edition of D&D, where you grab the same 5 good spells, cast them over and over, and ignore the large percentage of the spell list that is pure, unadulterated, useless crap. That being said, casters still do crazy shit like planar binding armies of demons, animating armies of the dead, abusing illusions, dumpster diving through the monster manual to steal abilities, and so on. The end result is exactly the same as Pathfinder - they nerfed some spells, but spellcasters are still Better Than You.
Appendices:
There are some appendices explaining conditions, deities, the multiverse, some stats for animal companions/familiars, and an appendix for suggesting reading. This is a pretty amusing list - note that a lot of the more modern literature can't actually be emulated in the game. Brandon Sanderson's
Mistborn trilogy is cited as an example, but you will never be able to play as a Mistborn or someone with abilities approximating one. The rules don't support it.
This lady was an inspiration to the game designers, but can't actually be played in the game at all
Other notable reads are things like Game of Thrones, at least 50% of which is social interaction that the rules don't support, the Drizz't series (only supported because it is literally D&D fiction), and a lot of the old sci-fi fantasy stuff from the 80s that the rules don't actually support or hint at. Sure, you can use these books to come up with a world idea and loot character ideas from some of them, but many of these books can't be emulated in D&D at all. N.K Jemison's Inheritance Trilogy is in there, but that book is literally about commanding captive gods to do your bidding and ascending to godhood, and there are no rules in this book to do that! Half of the supposedly inspirational fiction cannot be emulated with the rules in this book!
And with that this fucking book is finally over.
Final Thoughts
This book fails on pretty much every level, and there are no ideas that can be salvaged from this book. There is no original or interesting fluff. There are no new mechanical ideas. The authors did as little work as possible for 2 years and tried to pass it off as a finished product while trying to incorporate as many legacy shout-outs as they could. The rules for anything not directly related to making an attack roll are an incoherent mess. If someone told me that Wizards had to quickly make a new edition to not lose the rights to D&D and this is what they put out, I would believe them.
I'd be willing to speculate that the reason we have seen no new material for this system outside of web articles is that the system in this book is close to collapsing under its own weight (see: concentration) and that the designers don't trust themselves not to break it in half.
Now I want to make a comparison to 4e. This edition comes out on the losing end. Yes, 4e failed at pretty much every one of its initial goals, from making more interesting combats to making out of combat magic usable to making skill challenges a valid way of life - but virtually everything in 4e was the designers' earnest attempt to fix a problem. Sure, nerfing everything down to 2[w]+int and slide 1 square is
boring, but it was an attempt to fix the legitimate problem of class balance in 3.5. No, skill challenges never worked, but it was an attempt to make every class having something useful to do besides killing things. Was a lot of 4e dreck? Absolutely. But the designers of 4e at least had the courage to try new things and fix some of the problems of older editions.
5e is desperately running back to the ostrich hole, sticking its head in the sand, and singing "la la la" while denying the existance of Paizo.
