Namely, in D&D there are a number of things players and monsters can outside of their turn, like reactions, immediate actions, bonus actions and legendary actions. Eventually will we be able to use the full spectrum of actions or will the rules be only half arsed implemented like in NWN?
Wait 5e has immediate actions like 4e?
has anyone found a ritual spell?
Starting to wonder what's the difference between 4e and 5e rules.
The differences are enormous. Now, people are gonna jump on my shit for this, but here's my narrative about the editions of D&D.
All of the old classic editions, up through 2e, were a pretty niche hobby for a very different subset of gamers than we have today. 3e/3.5 came out and revolutionized D&D, massively improving it from its older incarnations, and proving extremely popular. But there were still some glaring balance and design issues that make the game drag down, and caused people to burn out on it. Many improvements had been made, but there was still a fair bit of old school cruft from earlier editions that just never really made for a balanced game.
So they took everything back to the drawing board with 4th edition, and pretty much redesigned the entire game, to make things more balanced, easier to DM, and more appealing to players of other types of popular games, like miniatures games, deckbuilding games, and video games. They brought in design elements from every type of gaming to try to fully modernize D&D, while also casting off nearly all of the vestiges of old school Gygaxian unbalanced design. Well, this didn't work out well for them, sadly. All of the people who loved 3.5 absolutely lost their shit, and jumped ship to go to Pathfinder instead (or just kept playing 3.5). 4e did bring in a bunch of new players who hadn't been interested in D&D before, but it wasn't enough to make up for the massive loss of old fans who just couldn't accept the enormous changes to the system.
Thus, the purpose of 5e was clear: bring back those old players, while also making the game so accessible that we can keep bringing in lots of new players to the hobby. So they scrapped almost everything that they had changed in 4th edition, bringing back a lot of that old-school feel (and the Gygaxian cruft, as I call it, that was previously abandoned), while also simplifying the game, reducing player choices and making it very easy for new people to jump in. It was a huge success, drawing back in lots of old players who were happy to see their old familiar (unbalanced) design principles return, and expanding into a whole new, huge audience of players for whom D&D had been too complex and too full of choices before. They kept a few things from 4e (and most of those things, ironically, are very popular elements of 5th edition, as most 5e players don't even know they came from 4e), but mostly they rolled back the balancing and ease-of-DMing innovations that had characterized 4th edition.
5e is without question the most popular edition of D&D ever, and the best edition for the largest number of people. But I think it came at a cost, the cost of bringing back old class imbalance, bringing back difficulty of DMing (prep, encounter design and balancing, challenging the players), and gutting the huge amount of player choice that were present in both 3.5 and 4e.
