I'll try and start with the positives:
The Good- I like the new streamlined monsters - much easier to track as a DM.
- I like the new style of mechanics for things like poison, Medusa's Petrifying Gaze, etc (albeit that the saving throw mechanic could've been handled much better imo, but the basic idea of making Save or Dies into death spiral effects is a good one)
- Removal of full-attacks - should encourage more fluid tactical combats, and makes balancing a Wizard's Standard Action spell and a Fighter's Standard Action attack easier.
- The Cleric. I love this class - fantastic healer/buffer, who can dish out a decent whack in combat but doesn't end up stealing everyone else's job. Just about the one class I think was actually done well (stupid Channel Divinity 1/encounter aside
).
- Easily homebrewed for - standardised power progressions, Paragon Path structures, etc mean that any schmuck can come up with summat and it'll probably be balanced. The job is so easy now a trained chimp can do it, hell, at least a chimp would never have published the Vigilante or the Shining Blade of Hieroneous.
- The toning down of full casters power. Less world-changing effects and less ability to simply steal the entire limelight with a single spell.
- Encouragement of teamwork and party synergy by building it into the game.
The Bad- certain monsters have been mutilated. The poor Balor has basically been castrated, and what the fuck is up with the new Hydra? Sure, streamline monsters in general, but the whole fucking point of a hydra is you have to cut off it's heads and it grows two more! FFS!
- Oversimplification of skills. Yes, merge some skills, ditch a few pointless ones, get rid of the clunky cross-class skill rules, all good. But they've gone too far - the difference between one character and the next is minimal, it's just boring now, might as well have gotten rid of them altogether and had everything run off of Ability Checks - no-one would've noticed the difference.
- The Skill Challenges. Compared to what Mearls did with similar mechanics in Iron Heroes, this sucks. Again, over-simplification ruins a nice idea imo.
- Encounter Powers. These are just so lame. It in no way models people being tired out by combat, as they can carry on swinging at-wills morning noon and night, so all it is is a completely arbitrary limit on an ability. It's such an unbelievably lazy way to approach a per encounter design paradigm. Fails to really account for differential lengths and difficulties of encounters - it's a game designed for dungeon crawls and nothing else, they've narrowed their horizons when they had a great chance to broaden them, make a game that could support dungeon crawls as well as other style of play (3.5. can, but starting from scratch they should've been able to do it better, which imo they haven't). Compare Encounter Powers to mechanics of the Factotum, ToB, the Hellreaver, Iron Heroes, Star Wars SE, etc and it's pathetic. 4e should've been the next generation in game mechanics, it should've opened up new avenues for growth and development, instead it's a step backwards from their own preview/precursor work. What's more, they don't feel any different to an at-will to me. Tactical feats that required certain actions to set up, or Iron Heroes classes that needed to spend time building up tokens in order to use their best abilities - these were cool and fun mechanics afaic. But no, "every class must have something cool to do every round" - that would be patronising even to small children.
- Daily Powers. Did they say Vancian casting was going the way of the dodo or did I get the wrong end of the stick? It may not talk about "slots" anymore, but it's still memorized fire and forget magic. The Sorcerer at least broke the paradigm a little, and Warlock et al made me expect this particular sacred cow finally to be given the death it so richly deserves. Instead, imho, what we've got is a more restricted Vancian system that tries to pretend it isn't.
- There's a lot of things I expected to see and simply aren't there. Aside from the obvious (Barbarian dammit!), why no Saga-esque Condition Track?
- Pointless and annoying nerfs - charge and reach for instance.
- "Grapple" rules. Yes, they needed redoing, they were annoying to work with. But, again, WotC just got rid of it and replaced it with a simplistic half measure that fails to address the problem - poor Grapple mechanics > No Grapple mechanics imo.
- Magic Item Dependency. They said this was gonna go. Afaic they lied. It's still there, just more explicit than it used to be, and the DM is still expected to go through placing treaure, conducting Wealth By Levels audits and all that crap (the main thing I dislike about DMing is dealing with fucking treasure!). It will be much easier to replace Enhancement bonuses with flat numbers, but there's a more subtle dependency built in now. As a character levels, they get an increasing number of Daily Powers from their magic items. Take them away and a lot of versatility goes, as well as a lot of stamina and a lot of fun (i.e. you reach the point of button-bashing at-will powers quicker without magic items). I think a low-magic (or just
different-magic game is still gonna be a pain in the arse.
The UglyMulticlassing and "Roles".
Yes, it gets a whole section to itself. So, they've diversified the healbot and skill-monkey roles throughout the party, but accompanied it by tying these 4 new roles into the pre-designed classes so closely that it's nigh on impossible to cross roles, in particular, Battlefield Control (in the non-magical AoO+Reach style) has been absorbed into the Fighter and Paladin class features - which no-one else can get their hands on. Imo, it's now a case of someone having to play the Defender, far more than there was ever any real need for someone to play the Healer Heaven help you if you have a 2 or 3 man party, coz there's no way anyone is gonna be a double-threat (much less triple-) any time soon.
Also, such a restricted system closes off too many options, even taking 4e on its own terms. There are certain classes that simply do not multiclass well. Harping on about it I know, but ToB proved that different rules systems could be amenable to mechanically worthwhile multiclassing. But, again, WotC abandoned the challenge in favour of a dumbed down system.
Also, it closes off the horizons for the game's future development. 3.5 was modular, that meant that each new class brought with it an ever expanding array of options - more and more ways to represent the concept you wanted to play. But it's as if they think the "Class 1 / Class 3 / Class 2 / PrC4 / PrC 7" builds were a problem, when normally it was just someone trying to match a concept, or make one of the god awful pieces of crap they published playable. The real powerhouses were mostly very simple - Druid 20, Druid 10 / Planar Shephard 10 / Wizard 5 / Incantatrix 10, etc. The new standardised system makes it harder to publish a "new Planar Shephard", but not impossible, but at the same time they make it virtually impossible to patch a class later (e.g. the way they patched Gish with Abjurant Champion, or patched melee with ToB). In fact, standardised abilities means there is still plenty of possibility for unintended interactions (see Blood Pulse or Arch Spell just in Core). They've all but killed multiclassing, but they haven't really solved any problem by doing so.
3.5 had loads of space into which it could grow, I don't think the same can be said for 4e. It feels stale already to me.
Heh, that turned into a bit of a rant. Overall, I really do feel there's some nice ideas in there, and I do feel that 3.5 has some serious problems built right into it's foundations - a clean start with a solid Core to develop from had my full support when they first announced it (irritation about the years of denial and broken promises notwithstanding), but that isn't what 4e is to my eyes. The game seems to be simultaneously trying to be an RPG and a basis for a planned omputer game adaptation, trying to chase the WoW dollar under pressure from Hasbro while simultaneously trying not to go too far in pissing off the existing customers, and in trying to be all things to all men, it falls between the two and misses both targets.