There is a segment of the D&D community pushing for a return to D&D 4E. My brother and I played this, a whole campaign to level 30, with multiple characters. And it's a hard pass from me. We collected the entire series, played every book, ate them up as they came out, and slowly watched a game that was great at levels 1-9 turn into a nightmare past level 10.
The multiple conditions per character, per monster, and tracking everything with tiny scraps of paper was atrocious and one of the worst examples of how not to do conditions in a game. Everything mattered! That extra minus two to one save for one turn was a core class ability for some, and we have these six PC versus 10 monsters fights that would turn into complex wargame scenarios worse than a by-the-book full-binder game of Advanced Squad Leader.
Sometimes one monster would have 4-6 "-2" conditions stacked on them in one turn, and those would end on different turns. If anyone sneezed, we would lose track of everything.
The bags of hit points led to combats where the PCs would stand around the boss, knock the monster down with turn-denial tactics, and have the damage dealers whittle another 20-30 hit points off a turn to a monster with over 450 hit points. The damage dealers missing their attacks elicited groans from everyone, players and DM included.
I ran a group at my work of D&D 4E players. Nobody liked this game. They put up with it. We needed computer programs to design and track characters. Does that sound familiar?
D&D 4E was great when it started, and I doubt the design team even play-tested this at all. The books were notorious for being obsolete when they were released, as the day-one errata for each were pages long. We were unable to keep up with the errata and had to rely on the online program to manage it all for us. Did they even test these before they went to print? Does that sound familiar?
The D&D 4E game is dead, and those wanting you to give this another try are likely just trying to keep you in the Wizards ecosystem for another few years while they rush out the "fixed" D&D 6E books in three years. A new team is in place, and the next edition is coming. This is how it always goes with D&D. You will drop 4E for 6E in two years, and never leave the mind-space of D&D.
Play Old School Essentials instead of 4E, and pick up the Carcass Crawler zines. You will have all the familiar races and classes. The game will be easy. You won't deal with shelves of broken and untested books. There isn't as much "flash bang" character power, but what does any of that matter when the damages and powers are so weak and the monster hit points so high, who cares if you get to use them every turn?
I would rather play the OSE magic user who gets fireball at level 5, and have one use of that a day that does 5d6 damage (18 hp) to everything in twenty feet. No attack roll is needed; it just happens. Save versus spells for half damage. No damage cap, 1d6 per level. OSE Ogres have 4+1 HD and 19 hp on average, which is enough damage to kill or seriously injure most of them within the blast radius. That one-use spell is more potent than most D&D 5E powers by far, just because damage scaling is not a thing on OSE.
D&D 5E? Let's go to the SRD. The fireball does a fixed 8d6 damage (28 hp) to ogres, who have 59 hp on average. Oh, so now my D&D wizard does half the damage as their first-edition counterpart? None of them dies in the blast. And damage only scales when you cast from a higher-level slot, and not even by that much.
5E takes away half your power and then expects you to be overjoyed when they give you half of that back. Then, scaling kicks in, and you get weaker anyway. This is the MMO shell game.
D&D 4E? I got the PDF. The fireball does 3d6 + INT mod (let's assume +4), for 15 hp of damage, in a 3 square burst. The ogre? 111 hit points. So my D&D 4 wizard is doing one-eighth the damage of my OSE wizard? The ogres laugh it off and apply a few layers of sunscreen. Fireball is a daily spell in this edition, too. The scorching burst spell I get as an at-will (cantrip) does 1d6+4 to creatures in a 1 square burst. I can use that every turn, and it will be a better damage output during a fight than fireball.
Was this even tested?
The D&D 4E wizard is a 1-hp minion mop.
Is D&D 3.5E any better? Fireball does 1d6 per level to a max of 10d6, so we are back to 5d6 damage, with an average of 18 hit points. The 3.5E ogres have 29 hit points. They will all likely survive the hit, since you would need to roll all sixes to kill one. So we are back to doing about half the damage again in D&D 3.5E. This hurts a little, but it does not take any of them out of the fight.
Wizards D&D started this whole videogame rebalancing of the game. Everyone got weaker.
AD&D and 2nd Edition AD&D are more like OSE, though 2nd Edition did cap the fireball damage to 10d6 (only scrolls were capped to 10d6 in AD&D 1st). 2nd Edition also upped the dragon hit dice from the first edition AD&D and B/X, with an ancient red dragon having 23 hit dice (104 hp), and in first edition AD&D, the same dragon had 88 hit points.
In OSE? That dragon has 59 hit points. That 5d6 fireball packs more punch in a game without scaled hit points. And that fireball does 1d6 a level without a damage cap. We were better off in terms of character power with TSR. All these powers you get as you level up in 5E are meaningless if the base math is wrong. Who cares that I get an action surge? The monster's hit points are doubled.
Shadowdark? This is a different game where a fireball inflicts a fixed 4d6 damage, and you can cast it repeatedly until you fail a spellcasting roll. The hit points are lower in that game and not scaled, so it feels like a higher-powered game in relative terms, especially with the repeated casting. OSE's fireball keeps going up in damage, whereas in Shadowdark it stays fixed.
Swords & Wizardry? On par with OSE, but a zero-edition game, with the same damage and ogre hit points. Functionally identical in balance to OSE, and you can't go wrong with this one either. There are fewer race options in S&W versus OSE + zines, but the OSE races are compatible with this game, so you could use them as-is in S&W without a problem. S&W includes the magic resistance mechanic first seen in AD&D, but ogres do not have that resistance.
S&W fighters are excellent. A lot of the classes have extra "heat" to them. Also note that not everyone gets the STR bonus to hit and damage; it's exclusive to fighters. Fighter sub-classes do not get the bonus either, such as paladins and rangers. This is how it was back in 1974, and I like these rules since they give people reasons to play fighters, and other subclasses get all sorts of different powers to balance that out.
The S&W fighter is very close to the DCC fighter in feeling.
S&W is like AD&D-lite based on the CC 5.1 SRD in the CC, under the AELF license. This is a future-proof game, where OSE is still OGL-based. The S&W team is bringing OSRIC 3 to an open license, as mentioned in their recent Kickstarter. I would love to see this same team tackle BECMI.
The hit point scaling started in AD&D 2nd Edition, by about 20% over AD&D for the iconic monsters. OSE keeps them at B/X levels, or about half of AD&D 2nd. OSE maintains a lower B/X-style hit point base than AD&D, with every class being a die lower than AD&D. In contrast, AD&D scaled up character hit points by a die size per class (probably to say it was a different game; there were royalty issues back then).
The fights are faster and more deadly in B/X games, and the spells and melee attacks are far more potent in OSE than any modern version of D&D.
The damage scaling that Wizards of the Coast introduced to make it more like a videogame ruined D&D's play balance. In no version of the game have they gotten it correct, and they have been trying to fix this for the last 25 years. You can keep buying new books until you are broke, or play a game that gets it right.
This is the original Gygaxian math.
It still works today, and it preserves character power.
My Old School Essentials magic user puts every "Wizards wizard" to shame in terms of damage and power. Sure, at fifth level, that fireball is a one-use-per-day spell, but WOW is it powerful. That is a "nuking them from orbit" level of power, not to mention what it would do to creatures with fewer hit dice, such as orcs or goblins, and you don't even need to roll for them, the damage is so high, they are just instantly turned to ash and incinerated. Bugbears? 14hp and likely all dead.
That is the wizard I want to play. The one with absolute power.
"But I play D&D 5E because I have options and character power!"
No, you don't. Wake up from the delusion.
I enjoy the D&D 5E character builds, too, but I know my history and games. They lowered the power level to increase party synergy, dragged out fights to keep them exciting, and turned it into a "combat for fun" game. It is like Diablo or any other MMO.
Weak characters and repeated attacks make it seem like you are doing more than you actually are. You get weaker as you level. Once you are hooked, the company slowly stops caring; the higher level you get, the less they care.
This is the MMO formula. The start of your game, the first few levels in, is the peak of your power. You go downhill from there. At the end game, you are getting one-shot-killed by the bosses, just like you were by the boars at the start of the game.
BECMI, AD&D, and B/X were designed to give higher-level characters more power. OSE is created along that same model. In any of these games, combat is best avoided, but the characters hold far more personal power than any counterpart in any version of the game made by Wizards. This also sadly includes Tales of the Valiant and Level Up A5E.
Even the OSE fighter has more power since the hit points of monsters are under control, and those attacks will hit harder than in any other version of the game. Red dragons? 45 hit points, and my 1d8+2 longsword is doing far more proportional damage per hit than in any other edition of the game. Make that a +2 magic longsword, and I am doing 9 points of damage per hit, and my fighter alone will have that dragon down in five solid blows.
Dragons are not pushovers, though, and they can decimate your party and TPK you in a single turn. You all have lower hit points. The red dragon's base attacks are two 1d8 claws and a 4d8 bite, per turn. Or a breath weapon equal to its current hit points, and if that is the full 45 hit points of damage on a failed save, your 10th-level magic users and thieves with 24-30 hit points will be turned to ash. Even a high-damage bite could swallow them whole.
That can't happen in any other version of the game.
And this is in a game that tells you to avoid combat if you can. But if you can't, you will likely mop the floor with your foes. It's amusing how two tiny OSE books offer a game with significantly more character power than D&D 5E. Yet, the general consensus is that D&D 5E reigns supreme in terms of character power.
The math says otherwise.
Today's games give you repeated attacks, more power usage, for less damage. You get weaker as you level. They are MMOs with dice.
D&D 4E is even worse off than 5E by orders of magnitude less in terms of character power, and has to use minions and other tricks to make the illusion happen. At low levels, it feels great. Just like that MMO, get past the 10th level and start counting the games that grind by before you want to quit and find better things to do with your time.
Old School Essentials preserves character power better than any modern edition of D&D, especially 4th Edition.
But Wizards still sells one version that stays true to the original math, and it is still called Dungeons & Dragons. OSE offers more of the options I want in a game, including a broader range of character choices, a better publishing model, and a company I want to support. OSE is also far better laid out, clearer, faster to use at the table, and easier to learn and teach. OSE also supports modern class and race options, once you get into the Carcass Crawler zines.
The above BECMI book is still a scanned copy and is not as well put together with modern publishing techniques, facing pages, or bulleted layouts. It is wordy, jammed with text, and harder to read and reference. It is still a classic. If you absolutely need to have D&D on the cover, then that is your go-to book.
While the Rules Cyclopedia is a good preservation of the past, OSE remains a solid game for today and into the future.