The "We've Finally Had Time to Read the 5e books" Post

  Not a real review, but just the comments of me and my sons as we have read through the books.

The Reviewers
  Me: 47 year old man
  Ja.: 17 year old man
  A: 15 year old half-man
  S.: 14 year old boy
  N.: 12 year old boy

The Good
  Me: "The artwork is really good. The binding is very nice."
  Ja.: "The books certainly are gorgeous."
  A.: "I love the artwork."
  S.: "Very pretty to look at, at least."
  N.: "The art is nice and the last picture in the PHB is a badger, so bonus points."

The Interesting/Positive
  Me: "You don't need multi-classing anymore since you can take various options to various classes to emulate a multi-class, which is interesting."
  Ja.: "Looks like they have cleaned up a number of monsters."
  A.: "Turns out that being almost-dead might actually have longer term effects than just the next long rest."
  S.: "Random dungeon creation charts are back, which is great."
  N.: "The various tables to help with motivations and background might lead to directions you'd never consider without help."

The Weird/Negative
  Me: "...and yet you can multi-class, at least as an option, so let the min/maxing and 14 levels ahead character optimization begin anew!"
  Ja.: "Monks can get an hadouken? What the?"
  A.: "I've already figured out a way to get multiple spells off in a round and I've only had the books 15 minutes."
  S.: "I should be third level after the 3rd or 4th session? So we'd have retired 2, maybe 3, 20th level character parties in just the Blackstone campaign?"
  N.: "They nerfed golems? Who nerfs golems?"

The Harsh
  Me: " Where do the credits acknowledge Runequest, Rolemaster, HackMaster, and Castles & Crusades 'for their contributions to the "new" content of this book'?"
  Ja.: "If you want something for nothing and think character death is a horrible event that should never happen this is the game for you."
  A.: "I don't want to play this, even to playtest."
  S.: ""The DMG reads as 'we're sorry that 4e destroyed your creativity - here's some charts!'"
  N.: "They nerfed badgers? THEY NERFED GIANT BADGERS?! This game is dead to me."

  Full review in a few weeks.