Here is a question for new 5ed DMs who never played a roleplaying game before. Please do not post in this thread if you are not a new DM.
How easy was it to pick up the books and start playing the game?
Which parts were easy?
What could be improved?
How new are we talking? Strictly speaking I have been DMing for about 6 years, but in that time I've only run a few sessions of 4E, all but one of which went horribly, and two 5E campaigns, both of which ended prematurely because of scheduling conflicts. That said, I'm pretty familiar with the rules, and I've studied a great deal of DMing advice. Am I in the demographic you're looking to survey?
I guess that you are. How easy was it to pick up the books and start playing the game? What could be improved?
For me, 5E was much, much easier to just pick up and use than 4E, which gave an impression of extremely rigid balance that I could easily disrupt with the slightest mistake. It seems more flexible and more forgiving, which gives me the confidence to play around with things and has made me actually WANT to DM, instead of grudgingly accepting the responsibility because no one else has the system mastery to do so. The place I see the most room for improvement is clarity. I get that they wanted everything to be written in "natural language" and that's fine. But the writers seem to go to great lengths to obfuscate and disguise the system wherever there is a slight risk of feeling "videogame-y", which can often lead to unnecessary ambiguity. For example, Bonus Actions are written very oddly, seemingly just to try to hide the fact that there is an action economy system, in which there are multiple kinds of resources that you spend to perform different kinds of actions. I have had many players who were confused by the fact that you can only take one bonus action per round, even if you have multiple abilities granting you bonus actions. And that could have been avoided if the rules were more transparent about the fact that you have a resource, called a bonus action, that you can spend once per round, and your abilities grant you things to spend that resource on, not more uses of the resource. The wording is at times deliberately obtuse, and the only reason I can ascertain is that they wanted to distance this edition from the ststems-heavy language of 3E and 4E.
I played some The Dark Eye back in elementary school, as a player though. I had an interest to continue with another Tabeltop RPG but didn't know how to get a group, so for the last years my connection to the hobby was solely through D&D player and discussion podcasts. With the release of 5e I decided to DM myself and ask all my friends if they'd be interested and to my surprise 3/4 I asked were very much on board.
Now, I don't think my case is particularly representative because I'm very interested in game design and have been playing video games all my life with roleplaying games being my favorite. What struck me the most was that in spite of all the streamlining and simplifying, compared to video games, there was a significant volume of upfront reading required before you are able to start playing. It's not bad at all if you have someone to explain it to you as you're playing but seeing that I was the DM, I was that person. Teaching my players the game worked quite well though and I was able to gradually introduce more systems as the game went along. I also printed all their improtant info on the back of their sheets, none of them read through the rules to be able to play in my game.
My number one issue with the way the rules often are written is that they are going for a very vague wording in an effort to create rules for a variety of different playstyles or to be applicable to number of situations which I find annoying. Give me a clear rule and simply say that you can deviate from it. The biggest offenders were no doubt the hiding rules. I think 5e requires a lot of design work from a DM in how he wants to interpret the rules because the rules themselves are often inconsistent or ambiguous. So you have to read through and think about how you will handle it because as is they are not helpful.
Another thing, creating characters is a hassle, way too much flipping back and forth, remembering stuff having to take notes. It gets better when you can use the basic rules in conjunction with the PHB but if both background and class are from the PHB ->
The basic gameplay is quite simple to grasp but there is still a vast volume of specific rules that I neeeded to memorize and still have to look up from time to time. How far or high can a character jump? What's the falling damage? How long till they suffocate? These things should really be on a cheat sheet for easy reference. One of the designers had made one for combat options, items and conditions which is very handy and something that's always lying on my table for the players to look at. They should do more of these and distribute them officially.
I haven't yet fully read through the DMG but a lot of the things I do in play are things I picked up through podcasts or blog posts and things that the DMG really doesn't get into. I feel like the only reasonable way to be a decent DM on your first session is if you picked it up through osmosis because I don't feel like there is really a great way to learn it. For me this wasn't a big deal as I did my first and second session prior to the DMG's release.
Edit: I don't feel like the rules support me as a DM, it's the opposite, I have to support the rules because they can't stand on their own.
Long-time-ago-DM, current player, considering AL DMing in near future:
4e's attack powers were written in almost a Computer Programming Code format that allowed everybody to know what to do and what would result from it. Many of the 5e Spells would benefit from a similar treatment. In current format, I am VERY reminded of Gamma World Volume 1 (c.1980): fluff text describing results, places where mechanical crunch text describing procedure needs to be.
Many 5e spells' internal mechanics are not consistent with each other. Does the Wizard make an attack roll, or the DM roll a Save - and against what? - isn't this spell just the Fire version of that other one I used last week? My current party's Wizard takes slow turns as we grope through the mechanical implementation of each spell. The extra work creates pressure against him introducing any new ones ...
"Build an enemy" does not appear to work in the manner desired, based on comments from elsewhere in the forums. I have only briefly perused the relevant DMG section. "Balance an encounter with a custom-built enemy" has problems as a direct result.