Wow goes to show how people are different I absolutely refuse to DM 3e ever again and one of the big reasons was having to make NPCs in 3e. It was way too much work for the fun involved. Before 4e came out I was making use of all sorts of hacks to make things easier and to reduce items being given to the party (those not in the know 3e NPCs designed to fight are really supposed to have a certain amount of magical gear in order to have the numbers that their challenge is supposed to have so if you have them fight these NPCs how tehy were intended your player's wealth will explode compared to them fighting standard monsters) such as giving out vow of poverty bonuses to NPCs while they did not actually have VoP. Eventually when the 4e previews came out I started using a lot of 4e principles in designing the enemies the party was going to fight and that was much easier and generally better. Later we just switched to 4e because the players really enjoyed its tactical combat and I enjoyed myself more because it is much easier to run and in more fun to run monsters.


As for "builds" I mean back in the day we had builds for AD&D single class fighters and the like and would preplan out an extent but the big difference is that in 3e you had to preplan everything in very specific ways if you wanted to be able to do anything you wanted. In 5e the need to do that is nothing like that and playing a single class anything is actually a very good choice and that is assuming you play with multiclassing or feats (which is not a given). For me that is not really the same issue at least to me.

I thought about playing the Dragon Age RPG but while I think stunts seem fun I also think that since your ability to do cool things are to a degree limited to getting lucky on the dice to give you the stunt points to do those cool things I do wonder how in the long term it would go.