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I'll get right down to the key bullet points:
Artwork: The artwork in the new editions is excellent. The new artists are very nice, and understand important things such as perspective, anatomy and shadowing that not all prior artists seemed to grasp. Although the overall look and feel of the artwork is very much a modern take on classic fantasy, the "dungeonpunk" look is diminished or even missing now. Best of all, those god-awful faux covers are gone. I can only hope that the era of crappy photoshopped fake-leather/metal covers is at last over.
Layout: The new books are very well presented, with the Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual being easy to access and filled with useful content for designing scenarios. The Player's Handbook is loaded with everything you need for the 8 character classes presented, along with the complete rules for the game. Interestingly, the Magic Items section is in the PHB, not the DMG, which seemed somehow wrong to my old-school sensibilities. Still, it does mean that all the important rules and information are now in the PHB. There is one grievous oversight in the HB, however: There is no index of powers (except for rituals) allowing you to look up an ability by page or class. You pretty much have to know which class to go to for which power, and flip through until you find it. This is a real pain, although not quite as bad as the 1st and 2nd edition method of formatting spell lists by class and level, in my opinion, if only because most of the time you'll be looking up a power because you already know the class or race of the character using it.
Gameplay: Now, that said, let me talk about the game play itself: 4th edition is a very smooth engine, and undeniably fun to play. The mechanics of combat are like a well-oiled machine, and the way in which the game streamlines clunky rules while dramatically enhancing individual options is pretty impressive. The game is written with the expectation that you will be using a map and minis (or counters, whatever) to manage combat, and I have not yet tried to run a combat in the abstract, if only because playing it as-written with board and minis is just so much fun.
Characters:The character design mechanics are massively retooled, and while the changes here are not as dramatic as 3rd edition was to 2nd, I would daresay it's probably nearly as much in terms of what the game is trying to achieve on a design and concept level. For example, the game is now structured around thirty levels of play, and first level characters feel about as competent as 5th level characters in older editions. All characters now progressive in levels at the same rate, with the same choices for powers, feats and other traits; the differences lie in the choices of powers offered by the individual classes. Multiclassing exists, but is now achieved through gaining feats that let you nab features of other classes.
The character classes themselves are now very homogenous; essentially, you pick the class for the flavor of your character, but need not worry that you're choice will be gimped compared to someone else. Now, depending upon your preferences, you may or may not like some of the changes to the classes. For example, wizards now gain a more even spread of powers as they level up, and are no longer pathetically weak at low levels and end-loaded with mighty power at the high levels. However, the wizard is now a very, very fun and viable class to play from level 1, as is the warlock; these characters can actually do something in combat other than fire off a magic missle or two and hide. That's a really different aspect to 4E from the older editions, as anyone who has tried playing a wizard can attest.
Book-keeping: This is much simpler, and many statistics are now more tightly managed; hit points are flat increases, with the characters being front-loaded at first level, and gaining predefined increments at each level thereafter. All abilities that are level dependent (i.e. get better at higher levels, like attacks and skills) now automatically do so, gaining 1 point at every even level. Attributes now get more increases as the character levels (two 1 increases at every fourth level, and an across the board 1 at the monumental level 11 where you become a paragon and level 21 when you become epic.) As a result, there's less pressure to get really high end attributes at first level. You can still do that, sure, but it's not as troublesome later on with the extra increases.
A Miscellany of Changes: There are so many little changes that the game ends up feeling very new, even though the fundamental characteristics of the D20 system are still hidden beneath it all. For example, prestige classes are gone (thankfully!) but now your character can take new, specific paths when they reach level 11 as a paragon class path, and at level 21 for epic paths. Magic items are still here, yes, but the magic items now work differently than they used to, acting more often to enhance existing traits and abilities over time. Characters advance in level, yes, and many, many powers, items and other things will also provide greater effects at later levels. It's a very new and different feel to the D20 system.
Monsters: Monsters now come in a variety of roles and types. One of the best new roles is the simplest, called minions, which are essentially one-hit-kill wonders that work like the mooks in Feng Shui or the nameless goons of Savage Worlds. You can now pepper the battlefield with dozens of easy-to-track foes who are minions, then enhance a handful of tougher badguys to flesh them out. In fact, you can also go the opposite route and make elite monsters (designed to be as tough as two characters) or solo boss types (designed to be as tough as an entire party). All monsters are now level-based for challenge; no more confusing scaled challenge ratings hat provide inadequate estimates; a level 1 monsters is equal to a level 1 character, case closed. Awarding XP and determining difficulty is much simpler now.
Settings: There are so many new little changes that it's hard to describe or digest them all. Setting changes are present as well, but that's not much of an issue for me since I was never a stickler for the core settings of D&D, anyway. Still, the choices made to the new edition's default background assumptions are interesting, and seem to reflect (to me) a willingness to embrace new concepts and ideas, as well as encouraging new DMs to make the campaign world their own beast, and not be a slave to old tropes. Gone are the old planar great wheel, the rigid and nonsensical alignment system, and the Greyhawk default setting. In its place is a more nebulous and dangerous world for dungeon delvers to face off within, with a strange medley of gods that will work well in almost any standard D&D campaign, and some setting assumptions that are fluid and easily adapted to a DM's choice of setting.
Problems: There are some notable problems with the new edition I have found, although I suspect the solution to these will boil down to, "Look for upcoming new book X." For example, the wizard class is primarily a combat-oriented monster, with the new ritual magic encompassing spells of a more utilitarian nature. Necromancers, enchanters and other class types are under-represented here. You can not, for example, make a true necromancer or even a wizard with strong leanings to such using these rules. Nonetheless, the absence of such suggests to me that not far down the road, maybe in the PHB2, there will be a separate necromancer class in itself.
Likewise, druids are missing, which seems somehow wrong to me. Monks, barbarians, bards and the half-orc and gnome races, all missing (well, gnomes have enough data in the MM to come back as players) but clearly waiting for their turn in a future book release. The new 4th edition rules are clearly written around a long-term book release schedule, one which will parse out new content to fans of the missing classes, races, and powers.
Fixing Things We Didn't Know Were Broken (But Really Were): The new rules also dispense with a ton of assumptions in older systems. Some have described older editions as more like "rules to simulate a fantasy world" and 4th edition feels more like "rules to run a fantasy game." This is certainly true, in some respect: all classes now have three kinds of powers/abilities, being at-will, ecounter an daily effects. The at-will things can be done every combat round until the end of time if you want. The encounter powers are a one-per-encounter sort of affair, and the dailies are (yep, you got it) once per day powers. The bottom line is that the system now reflect a sort of expedience in design, a retooling of the focus of the game to the fun parts, and a removal of the older, boring bits that often forced some players to sit out while others had fun. In recent 3rd edition games I played, for example, the spell casters would be forced to sit out after exhausting their magic and needing to rest for a day, while the rest of the party went off to check things out, then get in to an unexpected fight. The old theme in prior editions of "get in to a fight, exhaust resources of spell casters, everyone park to heal and rest," is now gone. So is the idea that the cleric is a walking trauma unit who on rare occasion gets to do some other effect....the game now has a unique sort of shared healing system in place that works alarmingly well in play.
The main issue is, the above concepts (second wind healing surges, powers that are essentially infinite vs. per encounter and per day) change some of the very focus of how D&D can be played. No more need to camp out for days at a time, for example. No more spell casters missing out on the combat because they used up their combat spell or are loaded with non-combat magic. Non-combat magic is still in the game, sure, but now it's a different kind of magic (ritual) and is a little more elaborate, but it is no longer the case that you must either be good at battle or good at non-combat magic....you can have a separate range of powers for both. Even better, with the right attributes and feats, a non-wzard could learn rituals; it is at last possible to accurately model the legendary Grey Mouser as a rogue with some ritual talents on the side, for example.
Skills: One thing we all noticed in playing 4E is that it is high on combat abilities, but the skill system, while also refined, tightened, and made easier to manage is also woefully lacking in non-combat, role-playing based skills. Now, it would be easy to tack on an additional secondary skill system to 4th edition, and I will be amazed if in the next few months we don't see exactly that from either WotC or a 3rd party publisher, but the game can be faulted right now for not having a mechanic to determine if your character is good with a musical instrument, say, or a proficient carpenter. I'll be interested in seeing what sort of systems are developed to compensate for this over time, because while the easiest way to handle such things right now in 4th edition is to simply tell the player, "hey, if you want to be a flute-playing carpenter, then you are," it is always nice to have a specific system in place to prevent insanely skilled jack-of-all-trade types from materializing.
Anyway, the best way I can describe D&D 4th edition is that it is a new system, with a new way of looking at a very old, tried-and-true game. It takes bottle-necks, speed-bumps and other things from older editions that one may not even have thought of as problems (even though they were) and essentially fixed or eliminated them. Those who are worried that 4E is closer to an advanced version of the miniatures game than a new RPG are only partially right; I can hardly imagine playing the minis-game, for example, when I know how damned fun the combat system in 4E is. However, in my weekend of gaming we had plenty of role-playing, and the DMG itself builds, for the first time, detailed rules on setting up skill and role-play based encounters, in great detail, something prior editions have never attempted, so the game itself is neither adverse nor opposed to role-playing; if anything it encourages it with lots of neat descriptive content, wild ideas, and interesting concepts. 4E just happens to also provide a very easily grasped game system with a lot of hidden nuances and intricacy imbedded in a very clean, smooth game system. It's going to be hard playing any other RPGs for a while when this one keeps beckoning to me!
The Traveller Connection: On a side note, I'd like to suggest that Mongoose's new Traveller is also a very clean, compelling game system, one which is also designed to eminently facilitate ease of play and is loaded with useful tools for the GM to quickly design and run interesting scenarios. Although D&D 4E and Traveller are both very different, I think that they both fall in to the same conceptual category of RPGs built for ease-of-access, and thus I think I'll be playing both of them quite a bit over the coming years.
