This sounds pretty cool and an emphasis on more tactical encounters sounds appealing to me. My group does like it's noncombat RP as well but maybe for campaigns that are really combat focused it could be fun.
Being unable to "theater of mind" it is definitely a negative for my group because they are lazy but I might have to look into trying it in the future.
There is a lot of options for non-combat RP, most of the better modules include optional ways to resolve some encounters through non-combat/low-combat options.
But in the economy established, a cow costs 10g, iirc a peasant earns 1g a week... and a lvl 1 magic item is worth 360g and lvl 1 players are finding multiple lvl 1 and sometimes lvl 3 items on their first outting. So you need to either work around that, or have a party who is more interested in going on an adventure than trying to break the local economy.
The no theater of the mind is admittedly not great (again, for a lot of "this random encounter is a bunch of shit the party can easily handle" I'll just have the party roll some attacks). But I like playing with toys and using VTT so its not a big deal for me.
And regarding both theater of mind and Role Playing vs Roll Playing... 4e introduced something called a "skill challenge" which I initially disliked but came to appreciate and adapt. Basically when the party wants to diplomatize the King into stopping his war on the Elves, instead of it coming down to a single roll of diplomacy, the party needs to take multiple actions - rolling to get a number of successes before certain number of failures - to succeed.
First player rolls straight INT and lays out an economic case for stopping the war, next player uses History to tell the King wars against the elves never end up well, Third player uses diplomacy to try to convince the king to stop being a violent asshat, etc. There's lots of room for players to go free form, players can even instead of calling out a skill just describe what their character does to aid the effort and the DM can assign it to a skill.
In the modules they have recommended stuff, but you can always make up your own.
(So what I usually do for non-gridded encounter is just turn the combat into a combat-based skill challenge, and just knock off healing surges depending on how long it took)
Or I want a skill challenge that doesn't have any penalties for failure other than time taken, 4e DM material has easy/medium/hard level DCs for player level, so I'll multiply that by number of successes to pass a skill challenge of the right complexity and have the party roll till they cumulatively hit that number and count how many rolls it takes - I've started doing this for overland travel and it's working pretty good.
This is one of my favorite things about having my interests overrun by consoomers. Stuff that caused a shitstorm a few years ago is now just allowed to happen and you are expected to be uncritical of it.
I suppose I should clarify:
I liked a lot of WotC play aids. They were nearly all of decent quality. But people lost their minds about the gall of WotC to sell a deck of Ranger Power cards or cards with magical weapons/armor, etc.
Stuff that 5e is doing and more, but this time there's no outcry.
I guess its more of a critique of the community than WotC (for once).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't the "buy this book for more options" been a thing for a lot longer than 4e?
Sort of.
They've always had splats for more options, but in general you could always just copy (copier or by hand) a paragraph to a page, maybe two, and have what you wanted from the splat. Everything you need to run a 3.5e fighter from level 1-20 will fit on like 3 pages, including your most popular feats. Do a cleric/wizard and you maybe add two pages that depending your spells and how verbose their descriptions are.
For a 4e class, its about 13 pages of content to go from 1-30 just in the PHB and that ignores feats, etc. Plus with all the keywords, its more than you really want to copy by hand. In the expasions, each class gets another 10ish pages of content plus some class options. This is more than you're going to want to just write out, especially since you need to get the keywords.
5e subclasses are a bit in between. From what I saw there too much content to just write down some quick notes.
Pre-5e also usually had options books - "but this book to pad out the PHB with new shit". Like 4e had The "X Power" books - martial power had options for all the martial classes. Divine for divine classes, etc.
From what I remember, 5e likes to hide their subclasses in settings books. So you maybe get a one or two subclasses and a bunch of shit you may or may not want. 4e only did this with (iirc) Necormancer/open grave.
