Been reading a lot of topics lately on how limiting 5e is for players and in making characters for their games. They often mention how 3.5e and Pathfinder allow for much more customized play. What I never see is how the game is for dungeon masters. So I'm wondering which edition or game is easiest or most enjoyable to play as a DM?
“Easiest” and “Most Enjoyable” are not necessarily interrelated. I would say this one is probably the “easiest” to DM in my experience. The “most enjoyable” has less to do with anything mechanical and more to do with the group having the most fun.
I completely agree with IamSposta. Each edition of D&D has been tailored to be easier for new players to grasp and for DMs to run (with the exception of 4e, which the community agrees, never happened). The amount of fun you have is not related to how easy it is to play, it’s all about how and with who you play.
I disagree about 5E being limited for players, while there are only what 10 classes there are loads of races, and each class has a myriad of subclasses. Add in feats and you get a wide range of customizable options.
There is a myth that Pathfinder is far more varied and has far more options, on paper yes that is true but in reality there are set builds that players take because they are most optimized. To my mind Pathfinder is all about RAW and adding detail through rules if you play parhfinder you probably like lots of mechanics and dice rolls and rules for all sorts of situations.
To me 5E as far as DnD/pathfinder games go is probably the most accessible to new players and, most important for me as a dm, the best in terms of being able to structure a story and let my players have a freedom to do whatever they want in game. There are different systems out there, seven seas and the other games that have the roll and keep mechanic can make for more cinematic gameplay mechanically but I am perfectly able to describe a DnD combat in the same ways.
There will be those who have there own favored systems but I think dnd 5E for all its faults is about as balanced as you can get in terms of a D20 system and balancing betwen rules and story telling capacity.
3.5 and Pathfinder appeal to a certain type of player/DM. If you like that much micro management, then you'll probably have more fun playing the older version. 5e is really easy to DM. I personally never wanted to DM prior to 5e because it just looked like too much of a hassle.
This edition there are currently 13 official classes, and the Blood Hunter which is technically Homebrew, but the closest thing to a “semi-official” Homebrewed class that there is.
I'm gonna put a plug in for old school Basic/Expert.
There's enough there that it is, for real, D&D, but it's simplified enough that you don't have all the variables of AD&D to deal with. (And keep in mind that all editions, 2-5, after this are really editions of AD&D... basic/expert was effectively tossed by the time the later editions started coming out). And as an added bonus, there are tons of B/E modules to choose from... the B series alone had 12 modules, X series has 13, M has 5 or 6, and the world (Mystara) is pretty solid for gameplay without being overly complex. There is enough there to play for a long while, and get new DMs used to everything without being overwhelming. And with the later books they add more stuff gradually, so again, it is not too overwhelming. One can easily start with the Basic set, and play for months just with that, then if you like it add the Expert set, and probably play for a couple of years just with that, and then move on to the higher sets if you want. There are some pretty enjoyable modules in there too --X2: Castle Amber was probably my all-time favorite adventure of D&D. It was strange, yes, but super fun and cool. (Though I don't know how much of it was the DM modding it, and how much was written in the module.)
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
AD&D/1E was the easiest to DM and roll up PCs. Easy to DM because the rules were so massive that your answer was "Because I am the DM and know something you don't know". But 5E is the easiest to acquire "Knowledge mastery" because the rules don't conflict too much. Information is not buried in bad edited books. To pile on what Biowizard states. 5E has greater module/adventure support than 1E. Just look at the Adventure League support of the books. Then add the con content.
I hope you were making a joke. The # of times I have tried to find basic information in the books and utterly failed to do so for long minutes is too high to count. The books, especially the DMG, are *horribly* organized in 5e. 1e was much better at that.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I hope you were making a joke. The # of times I have tried to find basic information in the books and utterly failed to do so for long minutes is too high to count. The books, especially the DMG, are *horribly* organized in 5e. 1e was much better at that.
The 1E DMG had information scattered over multiple places and include stuff which should have been in the players, or monster manual. The only reason I could find stuff quickly in 1E is I fell asleep reading the 1E books. AKA I memorized it or got close enough. While the layout to 5E DMG is not to my liking, I can generally find what I want in under 4 minutes.
I hope you were making a joke. The # of times I have tried to find basic information in the books and utterly failed to do so for long minutes is too high to count. The books, especially the DMG, are *horribly* organized in 5e. 1e was much better at that.
The 1E DMG had information scattered over multiple places and include stuff which should have been in the players, or monster manual. The only reason I could find stuff quickly in 1E is I fell asleep reading the 1E books. AKA I memorized it or got close enough. While the layout to 5E DMG is not to my liking, I can generally find what I want in under 4 minutes.
I find much the same I can place my hands on what I am looking for quickly and you have indexes in most books.
I miss basic d&d, still got my red box set. It was far the easiest to run. 2nd edition d&d was possibly my favorite edition to run. It had the advantage of having so many different settings that as a dm it was easy to find what your players wanted to play with little to no effort.
Yeah, 4e was super simple to run. Some of that was the encounter building system, some of that was a lot more normalization of PC capabilities so you were less likely to be ambushed by weird interactions, some of that was that an awful lot of "I cast destroy plot" spells got nerfed into oblivion. I would note that many of the complaints about 4e were directly related to those changes. Fundamentally, 4e was designed to be a tactical board game with a bit of RP to link the fights together, and it was well designed for that purpose... which was not necessarily what people wanted to play.
I got stared with the 1st edition of AD&D. I never got a chance to try any of the other versions of the game. The Player's Handbook was full of horrible restrictions. Alignment Restrictions. Score Restrictions, special rules for Strength. Intended or not the character generation rules encouraged cheating, because if you had your heart set on a specific class, you had to pass all the checks. While Gary Gygax brought us a wonderful hobby, his attitude was that it was his own personal game, and anything he had to say was Official Rules and should be treated so in all games. He had ideas, some good, some terrible.
Each version of the rules that came along the pipe was the same, they had great ideas, but people kept ignoring any of the restrictions, and they always wanted to try the latest and greatest. That's human nature.
I never got to try 4th edition. I purchased a 3 book set, a Player's Handbook, a Monster Manual, and a Dungeon Master's Guide, and I didn't like anything about it. It said I needed what was in effect a spellbook, a stack of notecards for each of my powers. There were a huge number of new classes, and what really upset me was that they didn't include Bards, one of my favorite classes. They said it would come in a book. Sooner or later. Great. No way of knowing when, or which book.
5th edition took pretty much all of the restrictions away, gave me that old school feeling again, and those simple and streamlined rules may be complicated, but you can't say they don't try to cover things in depth. The Sage Advice Compendium gives you an idea what they probably meant, there is errata, it's rare, but it's there, and with the subclass system, you end up with more choices than you had in 4th edition.
So I've got to say, 5th edition is the best one I've ever played.
…Intended or not the character generation rules encouraged cheating, because if you had your heart set on a specific class, you had to pass all the checks….
This edition is the most “play what your heart desires” edition I have played. (I went 2e-3/3.5–>5e myself.)
You know how the current PHB is set up Race->Class->Ability Scores->etc., but the old 1e/2e books were set up Ability Scores->Race->Class->etc? They set the books up in the intended order of operations. Back then we weren’t instructed to “create a character,” the books held instructions on how to “generate characters.” Back in 2e, the point wasn’t to set your heart on a specific class and play that character. It was intended to roll our stats in order Str-Cha, then pick a race that worked with those scores, and then select the best class that worked best with whatever character we were generating.
It was designed in such a way as to go quick because replacement characters were required constantly for the first several levels. It felt like 65-70% of all PCs died by 3rd level, another 15-20% died by 5th and another 5-10% died by 7th. It was the 5-15% that survived past 7th we were intended to fall in love with. The other 85-95% that didn’t were the “failure to thrives.” Remember how the ages chart we were sposta roll on skewed young? (Many human adventurers were in the 16-18 range for example.)
The theory was that we don’t get to choose who we are, it’s luck of genetics. And then we hit adulthood, and set off on our careers. There was an IRL theory that people would naturally gravitate towards whatever occupation best suited our particular abilities and attributes. (It was 🐴💩, but people believed it.) Anyway, Remember how there were no backgrounds, backstories were mostly just parents siblings, home life, significant childhood events, all the classes got their signature features at, like, levels 7 & 9, but PCs could hit level 36 or something? Levels 1-6 were us playing through the sorts of stuff that goes in backstories now, a signature features happen at 3rd level and their capped @20. The first half dozen levels were to weed out the ones that weren’t strong enough to survive in the wild.
My old group back then used to generate 3 PCs per player at a time and and have another 2 ready to go by the end of the first session of the campaign so when 2/3 of our PCs died we had backups ready to go. Another 1 or 2 would die and we’d “hire more “reinforcements.”
There was nothing wrong with fudging so you could finally be a Paladin or whatever, we all did it.
Been reading a lot of topics lately on how limiting 5e is for players and in making characters for their games. They often mention how 3.5e and Pathfinder allow for much more customized play. What I never see is how the game is for dungeon masters. So I'm wondering which edition or game is easiest or most enjoyable to play as a DM?
1 shot dungeon master
“Easiest” and “Most Enjoyable” are not necessarily interrelated. I would say this one is probably the “easiest” to DM in my experience. The “most enjoyable” has less to do with anything mechanical and more to do with the group having the most fun.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
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I completely agree with IamSposta. Each edition of D&D has been tailored to be easier for new players to grasp and for DMs to run (with the exception of 4e, which the community agrees, never happened). The amount of fun you have is not related to how easy it is to play, it’s all about how and with who you play.
I disagree about 5E being limited for players, while there are only what 10 classes there are loads of races, and each class has a myriad of subclasses. Add in feats and you get a wide range of customizable options.
There is a myth that Pathfinder is far more varied and has far more options, on paper yes that is true but in reality there are set builds that players take because they are most optimized. To my mind Pathfinder is all about RAW and adding detail through rules if you play parhfinder you probably like lots of mechanics and dice rolls and rules for all sorts of situations.
To me 5E as far as DnD/pathfinder games go is probably the most accessible to new players and, most important for me as a dm, the best in terms of being able to structure a story and let my players have a freedom to do whatever they want in game. There are different systems out there, seven seas and the other games that have the roll and keep mechanic can make for more cinematic gameplay mechanically but I am perfectly able to describe a DnD combat in the same ways.
There will be those who have there own favored systems but I think dnd 5E for all its faults is about as balanced as you can get in terms of a D20 system and balancing betwen rules and story telling capacity.
3.5 and Pathfinder appeal to a certain type of player/DM. If you like that much micro management, then you'll probably have more fun playing the older version. 5e is really easy to DM. I personally never wanted to DM prior to 5e because it just looked like too much of a hassle.
This edition there are currently 13 official classes, and the Blood Hunter which is technically Homebrew, but the closest thing to a “semi-official” Homebrewed class that there is.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
I'm gonna put a plug in for old school Basic/Expert.
There's enough there that it is, for real, D&D, but it's simplified enough that you don't have all the variables of AD&D to deal with. (And keep in mind that all editions, 2-5, after this are really editions of AD&D... basic/expert was effectively tossed by the time the later editions started coming out). And as an added bonus, there are tons of B/E modules to choose from... the B series alone had 12 modules, X series has 13, M has 5 or 6, and the world (Mystara) is pretty solid for gameplay without being overly complex. There is enough there to play for a long while, and get new DMs used to everything without being overwhelming. And with the later books they add more stuff gradually, so again, it is not too overwhelming. One can easily start with the Basic set, and play for months just with that, then if you like it add the Expert set, and probably play for a couple of years just with that, and then move on to the higher sets if you want. There are some pretty enjoyable modules in there too --X2: Castle Amber was probably my all-time favorite adventure of D&D. It was strange, yes, but super fun and cool. (Though I don't know how much of it was the DM modding it, and how much was written in the module.)
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
AD&D/1E was the easiest to DM and roll up PCs. Easy to DM because the rules were so massive that your answer was "Because I am the DM and know something you don't know". But 5E is the easiest to acquire "Knowledge mastery" because the rules don't conflict too much. Information is not buried in bad edited books. To pile on what Biowizard states. 5E has greater module/adventure support than 1E. Just look at the Adventure League support of the books. Then add the con content.
No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming.
HAHAHAHAHAH.
I hope you were making a joke. The # of times I have tried to find basic information in the books and utterly failed to do so for long minutes is too high to count. The books, especially the DMG, are *horribly* organized in 5e. 1e was much better at that.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
The 1E DMG had information scattered over multiple places and include stuff which should have been in the players, or monster manual. The only reason I could find stuff quickly in 1E is I fell asleep reading the 1E books. AKA I memorized it or got close enough. While the layout to 5E DMG is not to my liking, I can generally find what I want in under 4 minutes.
No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming.
4e was dirt simple as a DM. Monsters had a level. Minions were easy-to-kill monsters at their level.
The edition definitely had shortcomings, but it was cake to run.
I find much the same I can place my hands on what I am looking for quickly and you have indexes in most books.
I miss basic d&d, still got my red box set. It was far the easiest to run. 2nd edition d&d was possibly my favorite edition to run. It had the advantage of having so many different settings that as a dm it was easy to find what your players wanted to play with little to no effort.
100% agree. It certainly wasn't my favorite edition, but the encounter building was simple and elegant.
Yeah, 4e was super simple to run. Some of that was the encounter building system, some of that was a lot more normalization of PC capabilities so you were less likely to be ambushed by weird interactions, some of that was that an awful lot of "I cast destroy plot" spells got nerfed into oblivion. I would note that many of the complaints about 4e were directly related to those changes. Fundamentally, 4e was designed to be a tactical board game with a bit of RP to link the fights together, and it was well designed for that purpose... which was not necessarily what people wanted to play.
Hahahaha.
I love that. I am going to remember that for later and use it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I got stared with the 1st edition of AD&D. I never got a chance to try any of the other versions of the game. The Player's Handbook was full of horrible restrictions. Alignment Restrictions. Score Restrictions, special rules for Strength. Intended or not the character generation rules encouraged cheating, because if you had your heart set on a specific class, you had to pass all the checks. While Gary Gygax brought us a wonderful hobby, his attitude was that it was his own personal game, and anything he had to say was Official Rules and should be treated so in all games. He had ideas, some good, some terrible.
Each version of the rules that came along the pipe was the same, they had great ideas, but people kept ignoring any of the restrictions, and they always wanted to try the latest and greatest. That's human nature.
I never got to try 4th edition. I purchased a 3 book set, a Player's Handbook, a Monster Manual, and a Dungeon Master's Guide, and I didn't like anything about it. It said I needed what was in effect a spellbook, a stack of notecards for each of my powers. There were a huge number of new classes, and what really upset me was that they didn't include Bards, one of my favorite classes. They said it would come in a book. Sooner or later. Great. No way of knowing when, or which book.
5th edition took pretty much all of the restrictions away, gave me that old school feeling again, and those simple and streamlined rules may be complicated, but you can't say they don't try to cover things in depth. The Sage Advice Compendium gives you an idea what they probably meant, there is errata, it's rare, but it's there, and with the subclass system, you end up with more choices than you had in 4th edition.
So I've got to say, 5th edition is the best one I've ever played.
<Insert clever signature here>
One I stole from one of my players in my last campaign was “I cast advance plot!” Works like a charm no matter who is DMing.
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In the Dungeon Master's Workshop, chapter 9 under Adventuring Options, you will find a system for Plot Points at the bottom of the list.
<Insert clever signature here>
This edition is the most “play what your heart desires” edition I have played. (I went 2e-3/3.5–>5e myself.)
You know how the current PHB is set up Race->Class->Ability Scores->etc., but the old 1e/2e books were set up Ability Scores->Race->Class->etc? They set the books up in the intended order of operations. Back then we weren’t instructed to “create a character,” the books held instructions on how to “generate characters.” Back in 2e, the point wasn’t to set your heart on a specific class and play that character. It was intended to roll our stats in order Str-Cha, then pick a race that worked with those scores, and then select the best class that worked best with whatever character we were generating.
It was designed in such a way as to go quick because replacement characters were required constantly for the first several levels. It felt like 65-70% of all PCs died by 3rd level, another 15-20% died by 5th and another 5-10% died by 7th. It was the 5-15% that survived past 7th we were intended to fall in love with. The other 85-95% that didn’t were the “failure to thrives.” Remember how the ages chart we were sposta roll on skewed young? (Many human adventurers were in the 16-18 range for example.)
The theory was that we don’t get to choose who we are, it’s luck of genetics. And then we hit adulthood, and set off on our careers. There was an IRL theory that people would naturally gravitate towards whatever occupation best suited our particular abilities and attributes. (It was 🐴💩, but people believed it.) Anyway, Remember how there were no backgrounds, backstories were mostly just parents siblings, home life, significant childhood events, all the classes got their signature features at, like, levels 7 & 9, but PCs could hit level 36 or something? Levels 1-6 were us playing through the sorts of stuff that goes in backstories now, a signature features happen at 3rd level and their capped @20. The first half dozen levels were to weed out the ones that weren’t strong enough to survive in the wild.
My old group back then used to generate 3 PCs per player at a time and and have another 2 ready to go by the end of the first session of the campaign so when 2/3 of our PCs died we had backups ready to go. Another 1 or 2 would die and we’d “hire more “reinforcements.”
There was nothing wrong with fudging so you could finally be a Paladin or whatever, we all did it.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting