I personally have only ever played 5e (being a young and recent player, in the past 3 years). However, I know a lot of people enjoy earlier editions, either from nostalgia, or because they enjoy a certain system. I'd like to hear your reasoning on why the edition you play is your favorite.
Here are the ones I hear mentioned most often:
1e (red box I think its called)
2e or Advanced DnD (AD&D for short)
I don't hear 3e mentioned much but I hear a lot about the reforms of 3.5
I usually only hear bad about 4, but I'd like to know why
obviously 5e is our modern version, but if you've played 5e and another system, I'd like to know your thoughts as well
So I think the big reason why people hated 4th is the powers system. All classes felt the same in the sense that you had minor powers, at will powers, encounter powers, sustain, etc. All classes had these. So the fighter felt the same as the Warlock and Cleric.
There was just also too much damn bloat. In its seven year timespan, you had 3 PHBs, 2 DMGs, 3 Monster Manuals, and 29 player supplement books. That's not an exaggeration.
I think I have more fondness for AD&D 2nd, but I have played much more 5th than it, and I have more fun playing 5th than AD&D 2nd.
So I think the big reason why people hated 4th is the powers system. All classes felt the same in the sense that you had minor powers, at will powers, encounter powers, sustain, etc. All classes had these. So the fighter felt the same as the Warlock and Cleric.
There was just also too much damn bloat. In its seven year timespan, you had 3 PHBs, 2 DMGs, 3 Monster Manuals, and 29 player supplement books. That's not an exaggeration.
I think I have more fondness for AD&D 2nd, but I have played much more 5th than it, and I have more fun playing 5th than AD&D 2nd.
Yeah, I knew 4 had a lot of problems. I think 5e has condensed it a lot
All editions had/have good things going for them, so it's really hard to say. Barely played any 1st edition, didn't come across D&D until 2nd came along. I played a lot of 2nd ed, enjoyed it a lot too, but you couldn't pay me to play with that ruleset now (but I still love the setting material from that time). Third might be my favourite, because it's the edition I arguably played and ran the most, because it was the revival edition after the TSR era, because - despite all the flaws in implementation - it was the first edition that felt like a proper attempt at realizing a fully fledged system, complete ruleset, because the WotC forums were a fantastic community for me in the early nillies. From a DM POV, 4th was actually pretty darn good; I understand the resistance against it (was there for the edition war) due to what was dubbed the video game aesthetic, but it worked and the powers system was - if you looked past the superficial - not all that samey-samey across the classes. You really needed a battle mat, theatre of the mind was not truly an option, but other than that 4th edition was really easy to run IMO. Fifth is a throwback to 3rd only simplified and more streamlined, which makes it something of a throwback to TSR too in some ways; the best part about it for me is, without a doubt, that it's now something of a golden era. D&D has become a mainstream game.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I played them all, and the current is my favorite. The boxes were too simple, 1e was fun while we were playing it, but now looking back, it was unnecessarily complex. 2e was better than 1 in terms of complexity, but still fiddly. Also, those first two editions were too restrictive in what kind of character you could make. (Only a human could be a paladin. Dwarves couldn't be magic users, etc.) Finally, in 3e, we got the unified d20 mechanic, which was a bit of genius, really. Also, the developers realized that the game actually relied on probability in a way that could be mathematically expressed, and designed the game accordingly. (For example, to me it seems like early editions were based more on what the designers felt would be a good armor class for a given monster, as opposed to now where they say, a level x character should be able to hit this creature 55 percent of the time, so where do we need to put its AC to make that happen.) I do miss the customization of 3.x, but I don't miss how easy it was to accidentally make a really weak character, or intentionally make an infinitely powerful character (look up pun-pun some time). I loved 4 at first, but the more I played it, the more every character felt the same to me. I know, looking back, that they were not the same, but while it was happening, it felt like it. For me, 5 strikes a balance between customization, getting the math right, and giving you some meaningful choices without too many choices.
And not to get too much into a history lesson for the OP, the very first was the white box (actually, I never played the white box, so I guess I lied up above). The red box was was basic D&D (there were actually several other boxes as you leveled up, which created the acronym BECMI), and then there was Advanced D&D, or AD&D, which was out at the same time. D&D was like, if you're an elf, that was also your class, it was basically a hybrid of fighter and magic user. AD&D where was where class and race got split up into two separate things, and a bunch more classes, races and rules crunch got added. AD&D is usually considered first edition. When 2e rolled around, they killed the line of boxes, and dropped the word "advanced" reasoning that without the boxes, there was nothing to be advanced from, and because they thought the word advanced scared off new players.
In popular opinion, do you guys think 5e is the better version? I know a lot of people maybe enjoy other versions more, but as far as mechanics, and advanced game design, is 5e the best?
I guess my question is, for players like me who have only known 5e, is another version worth even going back to? (especially in terms of cost)
In popular opinion, do you guys think 5e is the better version? I know a lot of people maybe enjoy other versions more, but as far as mechanics, and advanced game design, is 5e the best?
I guess my question is, for players like me who have only known 5e, is another version worth even going back to? (especially in terms of cost)
I wouldn't. The learning curve is too steep. I think there are a lot of lovely modules and adventures that a DM if they wanted to take the time to convert could be explored that way from a lore standpoint, but I wouldn't.
Not only that, but the game was written very differently back then. 1e up to 3rd, monsters were MONSTERS. There were no talking to goblins, you just killed them. Evil characters were evil and very very rarely redeemable in the published material. It's very tropey. It's all we had back then and we absolutely loved it, but I do like what the game has done to evolve and shift to show that even evil characters have motivations beyond just "kill everyone no witnesses".
I guess my question is, for players like me who have only known 5e, is another version worth even going back to? (especially in terms of cost)
The only reason to look back as someone who's only known 5e is to just see, study, and understand how we got where we are.
I started with the Red Box after saving all my allowance for months. I moved on to 1e (AD&D) and every edition after.
Going back as a form of game study and exploring the different design theories can be a lot of fun and interesting.
Going back to play/run games is harder. Much harder. The further back you go the fewer people you are going to find that actually want to play the old rules. While there are adherents, including people who've played the same rules for 40 years - most of us either moved along as the editions happened (I'm one of those), or only know 5e.
I liked 4e a lot, I'll try to be brief on what I felt were the strong points.
A lot of people didn't like that everyone got powers. I thought this was amazing for martial classes. You didn't just hit things the same way every time like an idiot, you had techniques that did things. Anyone who thought a fighter's trip attack "felt the same" as a wizard's chromatic orb was focusing way too much on the rules and not enough on the actual play. I guess people actually want some classes to have fewer options and less to do in combat, but I don't get it.
Another common complaint, feature bloat, was also a plus for me and pushed against the "everything feels the same" complaint. It was a lot of material to go through, but modern technology makes that trivial with filtered searches. The end result was a very high level of customization which, combined with the hybrid and multiclass options, resulted in some very unique builds. Complaints about too much material always confuses me because any table can limit their source material, so it comes off to me not as "I don't want to use this," but rather "I don't want anyone else to use this."
On the DM side, 4e was much easier for me. The way monsters worked was much more intuitive than the annoyingly obscure CR system. Your baseline encounter for a party of 4 would be 4 standard monsters of the party's level. You could level anything up or down with some simple math, you had elite monsters that replaced 2 standard monsters and solo monsters that were worth 4 standards. No exp math with arbitrary multipliers needed to determine difficulty.
The monsters themselves all had unique, evocative powers and abilities that made them stand out. 5e's simplification of monsters does lighten the DM's mental load, but results in things like 90% of beast type creatures basically being cut-and-pastes of each other. Talk about everything feeling the same.
4e also had really great cosmology and a well-defined pantheon in their default setting, laid out from day 1 in the PHB and DMG. This has largely been ignored in 5e and I'm not really sure why. Having a default shared set of relationships between the planes and conflicts amongst the gods made it much easier to set up adventures without a whole lot of exposition.
4e certainly wasn't without flaws and I don't mean to go on a rant. I just don't think it gets the credit it deserves for all the good ideas it had. There's more 4e in 5e that many people realize or would like to admit. I have come around to liking 5e as it has added more options over time, but honestly I'd be happy still playing 4e if it had the same kind of online support and community that 5e does. I guess that's how a lot of people felt with 3.5 when 4 came out.
1e had a nice "choose your own adventure" style intro for players in the BECMI red box that I think would be helpful to reintroduce into D&D to help players get their bearings
2e had great campaign setting box sets (my favorites being Planescape and Forgotten Realms)
3e had tons of customization options, good lore books, and Eberron
4e had the best DMGs I've read, easier encounter/monster building
5e has nice, streamlined rules and it hasn't flooded the market with too much material (although I wouldn't mind getting say 6 releases a year)
I can't comment on OD&D/0e because I haven't read any of the materials for that edition, but I did enjoy reading the Designers & Dragons book series to learn more about the history of TSR and Wizards of the Coast. Those books go into some of the thinking behind the edition changes and some of the fan reaction to those changes.
Depends on what you want. First and second we’re the most free flow and very very hard core…. No max hit points at level 1 different Xp curves ect. 3 and 3.5 were anything you want you got it. Weather dragon god lich or demon and angle there was a source book for you. Flexibility was king it also had the best world building tools for dms and the wealth by level is a tool I wish dnd would bring back in 5th. 4th was a great table top fighting game but a terrible dnd game. 5th feels a lot like earlier editions but has a similar problem that it off loads a lot of work to the dm.
4th was a great table top fighting game but a terrible dnd game.
Don't want to derail the thread and everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I honestly don't see that. I don't see anything essential to D&D you can't do properly in 4E.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
4th was a great table top fighting game but a terrible dnd game.
Don't want to derail the thread and everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I honestly don't see that. I don't see anything essential to D&D you can't do properly in 4E.
Illusions and charms.
Which 4E has? And which can be homebrewed as needed?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I personally have only ever played 5e (being a young and recent player, in the past 3 years). However, I know a lot of people enjoy earlier editions, either from nostalgia, or because they enjoy a certain system. I'd like to hear your reasoning on why the edition you play is your favorite.
Here are the ones I hear mentioned most often:
1e (red box I think its called)
2e or Advanced DnD (AD&D for short)
I don't hear 3e mentioned much but I hear a lot about the reforms of 3.5
I usually only hear bad about 4, but I'd like to know why
obviously 5e is our modern version, but if you've played 5e and another system, I'd like to know your thoughts as well
Updog
So I think the big reason why people hated 4th is the powers system. All classes felt the same in the sense that you had minor powers, at will powers, encounter powers, sustain, etc. All classes had these. So the fighter felt the same as the Warlock and Cleric.
There was just also too much damn bloat. In its seven year timespan, you had 3 PHBs, 2 DMGs, 3 Monster Manuals, and 29 player supplement books. That's not an exaggeration.
I think I have more fondness for AD&D 2nd, but I have played much more 5th than it, and I have more fun playing 5th than AD&D 2nd.
Yeah, I knew 4 had a lot of problems. I think 5e has condensed it a lot
Updog
All editions had/have good things going for them, so it's really hard to say. Barely played any 1st edition, didn't come across D&D until 2nd came along. I played a lot of 2nd ed, enjoyed it a lot too, but you couldn't pay me to play with that ruleset now (but I still love the setting material from that time). Third might be my favourite, because it's the edition I arguably played and ran the most, because it was the revival edition after the TSR era, because - despite all the flaws in implementation - it was the first edition that felt like a proper attempt at realizing a fully fledged system, complete ruleset, because the WotC forums were a fantastic community for me in the early nillies. From a DM POV, 4th was actually pretty darn good; I understand the resistance against it (was there for the edition war) due to what was dubbed the video game aesthetic, but it worked and the powers system was - if you looked past the superficial - not all that samey-samey across the classes. You really needed a battle mat, theatre of the mind was not truly an option, but other than that 4th edition was really easy to run IMO. Fifth is a throwback to 3rd only simplified and more streamlined, which makes it something of a throwback to TSR too in some ways; the best part about it for me is, without a doubt, that it's now something of a golden era. D&D has become a mainstream game.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I played them all, and the current is my favorite. The boxes were too simple, 1e was fun while we were playing it, but now looking back, it was unnecessarily complex. 2e was better than 1 in terms of complexity, but still fiddly. Also, those first two editions were too restrictive in what kind of character you could make. (Only a human could be a paladin. Dwarves couldn't be magic users, etc.) Finally, in 3e, we got the unified d20 mechanic, which was a bit of genius, really. Also, the developers realized that the game actually relied on probability in a way that could be mathematically expressed, and designed the game accordingly. (For example, to me it seems like early editions were based more on what the designers felt would be a good armor class for a given monster, as opposed to now where they say, a level x character should be able to hit this creature 55 percent of the time, so where do we need to put its AC to make that happen.) I do miss the customization of 3.x, but I don't miss how easy it was to accidentally make a really weak character, or intentionally make an infinitely powerful character (look up pun-pun some time). I loved 4 at first, but the more I played it, the more every character felt the same to me. I know, looking back, that they were not the same, but while it was happening, it felt like it. For me, 5 strikes a balance between customization, getting the math right, and giving you some meaningful choices without too many choices.
And not to get too much into a history lesson for the OP, the very first was the white box (actually, I never played the white box, so I guess I lied up above). The red box was was basic D&D (there were actually several other boxes as you leveled up, which created the acronym BECMI), and then there was Advanced D&D, or AD&D, which was out at the same time. D&D was like, if you're an elf, that was also your class, it was basically a hybrid of fighter and magic user. AD&D where was where class and race got split up into two separate things, and a bunch more classes, races and rules crunch got added. AD&D is usually considered first edition. When 2e rolled around, they killed the line of boxes, and dropped the word "advanced" reasoning that without the boxes, there was nothing to be advanced from, and because they thought the word advanced scared off new players.
In popular opinion, do you guys think 5e is the better version? I know a lot of people maybe enjoy other versions more, but as far as mechanics, and advanced game design, is 5e the best?
I guess my question is, for players like me who have only known 5e, is another version worth even going back to? (especially in terms of cost)
Updog
I wouldn't. The learning curve is too steep. I think there are a lot of lovely modules and adventures that a DM if they wanted to take the time to convert could be explored that way from a lore standpoint, but I wouldn't.
Not only that, but the game was written very differently back then. 1e up to 3rd, monsters were MONSTERS. There were no talking to goblins, you just killed them. Evil characters were evil and very very rarely redeemable in the published material. It's very tropey. It's all we had back then and we absolutely loved it, but I do like what the game has done to evolve and shift to show that even evil characters have motivations beyond just "kill everyone no witnesses".
I never really thought about the worldbuilding and creative advancements. I definitely enjoy the amount of creativity 5e allows for
Updog
I wouldn't, unless you were joining an established group that was playing another edition already. Otherwise I don't think it's worth the bother.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
The only reason to look back as someone who's only known 5e is to just see, study, and understand how we got where we are.
I started with the Red Box after saving all my allowance for months. I moved on to 1e (AD&D) and every edition after.
Going back as a form of game study and exploring the different design theories can be a lot of fun and interesting.
Going back to play/run games is harder. Much harder. The further back you go the fewer people you are going to find that actually want to play the old rules. While there are adherents, including people who've played the same rules for 40 years - most of us either moved along as the editions happened (I'm one of those), or only know 5e.
I liked 4e a lot, I'll try to be brief on what I felt were the strong points.
A lot of people didn't like that everyone got powers. I thought this was amazing for martial classes. You didn't just hit things the same way every time like an idiot, you had techniques that did things. Anyone who thought a fighter's trip attack "felt the same" as a wizard's chromatic orb was focusing way too much on the rules and not enough on the actual play. I guess people actually want some classes to have fewer options and less to do in combat, but I don't get it.
Another common complaint, feature bloat, was also a plus for me and pushed against the "everything feels the same" complaint. It was a lot of material to go through, but modern technology makes that trivial with filtered searches. The end result was a very high level of customization which, combined with the hybrid and multiclass options, resulted in some very unique builds. Complaints about too much material always confuses me because any table can limit their source material, so it comes off to me not as "I don't want to use this," but rather "I don't want anyone else to use this."
On the DM side, 4e was much easier for me. The way monsters worked was much more intuitive than the annoyingly obscure CR system. Your baseline encounter for a party of 4 would be 4 standard monsters of the party's level. You could level anything up or down with some simple math, you had elite monsters that replaced 2 standard monsters and solo monsters that were worth 4 standards. No exp math with arbitrary multipliers needed to determine difficulty.
The monsters themselves all had unique, evocative powers and abilities that made them stand out. 5e's simplification of monsters does lighten the DM's mental load, but results in things like 90% of beast type creatures basically being cut-and-pastes of each other. Talk about everything feeling the same.
4e also had really great cosmology and a well-defined pantheon in their default setting, laid out from day 1 in the PHB and DMG. This has largely been ignored in 5e and I'm not really sure why. Having a default shared set of relationships between the planes and conflicts amongst the gods made it much easier to set up adventures without a whole lot of exposition.
4e certainly wasn't without flaws and I don't mean to go on a rant. I just don't think it gets the credit it deserves for all the good ideas it had. There's more 4e in 5e that many people realize or would like to admit. I have come around to liking 5e as it has added more options over time, but honestly I'd be happy still playing 4e if it had the same kind of online support and community that 5e does. I guess that's how a lot of people felt with 3.5 when 4 came out.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
There are cool things about every edition like...
I can't comment on OD&D/0e because I haven't read any of the materials for that edition, but I did enjoy reading the Designers & Dragons book series to learn more about the history of TSR and Wizards of the Coast. Those books go into some of the thinking behind the edition changes and some of the fan reaction to those changes.
Depends on what you want. First and second we’re the most free flow and very very hard core…. No max hit points at level 1 different Xp curves ect. 3 and 3.5 were anything you want you got it. Weather dragon god lich or demon and angle there was a source book for you. Flexibility was king it also had the best world building tools for dms and the wealth by level is a tool I wish dnd would bring back in 5th. 4th was a great table top fighting game but a terrible dnd game. 5th feels a lot like earlier editions but has a similar problem that it off loads a lot of work to the dm.
Don't want to derail the thread and everyone's entitled to their opinion, but I honestly don't see that. I don't see anything essential to D&D you can't do properly in 4E.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I played 3.5 the most and never made it past that didnt like the 4th and am willing to try the current. but my love is for 3.5.
Which 4E has? And which can be homebrewed as needed?
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].