Favourite D&D edition that’s not 5E

JustinCase said:

Interesting that 4e seems to be (slightly) in the lead in the poll. It's not my cup of tea; I was certain that 3.x would far outpace the others. My own vote is 3.5 although I'm almost completely over to 5e these days.
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Well, there is a PF forum. I suspect if you put this poll up there you might see the result you'd expect.

BTW, I'm curious why you play 5e rather than 3.5 or PF?

TwoSix said:

Can't agree with that; I'd argue the contingent that likes both 4e and 5e is larger than the contingent that only likes 4e.

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Not to mention liking 4e and some prior editions (I was a straight-up 4venger, but I'm also one of those old guys for whom nothing will ever match what I had with 1e, for instance - and more on that below, since you bring it up...).

I like pretty much every edition except 1e, the 1e books always seemed kinda ugly to me, and I never understood why people would go back and play 1e when 2e was right there.

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THE biggest reason for preferring one older edition is that it's the edition you started with. It's just a powerful emotional connection, I guess.

The 1e books graphic design elements were, well, ingenuous, they evinced the enthusiasm-over-experience development of the early game (many early RPGs, in fact). I got the impression that everyone involved in rolling out a 1e book was prettymuch a fan of the game. So it was a sort of charming amateurism, for me, and one I still like seeing, now and then, in some indie RPGs.

Mechanically, 2e didn't change 1e much, so you could - and I often did - go ahead and play 2e because it was there, often, I'd be playing a character that I started in 1e, for that matter. At first. But as the system bloated it became, IDK, less familiar, not worth the effort, more and more clear that TSR was just churning books out to move product? Plus, I'd never been big into setting material, and 2e pushed out so much for so many settings, so hard. It was the only edition of D&D to just outright lose my interest (though I certainly never hated it).

Tony Vargas said:

Well, there is a PF forum. I suspect if you put this poll up there you might see the result you'd expect.

BTW, I'm curious why you play 5e rather than 3.5 or PF?

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You could be very right about that.

I like 5e better; it’s simpler and easier to explain to newbies (and I play with newbies often). But also it feels, on average, more balanced than the edition that ended with “use the book of nine swords or be hopelessly outclassed”.

Hard choice between BECMI (my nostalgia fave) and 3.5 (my favorite for tinkering and creating new stuff). I went with 3.5 but it was close.

Yaarel said:

I’m curious, what does 3e have for you that 5e lacks?

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1. Lots of character customization options, if you're into that sort of thing.

2. Unified character creation and advancement rules, which make it just as easy to build an NPC or a monster as it does to make a PC.

3. The possibility of describing damage as largely physical, such that you can still feel it the next day.

Tony Vargas said:

THE biggest reason for preferring one older edition is that it's the edition you started with. It's just a powerful emotional connection, I guess.

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Oh, absolutely. I get it NOW, but at the time (mid-1990s) not moving over to 2e didn't really make sense to me. But I have that same nostalgic connection to 2e, and its many supplements and settings. I even liked Skills and Powers!

For me 3e to play in, 4e to DM

TwoSix said:

Oh, absolutely. I get it NOW, but at the time (mid-1990s) not moving over to 2e didn't really make sense to me. But I have that same nostalgic connection to 2e, and its many supplements and settings. I even liked Skills and Powers!

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For me, I was irked by some of of 2e's changes, but my group ended up running a hybrid of 1e and 2e.

I voted for 4e. I'm still considering making a hack of 4e that simply shares some simple powers within a role or power source to simplify the power list (delete effective duplicates), and put in bounded accuracy instead of the number ramping, and block most static bonus stacking.

IMO, those things, and enemy HP, are the only major problems with 4e.

billd91 said:

Lots of selective memory in this post.

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No kidding. I'm not going to argue, because Tony was part of those conversations, so to take the position he's taken on this lets me know there's no point, because I won't have to spend days looking up old forum posts to show things everyone else here already knows, and since he knows it too but still is disagreeing, then what's the point? No amount of evidence would change a person's mind if they already know now but still argue a false position. Those of us around back in 2012/13 are more than aware of the number of 4e fans who were very upset and engaged in edition warring. One popular unnamed rpg forum that had their mod staff all be unapologetic 4e fans who encouraged edition warring against any other edition but banned you if you criticized 4e just about blew up in indignation and fury when WoTC announced another edition. Posts were all over the place by 4e fans who said WoTC betrayed them. Most warlord threads to this day turn into edition warring pretty quickly. How many times did how many people keep saying "I get it, you hate 5e, so why do you keep posting over and over about how much you hate it on a 5e forum?" How many times did how many people say "WoTC isn't fracturing the player base, you still have your books and can still play 4e, right?"

That lasted for years, and still occasionally comes up. Just because it's not as bad as it once was doesn't mean it didn't happen and 4e fans were the most willing to accept 5e. That's rubbish. More likely, it's not as bad because people who said they hated 5e and would try to sabotage WoTC no longer post here (like Halloween Jack, Chocolate something or other, and Polar something off the top of my head). I don't think fans of any edition are more willing or accepting of 5e than any other. Maybe the OSR fans because they've gone so long being officially unsupported that they had no expectations of being officially back in the mix so to them, after ignoring 3e and 4e (literally over a decade), what would one new edition mean? We all long ago came to the acceptance that we'd just stick with our current stuff. Something 3e fans were getting used to, and 4e fans had a hard time dealing with because they never dealt with it before. But anyway, yeah, I don't need to tell anyone that there was plenty of edition warring and anger back in 2012-2014 from 4e fans. Which makes them like 1e fans in 1989, TSR fans in 2000, and 3e fans in 2008. Big shocker. (that's sarcasm). I'm guessing it will be the same for 5e fans when 6e comes out.

But I will link to one post, because I think it turned out to be pretty prophetic of the discussion that followed, made by [MENTION=7006]DEFCON 1[/MENTION] back in 2013, specifically:

"Player in Nebraska today: "If Next doesn't include the Warlord as a class, then I'm not switching to the game when it comes out!!! They've lost me as a customer!"

Cut to same player 3 years from now: "I can't find anyone to play non-Essentials 4E with me in my area!"

*Edit
Although, I did chuckle at this post. Not to pick on derron, because I've been wrong on my predictions as well, but it's pretty funny in hindsite:

"5E will fail pretty hard imo.

To get people to convert (and ignoring the people who always play the newest edition) 5E has to be an improvement over what the people play now. And it is imo pretty obvious that what 3E, PF and 4E players consider improvement is most of the time diametrically opposed.
Also with all their "game to unite editions" marketing going on 5E seems to go more for a "It is not as quite bad as the edition you do not like" feeling which will please no one.

I would be surprised if 5E even makes the same money as 4E did, let alone what Hasbro expects from it to let it live."