When did mixing editions become unusual?

Of note there was an explicit need when 4e was designed to create IP that was distinct from that of the d20(ie 3.x era) - due to licensing really, in other words the sharpness of that particular cut off was probably intentional.

AND now that this need is gone

I can very much pull tools and techniques and mechanics from 4e into 5e in some cases without horrid amounts of difficulty. Some need adjustments or have well defined impact desireable or not on 5e when you do them, but that is arguably good thing.

Hint 5e game math is rather similar to 4e divided by 2.

For me personally, I have found been mixing like editions from when I started. I came in right around the 3.0/3.5 timeframe, and therefore started mixing 3.0/3.5 at the start (e.g. 3.25). Since then, and along with Pathfinder, I have begun mixing Pathfinder and 3.5 (something I call 3.625). However, I haven't played any other edition of D&D (can't speak to mixing/not mixing).

For me, I like the framework as presented in 3.x. I have waffled between make it yourself and pull whatever; I tend to do a bit of both. However, I tend to pull from other d20 games, versus pulling from other games period.

pming said:

Hiya!

THAC0 = Back of the 1e DMG where you can see a list, in 'landscape' page mode, of all the MM monsters for quick access so the DM didn't have to open the MM if he was familiar enough with the monster.

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Indeed, THAC0 was back there. But it was also clearly a late bolt-on because it doesn't actually work with the Attack Matrix for Monsters on page 75. THAC0 was a nice innovation but it lacks the repeated 20s on the attack matrices in the actual 1e rules and so was never really a perfect fit in 1st edition.

billd91 said:

Indeed, THAC0 was back there. But it was also clearly a late bolt-on because it doesn't actually work with the Attack Matrix for Monsters on page 75. THAC0 was a nice innovation but it lacks the repeated 20s on the attack matrices in the actual 1e rules and so was never really a perfect fit in 1st edition.

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But in practice, I found that most groups house ruled 20 as an automatic critical hit so the weird 'repeated 20s, then 21...' stuff didn't matter anyway. I don't think I actually played in a game where a 20 wasn't at least an automatic hit, but I did know of one group who used the '6x20, then 21' part of the table.

2e was specifically designed to be backward compatible to 1e, because there was (quite reasonable) worry that you'd anger everyone who was a 1e player and end up splitting the customer base in two. A big part of that involved the fact that the Internet wasn't available for the majority yet. That prevented large amounts of rule information from being disseminated in a format other than new books that needed to be purchased.

So, yes, 3e is where the split occurred, and the Internet is a large part of the reason why it could work.

OverlordOcelot said:

But in practice, I found that most groups house ruled 20 as an automatic critical hit so the weird 'repeated 20s, then 21...' stuff didn't matter anyway. I don't think I actually played in a game where a 20 wasn't at least an automatic hit, but I did know of one group who used the '6x20, then 21' part of the table.

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In practice, the repeated 20's then 21's rule never came up in play anyway.

Monsters which had AC's which were in that range were rare and pretty much never came into play at a time when the PC's would have been forced to use those rules. Conversely, even if PC's managed to get AC's that would have forced monsters into that part of the table, monsters very rarely had any bonuses to hit (much less large ones) and as such questions about whether a modified D20 roll would need to be sufficiently above 20 to hit just were irrelevant. And likewise, if they were relevant then the DM likely wasn't selecting them as relevant foes to face the PCs because it was obvious such weak creatures couldn't threaten such potent PCs.

As such, most tables could simply ignore the existence of those rules as weird edge cases that never really came up in play and they'd be playing exactly the same game as the tables that very much knew about those rules and how they worked but never used them because they were weird edge cases that never really came up in play.

InVinoVeritas said:

2e was specifically designed to be backward compatible to 1e, because there was (quite reasonable) worry that you'd anger everyone who was a 1e player and end up splitting the customer base in two. A big part of that involved the fact that the Internet wasn't available for the majority yet. That prevented large amounts of rule information from being disseminated in a format other than new books that needed to be purchased.

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I'm not sure I'd agree that was why 2e was so backward compatible. Rather, 2e was intended to be a clean-up edition to compile all of the new things introduced in disparate books - specialization, non-weapon proficiencies - as well as generate new features like school specialties for wizards. I don't recall the threat of a schism being a big factor.

billd91 said:

I'm not sure I'd agree that was why 2e was so backward compatible. Rather, 2e was intended to be a clean-up edition to compile all of the new things introduced in disparate books - specialization, non-weapon proficiencies - as well as generate new features like school specialties for wizards. I don't recall the threat of a schism being a big factor.

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Although I agree that putting the Survival Guides and overhaul of Unearthed Arcana into the base game was a large part of the adjustment, I also remember there being extensive surveys in Polyhedron Magazine asking about what we as customers felt about it. It also asked questions like, "Would we want all the monsters in a mix-and-match binder?" "Do we still want the bard to be something a character builds toward?" "How much do we use the weapon type vs. armor table?", but I remember quite a bit of discussion about whether this was a callous cash grab.

ETA: Also the first generation products proudly displayed that they were compatible with 1e.

Celebrim said:

In practice, the repeated 20's then 21's rule never came up in play anyway.

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It would come up pretty often actually - at 1st level, thief and magic user needed a 20 to hit AC1, so using THAC0 to calculate hits even on normal ACs wasn't technically correct for either of those hit tables, as you'd end up with effectively a +1 bonus. My experience is that people tended to just ignore this since it wasn't a big deal, but you hit that part of the table right off the bat at 1st level with two common classes against any armor class.

OverlordOcelot said:

It would come up pretty often actually - at 1st level, thief and magic user needed a 20 to hit AC1...

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Just how often are 1st level characters going up against monsters with AC1 or better?

If you calculate THAC0 correctly and intend to use it in place of the tables, the problem happens only for thieves or MU at AC 0 or higher when a THAC0 calculation implies you need 21 to hit, yet you could in theory still hit on a modified 20 using the table's repeated 20s rule. But your low level characters are highly unlikely to run up against AC0 monsters anyway, or even AC1, and it's a pretty simple matter to adjust THAC0 on your character sheet such that you don't have the effective +1 bonus you are imagining.

Personally, I used radically different procedures of play, so this didn't come up. Because at my table I enforced the weapon vs. AC table (and divided AC in to AC and AB), at character generation we generated custom player vs. AC tables for the players preferred weapons so as to simplify calculation and not need to look up modifiers and otherwise slow down play by doing fiddly sums, neither THAC0 nor the tables were used any time except when setting up for play or handling ad hoc situations.

However, I don't see that it puts any sort of great difficulty on another DM to use THAC0 with 1e AD&D provided he uses the correct procedures of play to handle it, and knows ultimately from what the numbers derive. It's not like DMs are stupid and mindless AIs that follow procedures of play mechanically without thinking about the consequences.