What's really at stake in the Edition Wars

[ScottS]

It depends. I would hope that if a corporation had come out with FATAL it would fail miserably. I routinely hope that certain ad agencies or marketing departments of major fast food chains would get cleaned out for stupid commercials (...).
All that aside, I would hope that a corporation would acknowledge and learn from its mistakes and make any necessary changes that would be involved. If a game really is sub-par in quality or market performance, I'd want to see actions taken to protect higher quality product lines or ensure the company thrives in the long term.

The more direct point here is that this is the entertainment industry we're talking about, and for that very reason, we don't owe anyone at WOTC/Hasbro a paycheck. They're choosing to work in a field that involves milking disposable income from people, via "fad-farming" or otherwise creating non-essential goods that tickle people's fancies enough that they start irrationally throwing money around. If these guys made cancer drugs or bread or whatever, it would be a different story, but as it stands, I don't like their entertainment product, so I'm not overly concerned about them keeping their present jobs. If worst came to worst, I would wish them the best of luck in finding gainful employment elsewhere (outside of RPGs).

 

[Piratecat]

The more direct point here is that this is the entertainment industry we're talking about, and for that very reason, we don't owe anyone at WOTC/Hasbro a paycheck. They're choosing to work in a field that involves milking disposable income from people, via "fad-farming" or otherwise creating non-essential goods that tickle people's fancies enough that they start irrationally throwing money around. If these guys made cancer drugs or bread or whatever, it would be a different story, but as it stands, I don't like their entertainment product, so I'm not overly concerned about them keeping their present jobs. If worst came to worst, I would wish them the best of luck in finding gainful employment elsewhere (outside of RPGs).

Your tone comes across as rude. You may not like a product, but that doesn't mean that people who do are irrationally purchasing it.

Moderator caution for rudeness aside, I do disagree with you. WotC (and D&D) has a huge halo effect that helps support the entire hobby. They have by far the most brand awareness, they make inroads into distribution channels that would otherwise ignore us, their volume helps support specialty retailers, and they do more than anyone else for getting new players into the hobby. I'd argue that if you remove WotC and D&D from the industry, we'd splinter and shrink until it became very difficult to find new players.

That doesn't mean you should blindly buy what they're selling -- far from it. But it's good to be aware that a healthy WotC, for whatever reason, helps ensure a healthy player base.

 

[Garthanos]

I'm not really trying to say that it's an exact translation. Yes, certain things will be lost in the 2e-3e transition. But more stands to be lost in a 2e-4e transition, largely because of 4e's efforts at re-definition. Which, again, gives 4e a heck of a lot of freedom, but constrains people who liked what they were already doing more so than the 2e-3e transition did.

I can translate your elven beastmaster/meistersinger with more faithfulness from 2e to 3e using only the "core books" than I can from 2e to 4e using only the first generation of "core books." It's not gonna be exact, but it's a continuum. A comparison.

At this point in time restricting yourself to the first generation books of 4e qualifies as an artificial limit are you pretending it was still a couple years ago because it supports a point?
A 4e bard/beastmaster ranger hybrid shrug. I am not familiar with kits and 2e. The 2e character couldn't have been built without a lot of supplemental material in its source version I bet... so taking that character now to 4e ought to be quite reasonable.

[sblock=do not claim prohibitive expense]
Your group spending 12 dollars on a one month sub to DDi gives all access to all generations of player focused materia and a tool that makes creating tracking and leveling a character damn easy and also gives you tons of archival Dragon and Dungeon pdfs as well as dm focused monster making tools etc.
[/sblock]

 

[Hussar]

KM - oh, totally agree actually. Trying to do that ranger/bard in 4e would be a PITA. But, claims that it would be "easy" or "simple" to do in 3e aren't exactly accurate either.

Could it be done in 3e, or at least a reasonable facsimile, quite probably. It would likely take several levels, and probably work better as a PrC in all honesty, but, it could be done. In 3.5 it would be much more difficult because its very difficult to have multiple pets.

And, really, since it was a pet based PC, it would be even that much more difficult in 4e because it's REALLY hard to have pet based characters in 4e. I think it would be possible, but, a giganticly huge PITA.

My quibble is with the idea that 3e is backwards compatible with 2e. Having rewritten more than a few 1e and 2e modules and seen the rewrites done by others, it's a lot of work because the scaling is completely different. Backwards compatibility doesn't only mean on the player side of the screen. Encounter numbers in 1e and 2e modules would crush PC groups in 3e because the monsters got SO much stronger. So, you have to tweak just about every single encounter to make them work.

I guess my beef is with the idea of how backward compatible 3e really is. IMO, it isn't very compatible - the assumptions are just too different.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My quibble is with the idea that 3e is backwards compatible with 2e. Having rewritten more than a few 1e and 2e modules and seen the rewrites done by others, it's a lot of work because the scaling is completely different. Backwards compatibility doesn't only mean on the player side of the screen. Encounter numbers in 1e and 2e modules would crush PC groups in 3e because the monsters got SO much stronger. So, you have to tweak just about every single encounter to make them work.

I guess my beef is with the idea of how backward compatible 3e really is. IMO, it isn't very compatible - the assumptions are just too different.

To which I must counter: at least they gave us a conversion guide, at least base classes that had been in the game since 1Ed were not excised, at least base races that had been in the PHB since 1Ed were not booted out, etc.

By comparison, 4Ed didn't even try.

3Ed gave us enough backwards compatibility that a campaign that had been active since the mid 1980s was still viable without major revision.

I could tell with a single readthrough of the PHB that it wasn't even possible to make that campaign work within 4Ed.

 

[Hussar]

IMO, it comes down to dueling anecdotes. I look at the idea of base races and classes, look at the fact that the 2e PHB excised a number of classes (assassin, monk), completely rewrote a number of classes (illusionist, druid, cleric) and ejected the half orc and this didn't cause huge problems for compatibility, but somehow 4e is just TOO HARD to make compatible.

3e rewrote the ENTIRE encounter paradigm. Completely. Completely rewrote the reward system. The spell system was a massive change from 1e. New classes were included - the sorcerer, the barbarian - and yet that was considered compatible.

Sure, they gave you a guide to convert. But, again, I wonder how many people ACTUALLY used it. Yes, yes, I know you did. But, I wonder, as a percentage, how many people converted.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it was a very small percentage. The massive numbers of 3e campaigns that proliferated on the net that had no ties to earlier editions speaks to this. Plus, the rather large growth of the number of gamers in the 3e era who never played earlier editions.

Although, to be honest, this is just dueling anecdotes and gut feelings. We don't have any proof either way. Me, I don't care because I didn't update my earlier campaigns, you, you do because you did. And, really, that's all the conclusion we can come to.

 

[I'm A Banana]

At this point in time restricting yourself to the first generation books of 4e qualifies as an artificial limit are you pretending it was still a couple years ago because it supports a point?

Because if I opened it up to ALL of 4e and ALL of 3e, 3e would STILL be easier by dint of pure quantity of options.

By restricting it to the same general pagecount, I'm trying not to give 3e the 8-year, thousands of third-party-products advantage that it otherwise would have.

It's also faithful to the actual question posed to most groups when 4e did come out, where it was "Well, if you want a ranger with an animal companion, or a bard...um...wait. Trust us." It more faithfully recreates the actual environment that decision was made in. Furthermore, while 4e today has more options than it did when it first came out, a lot of those options are still re-defined. My 2e tiefling and a 4e tiefling are not really the same archetype, even if they share a race name.

I guess my beef is with the idea of how backward compatible 3e really is. IMO, it isn't very compatible - the assumptions are just too different.

I think you're right, but I was comparing two things on a continuum. -4 is still greater than -8.

And I think the very fact that 3e made an effort could be part of why the Edition Wars this time around are seen as more virulent. One of 3e's design mantras, IIRC, was "We want you to play the same game you've always played, but better." This filtered into making sure that they gave us rules for the stuff that D&D has had in it, like D&D has always had in it. A gnome was a gnome was a gnome, and that was the point -- they just wanted to deliver you a better way to play the gnome you already love to play, without so much casting judgement on why you loved to play it.

Now, this wan't a totally universally applied mantra -- they changed halflings, and there was a bit of an uproar, even though they allowed for "hobbit-halflings" to exist as well.

4e's fetish for sacred beef meant that 4e was a lot less concerned with letting you continue to play the game as you always had. They want you to play the game they made, which may or may not resemble the game you have always played, but hopefully does in all the ways that matter. Of course, in a lot of instances, it didn't resemble the game people had played.

Now, 4e gained a lot of freedom with the sacred cow slaughter. And 3e inherited a lot of problems from being faithful to older editions (I think a lot of 3e's high-level problems, forex, are holdovers from editions where nobody ever played at high levels, ultimately). Neither approach is, IMO, necessarily better or worse than the other.

But if you are looking to translate 2e into a more recent D&D edition, 3e is probably, in general, a better choice than 4e.

If you don't care and are just looking to go into some dungeons and kill some dragons...then, my own personal jury is still out deliberating that, but I'm sure some of the Edition Warriors can come down on one side or the other.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

IMO, it comes down to dueling anecdotes. I look at the idea of base races and classes, look at the fact that the 2e PHB excised a number of classes (assassin, monk), completely rewrote a number of classes (illusionist, druid, cleric) and ejected the half orc and this didn't cause huge problems for compatibility, but somehow 4e is just TOO HARD to make compatible.

1Ed and 2Ed were so mechanically compatible overall that you could ignore the excision of the monk and assassin and half-orc and run them in their 1Ed form without a hiccup in a 2Ed game...which is what we did.

You can't really say that about the conversion to 4Ed.

3e rewrote the ENTIRE encounter paradigm. Completely. Completely rewrote the reward system. The spell system was a massive change from 1e. New classes were included - the sorcerer, the barbarian - and yet that was considered compatible.

The barbarian showed up in the original Unearthed Arcana in 1Ed.

But, I wonder, as a percentage, how many people converted.

I have a sneaking suspicion that it was a very small percentage.

Probably unknowable. IME, there were a lot of people looking for those things about a year after 3Ed's release. I made copies for some people I knew.

But the point stands- at least 3Ed gave us the option.

[KanyeWest]Wizards of the Coast didn't care about legacy gamers![/Kanye West]

The massive numbers of 3e campaigns that proliferated on the net that had no ties to earlier editions speaks to this.

How, exactly? Most campaigns have no net presence at all, I'd bet, regardless of edition.

Plus, the rather large growth of the number of gamers in the 3e era who never played earlier editions.

Again, we have no way of knowing- in some cases, our group brought new players into established campaigns.

Although, to be honest, this is just dueling anecdotes and gut feelings.

QFT.

 

[Mistwell]

To which I must counter: at least they gave us a conversion guide, at least base classes that had been in the game since 1Ed were not excised, at least base races that had been in the PHB since 1Ed were not booted out, etc.

By comparison, 4Ed didn't even try.

3Ed gave us enough backwards compatibility that a campaign that had been active since the mid 1980s was still viable without major revision.

I could tell with a single readthrough of the PHB that it wasn't even possible to make that campaign work within 4Ed.

4e did try to offer conversions from 3e.
4e did offer all the base classes that had been in the game since 1e, anfd all the base races that had been in the PHB since 1e. They just didn't do all those things in the PHB.

It absolutely is possible to make a 3e campaign work with 4e. Many people have done it. You can even make a conversion ideas thread here, and I think you will find many helpful conversion ideas.

 

[pemerton]

"It's all D&D, therefore it's all good" just isn't true. The editions are different, they play differently, they don't deliver the same gameplay experience.

Agreed.

I'm a 4e fan - and I consider it not to be AD&D, so I have a lot of sympathy with the 4e non-fans who don't consider it to be AD&D either. This I consider a good thing.

Likewise.

For me, participation in edition war threads is mostly about someone being wrong on the internet. For me, the "wrongness" is mostly in what I regard as overly narrow conceptions of what can count as viable and enjoyable roleplaying.

It is also about broadening the conception of who has a stake or an entitlement in respect of D&D. I stopped playing AD&D as soon as I became aware (once I went to university) of the existence of other games that seemed to me more mechanically coherent. I played a little bit of 2nd ed AD&D over the mid-to-late 90s, but always in spite of the mechanics rather than because of them. After 20 years, 4e has brought me back to being a regular D&D player (and hence regular purchaser of D&D materials).

4e is a whole other beast. Your familiar magic items, spells, etc, have disappeared. I would say you are dealing with less that 50% compatibility. Many core concepts have changed. Its a lot harder to convert existing products. In fact, many core concepts have changed--this game is a lot more focused on tactical and gives a short shift to things like rituals or abilities that aren't dealing with close combat.

I don't agree with this, at least from a GM point of view. Although PCs may be hard to convert, pre-3E modules are (IMO) quite easy to convert. Use the maps as-is, and put in 4e versions of the monsters/npcs. 4e seems to me to be fairly mechanically forgiving in this respect, in that it is hard to accidentally produce a TPK encounter, and even a rather easy encounter can still be mechanically quite interesting to play out.

Admittedly, my criteria for ease of conversion may be skewed, as for many years I GMed a Rolemaster game relying heavily on converted D&D material - that was a case where I would say that mechanical conversion was frequently challenging.