Which edition change changed the game the most?

[Aberzanzorax]

I don't remember a lot of at wills or encounter powers in core third edition.

Some of the later material (e.g. warlock) did have at wills (their blast).


Several magic items in 3e and before were usable once per day.


But on the whole, I don't think it was common, and certainly nowhere close to as common as 4e.

 

[Janx]

Absolutely the 4E.

Lookl at it this way. Take a 10th level fighter, now convert from up one version from the one immediatly before.

There are no real changes until you go from 1st edition to 2nd, then there are a few changes and you might take 30 minutes to decide.

Go from 2nd to 3rd and you could spend a couple hours depending on if you convert some level to a PrC and how long you debate feats.

Now upgrade to 4E. Okay I have my class and my character name. Everything else I basically read through 4E and create all new. Only the most basic flavor focus of my character carries over.

That seems a fairly objective approach, more so than others..

 

[Bluenose]

As the only person at this point to have said 2e, I suppose I should explain why. It's the change in the motivation for being an adventurer.

In first edition AD&D, loot was experience. The character(s) who made off with a significant amount of treasure while avoiding as much as possible contact with enemies was a hero, and was going to level up for doing it. Second edition, that changed. Suddenly the motivation is different. The rather amoral, mercenary scoundrels who were perfectly at home in 1e games were rather less suitable for 2e. 2e settings and adventures were much more about heroic deeds in the service of some cause or other. It's the difference between Han Solo, becoming a hero almost incidentally while engaged in looking after Number One, and Luke Skywalker looking for a way to become a hero. And in a roleplaying game, motivations matters, and rules that support those motivations matter. When you switch from supporting one set of motivations to another, you're changing the nature of the game in a way that mechanical rules changes do not change it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Absolutely the 4E.

Lookl at it this way. Take a 10th level fighter, now convert from up one version from the one immediatly before.

There are no real changes until you go from 1st edition to 2nd, then there are a few changes and you might take 30 minutes to decide.

Go from 2nd to 3rd and you could spend a couple hours depending on if you convert some level to a PrC and how long you debate feats.

Now upgrade to 4E. Okay I have my class and my character name. Everything else I basically read through 4E and create all new. Only the most basic flavor focus of my character carries over.

That, in a nutshell, describes my experiences over the course of running and upgrading the aforementioned campaign active since the mid-1980s.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

If you absolutely make me pick one, I'd go with 3E. But I'll do it grudgingly, and with the caveat that it was a difficult choice, especially given where 2E was going at the end.

I see it like this. There is a core D&D experience (hat tip to the other thread) however poor we collectively are at communicating and defining it. Whatever else it means, it means the ability to use the ruleset to put together a group of adventurers, go into a dungeon, defeat some monsters, get their treasure, and maybe make it out again. But it doesn't end there. If it did, we could get a better handle on it.

So every edition has fluff and rules to support that dungeon delving. And then every edition supports some other stuff--different capabilities, different environments, different focuses--and yeah, different motivations.

I can't get away from the idea that every edition has made some fairly radical changes, or made assumptions contrary to the full range of possible game play.

 

[the Jester]

4e is the first edition that actively and pretty much completely rewrote certain aspects of the game so that they were totally inconsistent with earlier versions; specifically, I'm thinking of the planes and cosmology.

One huge gripe a lot of folks had when 4e launched was the lack of continuity with what came before; the new cosmology is probably the best example of that.

Personally, since I run the same campaign world pretty much forever, I feel that is a larger change than anything that came before.

 

[BriarMonkey]

Like many others, I voted 4E.

As DocMoriartty and others have pointed out, you just can not take a character from any other version and "upgrade" them - you have to rebuild them completely.

Too, as others have pointed out, the mechanical aspects of the game are so very different between 4E and the prior versions. In 4E, every class feels the same - they all have the same powers - regardless of what they are actually named, they are the same. This leads to a rather blah play experiance with no distinguishing features to speak of.

Of course, this is just my opinion.

P.S. And Oh!!! One of my bigest peeves - 4E got rid of multi-classing... (I like multi-classing.)

 

[BryonD]

I'm becoming swayed.

I still say both 3E and 4E brought enough changes that declaring one more is a but off.

But maybe 4E is more equal than the others....

 

[Puggins]

In terms of character building, absolutely 4e.

But in terms of how the game is played, 4e doesn't come close to 3e. I call 3e the "champions-ification" of d&d. I never used a battlemap for D&D up through 2e. The day 3e came out, a battlemap became indispensible. Monster creation changed radically, moving towards a framework similar to character creation. Multi-classing radically changed character development- in many ways, 4e character development is more similar to 1e/2e than 3e is.

I can definitely see arguments for 4e, but 3e blew up D&D quite well too.

 

[Lanefan]

I voted 2-3e but it was a coin flip vs. 3-4e.

From my admittedly highly-biased perspective, the change from 2e to 3e took the game focus away from character *play* (fluff) and put it firmly on to character *build* (crunch). System mastery went from being useful to being essential. Powergamers and number-crunchers finally had the D+D they'd always wanted.

The rest of us wondered what had happened.

The 3e-4e change was almost as big, but in a different way - more in feel than anything else, for me it seemed to be much smoother and more pre-packaged than any earlier edition. Kinda like the difference between a hypothetical song performed first by Metallica (1e, rough around the edges but loud as hell, sold some records and got played at lots of parties) then by Def Leppard (3e, still vaguely metal but much more radio-friendly, a massive hit in its day) then by Celine Dion (4e, a hit in some circles but so bland it's almost unrecognizable from the original).

Lan-"I don't think there really is such a song"-efan