Do you want/are you ready for a D&D 5th edition?

[Droogie]

4e has become bit of a logistical mess, so yeah, I am ready for a new edition to give the game a fresh reboot.

If they can steal all the best stuff from previous editions (subjective I know)

and allow me to make a character that fits on a single sheet of notebook paper rather than 7 sheets printed,

I am on board.

 

[Tallifer]

If they can steal all the best stuff from previous editions (subjective I know)

and allow me to make a character that fits on a single sheet of notebook paper rather than 7 sheets printed, I am on board.

The 4th edition haracter sheet itself is only 2 pages. The power cards are an extra thing: imagine if a wizard or cleric had printed out a card for everyone of his spells in 3rd edition? 4th edition has simply regularized the practice of writing out all the details for your spells.

Certainly in every roleplaying game I have ever played, I always wrote out by hand on the back of my paper my abilities and spells. I like having neatly formatted cards courtesy of the Character Builder.

When I made 4th edition characters by hand with no Character Builder, it only took the two pages plus a bunch of the usual scribbling on the back in my own weird shorthand.

 

[Razuur]

Hmmm. Lets see. Yet another edition war, this time instead of being broken up between 2 editions, now we will have one between three versions.

3.5/Pathfinder vs 4e/4e essentials vs 5e(and 5.5 soon after).

Three crowds arguing and bickering about hwo the "other two" aren't DnD by "mine" is.

3rd party publishers who now have to decide which of the three to support, and now the audience is down to a third.

And then there i Wizards, who will select one style of play, require miniatures, and calling it D&D - that you either adapt to or are left off the boat.

Yeah. Can't wait for an even deeper fracture in the hobby. Sounds fun.

And yes I am bitter.

Things have nicely settled into two camps now - the 4e crowd and the 3e/3.5/Pathfinder/retro crowds. I am happy with the delineation.

Last thing I want is thre emore years of bickering and hurt feelings. those things only hurt our small hobby.

 

[billd91]

Hmmm. Lets see. Yet another edition war, this time instead of being broken up between 2 editions, now we will have one between three versions.

3.5/Pathfinder vs 4e/4e essentials vs 5e(and 5.5 soon after).

Three crowds arguing and bickering about hwo the "other two" aren't DnD by "mine" is.

3rd party publishers who now have to decide which of the three to support, and now the audience is down to a third.

And then there i Wizards, who will select one style of play, require miniatures, and calling it D&D - that you either adapt to or are left off the boat.

Yeah. Can't wait for an even deeper fracture in the hobby. Sounds fun.

And yes I am bitter.

Things have nicely settled into two camps now - the 4e crowd and the 3e/3.5/Pathfinder/retro crowds. I am happy with the delineation.

Last thing I want is thre emore years of bickering and hurt feelings. those things only hurt our small hobby.

Realistically speaking, I think you need to resign yourself to it. It happens with every edition change in D&D, although with different magnitudes depending on how well the newest edition captures the player base. For example, the change from TSR AD&D (1e/2e) to WotC D&D (3e) was enough to spawn the Dragonsfoot board and fuel an old school revival. Interesting niches, but not significant competition for WotC. The change from 3x to 4e was enough to generate a 3x-based competitor that is increasingly likely to outsell 4e in the game store market, something we hadn't seen since TSR's money woes prevented it from paying its printer and getting product out to the market.

I'm trying to remember as much of the shift from 1e to 2e as I can. That's long enough ago and with relatively little access to the internet (as well as TSR being internet unfriendly) that it's harder. But since the two editions were so compatible, I remember seeing both 1e and 2e materials being used at game tables, pretty much interchangeably. There were holdouts for 1e, but they were so easy to integrate into 2e tables I didn't see much of a fuss. The transition was certainly a cakewalk compared to the transition from 3x to 4e.

 

[Matt James]

Not really. The D20 market did exactly what Ryan Dancey was saying he wanted it to do before 3rd Edition was released.

Luckily the lesson was learned. I'm still not sure how it got approved at levels above him.

 

[darjr]

I'm one of those that mixed 1e and 2e. Almost unconciously. Though my life got way to busy just after the begining of 2e that I stopped playing for a long while, a way to long while.

 

[rogueattorney]

I play in a B/X campaign right now, and aside from old edition .pdf's (back when they were available) have bought two, maybe three, new D&D products from the license holder of the D&D brand over the last 15 or so years. I do, however, frequently purchase new rpg materials, for D&D-ish clones and otherwise, and continue to go to cons.

TSR lost me in the mid-90s and WotC hasn't really done anything to get me back. I disliked 3.x e. I don't dislike 4e so much as it holds no interest for me whatsoever. I think I've come to the realization that I'm never going to buy another multi-volume, multi-hundred pages of core rules type rpg ever again, and as long as that is what the D&D brand is, I won't be a D&D customer.

I would have no compunctions whatsoever in giving WotC some of my rpg'ing money if they were to produce gaming products that I liked -- I've certainly done so in the past with Magic, Everway, and Heroscape. I think they're a good company. It's just that their take on D&D has generally been the polar opposite of what I want out of a D&D game.

If they were to produce a product that was compatible with or was in the spirit of the D&D of 1974 to 1982-ish, I'd certainly give it a look. But as it is, I'm not sure they can aim to get players like me back into the fold without either alienating their current customer base or producing multiple systems.

So, I guess all of that is to say that a new edition of D&D that came anywhere near my preferred play style would be neat, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm one of those that mixed 1e and 2e. Almost unconciously.

Ditto.

 

[Dausuul]

I'm one of those that mixed 1e and 2e. Almost unconciously.

For me, it was entirely unconscious. After a couple of years of sporadic BD&D playing, I started on AD&D right about when 2E was released, so there were still a ton of 1E books on the shelves, and I had no idea there was a difference. This resulted in me scratching my head over a number of inconsistencies, then shrugging and moving on--inconsistency was not exactly unheard-of in D&D products at the time.

It wasn't until several years later that the idea worked its way into my consciousness that "Hey, these things are different."

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Luckily the lesson was learned. I'm still not sure how it got approved at levels above him.

Yes the lesson was learned - Paizo is doing what Dancey described and is now leading the market....

The real lesson is never start a land war in Asia. never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. that you can't put the genie back into the bottle once you have freed him.

The Auld Grump