What's your favorite edition of D&D (so far)?

[Mercurius]

Right, @thedungeondelver . There's many ways to slice the cake and ultimately it is a subjective judgement call. I toyed with the idea of keeping 3E and 3.5E separate, but felt they were close enough to be grouped together, and that the number of folks that didn't transition to 3.5 is small enough to make it an unnecessary separate option. The same is even more true of Players Options and especially Unearthed Arcana, as well as Essentials. Those were all optional add-ons to the game, they weren't revisions. I was only looking at "major revision" or "new edition" - thus 3/3.5 being considered, but not the others.

 

[delericho]

3e, despite its flaws.

Other editions have good features, and in particular some parts of 4e are genius. But if I have to choose only one, I choose 3e.

(IMO, Pathfinder is actually an improvement on 3e, but it's still extremely complex, and not "better enough" to convince me to move over. If I were starting from a position of having no prior experience, I would go for Pathfinder, but starting where I am now...)

 

[Mercurius]

I'd really like to see this poll pass 300 votes; I think at around that point it becomes somewhat representative of ENWorld, even if that is but a tiny fraction of registered users.

(Like most online communities, ENWorld seems to follow a 99/1 rule - about 1% of the users are responsible for 90+% of the posts, so there might only be a few hundred posters that participate on a daily basis, with a few thousand being somewhat regular...but that's just a guess).

 

[Celebrim]

I voted that I protest your characterizations, because I consider 3.0 and 3.5 to be very different animals (and especially early 3.0 prior to the publication of non-core player supplements). There is about as much different between 3.0 and 3.5 as are different between Basic and 2e AD&D.

I think every edition has something going for it. I miss the terseness of 1e modules where you could have a good adventure in 8 pages of text and a minicampaign in 32, and I miss some of the then little used tactical complications like casting time, weapon vs. AC modifiers, and simultaneous declaration/resolution. Second edition is underrated for its clean simplicity and in practice most people played 1e according to rules that were closer to 2e than 1e thereby implementing 'rules light' in practice if not in the text, and BECMI was even more compact and efficient. OD&D had a strong focus on player over character that has been lost a bit and which by now the rules have gone too far away from. And 4e had good intentions...

But for how I run my table balancing the various demands on and needs of a system, 3.0 is closest to what I need. Granted, the version of 3.0 I'm playing is probably more different from 3.0 than 3.5 is, but its core philosophy of "1e in an updated engine" is something I can readily embrace and work from. Three point five took the idea of player mechanical empowerment just too far, championing ideas from 3.0 like PrC's that I found to be flaws and hammering as core to the system them until the system just broke. In addition, it took the relatively few OP aspects of 3.0 (haste, hold person, harm, etc.) and instead of just tweaking what need to be fixed, it introduced a slew of new subtle balance issues to the spell lists that made pure spellcasters even more broken than they were before. And it set up a race between player power and monster power that led to out of control power creep. Virtually none of the content introduced for 3.5 was well thought out. By the end, it started to resemble 2e's onslaught of overpriced poorly written products.

Pathfinder does some good things, and I might eventually adopt some of its reforms in terminology and system, but on the whole I don't think it addresses enough of the problems with the 3e system to make me give up my homebrew variant for it.

 

[DMKastmaria]

But for how I run my table balancing the various demands on and needs of a system, 3.0 is closest to what I need. Granted, the version of 3.0 I'm playing is probably more different from 3.0 than 3.5 is, but its core philosophy of "1e in an updated engine" is something I can readily embrace and work from. Three point five took the idea of player mechanical empowerment just too far, championing ideas from 3.0 like PrC's that I found to be flaws and hammering as core to the system them until the system just broke. In addition, it took the relatively few OP aspects of 3.0 (haste, hold person, harm, etc.) and instead of just tweaking what need to be fixed, it introduced a slew of new subtle balance issues to the spell lists that made pure spellcasters even more broken than they were before. And it set up a race between player power and monster power that led to out of control power creep. Virtually none of the content introduced for 3.5 was well thought out. By the end, it started to resemble 2e's onslaught of overpriced poorly written products.

If I were ever of a mind to run 3e again, it would be 3.0. Just the three core books + houserules. Maybe the main FR setting book, if I decided to go there with it.

 

[Ahnehnois]

3.X; not so much because the game in the PHB is flawless but because it is flexible and standardized enough and there are enough options and variants out there that I can make it work for me. To me, this makes the 3.0 vs 3.5 distinction pretty meaningless, as a liberal dose of variants from UA, PF, etc. is almost a given at this point in the game's lifespan.

To be fair, I only briefly played 2e and have no substantial experience with earlier versions, but I'm pretty confident I'd like 3e better.

We'll see about 5e...

 

[grodog]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, AD&D 1e.

 

[giant.robot]

Voted: BECMI/RC
Close second: Core 1E AD&D

I prefer the BECMI/RC game for its simplicity and flexibility. It makes a good system for a hack and slash one-shot but is flexible enough to run a long campaign. There's not a lot in the way of complicated rules and the DM is expected to rule on things not covered by the rules. I'd rather my friend sitting at the table rule on my proposed action rather than a writer in Lake Geneva or Seattle.

1E AD&D is not a bad ruleset but it's a little more daunting for new players. I didn't like the fact it put more rules in the hands of players. In my experience rules in the players' hands leads to rules lawyering. This is anecdotal and maybe localized to groups I've gamed with so I'm not willing to throw the game away based on my experience.

What I like about both of these games is they promise a lot of power but it feels special when you finally get/find it. The rest of the time the PCs have to struggle against a world that is unfriendly and often uninviting. It's not in a Call of Cthulhu depressing way but in the hero building challenging way. PCs start off slightly better than average and it takes a long time for them to become super heroes if they can even manage it. They're given mundane power like followers, hirelings, and a treasure hoard.

With 3E and 4E the power level jumped way up. First level characters were minor superheroes that turned into demigods in short order. I felt the rules were trying to emulate the feel of anime and video games with a smattering of wire-fu action blockbuster. While these games can be a lot of fun they don't fit my mental model of D&D. That's not to say they're not D&D or anything like that, I just preferred the older games if I want to play what I feel is a D&D game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I know it is an unpopular choice, but voted for 2E. It had its issues, but ultimately I prefer the NWP system to 3E or 4E skills, THAC0 (though frustrating for some) did a much better job IMO of containing the numbers than d20+modifier, kind of like that different actions feel different because there are different mechanics ( i realize this is a big flaw for most people), setting material was top notch, blue book and green book lines were excellent, and kits (which were usually in the brown books) offered options without busting the system (most of the time) or going gonzo on flavor, The Van Richten books were awesome, and i think the staggered level advancement helped balance the game while retaining the flavor of magic.

I realize much of the same could be said of 1E, but I simpy didn't play it enough to call it my favorite (since I started in 86 and was quite young at the time). But I do have to give a big nod to the 1E DMG. I've read that multipple times and found it useful in every edition.

 

[wolfattack]

D&D 3.5. It was the first non-national RPG that i bought and i fell in love with it immediately. until today,i didn't found any RPG that i played or liked most than that edition. it has a lot of diversity,options,classes and is fully customizable. all that i like.