D&D 5E I think we can safely say that 5E is a success, but will it lead to a new Golden Era?

[Steely Dan]

Meh. Dark Sun had a terrible time in it's native 2e because of the lack of clerics, and thus healing. A non-issue in 4e, which had 'Leaders' of every Source to fill the void. Dark Sun simply worked better in 4e.

Please, enough with the disingenuous and spreading of misinformation, first of all, there are clerics and healing in 2nd Ed Dark Sun, so that, right there, is you blatantly lying to try to convince people that 4th Ed is somehow the best D&D, once again, and all other editions are not as good a "game"; and no, it did not work for Dark Sun, like, at all, 3rd Ed's attempt was pathetic, but 4th Ed's was a travesty of a mockery of a sham.

 

[Mercurius]

I get that you're trying to take an agree-to-disagree approach, here, and, on a purely subjective level, that's fine. If, however, we get to the level of actual qualities of the game, though, it's not fine. The 'dissociative' bugaboo is one of those. There is no working definition ever put forth for a 'dissociative mechanic' that doesn't either fail to apply to the 4e mechanics it's stuck to, or apply equally to many mechanics in other editions the label-appliers claim aren't dissociative. It's just not a real quality that game mechanics have. It may be a descriptor for a real subjective experience, but that's about it.

But isn't "dissociative" a subjective quality? Isn't the real subjective experience what is, in the end, important? I agree that a specific mechanic or system might not be inherently dissociative, but some systems and mechanics seem to more frequently lead to a dissociative experience than others. I mean, you aren't saying that the subjective experience of all those who found 4E more dissociative than previous editions is "BadWrongSubjectiveExperience?"

The point I was responding to about tactics in 4e, however, had nothing to do with perspective or subjective experience of the game, though. You claimed that 'tactical mastery' of 4e created a gulf between the masterful and casual player comparable to that created by 'system mastery' in 3e. That is not true. The reward for tactical mastery, like that for system mastery, is relatively small. There is depth there to explore, in both cases, but the rewards are not disproportionate.

Again, we're comparing your experience with my experience, which is like competing anecdotes. What I saw in my own group was some players that took to the tactics of 4E, and others that didn't. Those that didn't suffered because of it - they couldn't get the hang of how to optimize powers and roles. I just found that 4E required more from players in this regard, although perhaps not as much as systems mastery in 3E.

By the way, let me tell you a secret, which you may not get from from our discussion: I actually liked 4E, maybe more than 3E - or at least I was happy to play 4E and not wanting to turn back the clock. I was happy with many of its innovations (I loved healing surges, for instance), but also have some issues with it. It isn't an either/or, us-vs-them thing for me. I just feel that from what I've seen of 5E so far, it may have a broader net in terms of how many types of D&D players it can satisfy.

We can't know how other people may have played the game outside our personal experience. Maybe some others did as you suggest - IMX, it was certainly /very/ common to mod the game, even if it was mostly things like spell points or boosting 1st level hps or adopting Len Lakofka's d10 iniitiative, rather than ignoring all the rules on range/area/movement and playing without minis.

I've found that house rules were the norm in AD&D, common in 3E, and rare in 4E. This, again, seems to have to do with the specific quality and flavor of 4E, and that house ruling it was kind of like playing Pick-up-sticks; you try to move one stick and it is too easy to mess with the whole lot.

5E seems to be advocating for a very AD&D-esque approach, in this regard - with a simple enough core to allow to add options as one desires.

That stikes me as kinda bizarre. 1e was, ultimately, I suppose, a lot of rules thrown at you, and you caught some of 'em and let others drop. 5e does seem to be consciously using a similar approach. It keeps /saying/ it's 'modularity' but that's certainly not what the word means to me, though, while sloppy by comparison, the results could end up comparable. :shrug:

What I meant by that was that the relative simplicity of 5E was similar to how many people played 1E (in my experience) - as a simpler game than Gygax wrote it, with a lot of the fiddly parts excised.

It funny how you preface a claim about what the game did, with an acknowledgement that you're not talking about what the game did, at all, but how it was perceived. I would like to talk about what's factual, and the game is there in black & white. If you compare say 1e & 4e, you find two games that are very much games, and very, very abstract. Nothing about them encourages any sort of deep immersion - Mazes & Monsters hysteria notwithstanding.

I don't think we can only talk about what is "factual" because our experience is always subjective. We can talk about the rules themselves, but how interesting is that? Anyhow, with RPGs the rules are merely the structure or scaffolding for the subjective, imaginative experience. I think the question is, how do different rules systems faciliate subjective, imaginative experience? Why does one rule system do it well for one group of people and not another? And what sort of rules system would best do it for as many people as possible? Etc.

If you could get a deep, immersive experience out of a version of D&D, you could as easily get it out of any version of D&D.

Yes and no. I've actually argued on both sides of this question, particularly aroud 4E, and don't have a clear answer. But it does seem that some people are able to get a deep, immersive experience more easily out of one version of D&D than another.

No, that's in comparison to past edition life-cycles. TSR continued to publish 0D&D for years after starting Basic & Advanced, so, while it was superceded fairly early, it was supported for over a decade. AD&D 1e ran from 1977 or 79 (depending on whether you start the clock with the first or last book of the definitive core 3) through 1989, BECMI/RC from 77 through 92, and 2e from 89 to 2000. Even treating 3.0 and 3.5 as a single edition, in only ran 8 years. That's less than a decade or more. Not opinion, not perspective, simple arithmetic. "Rediculously," I'll admit is highly qualitative. But, 4e & Essentials, together, were published for only about 4 years, and 5e came out only 6 years after 4e, giving it not even half the run of other eds.

So, yes, when you made the point that 4e an 5e were early, it is a very valid, and quite factual point.

Well again, it depends upon the success of the edition, and whether the company felt like it is worth continuing. My point was that from WotC's viewpoint it wasn't "ridiculously" early, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. In other words, I think they only pulled the plug because they felt like they had to, that the game itself would be better served by a new edition than sticking to the old. For those folks who were perfectly happy with 4E, this seemed ridiculously early - and it was historically, as you say, but it was also something that WotC (presumably) believed had to be done.

Anyhow, aren't the online tools going to continue to be usable? Aren't 4E PDFs going to continue to be available? Presumably no new material will be produced, but it seems at least with conversion guides and such WotC isn't completely orphaning 4E. So this is one (positive) difference from prior switch-overs.

For 4e fans, the provocation presented by 5e is, if anything, more extreme than that presented in 2008. The new rev is rolling even earlier, it is just as huge a change from the old one, the old edition is not just being disparaged with the appearance of the new, but had been for a long time

The comparative lack of edition waring this time around says something about the differences among fans of the various editions.

So now you're just being provocative - essentially saying that 4E fans are more mature than fans of other editions, because they aren't whining as much. To be honest, that's one of the most "edition warry" statements I've ever read, my friend.

It's a very safe or conservative choice. But, really, it's rather like trying to launch the renaissance in 1800.

Hmm, not really. I think some of your subjectivity is bleeding out a bit, Tony. Anyhow, it isn't the renaissance, but a renaissance - or renewal. That's what I think they're doing with 5E, trying to consolidate and combine some of the best flavors of previous editions, while adding a few new touches and providing options to customize as individual groups and DMs desire. That seems like a noble approach, don't you think?

As the oldest, sure. As the flagship and industry leader, OTOH, progress is important - maybe not radical innovation, that can be left to the little guys, but adopting innovations as they prove themselves.

I agree, and so far I think 5E has done this to some extent - or at least incorporated elements from 21st century RPGs and not simply re-made the 20th century wheel.

And that's just another proprietary, play D&D the OneTrueWay or get out, dismissal. You were doing so well, too.

No it isn't. Anyone is welcome to make of D&D whatever they want to. But it seems you want it to be something that many others don't, an innovative and exotic game. Sure, make it that - but it can't be the base level.

Let's use the analogy of ice cream. Vanilla could be considered boring, but it is almost certainly the most widely eaten flavor - not only on its own, but because it can be combined with anything. It seems you want the "base flavor" to be Chocolate Praline Hazelnut, which is delicious and good, but not as universal as vanilla.

All I'm saying is that D&D should be "vanilla" not only because it is more palatable to more people than more exotic flavors, but because it can be more easily adapted and combined. I'm not forcing you to eat vanilla, or say vanilla is the OneTrueWay. But if we start with vanilla, a really good vanilla, and then are given a variety of toppings, then we customize it to our hearts content.

 

[Haffrung]

So, we should ignore what the game actually was, in favor of your claim of how you remember your past experience. I'll stick with the game, itself, we can always crack the book and confirm it's contents.

D&D isn't a rulebook. I know people who have played for 30 years without ever cracking one. D&D is a shared game experience that you can't extrapolate from an inert text. May as well assume you know how people drive in California by reading the California Highway Regulations.

True. Some 2e fans decided that 3e's grid-dependence made it intolerable, ignoring both D&D's roots as a wargame, and the fact that many of those self-same rules appeared in 2e C&T. And then a lot of 3.5 fans who decided to hate 4e said the same things about it. I'm sorry, that really /is/ just edition warriors re-writing history, in both cases.

Was Gygax one of those 2E fans who ignored D&D's roots as a wargame? Because, you know, he didn't do combat on a grid. Maybe it's not edition war, and maybe people aren't lying, but stating how they actually played and prefer to play.

But I'll admit, my experience of non-gridded TSR D&D is limited to 7 or 8 groups between 1979 and 1999. Also, three D&D conventions between 1982-1984, with 12-15 tables of D&D at each in which there were no gridded representation of combat (though some tables had minis lined up representing marching order). It may be worthwhile to ask other people who attended conventions in the early 80s if the D&D games used minis and grids for combat. However, I have a feeling you'll dismiss any of their observations out of hand as revisionism and edition-warring.

If you want to talk about the rules as written in the books - that's cool. Crack open the books and discuss what's in them. I just don't think you can point at a book and then make a claim about how millions of people actually used that book.

Actually, I'll settle for a single example of play - from the dozens of combat examples published in D&D books between 1978 and 1986 - which refers to moving miniatures on a combat grid.

There's virtually nothing to choose from among the various eds of D&D in that regard. They all have rules for range, area, movement and positioning that are too granular to be convenient in TotM - 4e's, ironically, with squares as the unit of granularity and chunky cubes for most AES, actually presenting the slightly lesser obstacle in that regard.

Try removing all the of the feats and maneouvers in 3E and 4E that refer to the explicit relationship between combatants. Anything that calls for flanking, tumbling, knocking prone, pushing, sliding. Everything that refers to attacks of opportunity and 5 ft steps. It's a massive pain in the ass. I know, I've tried.

 

[Keldryn]

I hadn't heard that, specifically, but it sounds plausible: it's the obvious first thing to buy, and some percentage of first-timers presumably don't move on to anything else.

I and those I gamed with at the time all took the path from Basic set to AD&D. Seemed natural at the time. Start with Basic, go to Advanced. While basic might have eased us into D&D from outside the wargaming community (who's natural path would presumably have been Chainmail>0D&D>AD&D), it was still easing us into AD&D, not into some imaginary AD&D that didn't have any wargaming-style mechanics.

The "path" from the Basic Set was to the Expert Set, not AD&D. My Basic Set made it explicitly clear that AD&D was a separate game and product line that was "incompatible" with D&D. The AD&D books had a completely different look at format than the D&D sets. The "natural" progression would be to go from Set 1 to Set 2 to Set 3 and so on.

The D&D product line of the 80s and early 90s was a complete game in and of itself (either B/X, BECMI sets 1-5, or the Rules Cyclopedia). Unlike the Holmes Basic Set (1977), it was not assumed that players would "move on" to AD&D. This line also received extensive support through adventures, accessories, and campaign setting supplements.

I don't have any data on how many players started with the Set 1: Basic Rules and then progressed to AD&D versus how many progressed to Set 2: Expert Rules. I suspect that if the new players knew people who were already playing AD&D, then they most likely joined up with them and switched over to AD&D. For a kid who just finished running some friends through the adventure in the Basic Set and was thirsting for more, the Expert Set would probably have been his next purchase.

There always were when someone's reasoning from their own experiences.

Right, because you totally aren't reasoning from your own experiences.

But in case it needs clarification:

"And there are a lot of us" who started with B/X or BECMI D&D.

My statement that those of us who started with B/X or BECMI D&D "are probably more likely to have taken the same approach with AD&D" is based on the fact that the game books and the box itself stress that the action takes place entirely in your imagination and that no gameboard is required. The Basic Set books go to great lengths to emphasize the "theater of the mind" style of play. How would this not have an influence on players who later start playing the AD&D game?

I never claimed the existence of some imaginary AD&D that didn't have any wargaming-style mechanics. I am stating that players who started with B(X)ECMI D&D were probably more likely than players who started with Chainmail/OD&D/AD&D to approach AD&D with that "theater of the mind" perspective and simplify or just plain ignore many of those wargaming-style mechanics.

And I think that is a reasonable assumption. AD&D 1e had a lot of overly complex and poorly-explained rules that many hardcore fans on the Internet admit that they never bothered with. Despite warnings of "incompatibility," it was quite easy to use AD&D classes, spells, monsters, and magic items with the more streamlined rules of BECMI D&D.

OK, so another 'grid dependent' version of the game even before C&T. I'm not shocked.

It's a starter set to cover levels 1-5, titled "The New, Easy-to-Master Dungeons & Dragons Game." It came in a box about the same size as any board game you'd find in a toy or department store. The set was designed and sold as a lead-in to the D&D Rules Cyclopedia (which was a compilation of Sets 1 to 4 and some rules from Gazetteer supplements), which was not grid dependent in the least.

This starter set was designed to play more like a board game in order to make it easier to learn, and I suspect also to make it look more like a typical game so that parents would be more likely to buy it for their kids. It had exactly the same combat rules as the '81 and '83 Basic Sets, which meant that the grid was entirely unnecessary.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But isn't "dissociative" a subjective quality? Isn't the real subjective experience what is, in the end, important? I agree that a specific mechanic or system might not be inherently dissociative, but some systems and mechanics seem to more frequently lead to a dissociative experience than others.

We can't really say that some mechanics lead to this or that subjective experience 'more often' without some sort of exhaustive survey, and, really, it wouldn't help in the case of 'dissociative mechanics,' as it would just map precisely to what side of the edition war the respondent was on. It's meaningless.

Again, we're comparing your experience with my experience, which is like competing anecdotes. What I saw in my own group was some players that took to the tactics of 4E, and others that didn't. Those that didn't suffered because of it - they couldn't get the hang of how to optimize powers and roles. I just found that 4E required more from players in this regard, although perhaps not as much as systems mastery in 3E.

At that level, yes, you just have anecdotes nullifying eachother's minimal value. Looking at the game itself, though, how badly is being off a little on tactics vs spot-on going to skew things? I don't think it compares to the gulf you get from poorly-balanced systems, or systems, like 3e, that intentionally reward system mastery.

For instance, one tactical blunder that's easy to make is applying a condition a creature already has. You could, say, waste an encounter dazing something that's already dazed save ends. You still did damage to it, though, so you still contributed, and it is still dazed so you didn't make the situation worse for your party or anything, just expended a resource inefficiently.

I've found that house rules were the norm in AD)&D, common in 3E, and rare in 4E.

Again, slightly different experience. I found house rules were the norm in AD&D, rare and poorly-regarded in the RAW-is-king 3.x years, and rare but generally accepted in 4e. In 3e, RAW was a big deal because that's the system you mastered that gave you your rewards. In 4e, the system was workable, so the /need/ to mod it was a lot less, but there were no great objections from players when a DM did so.

5E seems to be advocating for a very AD&D-esque approach, in this regard - with a simple enough core to allow to add options as one desires.

Nothing about AD&D was /simple/, but yes, it did invite voluminous rulings and variants, both because the rules were vague and baroque enough that their actually meaning was debateable and the DM obliged to provide frequent rulings, and because there just weren't as many alternatives if you wanted something different, you modded D&D /into/ what you wanted. 5e is, indeed, very similar. It's core /mechanics/ are more consistent, as they're inherited from d20. But, no, like AD&D, it's not simplicity that'll tempt one to make ruling and additions.

What I meant by that was that the relative simplicity of 5E was similar to how many people played 1E (in my experience) - as a simpler game than Gygax wrote it, with a lot of the fiddly parts excised.

So 5e is simple because you expect people to ignore bits of it? Or it feels like AD&D with fiddly bits excised? The latter's prettymuch been the case since 3.0, when things were consolidated around the d20 core system.

We can talk about the rules themselves, but how interesting is that? Anyhow, with RPGs the rules are merely the structure or scaffolding for the subjective, imaginative experience. I think the question is, how do different rules systems faciliate subjective, imaginative experience? Why does one rule system do it well for one group of people and not another? And what sort of rules system would best do it for as many people as possible? Etc.

I find rule systems pretty interesting, actually. But I don't get the impression you're looking for answers to that question. If you want to put the quality of a system down to a set of imponderables and subjective opinions, you can. But, really, what do you have to talk about then. You can state how you feel, and, if asked 'why,' you'd be obliged to explain that you have no reasons or justifications, and that's the end of it.

It would be kinda awesome of people who didn't care for something on purely subjective grounds just did that. One post "I kinda don't care for it, can't say why," and gone. No warring.

Yes and no. I've actually argued on both sides of this question, particularly aroud 4E, and don't have a clear answer. But it does seem that some people are able to get a deep, immersive experience more easily out of one version of D&D than another.

As with 'dissociative mechanics' that just maps to which edition war trench you're in. When you try to identify the qualities that make this or that mechanic immersion-shattering, it becomes contradictory. A mechanic that shatters immersion on one edition is no barrier to it in another.

For those folks who were perfectly happy with 4E, this seemed ridiculously early - and it was historically, as you say, but it was also something that WotC (presumably) believed had to be done.

I'm sure they didn't think they were doing it for no reason. It turned out that reason had a lot to do with unrealistic revenue goals and the implosion of on-line tools, but that doesn't matter. I'm not sure we've heard an explanation for dropping 3e early, but, presumably, again, they probably thought that launching 4e in 2008 instead of a more decorous 2011 or 12 (maybe right after the Mayan callendar ended would've been a good time) was something they believed (just as strongly as they do now) would be best for the game.

Point is, whatever the reasons, 8 years is a shorter run than 10 or 12, and 4-6 is a /lot/ shorter.

And, for the fan, the rapid cycle can be discouraging.

Anyhow, aren't the online tools going to continue to be usable?

They were summarily hidden away when the site changed, so I suspect they lost a lot of folks right there, so, no probably not for long.

Aren't 4E PDFs going to continue to be available? Presumably no new material will be produced

Not produced legally, no, and not cloned like Pathfinder did for 3.5, again, not legally. So, no, no ongoing support, much like the 2e>3e changeover. Really, like all of them but 3e>4e, when ongoing support in perpetuity was on the table and the game could be legally cloned.

, but it seems at least with conversion guides and such WotC isn't completely orphaning 4E. So this is one (positive) difference from prior switch-overs.

Conversion guides - official and otherwise - are nothing new, no.

So now you're just being provocative - essentially saying that 4E fans are more mature than fans of other editions, because they aren't whining as much.

''Whining" hardly captures the full scope of the edition war.

That's what I think they're doing with 5E, trying to consolidate and combine some of the best flavors of previous editions, while adding a few new touches and providing options to customize as individual groups and DMs desire. That seems like a noble approach, don't you think?

Pragmatic, perhaps. The early-stated spin on the goal - to create a "D&D for everyone who ever loved D&D" and to have erstwhile edition warriors able to play characters embodying the things they loved about their respective edition at the same table - that was pretty noble. Far-fetched, but noble.

It's very easy to look at 5e and see the things you hate from another edition, and conclude that it's just that other edition and not for you. That's unfortunate, but if you look past it (or if you don't hate specific things from specific editions too much), you get a clearer view: it's a d20 game.

it seems you want it to be something that many others don't, an innovative and exotic game.

Clear, balanced and playable would be quite adequate. That D&D had to change so much to achieve those fairly simple things that it seemed innovative, revolutionary or exotic is just a testament to how stodgy it had been for so long.

Let's use the analogy of ice cream. Vanilla could be considered boring, but it is almost certainly the most widely eaten flavor - not only on its own, but because it can be combined with anything. It seems you want the "base flavor" to be Chocolate Praline Hazelnut, which is delicious and good, but not as universal as vanilla.

Funny. I've got some folks telling me that 4e is homogenous and blah, and you're painting it as a unique specialty item. It's just a version of D&D that was better-balanced than before. Better balanced games just give you more meaningful/viable choices, and remain workable over a wider range of applications.

That doesn't map to a flavor of ice cream. A better analogy might be that the balanced RPG is like the ice cream bar where you can select from a lot of flavors and toppings. While the imbalanced one may have more or fewer flavors and toppings - but some of them are contaminated with salmonella.

 

[Keldryn]

Regardless of what the rules say, a great many people (in my experience most) played TSR D&D theatre of the mind. You know that's the way Gygax himself played, right? And that none of the examples of play in any of the books mention grids? We weren't houseruling or settling for playing without minis. We simply preferred combat that way. This isn't some revisionist history promoted by edition warriors. Go read some Dragonsfoot archives from 2001 or so. A lot of long-time players didn't make the jump to 3E because it was more difficult to play 3E TotM. Or read the archives on the Necromancer Games forum, a place for old-school players who bought NG's 3E material. Half the people on that forum played 3E and half still played earlier editions of the game, but there was no edition-warring. And there was consensus that playing with minis and a grid was more of a 3E thing that some people liked and some didn't. Nobody called those who said they had played D&D for 20 years without minis and a battle grid liars.

I'd +1 XP you, but I need to spread them around more first.

In my youth, we played many a D&D game in the car during a long trip, while camping, or during our 45-minute lunch breaks at high school. We never used miniatures or grids for any of those games. A lot of the time, we didn't bother when playing at home either.

I will admit that I do actually like miniatures. I like collecting them, painting them, and displaying them. They do make it easier to visualize where everybody is in combat, so I do generally use them unless there are a small number of combatants.

However, the way that I used them changed with 3e. Prior to 3e, I had various miniatures, battle maps, and the old D&D Dragon Tiles. I can sum up how we used the "grid" in one sentence: "I move over here."

It was a very useful tool for visualizing larger battles, but completely unessential to playing the game. One-minute rounds meant that characters could move far enough that we'd just eyeball movement, and other than needing to explicitly withdraw or disengage from an opponent in melee, there weren't any game rules that needed to be considered.

Look at the game itself from those days. 0D&D came right out and called itself a wargame, for use with miniature figures, right on the cover. AD&D's rules were still very much those of such a game, with everything in scale inches, dicing for initiative, and checking morale and on and on.
And there's no dispute that D&D grew out of Chainmail, a medieval wargame.

Yes, D&D did grow out of Chainmail. AD&D was essentially a compilation, revision, and expansion of OD&D and its supplements. The "Classic" D&D game (B/X, BECMI, RC) went back OD&D and rebuilt it from the ground up to appeal to players with no wargaming experience, thus shedding many of the wargaming conventions that AD&D held onto.

AD&D 2e dropped a lot of the wargaming terminology that was still used in 1e, and while the mechanics didn't change a lot, there was a major emphasis on story and setting during the 2e era.

There was a very clear move away from D&D's wargaming roots with both "Classic" D&D and AD&D 2e. The Combat & Tactics supplement was an optional late-2e rulebook, but its influence on 3e was very strong. The "grid" in 3e and especially 4e did not feel very optional, as there were so many rules that interacted with positioning, movement, and measurements on the grid.

With 5e, I finally feel like it's back to being an optional tool to use when I think it will help visualize the situation.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It may be worthwhile to ask other people who attended conventions in the early 80s if the D&D games used minis and grids for combat.

I've been attending conventions regularly since '83. And, yes, IMX, DMs prepped for conventions a little more elaborately, so would often have not only minis (big, heavy cases of them, because they were all lead back then), but pre-drawn maps or even elaborate terrain.

Try removing all the of the feats and maneouvers in 3E and 4E that refer to the explicit relationship between combatants. Anything that calls for flanking, tumbling, knocking prone, pushing, sliding. Everything that refers to attacks of opportunity and 5 ft steps. It's a massive pain in the ass. I know, I've tried.

Some of those are actually pretty easy - you just track adjacent vs 5' vs w/in a move and you can handle it pretty well. But there are lots of things that go either way with different eds. 4e has more forced movement for instance (annoying in TotM if you try to track everything precise-to-the-square), but it's area's are these easy-to-visualize cubes, while 3e has area templates (annoying in TotM if you try to track everything precise-to-the-square), but it's melees tend to be static, with little movement. 5e, like AD&D, has movement, positioning, range and area granular to the foot, and the areas can be a variety of geometric shapes (annoying, in TotM, if you're trying to track everything precise-to-the-foot), but it does things like let the rogue SA when an ally is adjacent to the same enemy, rather than flanking (in contrast, AD&D had facing that determined AC from shields or DEX, and contributed to whether the thief could backstab). None them /say/ you have to be all that precise, but they don't exactly give you an alternative, either. Then you have systems like 13A that /do/ have rules to facilitate TotM, which much less move/position/range/area granularity, just 'adjacent,' 'near' and 'far' or something like that.

Much is made of this or that edition being grid-dependent or 'Roll-playing,' or not - or 5e trying to be TotM, but D&D has never been and still doesn't have the kind of rules that facilitate TotM. It's not like they'd be hard to include - they tend to be of the 'rules lite' sort - and maybe there'll be something like that in the DMG. It just seems odd to call out TotM as the assumed mode of play, and then fail to support it.

The Combat & Tactics supplement was an optional late-2e rulebook, but its influence on 3e was very strong. The "grid" in 3e and especially 4e did not feel very optional, as there were so many rules that interacted with positioning, movement, and measurements on the grid.

Of course, everything is essentially optional in an RPG. But, the grid in 3e was explicitly an option, a way of making dealing with movement/positioning /easier/ than using a bare surface or TotM. Diagonal movement, areas, and reach turned out to be a bit of a problem, though, and led to those nifty wire templates. 4e certainly assumed a grid, and used it in a simplified way (no diagonals or templates), but it was a 5' grid, so, just as all you needed to use a grid in 3e was to divide by 5, all you needed to get off one in 4e was to multiply by 5.

The whole thing was wildly blown out of proportion - and 5e's odd lip-service to TotM (while just using feet like "grid-dependent" 3e), seems to be based on the fake controversy, itself, not on the supposedly-controversial mechanics.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I don't have any data on how many players started with the Set 1: Basic Rules and then progressed to AD&D versus how many progressed to Set 2: Expert Rules. I suspect that if the new players knew people who were already playing AD&D, then they most likely joined up with them and switched over to AD&D. For a kid who just finished running some friends through the adventure in the Basic Set and was thirsting for more, the Expert Set would probably have been his next purchase.

We have some indication from the TSR catalogs of the early 90s. They report that the combined sales for Expert, Companion and Masters were around the 500,000 mark at the point the Rules Cyclopedia was announced. By contrast, the 2E core books sold around 250,000-300,000 each in their first year.

Anecdotal evidence collected by TSR (referenced in the section of Thirty Years of Adventure dealing with the Black Box) was that new gamers may start with the Basic Set, but moved onto the more structured and supported AD&D, while BECMI D&D was played primarily by older, more experienced players who were comfortable with winging it.

 

[RotGrub]

My copy of the PHB arrived at my door last week, but I'm still really struggling to like this edition. I have to be perfectly honest that I'm a bit underwhelmed. At the moment, I think 5e is a failure for my playstyle. The default system is NOT something I want to play at all.

For this reason, I do not think that D&D 5th edition will lead to a golden era. The PHB defines the game going forward and since it contains several ridiculous mechanics my group is not interested.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The "path" from the Basic Set was to the Expert Set, not AD&D. My Basic Set made it explicitly clear that AD&D was a separate game and product line that was "incompatible" with D&D. The AD&D books had a completely different look at format than the D&D sets. The "natural" progression would be to go from Set 1 to Set 2 to Set 3 and so on.

That's a very compelling argument for me not having actually gone from the Basic set to the Advanced game. Of course, I did so in 1980, a year before the Expert Set hit the shelves, so it was either AD&D or the old booklets.

The 'two pronged approach' always was a little weird, though, I'll grant you.

I don't have any data on how many players started with the Set 1: Basic Rules and then progressed to AD&D versus how many progressed to Set 2: Expert Rules.

Exactly.

Right, because you totally aren't reasoning from your own experiences.

Not where I can avoid it. People do keep bringing up anecdotes like they prove something, though, so maybe a sharing a differing anecdote will drive home that they really don't.

We have some indication from the TSR catalogs of the early 90s. They report that the combined sales for Expert, Companion and Masters were around the 500,000 mark at the point the Rules Cyclopedia was announced. By contrast, the 2E core books sold around 250,000-300,000 each in their first year.

Not really perfectly comparable numbers. Core books often sell the heaviest early on, and I'd expect more than a 50k swing between PHs and the DM-only MM & DMG. It'd be helpful to break out the Expert set, at least, why isn't Basic mentioned, etc...

Anecdotal evidence collected by TSR (referenced in the section of Thirty Years of Adventure dealing with the Black Box) was that new gamers may start with the Basic Set, but moved onto the more structured and supported AD&D, while BECMI D&D was played primarily by older, more experienced players who were comfortable with winging it.

I'd often /heard/ that, didn't know where it came from.