What changed between editions

[pemerton]

4e on the other hand assumes that this exploratory game - this simulation of the whole world if you will - won't be a big part of play, and instead far and away the dominate focus of play will be on producing exciting and yes cinematic combat scenes. Almost the whole game is assumed to occur within the framework of combat

<snip>

The game is paced specifically around 'encounters', which are 'combat encounters', and for which you have 'encounter powers', which are actually 'combat encounter powers'.

<snip>

The idea of the open ended negotiation of the scene implicit in 1e is almost completely gone.

From the 4e PHB (pp 9, 259):

Encounters come in two types.

*Combat encounters are battles against nefarious foes. In a combat encounter, characters and monsters take turns attacking until one side or the other is defeated. . . .

Combat encounters rely on your attack powers, movement abilities, skills, feats, and magic items - just about every bit of rules material that appears on your character sheet. A combat encounter might include elements of a noncombat encounter. . . .


*Noncombat encounters include deadly traps, difficult puzzles, and other obstacles to overcome. Sometimes you overcome noncombat encounters by using your character’s skills, sometimes you can defeat them with clever uses of magic, and sometimes you have to puzzle them out with nothing but your wits. Noncombat encounters also include social interactions, such as attempts to persuade, bargain with, or obtain information from a nonplayer character (NPC) controlled by the DM. Whenever you decide that your character wants to talk to a person or monster, it’s a noncombat encounter. . . .

Noncombat encounters focus on skills, utility powers, and your own wits (not your character’s), although sometimes attack powers can come in handy as well. Such encounters include dealing with traps and hazards, solving puzzles, and a broad category of situations called skill challenges.

A skill challenge occurs when exploration . . . or social interaction becomes an encounter, with serious consequences for success or failure. When you’re making your way through a dungeon or across the trackless wilderness, you typically don’t take turns or make checks. But when you spring a trap or face a serious obstacle or hazard, you’re in a skill challenge. When you try to persuade a dragon to help you against an oncoming orc horde, you’re also in a skill challenge.

In a skill challenge, your goal is to accumulate a certain number of successful skill checks before rolling too many failures. Powers you use might give you bonuses on your checks, make some checks unnecessary, or otherwise help you through the challenge. Your DM sets the stage for a skill challenge by describing the obstacle you face and giving you some idea of the options you have in the encounter. Then you describe your actions and make checks until you either successfully complete the challenge or fail. . . .

You can use a wide variety of skills, from Acrobatics and Athletics to Nature and Stealth. You might also use combat powers and ability checks. The Dungeon Master’s Guide contains rules for designing and running skill challenges.​

From the 4e DMG (pp 34, 70, 72):

Stripped to the very basics, the D&D game is a series of encounters. Encounters are where
the game happens - where the capabilities of the characters are put to the test and success or failure hang in the balance. An encounter is a single scene in an ongoing drama, when the player characters come up against something that impedes their progress. This chapter talks you through running combat encounters . . .

No D&D game consists of endless combat. You need other challenges to spice up and add variety to adventures. Sometimes these challenges are combined with combat encounters, making for really interesting and strategic situations. Other times, an encounter completely revolves around character skills and social interactions. This chapter is your guide to running and creating encounters that feature skill challenges, puzzles, traps, and hazards. . . .

An audience with the duke, a mysterious set of sigils in a hidden chamber, finding your way through the Forest of Neverlight - all of these present challenges that test both the characters and the people who play them. The difference between a combat challenge and a skill challenge isn’t the presence or absence of physical risk, nor the presence or absence of attack rolls and damage rolls and power use. The difference is in how the encounter treats PC actions.

Skill challenges can account for all the action in a particular encounter, or they can be used as part of a combat encounter to add variety and a sense of urgency to the proceedings. . . .

More so than perhaps any other kind of encounter, a skill challenge is defined by its context in an adventure. Adventurers can fight a group of five foulspawn in just about any 8th- to 10th-level adventure, but a skill challenge that requires the PCs to unmask the doppelganger in the baron’s court is directly related to the particular adventure and campaign it’s set in.​

I've quoted at length both for reasons of clarity, and to provide the texts that explain how encounters, in 4e, relate to the broader context of the adventure/campaign, and the role that mechanics play in them.

characters were given powers that almost exclusively were meant to be used in combat.

<snip>

No one really has daily powers like, "Find secret door." or "Initiate a Parlay" or "Decipher a clue."

Here are some abilities from the 4e PHB:

Astral Speech (Paladin Utility 2)
Daily * Divine
Minor Action, Personal
Effect: You gain a +4 power bonus to Diplomacy checksuntil the end of the encounter.

Crucial Advice (Ranger Utility 2)
Encounter * Martial
Immediate Reaction, Ranged 5
Trigger: An ally within range that you can see or hear makes a skill check using a skill in which you’re trained
Effect: Grant the ally the ability to reroll the skill check, with a power bonus equal to your Wisdom modifier.

Beguiling Tongue (Warlock (Fey) Utility 2)
Encounter * Arcane
Minor Action, Personal
Effect: You gain a +5 power bonus to your next Bluff, Diplomacy, or Intimidate check during this encounter.

Ritual Casting
You gain the Ritual Caster feat . . . as a bonus feat, allowing you to use magical rituals . . . You possess a spellbook, a book full of mystic lore in which you store your rituals . . . Your book contains three 1st-level rituals of your choice that you have mastered. . . .

Comprehend Language (Ritual)
Level: 1
Category: Exploration
Time: 10 minutes
Duration: 24 hours
Component Cost: 10 gp
Market Price: 50 gp
Key Skill: Arcana
When beginning the ritual, choose a language you have heard or a piece of writing you have seen within the past
24 hours.

Using this ritual on a language you have heard allows you to understand it when spoken for the next 24 hours
and, if your Arcana check result is 35 or higher, to speak the language fluently for the duration.

Using this ritual on a language you have seen as a piece of writing allows you to read the language for the next 24 hours and, if your Arcana check result is 35 or higher, to write the language in its native script or in any other script you know for the duration.

Using this ritual on a language you have both heard and seen as a piece of writing within the past 24 hours allows you to understand it in both forms for the next 24 hours, and an Arcana check result of 35 or higher allows you to speak and write the language.​

These abilities can clearly be used to initiate a parlay, to find a secret door or to decipher a clue.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Still haven't heard from [MENTION=6808538]huginn12[/MENTION], must still be reporting to Odin13.

If you're familiar with 3E, the main differences you will notice in 5e are (i) that spells don't scale with caster level,

You might also notice that everyone's casting spontaneously, and there's a remarkable dearth of AoOs.

Which is why I pointed to 1e's very strong and obvious links to war gaming. Those have never completely went away, but I have seen BECMI and 2e in particular largely played in a theater of the mind style, with largely subjective positioning (as a practical matter, often 'in melee' and 'not in melee') and little attention paid to tactics.

Just because you've seen it doesn't mean it's the only way it was played, or that 2e AD&D was that much further from its wargame roots than 1e. If you'd been at The Game Table in Cambell, CA, in 1985, you'd've seen me running 1e AD&D 'TotM' with not a mini in sight. I've even run Champions! that way, which should be impossible. ;P

2e payed a lot of lip service to the storytelling trend and pushed a lot of settings, but it's rules were not all that different from 1e's, and not particularly more conducive to doing away with minis than any other edition.

 

[dco]

You'll find most of the basic classes, most of the monster, 1 book for players, other for monsters and other for the DM, most of the spells have the same name... but the mechanics are very different, the list of changes are practically all the content of the books.

 

[Ath-kethin]

To be honest, I more or less skipped straight from 1e to 3e, so exactly how 2e tried to force its world on to the player I don't really remember. I just remember that if you had an existing campaign world, with existing characters and demographic assumptions, you were forced to break your world to accommodate the designer's preferences.

I started playing in '94 with 2nd Edition, so I missed whatever animosity existed in the 1e-2e transition. In fact, I was playing and DMing for years beore I even realized there were different editions. All the (I later discovered to be 1e) stuff I had seemed to work fine with the 2e rules.

One of the main turnoffs of 4e for me was that the core races and classes were completely different than 3e (at least in the first 4e Player's Handbook), making it impossible to continue a campaign begun earlier.

EDIT: clarity

 

[Celebrim]

One of the main turnoffs of 4e for me was that the core races and classes were completely different than 3e (at least in the first 4e Player's Handbook), making it impossible to continue a campaign begun earlier.

One of the things newer players don't get is that older DMs have engaged in a mythopoetic work based on the older fluff and crunch of the game. So, when the new edition comes along you don't expect necessarily a continuity with all the rules, but you need continuity with the ideas.

The same turn off you had for 4e coming from a 2e/3e background, is the same trouble I had with 2e (and with 4e). That total break in continuity is just a non-starter. That's something that the 3e team got right. Indeed, if I had to fault them, they erred to much on the side of ensuring continuity. They probably should have played around more with spell balance than they did, as we inherited the often arbitrary balance of spells from earlier edition.

Still, as an oldbie, I'd rather you err on the side of continuity than go too far with your creativity. I see some of the same trends in 4e reappearing in 5e, for example turning flinds from a barely superior race of gnolls to demonic nightmares that are miniature versions of their fiend lord master. A little bit of that is ok, but its easy to go overboard. You have to respect the heritage, which is harder and harder the more creative and skilled you are. I'm sure every product manager that takes over wants to essentially port his own homebrew preferences into the game, but that's really hard on the oldbies.

 

[LostSoul]

4e: D&D as reimagined by someone that hated D&D. Virtually everything except the core ideas of the game is tossed out.

Why would someone who hates D&D retain the core ideas of the game? Wouldn't that be exactly what you expect someone who likes the game to keep?

Let me highlight this: Classes are reimagined as primarily pawns with tactical roles in a table top wargame, with non-combat activity being left largely to the fiat of the DM.

Let's contrast with this:

While 1e had no unified approach to exploration and relied heavily on a metagame negotiation to discover and overcome features of the environment that has been disparagingly called 'pixel bitching', the game still assumed on a meta-level that exploration between and within rooms was still a big part of the game.

Anyway.

So, just what I've played:

Basic: Simple dungeon exploration. Simple meaning that the game is simple to understand and play, not that the tactical or strategic qualities are.

AD&D: Complex, adds a lot outside of the dungeon.

3E: Rule space has precedence over imagined space.

4E: Cleaner 3E but without a strategic element.

5E: A simpler version of AD&D, but sacrifices support.

 

[Lanefan]

2e payed a lot of lip service to the storytelling trend and pushed a lot of settings, but it's rules were not all that different from 1e's, and not particularly more conducive to doing away with minis than any other edition.

Minis or not, 2e did make one small-ish rule change from 1e that turned out to very much affect how the game played out at the table: it did away with experience for gold.

What this did was take a lot of focus away from treasure-hunting and put it on to combat...and on to story, if any sort of story-reward system was used. Combine that with the growing emphasis on publishing story-based adventures and while the rules themselves may not have been all that different the end result at the table was.

Lan-"and 2e in 1991 was a very different beast than 2e in 1998"-efan

 

[WheresMyD20]

Just because you've seen it doesn't mean it's the only way it was played, or that 2e AD&D was that much further from its wargame roots than 1e. If you'd been at The Game Table in Cambell, CA, in 1985, you'd've seen me running 1e AD&D 'TotM' with not a mini in sight.

Funny that you mention Campbell, CA in the 80s... I played in several different AD&D groups in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 80s and my experience was the same: none of them ever used minis, just "TotM" for combat.

I don't think it was just a Northern California thing, either. People who played in the original Greyhawk and Blackmoor campaigns back in the 70s have said that neither Gary Gygax nor Dave Arneson used wargame-style minis rules for combat. "TotM" was the default in their campaigns.

One thing that's important to remember is that just because rules for minis combat were included in the 1e DMG doesn't mean that you were required to use them to play a proper game of AD&D. The 1e DMG is a bag of tools that a DM can use as he or she sees fit. Just because a tool is included in the bag doesn't mean that you need to use it. I don't think it's an accident that the book was given the title "DM Guide" instead of "DM Rulebook".

 

[Tony Vargas]

Funny that you mention Campbell, CA in the 80s... I played in several different AD&D groups in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 80s and my experience was the same: none of them ever used minis, just "TotM" for combat.

To be clear, my anecdote spoke for my own campaign that I had started that year, only. When I first started playing at that location, there were two other D&D games going, and both used minis. And, since one was full and other shaded over into a style I can only call "Monty-Killer" (murderous killer-DMing leavened with very high levels of treasure, especially magic items), I didn't play in either of them. Champions! (using battlemats and cardboard heroes), also got several tables a week there, and I ended up playing that, Traveler (totally TotM), Gamma World, and more Battletech (actually, battledroids, at first, an outright boardgame really) than I'd've liked - and even some GURPS and assorted other weirdness. That was after the Game Reserve in San Jose, much closer to my place, had closed - the AD&D campaign (really long dungeon crawl, if we're being honest) I was in there also featured minis, because the DM had tons of them (well, fifty pounds or so, I'd guess, in tackle boxes that he dragged in every week).

The 1e DMG is a bag of tools that a DM can use as he or she sees fit. Just because a tool is included in the bag doesn't mean that you need to use it.

Which makes claims about 'everyone' playing it a certain way pretty silly. The only blanket statement that might be valid about AD&D was that every DM had his own set of variants... ;P

 

[GreyLord]

Still haven't heard from [MENTION=6808538]huginn12[/MENTION], must still be reporting to Odin13.

You might also notice that everyone's casting spontaneously, and there's a remarkable dearth of AoOs.

Just because you've seen it doesn't mean it's the only way it was played, or that 2e AD&D was that much further from its wargame roots than 1e. If you'd been at The Game Table in Cambell, CA, in 1985, you'd've seen me running 1e AD&D 'TotM' with not a mini in sight. I've even run Champions! that way, which should be impossible. ;P

2e payed a lot of lip service to the storytelling trend and pushed a lot of settings, but it's rules were not all that different from 1e's, and not particularly more conducive to doing away with minis than any other edition.

With 4e, the most common way I played was also without minis or a tactical map. 4e was a GREAT return to being able to do whatever you want as long as you could describe it (42 baby!), at least out of combat (in combat as well, but I find most people didn't do that and just resorted to sorting through their powers instead).

It was something very common in OD&D, B/X, BECMI, and AD&D (not as common I think with 2e, but I didn't play with all groups nor am I able to speak for all groups).

It fell out of practice with 3.5, absolutely, as there were skills and feats for everything, so it turned into something where people weren't as willing to try something that was a skill or a feat if they didn't have it or weren't skilled in it.

With the huge reduction in skills and far less emphasis on feats I found people far more willing to do things they came up with if the DM merely encouraged them to do so.

Still, if one is coming from AD&D, probably would say 4e might not be the system for them to look at. It might scare them away rather than draw them in as it is drastically different than AD&D in almost every way. Fun system, but vastly different.

Ironically, despite popular opinion, I'd say the same thing about 5e. The bonded accuracy has...not gone over well with just about every true old school player I've presented it too (those who hated 3e and D&D versions afterwards...even when they try 5e, the entire bonded accuracy thing seems to be a major sticking point, though it may just be an excuse they hold for not playing 5e in favor of going back to AD&D or another older D&D version).

In that light, if someone is looking at the New D&D from AD&D, if they are going for 5e I'd say come with a VERY open mind and do NOT expect anything like the D&D you knew. Look at it as an entirely different and new system, sort of like you would if you were trying out Cyberpunk, or Warhammer FRPG or something entirely different. Use that mindset when you look at 5e and you may like what you see. I find the most disappointments I get are those who come from AD&D or older and are expecting something like what they've played before. Don't think that way, it's probably the number one way to get disappointed with 5e.

I'd echo the idea (if not the exact opinions on each edition expressed) that after 2e, the changes between each edition are really pretty vast, and expecting the same gaming experience from them from one to the other isn't really going to occur for many people.

If 5e is something one can't enjoy because it's not the D&D they remember, but they want something in print, but NOT the PDFs that are cheaply available on DMsguild, I'd suggest something like Basic Fantasy, Castles and Crusades, or if they can do something a little bit more in the transition, but not as drastic a change as 4e or 5e, then they might give Pathfinder a shot.

The good thing is that 5e basic is free to try, as is Pathfinder via their PRD. No need to do a big buy in before one has a try in it first.