Doesn't matter what WotC wants to call it; it's almost certainly going to end up being called 5.5e in the wild anyway, and they're stuck with that.
Exactly. They may not call it an "edition" or "5.5" or "6e", but that cannot stop us doing so. After all, they (almost?) never refer to the current edition as 5e, but that does not stop any of us!
On the other hand, WotC marketing horse hockey worked well enough that theybgotnpeople to use the garbage "3.5" to this day. Don't count them out yet.
That is not my recollection. IIRC, the online community started calling it 3.5 first, and WotC's marketting saw it and thought "That's a good idea!"
(Narrator: "It was not a good idea.)
Which version of the D&D term? The original 1e - 2e version, or the 2e-3e version, or the 3e-3,5e version, or...? D&D has not been consistent on what an "edition" is.
I believe "new edition" has pretty consistently meant "new version of the game
line, inspired by but not fully compatible with its predecessors". The degree of incompatibility has varied, which has given rise to "edition families", and the numbering has been inconsistent: I started with 2e, but AFAICT the 1e => 2e changes were of the same order as 3 => 3.5, so on that basis 2e should really have been called 1.5, and the basic branch had no numbers at all.
I mean, 3.5 was not fully backwards compatible with 3e but it was a half edition rather than a full edition.
No such things as a "half edition".
Thank you, would it be fair to say PF is more compatible to 3.5 than 3.5 to 3.0?
Yes, but not by a wide margin. The biggest things is probably PF1 has the same action economy as 3.5 (with the exception of swift actions being core), whereas in 3.0 you could do roughly the same amount of things on your turn but how you arrived at that was rather different.
Is this actually true? Meaning, was 3.5 planned from the beginning, or was it the result of things learned in the first year or two of wide distribution of 3E?
According to Monte Cook, revision of the core books was planned from the beginning (although IIRC it was originally planned for 5 years out, rather than 3). But originally it was to have new art, incorporate errata, and have some extra content, but probably not the scope of changes that 3.5 ended up having.
I don't know about that.
Just pulling up the
first interview I found with the creators:
Thank you for digging that up. Sadly I fear our efforts are in vain; the edition warriors have been so successful that even some 4e fans repeat their talking points as if they had some basis in reality, But I will keep trying, even if I am tilting at windmills.
So multiclass, then. If you want a warrior with tricks or spells to call upon, multiclass a Fighter with a Cleric or Mage or Bard or whatever.
"I want a complex martial". "So play a spellcaster".
Regarding the "D&D edition" vs "publisher's edition" thing. AIUI, the latter typically applies to individual books, while the former applies to entire gamelines. So it would be perfectly correct to call the 1995 2e PHB a new edition of that book, despite its not being new edition of D&D. (In many contexts it would probably be a mistake to call it that, if avoiding confusion is a goal, but it would not be factually wrong.)