D+1
First Post
I still don't buy it. This is an argument that didn't work for switching from 1E to 2E, nor 2E to 3E. The response remains the same as it was then - nobody is holding a gun to your head. Whether you like it or not, if you don't want to use it (for whatever reasons) you don't have to buy it. There is one thing that is not sold with the rules that is VITAL for playing any version of D&D and that is your imagination. If you have that you don't need anything else - not updated rules, prepackaged campaign settings, adventures, etc., and therefore it should be largely unimportant if you like the new rules or not. If you are actively using that vital ingredient that you are supposed to supply yourself it should not ultimately matter to you if nobody published so much as a leaflet for D&D ever again.
I hate to sound like the old geezer gamer that I am but back in the day, when 1E was still referred to as "Advanced", we played 12 hours or more every Saturday with religious regularity for almost a decade and only used perhaps a dozen modules. We made it up. We created our own adventures, we wrote our own house rules, adapted material from books, movies, TV, and other RPGs. We did it all by the seat of our own pants because we didn't have a glut of 3rd party publishers trying to do it for us. The overwhelming amount of support we now enjoy for D&D has made gamers soft.
Hell, it made me soft and I'm getting crustier by the day. As my first 3E campaign wound down I realized I had actually lost some of my skill at making up the campaign as I went along. I ran any number of campaigns for years at a stretch with never more prep for a weekly game than page of vague notes - if that. Looking at my 3E game I dreaded the idea of trying to prep something for the PC's to do in the next session without having a module to run them through. That dread didn't come from 3E being any more complex or facing up to doing massive stat blocks, it came from 3E being LESS complex and yet having a line of writers doing up stat blocks FOR me.
As does 2E and 1E and Basic D&D, etc. People still play those versions. They play them because they LIKE THEM BETTER, not because they were too poor to pay for new books.
If you say you actually like a lot of the 3.5 changes then your arguments about not wanting to spend $100 on new books, or spending time on adapting material have to hold almost as much water 5 years down the road as they do right now. 5 years from now will you still be playing 3E because you still don't want to pay money for new books, or to keep up with the latest materials, or because you don't want to put in time to adapt things to a new system? Hell, the people who HAVE made the switch to 3.5 are currently putting in more time doing adaptations of 3E material than you are going to if you stick with 3E for quite some time to come. And really, I mean really, how difficult is the vast bulk of the adaptation going to be?
And thus people generally did NOT go rushing out to buy Win98 2nd revision to replace Win98 unless they DID have a neurotic need to have only the latest and greatest. Simply having a newer, slightly better OS didn't make the previous OS any less useful (although I've heard nothing particularly praiseworthy about ME).
And there you have it - gaming like it was in the old days. Everyone picks and chooses bits and pieces that they like from everywhere and fit them into their games. Whether they use 3.5 in whole, or just small parts, it tends to improve their games because their creativity has been stirred into motion after an extended period of disuse. It isn't so much the 3.5 rules in and of themselves that do the improving, it's the proactive attitude they seem to have required of gamers to deal with them one way or another. Even if they are legitimately examined and then totally rejected the potential user has still just made a complete survey of his existing game and how he wants to run it.
