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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Richards" data-source="post: 744661" data-attributes="member: 508">Okay, here's my input on the subject.  Actually, I'm going to change the parameters a little and not talk about different d20 publishers, but rather about the changes between editions.I see the change from AD&D 1st Edition to 2nd Edition as being very much like how Marvel works.  By that, I mean they were concerned about the past continuity.  Of the two main comics companies, I've always seen Marvel as being far more concerned about maintaining the continuity of their universe.  Sure, they've made changes, but they've usually made an effort to incorporate the changes into what's already been established.  Plus, they keep meticulous track of their past history!  There have been, over the years, several versions of The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, with encyclopedia-type entries on the main characters of their universe.  You can look up, say, Magneto, and the fact that he was once age-regressed into a baby, and then later regained his true age and became a "good guy" for awhile - it's all there, documented.Most of the changes between 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D were mostly cosmetic.  Okay, we're not going to call them devils and demons anymore, now they're tanar'ri and baatezu - but really, nothing's changed.  As far as significant changes to the editions - the fact that there are no longer assassin or monk player characters, for instance - these are explained away (at least in the Forgotten Realms): there's this Time of Troubles, see, and the Gods are trapped on the Prime Material Plane, and some of the evil gods suck up the life forces of the assassins and monks, so they're all killed and that's why there aren't any more of those character classes in the world.  So 2nd Edition goes out of its way to "hold on" to the continuity that's been established in 1st Edition.  The same monsters exist in the world, and for the most part they look the way they've always looked.In the change from 2nd Edition to 3E, however, a completely different approach was used.  Rather than trying to seamlessly integrate campaigns over from one edition to the other, they just scrapped everything and started over from scratch.  In fact, there were several adventures at the end of 2nd Edition specifically designed to end your campaigns with a bang so you could start over with a clean slate for 3E.  This, to me, is more of a "DC approach."DC seems to me to have never been all that concerned with what has gone before.  Many times a long-running title will just start over from scratch and redo the whole origin of its main character.  You might read several hundred issues of a Superman title, and then a new creative team takes over and boom, we're right back to baby Kal-El crashlanding in the Kents' farm.  Over the next few issues, we see a "new" first meeting between superman and Lex Luthor, a 'new" first meeting with Brainiac, etc. - all of the past history now never happened.  Wonder Woman goes from being a mortal Amazon one day to having been sculpted from clay and brought to life as a goddess by the Greek pantheon the next.  Batman and Catwoman are lovers who know each others' secret identities one day, and the next: nope, that never happened.With the change to 3E, there was very little continuity from previous editions.  3E brought a "new look" to everything from armor to the appearances of traditional monsters, and now not only was everything different, it had now "always been that way."  Oddly enough, Marvel and DC in recent years have both dropped their own "continuity" views and tried out the other side of the fence.  Marvel had the X-Men super-enemy Onslaught kill off the Avengers and the Fantastic Four so they could be "reborn" in new titles, effectively restarting and updating their origins for a 12 or 13 issue miniseries, then restarted them again in new editions of their comic titles starting over again with a new issue #1.  Peter Parker's spider-bite origin is now suddenly tied in to Doctor Octopus' (thanks to John Byrne, who can't seem to resist changing things about established origins whenever he gets the chance).  Of course, now it seems like they're regretting that: they've restablished the characters into normal Marvel Universe continuity, and they even seem to be regretting the whole "renumbering from issue #1" scheme, as Marvel Comics now include the issue number from the restart as well as the issue number they would have been at if they hadn't restarted the numbering scheme.  Why?  I think they realized they were approaching some landmark issue numbers had they not reset the clock, so to speak.DC, on the other hand, who never really seemed to care all that much for continuity, did their whole "Crisis on Infinite Earths" crossover, wherein many multiple alternate universes were being destroyed and bits and pieces of universes were "cobbled together" to create the one, true DC Universe from which all DC comics would thereafter come from.  In this universe, Superboy never was part of the Legion of Superheroes in the far future, there no longer was a Supergirl or Barry Allen Flash, etc.  However, after several years of this "Marvel-like" approach, DC came out with a bunch of crossover titles involving characters from the possible future of Kingdom Come, and the end of that was they "unlocked" all of the past universes, making stories from "previously scrapped continuities" possible once again.  As to whether or not the DC Universe is once again at its former "reboot when necessary" mode I couldn't say, as most of my superhero comics are from the Marvel side of things these days.Anyway, that's my take on things, in a much more long-winded fashion than I had intended.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Johnathan</blockquote>

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