Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 3414181" data-attributes="member: 22779">Y'know, there's a difference that we haven't really mentioned yet.  Writing style.Each edition has its own distinct style.  And, really, I think that goes a long way to setting the tone of the game.  I remember 1e as being very conversational in nature, with digressions and whatnot within each section with an organization that was, well, loose I guess is the best word.  And, that gets reflected in play as well.  People come to 1e games fully expecting the rules to be folded, mangled and bent.  Structure and form were less important than content.  (IMO).2e brought up a more structured approach to the books and the rules.  There is still a lot of very evocative language used in the PHB and the DMG, but, a lot of the information in the DMG got shuffled into the PHB.  The books are easier to use, with some thought being given towards putting pertinent information all in one place.  OTOH, you still see a great deal of fluidity in the rules.  Look at the section on clerics where it talks about specialty priests.  Boil the lines down and you get, "Go ahead and make whatever you think is best".  3e is much more rigidly structured than the previous two.  The language is intended to be as plain and straightforward as possible.  Finding pertinent information is probably the easiest it has ever been.  Far more information is now given to the players than ever before, placing the onus of rules knowledge on the players as well as the DM.  The writing is certainly less evocative than before as well, mostly in an attempt to remove ambiguity (with various results).  3.5 takes this even further.  Compare the 3e PHB section on attacks of opportunity to the 3.5 one.  Rules that were problematic for some groups in 3e have been altered and nearly every class got a bit of tweaking between editions.  Ruleswise there's as much difference between 3.0 and 3.5 as there was between 1e and 2e.  I really think that the use of clear language has made the push towards RAW much stronger.  As I mentioned, pretty much no one played 1e even remotely close to RAW.  (Yes, Yes, I know that YOU did, I'm talking about all those other guys.)  And, mostly, people never thought much about it.  The first question asked was usually about house rules.  With 3e, with much more concise language, I think the assumption of a new player is that RAW (or something very close) will be in play with any exceptions to RAW being presented beforehand.But, one of the biggest differences between editions has been the use of language.  Now, whether you like one or another is a matter of personal taste.  I am in no way trying to place a value judgement on any of them.  It's pretty obvious that I prefer less ambiguity, but, that doesn't make the previous editions bad, just bad for me.  <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=":)" />Really, I think that's what Celebrim meant when he said that 3e has the best mechanics.  Certainly 3e has the clearest mechanics.</blockquote>

Verification