Being Left Behind

[Dice4Hire]

I know this has happened to a lot of D&D players.

A new edition comes (or two or three or ...) and you and your group just do not move on, you stick with an 'older' edition and keep playing what you like.

I have always moved on with WOTC and D&D. I started with the red and blue boxes, and have bought extensively up to and including 4E, but 5E looks .... unlikely.

So, what happened, or how did you adjust when your edition got 'older' and the print products stopped?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

We upgraded our major campaigns from AD&D to 2Ed to 3.5Ed, but 4Ed was too different to do that with.

Those campaigns remain 3.5Ed, as are most of our other active games. We have precisely one 4Ed game, and really, only one guy interested in running it.

5Ed? We'll decide when we see it- I, for one, plan on buying the initial release of DMG, MM, and PHB...plus possibly whatever comes along in the first few months. That is when the game will be made or broken for us.

 

[Renion]

I played with the same gaming group from the launch of 4e until earlier this year. We played 4e every week until mid 2010, then the DM and players revolted when Essentials came out and went back to 3.5. I played 3.5 for 18 months because I wanted to play with my friends even though I don't like 3.5 because of it's simulationist philosophy. The last 6 months or so I was not having fun at all with the game, even though I enjoyed hanging out with my friends.

We aren't friends anymore because of the edition wars. Thanks WotC.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Don't blame the edition wars.

Instead, do what we do: those who want to play in 3.5Ed games do, those who want to play in 4Ed games do. When its not your preferred game's night, don't show up. Or so show up and hang out. Or help the DM run things.

If that means someone besides the guy who is currently running 3.5Ed has to step up and run a 4Ed game, so be it.

 

[Renion]

We tried that. At some point they liked 3.5 so much that both games became 3.5, and stayed 3.5 until I had to leave.

 

[Elf Witch]

I played with the same gaming group from the launch of 4e until earlier this year. We played 4e every week until mid 2010, then the DM and players revolted when Essentials came out and went back to 3.5. I played 3.5 for 18 months because I wanted to play with my friends even though I don't like 3.5 because of it's simulationist philosophy. The last 6 months or so I was not having fun at all with the game, even though I enjoyed hanging out with my friends.

We aren't friends anymore because of the edition wars. Thanks WotC.

Why are you blaming WOTC for your friendships breaking up?

I have good friends who I stopped playing with when they went to 4E and I didn't because I didn't enjoy the rule set at all.

I have friends who didn't switch to 3E.

I handle it by finding people who want to play the edition I like or I sucked it up an play what they want to play. Unless you are totally dependent on modules and adventure paths to run a game you really don't need but the basic stuff to play a game. I have plenty of stuff from the differnt editions that I can use if I want to play them. There are stuff I want to use that I have never gotten the chance to yet with 3E.

 

[Abraxas]

First, get used to people telling you
1) why your edition needed fixing
2) how you should make the switch
and
3) your doing it wrong/thinking about it wrong if you don't want to switch because you don't get the gaming experience you want from the new edition.

After you get past that, If you have a DDI subscription, download everything you can from the WoTC site before it goes away. You also buy all the books you think you'll need on the second hand market - someone who really likes the new edition will probably be doing a fire sale to get rid of all their old stuff. Then you need to find a core group of players that really likes 4E too - with any luck those people will also be long term friends that you have outside of gaming making it more likely that they will be around to play (I have had the same basic group of gaming friends for the last 27 years). In addition, you can hope that WoTC releases all the 4E stuff in a form that could be used by the old off-line character builder (not likely, but hey it would garner some goodwill) - Or learn to edit yourself so that you can add everything that you need. After that, you play what you like until you can no longer find anyone to play.

 

[Sunseeker]

I know this has happened to a lot of D&D players.

A new edition comes (or two or three or ...) and you and your group just do not move on, you stick with an 'older' edition and keep playing what you like.

Emphasis mine. That's exactly what I do. Keep playing what I like.

I have always moved on with WOTC and D&D. I started with the red and blue boxes, and have bought extensively up to and including 4E, but 5E looks .... unlikely.

I play what my friends play. I buy a few Core books of that system, some splat if I really like it. But I generally just "go with the flow" of my groups.

So, what happened, or how did you adjust when your edition got 'older' and the print products stopped?

I have never been reliant on a company to be able to game...save for MMOs where the game stops happening if the company stops supporting.

But D&D doesn't work like that. I've got my books, my PDFs, so long as I have them, I can keep playing that edition. Using them I can create my own stories, my own settings, and help other players learn the system. I admit, I use DDI for a great deal of 4e information, I have to admit that if that goes offline when DDN comes out, my ability to run a 4e game will be diminished, but not eliminated. I hope in that regard at least, service will be expanded, not ended. Supporting older editions through digital products, even if they are no longer producing new content for them, will only net them more in their favor.

Anyway, like I said, I play what I like, regardless of what's new or supported. As long as I have copies of the information in some form, I can play whatever I want.

 

[Stormonu]

I kept up with D&D's changes and didn't blink once until the announcement of 4E. I was leery of how much change there seemed to be. So, while we awaited 4E to hit the shelves, I started going through my other RPGs I'd been collecting and actually give them a go. If 3.5E was ending, I figured I might as well test drive a few cars in the interim.

When I found 4E not to my liking, we ended up playing a bit of nWoD for a while. I picked up on [notranslate]Pathfinder[/notranslate] when it came out, but I now play a lot more RPGs beyond D&D these days (Savage Worlds, Lot5R, nWoD and [notranslate]Pathfinder[/notranslate] are my current favorites). And I've actually regained a liking for 2E and would once again try a campaign using the rules.

 

[timASW]

I had gotten a little sick of 3.5 before 4e actually came out and was mainly playing Warhammer FRPG and NWoD. But when 4e looked.... well how it looked. It really made me think about the things I had liked about D&D in the first place. Which made me try [notranslate]Pathfinder[/notranslate] when it came out and thats been what I use to scratch my itch for D&D style gaming since it came out. Still mainly play warhammer and NWoD though.