characters/adventure across the editions

[GMforPowergamers]

well guessing about the new setting Scribble said:

Wouldn't it be interesting if it was setup to use every edition of D&D?

so I was thinking. What would be possible for an adventure.

Imagin you make basic, 1e/2e, 3e, and 4e versions of the same character. Then an adventue that at key moments shifts editions.

The plot I have in mind is a hokey comic book one (yea cause you don't steal ideas...) Mixing DC comcis Crissis on infinit earths and the current flash point (with a little zero hour thrown in)

Imagin alt worlds that were all in danger from a world spaning super villian. each edition is it's own world.

maybe go all hog wild and have a True20 world, and a Pathfinder world too.

could it work or more trouble then it's worth?

 

[Riastlin]

I think it could work . . .






. . . for a single adventure. For an entire campaign setting though, I think things would get too complicated. Unfortunately the rules, powers, abilities, etc. from edition to edition are just too different for it to really be able to flow very well in terms of getting to know your character, your party, and how everything works best together. Just take 4ed. Get a group together and have them make up 16th level characters and watch how long combat takes. The problem is that particularly with 4ed, the characters are significantly complex that its not real easy to make decisions on the fly if you are not familiar with your character.

Now imagine playing a spellcaster where you have to prepare your spells ahead of time in some editions, but not others, or some spells maybe are not even taken in some editions, etc.

I think over the course of the campaign things would just grind to a halt too much. For an adventure though, it would be pretty cool. Heck, I've even always considered running an adventure some time wherein the party gets sent to modern day Earth and you end up describing modern scenes in terminology that would be familiar to the characters, etc. So yeah, the idea of world hopping and edition hopping would be fun on a short scale.

 

[the Jester]

Well, it depends. How many sessions do you want to spend making characters, and are your players willing to spend them without actually gaming in the hopes that this works well?

EDIT: I say this as someone who has done something similar with a time-travel plot. It was a lot of work for everyone involved, and although it was a lot of fun, I think that some players would have preferred not to do it.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

maybe it would work with pregens for a con game.

 

[JohnnyO]

I think it would be interesting for a one-off type of thing (i.e. players get sent back in time and use a previous edition) but I'm not sure it would work long term.

I remember Gabe on Penny Arcade had an article once where he did exactly this, but I seem to remember he pre-generated everyone's 1e equivalent, and ran it as a 1e "light" type of system so the players didn't need to be intimately familiar with all the rules details of the system.

If you can find that article, its worth reading (my Google-fu is failing me)

 

[the Jester]

maybe it would work with pregens for a con game.

The problem here is twofold.

1. All the players need to have enough of a grasp of all of the systems involved to function effectively enough to get through the adventure; and

2. There's no point in doing this at all if you don't have enough time to play each version.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I shudder to think of the work the DM would have to do for this.

And as a DM, this is foremost in my mind. I can see doing it for two editions, like 4E and 1E, and running it like time travel or the like.

Interesting idea, but not sure if I would want to do it. The editions are just too dissimilar.