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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6136670" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, I think your groupings are pretty much the way I would group them, everything pre-3e is to a large degree fundamentally one game, with some generally minor rules differences, though later on starting with UA in 1e it starts to shade in the direction of a more toolboxy game that ultimately leads through late 2e into 3e. Even so, even the last few years of 2e in a lot of ways is not all that different from stock 3 books plus GH OD&D. However, there's a fundamental commonality that plainly runs through ALL of them, right up to 4e and DDN. You can clearly take any adventure ever written for any edition of D&D and any two people can agree that a specific conversion to some other edition is 'the same adventure' (though they might disagree on the best way to do such a conversion). The recent Dragon Mountain 4e conversion thread here is a pretty good illustration of that. The resulting adventure is pretty different from the original in a lot of details, arguably it is maybe even more of a re-imagining than a strict conversion, but it still retains the essential elements of the original module in recognizable form. Clearly ports like Chris Perkins' G-series 4e conversions are VERY close to verbatim, you can take any given element of the original modules and recognize its equivalent in the 4e version. Now, you could do reasonable ports of the G's and other old classics to other systems. I'd guess conversions to SW or FC would not be super hard. You could probably do something with GURPS, RM, etc too, but I suspect it wouldn't be straightforward. Despite changes to the mechanics, there's an essential core of game play and genre expectations, and stylistic elements of various kinds that remain common in all editions such that you can reimagine the same adventures, the same characters, and the same settings into any of them and it will all retain much the same character. I think that's a bit closer than saying OD&D and 4e or DDN are like NFL Football vs soccer. That's almost like saying they're no closer than any 2 RPGs, clearly not the case.</blockquote>

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