D&D General Did You "Return" because of some Edition of D&D?

[schneeland]

Our Shadowrun group dissolved, I think, in 96 or 97, and I didn't start playing again until 2001 with D&D3.0. In a way, I stayed connected with D&D, though, as I was still playing D&D-based video games.

The was also a longer break in 2013 or 2014 when a long-running D&D campaign ended with a fried USB stick with GM notes and lore changes from 4e being introduced. We shortly restarted with 5e, but moved on to other systems rather quickly and I'm only playing in a 5e game again since last year.

 

[darjr]

I returned because my boys were interested in this cool miniature battle game. D&D miniatures.

 

[Reynard]

You know, it's really weird that so many people are reading this as "did you stop playing D&D" rather than "did you leave the hobby." I even went back and reread the title, the poll and the OP and they all ask about the hobby, not D&D specifically.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The question isn't about you leaving D&D, although it appears most people are taking it that way.

Ok. "Never left" then!

 

[schneeland]

You did place the poll in "D&D General", though, not in "TTRPGs General", so at first sight, it seemed natural that you were talking about D&D only.

 

[Scribe]

Cannot vote. I have in fact essentially stopped playing D&D specifically (and the hobby at large, other than as DM) because of the current edition, which pretty openly told me "all the things you love suck, and you should feel bad for liking them."

Its funny, because if you feel that, and I feel that for wildly different reasons, Wizards better hope there are plenty of people that disagree with both of us.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

For all of its flaws if you tried to run Vampire by the book, it had a consistent core that required almost no mastery from the player side to grasp. A player had only one thing to worry about - how many dice am I rolling? Then count up the successes and tell the GM how many you had.

Trying to decipher the rules was not as bad as trying to run Palladium by the rules, but it was bad. However that consistency meant that it was actually easy to ignore the rules for the most part and just wing it because in the end you were always asking players to do the same thing - figure out how many dice to roll, roll them all, count up successes and tell the GM how many you get.

D&D had places where you wanted to roll high. Places where you wanted to roll low. THAC0 if you weren't using an increasing AC variant (which we did, so that wasn't an issue usually). d20 rolls for some things, percentile rolls for others. If you made the mistake of using non-weapon proficiencies (or skills in BECMI) you had two different kinds of skill systems in the game that both worked differently. For new or casual players it was a mess - and once they knew RPGs didn't have to be like that IME they preferred to play the flawed but consistent Vampire over any flavor of D&D. At least until 3e came along.

Exactly this! It's not really about how well the game works, but an unified system just is way easier to grasp and to a lot of people just feels like aesthetically more pleasing than a byzantine jumble of separate mechanics.

 

[Reynard]

You did place the poll in "D&D General", though, not in "TTRPGs General", so at first sight, it seemed natural that you were talking about D&D only.

Sure, unless you, you know, read it...

I mean, no harm no foul. It's not a big deal. I just found it odd.

 

[Kurotowa]

I think I'm falling into the same bin as a lot of folks. Never stopped playing TTRPGs, but did focus on other ones at various a time. In the late AD&D 2e era I was mostly playing WoD and other White Wolf games, then came back for 3e D&D. When 4e let my entire group unenthused we switched to playing Pathfinder and Savage Worlds and others, then came back for 5e.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Its funny, because if you feel that, and I feel that for wildly different reasons, Wizards better hope there are plenty of people that disagree with both of us.

Evidence suggests that there are, or at least that there are sufficient pluralities of players/DMs that can persuade folks like us to stick around even when we'd rather not.