D&D General Does D&D (and RPGs in general) Need Edition Resets?

[the Jester]

3.5's Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords. Elements from this book were used in 4e according to Wikipedia. I don't know if any other 3.5 books had 'testbed' material for 4e.

I wonder if this book's maneuvers and stances were used as inspiration for Level Up's Combat Traditions.

Dungeonscape had a prototype of monster roles and 4e style traps (as "encounter traps") as well as a GREAT section on designing 4e style encounters.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Depends on the innovation. There’s always a cost/benefit assessment to be done in deciding when to hit the big red “new edition” button.

Inasmuch as an RPG book can even be obsoleted. TSR-era D&D is still played by tons of people, and probably always will be. It’s available for you if you want it. On the other hand, 3e would not have been available for those who wanted it if WotC had decided never to reset the D&D rules. So I would say yes, the cost was absolutely worth it, no contest. And again, personally I value the quality of the artwork infinitely more than the longevity of the product, so for me, the cost of a new edition will almost always be worth the gain. YMMV if you value those things differently than I do.

I generally prefer the TSR-era art too, to be honest.

 

[Parmandur]

And the issue I see is that there are changes 5E needs in order to be genuinely a great D&D game, rather than I think merely one decent game among many (only raised above that by amount and quality of support), gradually increasingly eclipsed by better designs, which couldn't be done whilst maintaining full backwards compatibility.

Mearls is half-right in his claim. They could probably have had small sales of an improved BECMI/RC D&D indefinitely, but the 1990s would have made it just one of the crowd and it would never have re-emerged significantly from the crowd. Without 3E (and to some extent PF and 4E), there would be no massive 5E. There would have been no big cultural resurgence of D&D if D&D was just incrementally improved BECMI - there would just have been some cash-in sales spike around Stranger Things. Because fundamentally a lot of BECMI's systems and approaches aren't great. Instead we'd probably have seen a couple of other RPGs go much, much bigger than they are, but not reach the peaks that 5E has. What RPGs those would be, I have no idea, but I'm confident in saying they wouldn't be slightly upgraded BECMI. There's no way Critical Role, for example, would have picked "upgraded BECMI". Especially as without D&D as a "big dog", there'd have been more competition and advancement in the fantasy RPG space.

I mean, maybe...but maybe not. Counterfactuals are tricky. But one could imagine the oppojust as easily. The theory that WotC seems to be operating under now is that those edition shifts fractured their audience, and it doesn't really seem to me particularly plausible that other games would necessarily be able to degrade D&D market share in this alternate reality.

 

[Parmandur]

There are actually also tons of modern chess variants. But also, chess isn’t an RPG.

Sure, but almost everyone who plays chess is playing standard chess rules most of the time (apropos of nothing, my favorite variety is dice chess). And sure, chess is not an RPG: but RPGS were invented when my dad was in hisn20's already. We don't know what RPGs might evolve to after, day, centuries of play, so analogies are helpful. And it is clear that games can be stable for a long time, while being extremely successful as design and popular, no contradiction between those poles.

 

[the Jester]

To answer the OP, I don't think D&D "needs" edition resets, but I do think mechanical resets can offer the opportunity to improve the game more than mere 'tidying up the rules' attempts. But they can also lose things that are important to the game and change the game in really fundamental ways.

Are edition resets good for the game? In some ways, maybe. But I don't like 'em. I mean, I do, after they come out and I'm on board and have learned the new game and what it does well and how to compensate for its weaknesses; but I don't like them in principle unless the game actually NEEDS a reset.

And the thing I really dislike is when lore is changed for no good reason. Aarakocra (in their original appearance) don't make good adventurers because they have a racial claustrophobia that prevents them from going indoors. That's a great bit of wonderful flavor that has subsequently been removed for no real reason other than giving pcs a flying race to choose. Or check out the amazing lore on mind flayers and beholders in the 2e books I, Tyrant and The Illithiad. Much of that has subsequently been discarded or revised, sometimes more than once, for no real good reason. These are small things, but they are things that can really matter to long term, ongoing campaigns. Sometimes some obscure little bit of lore becomes important to the campaign and if it's later re-written wholesale, it can make the DM choose between invalidating part of the stuff that his players played through and discarding the new lore, making the new material less useful.

So I guess my position is- if you're going to reset the rules, try to preserve the lore. There is no reason that we shouldn't still have the quasi-elemental planes. There is no reason that we should have to change the map of the campaign world due to a new edition if there weren't massive geographic changes. Add and expand, don't overwrite and undermine.

 

[nevin]

The TMNT game was out of print so long I’m not sure that qualifies as any evidence of edition swaps. I’d argue it’s more evidence nostalgia can sell if you strike while the iron is hot enough if anything.

not evidence of edition swaps. Evidence the game can survive long past the devs without editions.

 

[nevin]

To answer the OP, I don't think D&D "needs" edition resets, but I do think mechanical resets can offer the opportunity to improve the game more than mere 'tidying up the rules' attempts. But they can also lose things that are important to the game and change the game in really fundamental ways.

Are edition resets good for the game? In some ways, maybe. But I don't like 'em. I mean, I do, after they come out and I'm on board and have learned the new game and what it does well and how to compensate for its weaknesses; but I don't like them in principle unless the game actually NEEDS a reset.

And the thing I really dislike is when lore is changed for no good reason. Aarakocra (in their original appearance) don't make good adventurers because they have a racial claustrophobia that prevents them from going indoors. That's a great bit of wonderful flavor that has subsequently been removed for no real reason other than giving pcs a flying race to choose. Or check out the amazing lore on mind flayers and beholders in the 2e books I, Tyrant and The Illithiad. Much of that has subsequently been discarded or revised, sometimes more than once, for no real good reason. These are small things, but they are things that can really matter to long term, ongoing campaigns. Sometimes some obscure little bit of lore becomes important to the campaign and if it's later re-written wholesale, it can make the DM choose between invalidating part of the stuff that his players played through and discarding the new lore, making the new material less useful.

So I guess my position is- if you're going to reset the rules, try to preserve the lore. There is no reason that we shouldn't still have the quasi-elemental planes. There is no reason that we should have to change the map of the campaign world due to a new edition if there weren't massive geographic changes. Add and expand, don't overwrite and undermine.

I think this is an unfortunate side effect of the modern world where old is bad and new is good till you blow up sales. I do agree D&D and most games would be better off if they quit messing with the base lore and the campaign worlds in attempts to refresh everything or to sell books, movies etc. but younger people always feel obligated to show us old timers how stupid we are and I don't think that's going to change.

 

[Micah Sweet]

My favorite version of D&D is essentially a heavily iterated upon version of B/X. My second favorite is the current version with a lot of added material to make the game more interesting and verisimilitudinous to me. Ultimately that's where I'm coming from.

 

[Velderan]

not evidence of edition swaps. Evidence the game can survive long past the devs without editions.

But it didn’t survive. It died for a looong time before being resurrected for a nostalgia fueled crowdfunding campaign. You can’t argue Shadowrun didn't need edition swaps to keep plugging along based on a limited 1e reprint run.

I’m sure you can find someone that’s played these old editions the entire time, but they’re very much the exception just like folks that never moved past a TSR edition of D&D.

 

[nevin]

You mean the 1e players, all the variations of 1e players and the spinoff versions of first edition that collectively have more players than 1e had in it's hey day? thank you for making my point. A lot of these game's are still being played, or they wouldn't have done a kickstarter. We like to pretend those games have all faded away but they've taken root and still have what used to be called healthy ecosystems. There are lot's of games still played ,and all of those rules have been out there for download or sale which is how they knew the demand was there to make a lot of money.