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

[Umbran]

If you can come up with an outside referent for you claim that something is "easiest" or "better" then you're welcome to it. Preferable in metric units.

You're welcome.

Will empirical study of the cognitive load incurred by various forms of mental arithmetic do - using speed of calculation as a proxy for ease?

Because that's something that has been studied. If we are really picky one of us can likely search up a reference or two. But broadly, iirc, the order of rising difficulty is mental addition, subtraction, multiplication, then division. This translates to rising scales, in which the typical action is adding some small number, being more intuitive to humans than falling ones, especially if you get into negative numbers. Smaller ranges are simpler than large ones, etc.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That it's a numbered scale (no argument there) has no bearing on whether those numbers go up or down in order to represent improvement in one's defenses.

I can't remember ever having to multiply or divide armour units in any form. Plus and minus is all it needs.

....yes, and plus/minus isn't what ordinal data is for.

You can't add third place to second place in order to get first place, or any other place! The whole notion is meaningless. That's literally the point.

 

[Umbran]

I'd love a reason to think otherwise, but isn't OneD&D's idea of "fifth edition forever" stifling further evolution and experimentation? They can add systems for things, like bastions etc, but for things to stay backwards-compatible that means no new design-challenging ideas.

Sure, one reason OD&D to AD&D happened because of IP rights.. but every new edition, even if it's to "juice sales," results in a very different game. 2e to 3e to 4e to 5e. That's how we got where we are, new editions. New ideas.

I think you'll find that the "new ideas" seen in D&D typically have a prior referent in some other game or house rule that's floated around the community. D&D is not typically the leader in design ideas, they are the leader in popularizing ideas.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'd love a reason to think otherwise, but isn't OneD&D's idea of "fifth edition forever" stifling further evolution and experimentation? They can add systems for things, like bastions etc, but for things to stay backwards-compatible that means no new design-challenging ideas.

Sure, one reason OD&D to AD&D happened because of IP rights.. but every new edition, even if it's to "juice sales," results in a very different game. 2e to 3e to 4e to 5e. That's how we got where we are, new editions. New ideas.

As I mentioned above, though, you need a balance between novelty (at least as far as D&D is concerned, per Umbran's above post) and stability. I think folks can generally agree that the 2000s had too many launches back to back. 3e to 3.5e to 4e was too much in only a few years--a new edition or near-edition every 4-5 years from 2000 to 2014 is not good for the game. 15 years or a bit less, on the other hand, seems to be about the point at which folks start to tire with a ruleset. I think that's a big part of what made people receptive to 5e when it dropped. Pathfinder 1e had become long in the tooth and more than a little sprawling.

I definitely think that, should we be having a similar conversation in another 8-10 years, it would be a good time for a proper new edition, not just the "it's a revised edition but we don't want to call it that" that is the appallingly-named "One D&D" playtest. Not just because, as I have made quite clear, I'm not really the audience for 5e and thus it would be nice to feel included. More importantly, though, because at that point we'll have been working under a single, largely-unchanged framework for enough time that someone could have been born after 5e launched and an adult before hypothetical 6e did.

Nothing designed by human hands is eternal, and that includes game designs.

 

[jgsugden]

For things to be compatible, they can't deviate very far from the origin source- if everything had stayed compatible with AD&D, we wouldn't have arrived at 5e... I think you're saying that 5e is a good place for you- but you're also saying "this is good for me, thanks evolution you can stop now." I guess that's fine and dandy for you, but I'm sure there were folk that thought the same about each edition of D&D.

No, evolution is great. I'm saying that we could benefit from it - but also mentioning that you risk seeing a step back when they enact change. Many people consider 4E to have been a step back for D&D - not forward. And I'm also noting that they've said 5E and 6E will be compatible ... but at one point they told us that 4E would allow you to continue with your 3.5 characters with a 'quick and easy conversion'. We won't know how 5E and the next product will interact until we see it.

 

[Clint_L]

I'd love a reason to think otherwise, but isn't OneD&D's idea of "fifth edition forever" stifling further evolution and experimentation? They can add systems for things, like bastions etc, but for things to stay backwards-compatible that means no new design-challenging ideas.

WotC actually addressed this point explicitly, and have chosen the emphasize the word "evolve" for precisely this reason, IMO. Note that they didn't say backwards compatible forever.

Evolution doesn't create hard breaks between species. It creates gradual drift. And that's what we are seeing with the 2024 revision. They are backwards compatible in that they can still interbreed, so to speak, with the 2014 stuff. But the next edition of, say Curse of Strahd, will likely be updated to the latest version. And over time, that will happen repeatedly. Until eventually, the current version of D&D will not be as easily backwards compatible with the 2014 version.

But instead of there being a hard break where you have to replace all your stuff at once, the game will update gradually over time. It will evolve. I think that, for consumers, this is a much better model, since I am heavily invested in the 2014 version of the game and if I was told I needed to replace it all, I might just say, "nah." In fact, this has been a problem for the game over the years: it has essentially become its own biggest competitor due to splitting its audience every time it put out a new edition. OneD&D largely eliminates that problem.

Sure, one reason OD&D to AD&D happened because of IP rights.. but every new edition, even if it's to "juice sales," results in a very different game. 2e to 3e to 4e to 5e. That's how we got where we are, new editions. New ideas.

Yes, but you don't need to throw out an entire edition at once to bring in new ideas.

 

[Umbran]

No, evolution is great. I'm saying that we could benefit from it - but also mentioning that you risk seeing a step back when they enact change.

Folks always forget what evolution actually is.

Evolution is a random walk of various changes in individuals in a population, where some of those changes increase survivability, and spread through the population, across generations, and others decrease viability, and tend to be lost. Evolution is a process that has a result, but has no intentional goal.

Things that are subject to design thinking, and are purposefully changed to produce a specific effect, are not evolving. D&D changes from edition to edition, but that change isn't really evolution.

We might think of the overall species of entertainment that is "RPGs" as evolving, as hundreds of individual games try thousands of little changes over time - and when a change gets adopted through much of the RPG space, we can say that RPGs as a species have evolved.

As an example, early on, most games had something like classes and levels. Over time, more and more games have been made with weaker constructions of class and level (like, say, World of Darkness games) or to have no such concepts at all (games that are skill-based, and point buy, like Fate or Gumshoe games). RPGs have evolved to contain such concepts.

 

[Clint_L]

Folks always forget what evolution actually is.

Evolution is a random walk of various changes in individuals in a population, where some of those changes increase survivability, and spread through the population, across generations, and others decrease viability, and tend to be lost. Evolution is a process that has a result, but has no intentional goal.

Things that are subject to design thinking, and are purposefully changed to produce a specific effect, are not evolving. D&D changes from edition to edition, but that change isn't really evolution.

We might think of the overall species of entertainment that is "RPGs" as evolving, as hundreds of individual games try thousands of little changes over time - and when a change gets adopted through much of the RPG space, we can say that RPGs as a species have evolved.

As an example, early on, most games had something like classes and levels. Over time, more and more games have been made with weaker constructions of class and level (like, say, World of Darkness games) or to have no such concepts at all (games that are skill-based, and point buy, like Fate or Gumshoe games). RPGs have evolved to contain such concepts.

Yes, exactly. This is why I think that the OneD&D model for the game is much more conducive to the game's overall improvement. It allows the game to incorporate the ideas that are percolating throughout the RPG community, and throughout the wider culture, which can lead to extensive change over time but isn't forcing it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Folks always forget what evolution actually is.

"Evolution" had several shades of meaning before its use to describe the (titular) Origin of Species. It meant a "wheeling" maneuver in ye olden dayse (15th century), but took on a meaning of "growth to maturity and development" in the 17th. Both senses, the formal biological one and the informal use in medicine, mathematics, and colloquialism, are still relevant to us today; the definition given by Dictionary.com for "evolve" starts with "to develop gradually: to evolve a scheme." There's no way one could "evolve a scheme" as you describe.

In the sense that predated the 19th-century biology use, D&D has absolutely evolved and continues to, and--as with a "wheeling" maneuver to get ships or troops into place--sometimes that older sense of evolution rustles some jimmies in the doing.

(technically, there's also a sense specific to chemistry, "to yield, emit, or give off, e.g. gases, heat, or vapors," but that's a very technical use and most people wouldn't encounter it)

 

[Retros_x]

The different DnD editions are not THAT different, its still the same game. Sure they are not compatible that characters from different editions can play in one adventure, or that you can run an adventure in different editions without adjustments, but the adjustments are actually not that hard. You need to know what easy/med/hard DCs are in the two editions you are converting. Standard monster you can just replace from the monster manuals. But the base principles stay the same, same as the core gameplay because at heart its still the same game.

It is much harder to play a DnD character in a Cthulu game or vice versa. Or convert characters between these games. Because they are fundamentally different.