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<blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 9228636" data-attributes="member: 29398">A good example of incremental design that maintains (and better yet, can measure) backwards compatibility is baseball.Baseball has changed over the 130-ish years it's been played but is and always has been clearly recognizable for what it is.&nbsp; More to the compatibility point, records set 80 or even 100 years ago are still valid today.&nbsp; A big-league player from 1955 could step out on Wrigley field today and still pretty much know what to do, though would have to adjust to some modern rules such as the pitch clock.D&amp;D in a lesser sense had that same feel through the TSR years: you could roll up an OD&amp;D character and (with a few exceptions e.g. race-as-class) put it into play in a 2e game; and while it might not have all the modern bells and whistles, it would still be playable and the basics would still work much as expected.&nbsp; Same goes for a player jumping straight from one TSR version to another: they're all close enough in the basics to make the fiddly bits easy to figure out.Each WotC edition has been designed such that a character rolled up in any other edition (or a player jumping editions) is much more a fish out of water.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lanefan, post: 9228636, member: 29398"] A good example of incremental design that maintains (and better yet, can measure) backwards compatibility is baseball. Baseball has changed over the 130-ish years it's been played but is and always has been clearly recognizable for what it is. More to the compatibility point, records set 80 or even 100 years ago are still valid today. A big-league player from 1955 could step out on Wrigley field today and still pretty much know what to do, though would have to adjust to some modern rules such as the pitch clock. D&D in a lesser sense had that same feel through the TSR years: you could roll up an OD&D character and (with a few exceptions e.g. race-as-class) put it into play in a 2e game; and while it might not have all the modern bells and whistles, it would still be playable and the basics would still work much as expected. Same goes for a player jumping straight from one TSR version to another: they're all close enough in the basics to make the fiddly bits easy to figure out. Each WotC edition has been designed such that a character rolled up in any other edition (or a player jumping editions) is much more a fish out of water. [/QUOTE]

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