In terms of readability, my experience is 5E > > 2E/Basic > 1E/3E > 4E. 3E and 1E have very different strengths and weaknesses in writing style, but it's about a wash for me. All of the non-4E books I've tried have at least been fun to read, and through that of use outside of their Edition. 4E material is not useful for anything other than playing 4E, Gygax's polearm charts are evergreen.
Why would you need game rules to be useful for anything other than playing the game? We don’t rate Monopoly instructions this way.
Because I enjoy reading. And, game books that are enjoyable to read can remain useful. The 1E Manual of the Planes or the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, for example, are completely usable with 5E aside from some crunchy fiddly bits (actually, the MotP might be close to 100% compatible still). 4E books, laser focused on usability for the game mechanics, are ironically not useful for 5E games. Readability creates a specific sort of usability for TTRPGs, part of what makes the medium unique. Basically all 5E books will retain this sort of adaptable usability through their natural language format.
That’s fine, but doesn’t speak to the books’ utility.
Again though, why would 4e books need to be useful for 5e games? 5e has its own books for use in 5e games. I don’t fault the Monopoly rules for not being useful in Yahtzee games, nor Dickens for not writing good Shakespeare.
I think we’re using the term “readability” differently. In my experience, 4e books are eminently readable. Whether or not reading them is enjoyable is a matter of taste, of course.
There is a lot of themes in the board game of Monopoly that come out during play. In 4E, those themes were excised from the manual, and you had to rely on your GM to provide the flavor. Many GMs are not so good at this. By reinforcing the themes in the manual, you give notion to the GM to keep it up as well.
"Readability" means the enjoyability of reading something, not legibility. 4E material is legible, if technical and dry. Admittedly thisnis somewhat to taste, but there are common trends.
This is interesting. I am general in agreement with @Parmandur , but I actually enjoyed reading 4e books. The amount of lore contained in the write ups for nearly every option they put out was fantastical!
And for many others, it does significantly change the experience of reading the books and learning the system.
I'll cop to hamming up my point for effect somewhat. My perspective was that of going inton4E hopeful and excited...and the readability is what kept knocking me down and deflating my optimism, which is frankly a darkly impressive feat because I'm all sunshine and rainbows over here wanting to think the best of people.
Wait what?
Yeah the formatting and such really did a lot to make people see the books as dry and technical, sadly.
