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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7960171" data-attributes="member: 71699">I think that they are not dichotomous. Geek culture rose and the latest edition mechanics are superior. The eventual refinement of the core d20 system is a good example. Another might be neo-Vancian casting. Advantage/Disadvantage. All through there are mechanics that couldn't have existed without the years of designer experimentation (and not just by TSR/WotC) that lie between 1e and 5e.Or to put it another way, the thesis that 5e is not mechanically superior to 1e would seem to rest on the work of numerous designers across multiple companies and years being fruitless.I agree with some of what you say here. Especially that there was much that had to be house-ruled to work, and that in many ways it is perfectly fine to have that assumption, including for the reasons you stated.However, I am not quite following how 1e was easier to customise than 5e? It might be so, because 5e is a tighter system and one often finds that the ramifications of a group's changes ripple through the mechanics in ways that they might not guess because they might under-appreciate the expertise and playtesting time that went into crafting those mechanics. But then, that seems to amount to saying that just because mechanics are more in need of fixing, it is easier to fix them...</blockquote>