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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Campbell" data-source="post: 7021769" data-attributes="member: 16586">Gygax's AD&D is a pretty solid game. It knows what it's about, has rules targeted with engaging its premise, and a reward structure that fits the gameplay it is after. The text did not do the best job at communicating its premise to those not part of Gygax's cultural group though. There was also significant drift amongst play groups who were not ultimately interested in Gygax's game. Some of that can be blamed on scenario design and early attempts to make D&D a cross-media property. I'm not only speaking of Castle Ravenloft and Dragonlance, but also the Greyhawk novels and the Giant and Drow series. Over the lifetime of 1st edition the game became less about the players and more about setting exploration and plot heavy scenarios. To be fair, the Greyhawk adventures never really assumed a particular path in the same way that Dragonlance did. 2e would make Dragonlance style games the point and strip out a good portion of AD&D's exploration rules and gut the game's reward structure.Of course, I missed all that. I started playing with 2e in 1997 with a railroady Dragonlance game! I did come back to 1e years later in 2012, and really enjoyed it despite it not being quite my jam. That same group  played in a Mentzer B/X game that I felt worked much better for the same sort of play. I definitely consider it a superior text. Frank Mentzer knows how to write a game. I've also gone back to 2e since and drifted the hell out of it. You just have to ignore everything the game tells you to do, and the reward structures are all off. Still, it was a better experience than trying to do the same with 3e. 4e drifted that way pretty easily. All in all, I consider them all phenomenally different games. B/X is probably the best from a pure design perspective. I consider Gygax's AD&D second best from a pure design perspective. I enjoyed 4e the most, but ignored half the text, and drifted the hell out of it. I haven't played 5e yet. My impression is that in spirit it matches 2e the most. I might eventually take a look at it to see if there's something I can hack, but my desire for text clarity and kneejerk reaction to enshrining the Golden Rule has left me hesitant.</blockquote>

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