NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5321093" data-attributes="member: 55271">Speaking from personal experience, I can say that I've frequently played Call of Cthulhu games where different players were using different editions of the game and rarely, if ever, run into problems or hiccups.The same, unfortunately, can't be said about the 3.0 -> 3.5 change. Changes to core classes; the rearrangement of the skill system; and a few other radical points of re-design caused constant friction when I've played at tables where people are using rulebooks from each edition.OTOH, the incompatibility between 3.0 and 3.5 can also be radically overstated. For example, I've had players run 3.0 rangers and druids under the 3.5 rules and never had a problem. And I don't have qualms about pulling material from 3.0 supplements and plugging it straight into my 3.5 campaign (because I can deal with the niggling incompatibilities on the fly).One of the reasons it was viewed as "slimy", however, is because WotC lied about the severity of the changes. This had a profound impact not only on fans, but also on the industry: Companies producing D20 supplements got severely burned by the 3.0 -> 3.5 switch in a way that wouldn't have happened if WotC had been honest about the fact that the 3.0 -> 3.5 changes were going to render 3.0 products effectively obsolete.And that burn passed down to the local game stores, as well, who got stuck with a ton of dead product that they had been told would still be compatible with the newly revised rules (but wasn't). (Yet another example of WotC's policies <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />ing over the FLGS in a tradition dating back to at least 1993.)(WotC, of course, also has a long track record of lying about edition changes. There may be sound marketing reasons for this. But at this point I pretty much just tune out anything they have to say about new editions of the game until I can actually hold the edition in my hand and see it for myself.)And, frankly, I think any rational analysis of the release of 3.5 makes it pretty clear that a major reason it was released ahead of schedule in 2003 was because WotC needed to re-launch their core supplement lines as hardcover books that could better compete in the D20 market. This may have also contributed to some of the changes in the ruleset which specifically broke backwards compatibility.Having made (or attempted) both jumps, I'd be forced to disagree. 3E cleaned up a lot of the rules (and seriously broke stat block compatibility by making all the numbers add in the same direction), but gave us a game that was fundamentally the same in most respects. Even most of the stuff that people considered radical or new in 3E had actually been part of 2E for half a decade (having been added as part of the Players' Option series), in much the same way that a lot of the "new" stuff in 2E had actually been kicking around in 1E for half a decade.4E, on the other hand, is a fundamentally different fantasy roleplaying game. This isn't much of a secret, although it's an observation that can apparently cause some people to flip out. But ShinHakkaider has already made a great post showing that the proof is in the pudding: I can take modules from 0/1/2/3E, plug in the stat blocks for whatever edition I'm actually using, and the modules work just fine. But that doesn't work for 4E, because the game doesn't play the same way.The switch of 2.0 -> 3.0 was certainly larger than 3.0 -> 3.5, but both pale in comparison to 3.5 -> 4.0.</blockquote>

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