I'm stocked for life! (But what if no one cares?)

[pawsplay]

3.5 is playable and fun, and yes, there is enough in print to game for a lifetime. I think therefore it is guaranteed near immortality.

Most games fade into obscurity because they go out of print before they are "finished" or because they were not well conceived from the beginning. Some editions are supplanted by very similar yet generally superior versions. For instance, essentially no one plays GURPS 1e anymore, but 3e and 4e will probably both be with us a long, long time, and GURPS is a much smaller game than D&D.

 

[WayneLigon]

I don't think I've ever met a player that has said "look - I have to play by a certain set of rules or I won't play". People will play whatever game system I'm running my game in, therefore no RPG in the world is meaningless if I'm willing to play it.

I have, many time. In fact in the last gaming group I was in we changed the system we were playing because - after one session of System X - one person refused to have anything to do with it, ever again. Rather than lose the player, the GM changed the system. Same characters, same NPC's, same plot, same GM, but the player refused to even discuss playing in System X ever again.

Even with house rules, System Y didn't do what I wanted it to do; it didn't have the flexibility or richness that System X had. Yeah, I had a character named the same thing, with the same personality and all, and I made the best of it... but I was still hamstrung because of System Y. Even though I ran System Y for many years and was considered a 'guru' of it, I doubt I'll ever play it again. I might not be so inflexible as the player in my example, but it would take a lot of convincing for me to play System Y. You'd probably have to pay me, in fact, and even then I'd be conscious of just what it didn't do that under System X I could do easily.

I still believe that a great GM can make any system worth my time, but he'd have to be truly great - and a personal friend of mine, and be playing with a bunch of personal friends of mine - to make me play certain systems. I've tried several, and found several very lacking, to the point that I'd think long and hard about whether I'd bother playing in a campaign with that system, even if the campaign premise and characters sounded very cool.

Earlier versions of D&D are like that to me. With the exception of some map-intesive books, all my 2E stuff went into boxes a few days after I bought 3E (after having started a campaign in it with the pre-release info) and hasn't seen the light of day since. I've tried to sell it on eBay, but auction after auction rolls over with no buyers, even at $5.00 per hardback. I'll probably wind up throwing most of it away if I ever move.

And I liked 2E better than 1E. About, oh, four or five years after 2E was released, a friend of mine wanted me to play in a campaign he was a part of. They were using 1E rules, with some house rules. It was like pulling teeth to go backwards like that, unable to use a number of advances I'd come to enjoy and count on. ("What do you mean, I can't be X or Y? Oh, that's right; 1E didn't allow for that"). I kept some 1E stuff for the pure nostalgia value, but most of it was given away or sold off long ago.

 

[phindar]

For my group, I think it comes down to how much "better" (whatever that ends up meaning) 4e is than 3e. We made the jump to 3e because we felt it was a better system than 2e, in that it fixed some things we had been complaining about and house ruling for years. If 4e isn't a similar jump forward, I don't really see a reason to make the switch. If it is a giant leap forward (again, whatever that ends up meaning), then I don't see a reason not to.

I've spent about $200 bucks on D&D books, plus maybe another $100 on 3rd party stuff. Most of my gaming expenses-- more than I'd care to mention-- go into the minis and toys side of things. (I have enough plastic dinosaurs to... well, let's just say I have a lot.) And that sort of stuff should be compatible with any edition (unless 4e decides to make everything 54mm scale, but honestly, I can't see how they'd enforce that one.)

Edit cuz spelling hard.

 

[Ourph]

I still believe that a great GM can make any system worth my time, but he'd have to be truly great - and a personal friend of mine, and be playing with a bunch of personal friends of mine - to make me play certain systems. I've tried several, and found several very lacking, to the point that I'd think long and hard about whether I'd bother playing in a campaign with that system, even if the campaign premise and characters sounded very cool.

How good would someone have to be to get you to play in a D&D 3.5 game?

 

[WayneLigon]

How good would someone have to be to get you to play in a D&D 3.5 game?

I'm running one right now. If 4E has some significant advances to game play and mechanics, I have little doubt that we'll switch. It might take some time; we didn't change over to 3.5 until a couple years after it was out because I was running Arcana Unearthed at the time and then we went to Mutants and Masterminds for some time. We did eventually switch over though when we came back to D&D.

 

[gizmo33]

to the point that I'd think long and hard about whether I'd bother playing in a campaign with that system, even if the campaign premise and characters sounded very cool.

The relevant issue seems to me to be the question of whether or not anyone ought to abandon old versions of DnD just because some people have a preference for certain systems.

I should have expected to hear from the people that disagreed. It just makes my case that this is an internet issue even though you-all live in the real world because to me, you don't live in mine. And so there's a chance that you don't live in the OPs either, nor do I in his, but all I need to do is raise the possibility that things aren't as gloomy as it might appear.

I've never met anyone that doesn't think that puppies are cute. Yet a bet if people were paying attention there'd be 100 posts right now from people telling me how much they hate puppies. Therefore, for those of you who can follow the logic - never get a puppy.

 

[johnnype]

I don't have anything against retired or "unsuported" systems but i doubt I'll be looking back to 3.x once 4th edition is out. Unless the new edition (when and if it ever comes out) is flawed I'm fairly certain I'll move on.

Perhaps this is due to the fact that cost is not that big a deal to me. I hesitate to say that cost is completely irrelevant but it's far from the deciding factor for me. Something which I'm sure is not true of many who have sunk large amounts of money into books full of supplementary rules. In addition I've scaled back my crunch supplement purchases a while back anticipating 4th edition in the not too distant future. Fluff, which I enjoy more anyway and is usable regardless of edition, I'm still buying almost sight unseen.

 

[Krolik]

The relevant issue seems to me to be the question of whether or not anyone ought to abandon old versions of DnD just because some people have a preference for certain systems.

I believe most people abandon older versions of game systems because the product supply dries up. They often try to maintain the game but eventually the amount of work required to make up or convert everything themselves becomes too time consuming and it just becomes easier to buy the new edition and get a whole series of new ideas from the various new sourcebooks. Part of the issue with 3.5 is that the supply chain will not immediately dry up. A lot of publishers are going to continue publishing compatible OGL material for the system long after WotC switches to 4e. That means the fans are only going to need to switch if they find the new game superior rather then dealing with lack of product issues.

 

[silver_wizard]

Prior to the advent of 3E, things like that were pretty straightforward: new edition out, majority of players jumps on immediately, some hold out for longer but eventually swith over too, leaving only a fraction of die-hard fans sticking to the old stuff. Thing is, now everything depends on market support. A deciding factor will be the existence of a 4E OGL. If there is a new OGL, then soon the majority of publishers will go for the new thing. If, on the other hand, 4E comes out with no OGL, I assume that many publishers will stick with 3.X for quite some time, some even exclussively. Even in the former case, however, the players who will prefer not to make the switch will be more numerous than those who adopted a similar stance when 3E had just hit the shelves.

 

[Erithtotl]

I think it will depend a lot on whether 4th edition goes the way of previous editions of D&D (i.e. not throwing the baby out with the bathwater). I think an example of where a previously exisiting version was still viable was with Battletech, where the core game was thrown out of the window, including it's rules and narrative, in an effort to produce a collectable miniatures game. The result was another vendor continuing to publish the old system and being quite successful at it (as far as I can tell from all the books in the gaming store).