Is D&D the only game that radically changes each edition?

[billd91]

Villains and Vigilantes went through a pretty major change between 1st and 2nd edition. And it's gone through another significant change into Living Legends (though it's a lot harder to call that a new edition of V&V).

 

[Ranger REG]

Is D&D the only game that does this? What other examples can you think of?

MechWarrior: The BattleTech Role Playing Game. Three editions, all different between the others.

And, here's the meat of the question: why does D&D do this?

To be better, based on fan feedback.

Even I think 3e is better than the other predecessors.

 

[Psion]

Yes, the differences between 4th Edition Champions and HERO 5th Edition are numerous (notably, HERO 5th is no longer a superheroes game with notes for generica tacked on but, rather, a fully functional generic system with its own line of supers supplements).

You realize a generic 4e Hero book was published, and even the BBB was separated into a generic ruleset section and a supers campaigning section? This change really was underway prior to 5e.

Edit: Scooped by Nikosandros. Disregard.

 

[Mauricio Pezzotta]

but no real notice of the changes and certainly no edition change.

Actually, there was a change in editions, it just wasn't written on the cover, like they do nowadays. AD&D 2 Edition was the first one to stop using "edition" in the usual sense.


And if you want to get technical, they actually never changed the meanings, as these "2nd Edition", "3rd Edition", etc, are part of the book's title, not an edition number.

 

[WizarDru]

Apparently, until GURPS 3rd edition, the game had little material on settings outside of the fantasy genre.

I nearly did a spit-take there, until I realized you meant prior to the release of GURPS 3rd edition. That's hardly much of a comparison, though. The GURPS Basic set for 1st edition came out in 1986 in a box set. Later in 1986, SJG combined them into a book and called it second edition. 3rd edition came out in 1988, just two years later. 3rd edition, then got dozens of supplements covering every genre imaginable.

Several game systems have gone through radical changes between editions. Some have done more gradual changes. It all varies on how well designed the original system was and how well it's aged.

Traveller, for example, has changed DRAMATICALLY from edition to edition. The original used a 2d6 mechanic and fit in a series of 32 page books, after all. Vampire has had a dramatic history. Games like Villians and Vigilantes, Twilight 2000, Star Frontiers, Boot Hill, Gamme World, Bushido and many others have sometimes undergone radical changes from one version to the next.

D&D is definitely not alone in that aspect. In fact, I remember when 2e was introduced, one of the Jeff Grubb-written D&D comics had a wizard who went insane for a short while because of the changes to the magic system, and who would mumble things to himself half-coherently like "Magic Missle is a second level spell, now...." while other characters looked on with pity.

 

[buzz]

Most games that are still around in any form are late 3rd generation games that were designed from the get-go to be more flexible in many ways than D&D was. In essence they learned from D&D's mistakes, which is something D&D itself has only recently been allowed to do. On the whole they don't need major revisions because most of them 'got it right' to begin with. D&D is still trying to shed itself of past mistakes and cruft that has gotten in the gears, slowing things down. Shedding some of these mistakes is going to result in change. Unfortunately, the revision time has been so long that it's hard to do that. Now you have the power of nostalgia working against the changes that need to take place.

QFT.

 

[Gentlegamer]

2nd edition was released because people were moving away from D&D. There were many strong choices for alternate RPGs in the mid-80s. People saw major flaws in D&D and moved away from D&D (not always abandoning it, but often doing so). 2nd edition was an attempt to move the game forward and draw some of those players back.

2nd Edition was released to cut Gary Gygax out of the royalties. In fact, the original AD&D game continued to be published after the release of 2nd edition because distributers were still ordering it.

 

[JDJblatherings]

Ever play Traveller? How many editions of that are there ? 8 , 9 ??? Runequest changed from 2nd to 3rd and the unreleased Runequest Slayers would have been radically different and the current mongoose editon is fairly different. EPT/Tekumel games ...that setting gets a whole new game every 8-10 years.

It is done for sales and so people stop biatching about the erratta in the rulebook.

 

[WayneLigon]

It is done for sales and so people stop biatching about the erratta in the rulebook.

So nothing is ever changed because designers say 'You know, when we wrote this thing five or six years ago, we were new to game design and everything else but now we've learned from our mistakes and we have the talent and knowledge to make things much better now'?

 

[VirgilCaine]

(Well CoC got a d20 version, but the old game still exists).

BRP CoC has changed very little over six-some editions.

Unfortunately.