Let's talk about "plot", "story", and "play to find out."

[Micah Sweet]

When I run a game it's to provide a basic structure or foundation within limits. I expect people to focus on the adventure at hand, but what happens on the adventure , and the decisions they make are the story that unfolds.

Yup. That's all the story I want out of an RPG.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't know how compatible different versions of Runequest are from each other. How does it compare to 3e, 4e, and 5e versus the clearly more compatible TSR editions?

Answer is "It depends." You'd need to rework some elements of some of them, but they have the same criteria I'm using: structural, look and feel, terminology and various things only them and games clearly spun off from them share.

In the case of D&D: same attribute sets, in the same ranges, classes, levels, level elevating hit points, same basic combat resolution (hit rolls against target numbers primarily derived from armor abstraction), same resolution die used for roll high, general use of polyhedra for damage--thee's way too many common elements to call it anything but D&D, same as the common elements in RQ scream what it is. Maybe they're not enough for you to consider it so, but there are too much for me to call it anything else.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think to a large extent OD&D to AD&D 2.0 are different variations of the same game.

I think after that each full edition change is pretty much a new game, with 4e being a natural but significant evolution of some aspects of how 3.X worked, and 5e being to some extent a synthesis of big chunks of both 3.X and 4e combined with a withdrawal from saying anything definitive about what you should do with it.

I can respect the position that all editions are largely different games and I can respect the position that (to some extent) they are all the same game. The only position I find baffling is the idea that 2.0 to 3.0 is some sort of natural progression while 3.5 to 4e is a paradigm shift. The paradigm shift if anywhere is TSR to WotC.

Well I explained my position. If you handed me ten games from the period of D&D 4.0 and said "One of these is the new edition of D&D" I'm pretty sure I'd have picked out the correct one in a heartbeat. The only thing that would have potentially confused me is if the other nine included Pathfinder 1e, which might as well be a D&D edition. Even other D&D offshoots looked less like it than D&D 4e.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, but I can't speak from anyone else's perspective than my own, and neither can you.

Can you give me an example of incompatible game editions from someone other than WotC? Preferably by the same company.

How incompatible do they need to be? Some people would claim that about Shadowrun 4e. Traveler the New Era certainly was. Each edition of Villains and Vigilantes has been pretty significantly different from the prior, and the 1st and 2nd were both from the same publisher. Gamma World had a notorious range of game system versions. Mekton changed to various degrees with each edition, and none of them were entirely intercompatible.

Not all of these have the same publishers, but at least some of them did.

 

[Micah Sweet]

How incompatible do they need to be? Some people would claim that about Shadowrun 4e. Traveler the New Era certainly was. Each edition of Villains and Vigilantes has been pretty significantly different from the prior, and the 1st and 2nd were both from the same publisher. Gamma World had a notorious range of game system versions. Mekton changed to various degrees with each edition, and none of them were entirely intercompatible.

Not all of these have the same publishers, but at least some of them did.

To me, 2e, 3e, 4e, and 5e are not compatible to each other (and therefore IMO should be called something other than Dungeons & Dragons). 2e and it's antecedents, 3e, 3.5 and the 3e 3pps, 4e and Essentials, and 5e, 5.5 and the 5e 3pps are all compatible enough with each other in their group to more or less work together (especially Essentials, which changed virtually none of 4e's rules). That's my standard for compatibility.

This has nothing to do with whether or not I like any of these games. I feel mostly positive about every game called D&D except 4e, but it doesn't matter to my point. It is not about feel, genre, or similar terminology. It's about the game engine.