Maybe different versions just have different goals, and that's okay.

[MerricB]

I'd forgotten about the strongholds and such as a high level character. That was a very different aspect of 1e that other versions don't really capture! It also adds a new way to drain characters of money, focuses them on doing something that leads to difficult choices about spending their time on non-adventuring pursuits, and provides hooks for adventures (dealing with their holdings, enemy armies, bandits and other threats, and getting cash to cover expenses.)

BECM D&D took this a step further by actually providing rules for such, but it took away what was probably a more significant aspect of AD&D 1e: that of henchmen. Keeping followers was what really took a lot of money in the mid-levels of the game.

2e hand-waved henchmen and made them a pain to handle, 3e brought them back (as cohorts), and 4e got rid of them entirely.

If you read adventures by Gary Gygax, there's a definite focus on action and adventure. It isn't about avoiding all combat; it's about avoiding combats that are too tough for you. I'm having trouble thinking of times where you actually become involved in conversation with helpful NPCs - most of the NPCs Gary described were of the annoying and malicious sort, that might be presented as benign but were actually villains looking to deceive you. Even possibly friendly NPCs tended to be irritations rather than helpers.

Cheers!

 

[Wisdom Penalty]

1E: My favorite. Perhaps only due to nostalgia. I certainly couldn't play it now for an extended campaign (and yes, I've tried).

2E: Skipped this version.

3E: Loved it. Power to the Players. Brought me back into the fold.

4E: Love it. Power to the DM. Makes me happy to DM again.

I think, clearly, the "power" rests in the hands of the players in 2E and 3E. In 1E and 4E, the DM has much more authority to make the type of game he wants to make. My opinion - not trying to ruffle any feathers here. Because I DM most often, 1E/4E appeal to me. As a player, I'm happy with any edition.

Long live D&D.

WP

 

[rounser]

Here's how I see it.

1E: All about simulation of pulp fantasy novels, and pioneering adventure ideas. "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser get together with Conan and Gandalf and go down a dungeon." Hey, we can do lost aztec cities. Hey, we can do crashed spacecraft. Hey, here's a chess puzzle and it's not yet a cliche etc. Rules simple in some areas, and fettered with labyrinthine subsystems in others, many of which never get used. Balance between classes mostly an illusion. Encounter design handwaved. Lots of rules handwaved. Unplayable by today's standards. Nice flavour, though.

2E: All about exploring campaign settings. Halcyon days for published campaigns with cool concepts - Dark Sun, Planescape, Birthright, Al Qadim, Ravenloft, even stuff like Living Jungle. Trivial differences to 1E - perhaps the biggest were kits, and the rise of splat. Those kits and splat made the balance issues more apparent than they were in 1E, resulting in 2E becoming the scorned edition. A case of "oops, we forgot the homebrews", as TSR became increasingly irrelevant to people's home campaigns.

3E: All about trying to balance the game, whilst retaining much of the legacy clunk so that people would switch. The rise of crunch-before-flavour, where the monster manual contents were determined with many crunch objectives in mind, flavour as afterthought (a direction turned up to 11 with 4E). Lots of player options in the core, which didn't translate well to stats for NPCs and monsters. But on the whole, faithful to D&D mythology and much more balanced than 1E and 2E.

4E: Create a new game based roughly on the exception-based design of Magic: The Gathering. Remove almost all the legacy clunk in an attempt to make things balanced and fun from a gameplay standpoint (although critically, not from a flavour or suspension of disbelief standpoint, IMO). Try and get the game online. Try and sell miniatures. Try and be hip and different enough flavourwise draw some of the WoW and Harry Potter crowd. Ignore generic pulp fantasy simulation to a degree, but do an ourobouros so that D&D eats it's own tail with an identifiable specific and trademarkable IP in the core and is difficult to relate to anything but itself (a direction started out in OD&D with things like the cleric, but arguably fetishised with Praemal, Eberron, and 4E. Hello dragonborn, hello warlord, hello eladrin). Overhaul flavour so that it's more fun from a metagame standpoint, is compromised by crunch or handwaved when the two conflict, and has a specific, identifiable IP which can no longer do classic pulp fantasy without banning core races and at least one class. All splat becomes core to sell more books.

I suspect 4E is much influenced by M:tG, WoW and GW. M:tG for the exception-based design, random collectables and M:tG Online. WoW and GW for the identifiable IP (Dragonborn vs taurens? Eladrin vs eldar?). GW for firing the customer base periodically - after all, grognards already own an army, so they're of no more use to the company unless those minis are rendered obsolete. I suspect that might have given WOTC the "who cares about retention" direction that 4E has in not tipping it's cap to D&D flavour continuity in the same way that 3E did.

 

[AllisterH]

So where does the healing surges, rituals and minion concept fall under?

I've always seen those three aspects as directly ported from pulp novels/action movies/fantasy novels more than anything from WoW or M:TG.

I think someone said it best earlier.

4E is designed/focused on the fantasy novel/action movie and anything that gets in the way of that goes by the wayside.

 

[rounser]

So where does the healing surges

A design convenience flimsily justified by references to Die Hard. Doesn't stand the test of suspension of disbelief for me. It just brings up more issues about what HP actually represent. They should have made this luck, IMO - your wounds don't heal over because you've got a "second wind", you just have enough luck to survive the next few sword thrusts and dragon's breath.

rituals

A spell cast with candles and a circle, or a spell without candles and a circle, doesn't make much difference. It's just a buzzword. Much more fundamental is the lack of rationalisation of many of the powers - they're there as a crunch device, and the flavour is mostly handwaved and difficult to envision as something happening in the real world.

and minion concept fall under?

Another design convenience handwaved by pointing to hollywood. The difference is that we can see the 1 HP, and it doesn't make sense in the context of a D&D world. A movie can get away with things that D&D can't, because in D&D we can see the rules.

You can always justify it if you strain hard enough, but by default it makes so little sense that it actually requires explanation. This alone should be a strong suggestion that it's been done wrong.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Another design convenience handwaved by pointing to hollywood. The difference is that we can see the 1 HP, and it doesn't make sense in the context of a D&D world. A movie can get away with things that D&D can't, because in D&D we can see the rules.

You can always justify it if you strain hard enough, but by default it makes so little sense that it actually requires explanation. This alone should be a strong suggestion that it's been done wrong.

I agree with you in principle, but I accept that this isn't going to (and should not) detract from the pleasure those who enjoy 4e have when playing the game.


RC

 

[Aus_Snow]

A spell cast with candles and a circle, or a spell without candles and a circle, doesn't make much difference. It's just a buzzword. Much more fundamental is the lack of rationalisation of many of the powers - they're there as a crunch device, and the flavour is mostly handwaved and difficult to envision as something happening in the real world.

Ouch.

As for different editions having different goals, yes. Though I would tentatively agree with Jurgen Hubert about 4e's design goals being more explicit, and (AFAICS) being pretty well realised.

Actually, I find it difficult to be sure what the goals were for earlier editions. Or at least, the ones in the middle there. . .

 

[rounser]

Ouch.

Yeah, okay, that should read "in the D&D world." You know what I mean.

 

[Mallus]

Doesn't stand the test of suspension of disbelief for me.

Try reserving the suspension of disbelief test for things like plot and NPC characterization/motivation. It helps.

Otherwise, you end up wrestling with thorny questions like why limbs can't be broken, why aging only makes you smarter and wiser (and never senile nor demented), and why charging horses are immune to inertia.

ie: Design convenience has always left its mark on D&D. We're just accustomed to looking the other way when it crops up in the ways I just mentioned.

 

[radferth]

Some random additional observations on the editions:

1st) Some folks seem to scorn it as unplayable. That seems a bit harsh. We all played it fine when it was that or OD&D. It's not very playable as written, with every odd subsystem in use, but it wasn't really designed to be played that way. The DM is expected to make house rules and on-the-spot rulings for all sorts of things. It couldn't be published today without a major clean-up, but it's not unplayable.

2nd) Not that different from first before all the kits and splatbooks and option books made each individual campaign virtually unrecognizable. The campaign focus that many have mentioned seems to me to more of a TSR publishing strategy than anything inherit to the system, but was definitely a real phenomenon. And I must give a huge thank you to 2nd ed's experience point system, which drove me to free-form experience after 2 weeks of trying to use it. No other single thing has had a stronger positive effect on my DMing.

3rd) I love the tactical aspect of third edition, and I was usually the only one at the table to think so. Many folks (not so much in this thread) have commented that character builds took precedence of tactics. This way most definitely true in most games that I played, but I once again argue this was not inherent in the rules themselves. I remember one combat when my character passed up running in the room to make an attack to stand a a tactically advantageous bottleneck. Not only did the other players question my decision, most of them seemed to have no idea what I was doing. My theory is some interaction of the initiative system and human nature led to the majority of players thinking in terms of "how can I deal the most damage on my turn" to the exclusion of other factors.

4th) There are a lot of good things in it, but one disappointment I have is that, in combat, my point of view differs greatly from my character's. I am thinking in terms of encounter powers and daily powers, when in most cases may character would not be. Combat was highly abstracted in all edition (which I like), but in previous ones, it was not too much of stretch to image my character was making the same tactical decisions that I was. In 4th, it _is_ too much of stretch.

One last observation: the nature of RPGs is flexible enough that a determined DM could make most any of these systems suit any of the mentions design goals, it just takes more work in some cases.