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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Daniel" data-source="post: 7612674" data-attributes="member: 694">I tried switching back to 2nd edition twice; it didn't take in either case.The first time was 2006, when I'd become fed up with (revised) 3rd edition. I tried switching my campaign over to Castles & Crusades, and I liked it well enough, but that SIEGE mechanic… between the weirdness of its level-bonuses and TNs, the wonky saving throws, and a pure nostalgic desire to rekindle my old love of gaming, the C&C phase only lasted a couple of weeks before I decided to go all the way back to 2nd edition. And that worked well enough for a couple of weeks too, but then, looking around online (Dragonsfoot and such), I saw a lot of incipient interest in other old-school versions of D&D, the whole proto-OSR-thing percolating around here and there, and I wound up giving basic D&D a try again. (I was one of those players who had started with the black box in the 90s and then switched to 2nd edition after a few months as my "formative/definitive D&D"). And, well, I just liked basic better. So that was what I played from then on.It wasn't without its hiccups, though. This was really before all of the OSR theorizing and navel-gazing had appeared, so I kept on trying to run basic the same way that I'd run 2nd and 3rd: as a traditional story-centric, character-driven RPG. And so I was never, ever satisfied. I loved that basic D&D basically did all of the dungeon-design and monster and item stocking for you and it balanced itself out; but certain things (like gold for XP) I never really "got," and so I replaced them with house rules. And, of course, that's how you break D&D. "XP? Sure, you get that for killing monsters, like in video games! Where else would you get it?"Eventually, frustration with my broken basic experience led me to flirting with other systems, looking for that perfect go-to game. This would have been, say, 2011 to 2014 for me. I tried rules-light games like Risus and Barbarians of Lemuria. I tried FATE and Savage Worlds. And in 2014, after deciding that Barbarians of Lemuria just didn't have enough "there" there to support a campaign, I tried my second return to 2nd edition. Converted the whole game mid-stride, and ran it another few months all the way to its conclusion. But it was a conclusion that I'd artificially hastened to its end, because I found myself annoyed that 2nd edition was more complicated than basic; and that it did things differently than I had become used to. 2nd edition had been my D&D back when I was in high school, but now I discovered that it just wasn't my D&D anymore.Since then, I've been running basic D&D again, increasingly by the book with each new campaign. Discarding more house-rules, it seems, every time I start a new one.</blockquote>

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