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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thasmodious" data-source="post: 4506178" data-attributes="member: 63272">As I was reading this thread, I was mentally crafting my response to the good question of the OP when I came across this post, which is basically exactly what I would say (likely better than I would have said it).  I recall that love/hate relationship someone else was talking about hitting me and my group after a couple years of 2e (before the Options clutter).  We've always played other systems, but D&D was always the center, ongoing game.  But we put it aside and started playing Runequest.  Runequest was a great system with some things that many sometimes felt were missing from D&D, like experience based skills (where if you spend time climbing, you get better at climbing, but not at swimming), a hit location system, a de-emphasis on magics dominant role, etc.  We played the same game, same playstyle, in the same homebrew world I'd been running for years, and we had some good times playing Runequest for quite awhile.  But eventually something began nagging us in the backs of our skulls, a feeling that something was missing.  One day, we looked around at the table at each other and there was a sort of psionic connection (despite all of us loathing psionics) and one of us said, "so, we should switch back to AD&D, huh?"  The rest agreed, we grabbed the books of the shelf and spent that session converting the PCs over, as close as we could, to 2e.  And we've never abandoned the game since.  D&D just has this certain, je ne sais quoi about it.  Its not about levels or THACO or hitpoints, or some certain mechanic or monster, its just this essence that sets it apart, the feeling the game has always captured.  Maybe it's just that D&D was the first and all other fantasy RPGs (and RPGs in general), no matter how different, are in the shadow of that legacy.  If you've been around for the whole ride, D&D created the hobby, defined it, and was the first to capture our imaginations in the way that RPGs do.  Everything else in the industry, whether horror, fantasy, or scifi, whether PnP, PC, or MMO, is viewed in context to D&D.</blockquote>

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