Support for older editions?

[Lanefan]

I'll leave the jury out until older edition support becomes a consistent thing, but if this does signal a change in attitude there might be hope for 'em yet!

Lanefan

 

[the Jester]

Wow, that's awesome to hear!

DDI is looking pretty good again. I was planning on waiting until the MB can actually build monsters before I re-subbed, but the last month or two the magazines have given a good amount of content that sounds excellent. If they keep this up, I may resubscribe earlier than planned.

I would love it if there were even occasional dribbles of stuff like this, even though I am currently running 4e and my homebrewed version of the game. I routinely read old edition books for inspiration or convert 1e, 2e or 3e stuff to 4e and love to see the differing interpretations by edition of game elements.

Would someone mind giving a quick synopsis of how Vlaakith looks in 1e?

 

[Starfox]

Supporting 1st and 2nd edition (but presumably not 3rd) is also a way to kick at Pathfinder. So its not all rosy-colored niceness.

 

[Baz King]

Supporting 1st and 2nd edition (but presumably not 3rd) is also a way to kick at Pathfinder. So its not all rosy-colored niceness.

That's a spectacularly uncharitable viewpoint!

 

[Windjammer]

Supporting 1st and 2nd edition (but presumably not 3rd) is also a way to kick at Pathfinder. So its not all rosy-colored niceness.

I wouldn't agree that's part of their intention (btw it's too small an effort right now to read much into it) but I certainly see that as a side effect WotC might welcome.

3.x always struck me as a game that sits half way between the older (esp. more rules lite) versions and 4E, in that it borrows heavily from the old while complementing it by the new (whereas 4E strikes me as ditching the old nearly wholesale; I say that as someone who likes it for that reason). But if one was to play one of these rules lite older versions and/or 4E - as I do - this may kind of remove the impetus for wanting one's itch scratched by 3.x or one of its derivates.

I think the brilliance of doing pre-3.x conversions for WotC may well be that they'd pump out stuff that's directly usable (with minimum conversion) for players not just playing older editions but any of the retro clones. Not that the latter is a sizeable market in the larger picture, but boy would this help them alleviate all the ill will they've accumulated over the past decade. [Edit. Not to mention that the VTT is supposedly edition-neutral. Am still very curious to what that amounts to in actual play!]

 

[MatthewJHanson]

Supporting 1st and 2nd edition (but presumably not 3rd) is also a way to kick at Pathfinder. So its not all rosy-colored niceness.

In this case the original adventure was written for 3rd edition, so it would be a little silly to talk about how to convert it. (And they provided the whole adventure, so 3e is actually getting way more support than 1st or 2nd).

 

[ExploderWizard]

I think the conversion material will continue as long as filler material is needed to keep the pagecount of content up.

 

[Starfox]

I can see why WotC would support 2E and not 3E - simply because 4E is a lot closer to these older games. Much of the "realism" and "simulationism" that was in 3E had disappeared in 4E, which is a game of being larger than life, not an exceptional but still believable (demi)human. This reflects mechanically to make 4E easier to convert back to 2E than back to 3E.

By the same token, I find that when I try to convert things from DnD to my homebrew, it is often easier to convert from 1E or 2E than from 3E or 4E - the later editions have a lot of extraneous information that only muddles the conversion.

 

[grodog]

I can't imagine there are many pre-3e players subscribing to DDI---they should have made the article freely available if they wanted to lure OSR folks back in as potential subscribers

 

[Water Bob]

I'm surprised no one has mentioned this yet. I think the reference in the OP is WotC's nod that the older versions of D&D are still being played and still have quite large followings.

Check out the Dragonsfoot forum. Tons of people there playing all the pre-3E editions, all the way back to the three little books TSR first published.

Plus, there are new products being published by niche companies all the time for earlier editions--not to mention the older edition rule clones that can be purchased (OSRIC is a good example).

If your favorite D&D edition is, say, 1E AD&D, there are a ton of people still playing that version of the rules, and you can still buy new products for the game (not near as much as you can buy for 3E or 4E, mind you). And, there's a ton of fan material on the net, too, from supplements to game worlds to adventures.