The Inverse Trek Law?

[Hussar]

I've seen this a bunch of times being brought up here. The Trek Law, for those of you who may not know, states that every odd numbered Trek movie will suck and every even numbered one will be good.

People are pointing to 2e and now 4e and claiming that, in some sort of Trek logic, we can apply an inverse of the law and even numbered editions will suck.

There's a serious problem with this little gem though. The idea that 2e sucked. Yeah, I know, there's lots of people who flatly claim that 2e sucked. But, mechanically, 2e was a pretty decent improvement on 1e. They cleaned up a lot of the crap that littered 1e, brought the game at least a little further away from the tactical wargame that was 1e, and introduced all sorts of concepts which have gone on to inform later editions - the idea of customizing your character through kits (the grandfather of PrC's), the introduction of rules to play non-standard races, etc.

Yeah, yeah, I know that people are going to start jumping up and down about how could I possibly defend 2e. Fine. But, then again, 2e lasted just as long as 1e and did pretty darn well. It's just that those who jumped from 1e to 2e dropped 2e like a bad habit when 3e came around. We're rules whores. Absolutely no loyalty to a given system.

Anyway, just wanted to get that bit off my chest.

 

[Jack99]

I loved 2e, I loved 3e, and I already love 4e.

Go figure.

 

[DreamChaser]

I tend to find that people like 1e because it was "the good old days" of D&D not because it had anything inherently positive about it. No one knew any better. There were no better games. It was mere years after fantasy role playing was created.

Examined under the today's lens, 1e has little to nothing going for it.

2e really can't be taken as all one edition, any more than 3e can. With Skills and Powers came a whole new set of pluses and minuses to be considered. Overall, 2e should have known better on a great number of things but then 2e wasn't released and sustained to support the game, but rather to earn certain people money. (Some will say that that is always the reason, but there is a difference between running a business and the "slash and burn" philosophy that powered much of 2e decision making.)


so I agree with you...the analogy doesn't work.

Anyway, its not that simple. We aren't really on the 4th edition (even though that is its name). There is the original (1), then simultaneously Advanced 1e D&D (2) and Basic D&D (3), 2e (4), 2e Skills & Powers (5), 3e (6), 3.5 (7), and now 4e (8).

DC

 

[Black Knight Irios]

How about: "D&D gets better with each new edition."

I've played 2E, 3.x and I'm going to play 4E.

 

[BryonD]

I dropped 2e pretty quickly. 3e brought me back. I've got no interest in 4e.

It doesn't mean anything to say that 2e "sucked" without context.
I'd say that 1e was the best RPG out there in its day.
During 2e times it rocked along on the D&D brand, but there were much better games around.
By the time 3E rolled around the market was vastly more complex, so the idea of "best" is pretty slippery. But I think it is fair to say that it redefined a lot of gaming and was the standard of its time in a way that 2e couldn't dream about.
4e will come out gang-busters, just like 2e did. But give it a couple years and it will be just another game out there, only rocking along on the D&D brand.

In the context of what options are out there, the Inverse Trek Rule works just fine.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Not to mention the fact that postulating a continuing pattern without there already BEING a pattern and needing an ESTABLISHED 4th data point to even begin to SUGGEST a pattern is, to be as kind as I can, either stupidly speculative, or else bald edition-hatemongering.

 

[Imban]

There's a serious problem with this little gem though. The idea that 2e sucked. Yeah, I know, there's lots of people who flatly claim that 2e sucked.

I think the part where 2e sucks - and feel the part where I'm disliking 4e - is in its core philosophy. I don't question the idea that neat and awesome concepts will always come out over time, and D&D's history bears this out, but...

But, mechanically, 2e was a pretty decent improvement on 1e.

...I disagree, because I found the core bits of 2e - what got it published in the first place - to be lacking once I finally looked into things. I appreciated how much they cleaned up and fixed up things, but none of those changes - rather than fixes - that they made right then and there in 1989 really appealed to me.

Basically, I recognize that 2e brought a lot of things with it over its ten-year lifespan (a shift away from "rollplaying" to reflect the change the roleplaying community at the time was going through, the appearance of kits, Skills & Powers, rules for playing dragons, etc.), but I look at them and can't help but think that if all the core 2e books were was a fix-up of 1e, all of the major changes over 2e's lifespan could still have happened, and it would have produced a game I would have liked slightly more.

In other words, yeah, 3e brought me Magic of Incarnum and Tome of Battle, but I'd rather only consider the base system when I compare versions. Not doing that makes the buildup of neat addons over time crowd out any real efforts to compare things - new and shiny is always going to be new and shiny, except in the very rare case of major screwups.

(And I say all of this as someone who started with 2e and still very much has a soft spot for it.)

 

[Doug McCrae]

The Trek Law has never applied because 1e was by far and away the worst edition of D&D ever.

It took the wonderful, solid simplicity of the OD&D line and added a huge amount of clunky, time-consuming pointlessness such as different weapon damage vs S-M or L. Subsystems sprout like fungus all over 1e.

And Gary's prose sucks.

2e made a bad mistake in cutting the balls off D&D. It became less red-blooded. Less Conan, more Dragonlance. But the rules and text were a big improvement over 1e, so overall it was a lot better.

 

[Mercule]

And Gary's prose sucks.

Heathen!

 

[S'mon]

While I do think 1e & 3e were better than 2e overall, I don't think one data point is enough for an "evens suck" hypothesis.