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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orryn Emrys" data-source="post: 4069433" data-attributes="member: 6799">I don't know... I've been playing and running D&D games since about 1983.  Original Dungeons & Dragons was a cool and simple system that gave fuel to an endless variety of wonky ideas and unbalanced schemes, with just enough rules to make it all work.  The BECMI system was a whole lot of fun, throwing new and different ways to play into the mix with each release.  1st Edition AD&D was an extravagent set of uncoordinated subsystems that, fortunately, could be pillaged for what was necessary to run a great game.  If some of the rules were simply ridiculously cumbersome (encumbrance, for example... pun intended) or patently non-sensical (1E bards jump to mind), or thoroughly unbalanced (I'm thinkin' psionics here... which was, of course, quite optional), they could be ignored without breaking the game, as long as a modicum of common sense was implemented.  Good times were had by all.I resisted the 2nd Edition switch with great tenacity.  I'd spent years collecting what seemed to me at the time a veritable library of sourcebooks, and I had no intention of starting completely over.  It was 1990 before I took the plunge, upon encountering new players who preferred the new system.  2E seemed brilliant to me at the time!  The reorganization of the spell system, the new initiative rules and combat options (though I never liked rolling on a chart to see what unarmed combat or grapple maneuver your character decided to try), the restructured races and classes (yeah! 1st-level bards!)... and the continued (and persistent) expansion of character ideas with the 7,000 other books I couldn't keep from purchasing in the years that followed.Then came 3E.  Ironically, in the year or two prior to the announcement I'd started developing my own sort of game system.  I abandoned the project when Eric Noah's website and the "countdown" articles in Dragon Magazine started showing me that 3E was going to be moving in a very similar direction to my own efforts... and was going to do it a lot better.  I've never regretted getting behind the 3rd Edition release and supporting it from the get-go.  We've had a fantastic run with it, and I was blissfully oblivious to the various challenges that the system provided me, as a Dungeon Master, in running the games as I wanted them to be.  Certainly, there were things I avoided because the system made them so high-maintenance (large numbers of enemies, writing up numerous high-level NPCs, enemies that stacked their buff spells overly much), but I really just accepted all that as part of the system and made the game work.I eventually overcame many of these complications with the advent of DM Genie and NPC Designer and such.  Computerized campaign maintenance and combat management really made things possible that hadn't been before.  It's been fun.  I am, however, no longer oblivious, and I'm ready to see a game system that empowers me to do what I can imagine from the outset.  I'm ambivalent about some of the "fluff" elements that have made their way onto the internet, but I'm not much for assuming that they represent the whole of the game.  The rules, however, seem to me to have great potential.To my way of thinking... None of the editions have really sucked.  They haven't been perfect, by any stretch, with a smattering of strengths and weaknesses.  But they are what you make of them.  They've allowed me a lifetime of D&D, and it has been excellent, whatever the system.I may not like everything they do, but I will approach the future with optimism and the will to cull whatever I wish from the system to come.  I eagerly await the release of 4th Edition, 5th, 6th... what have you.  And if I decide to continue to play 3.5, I don't imagine I'll ever look on the changes to come as anything but good.Change is good.  And if I want gnomes in my game, there will damn well be gnomes in my game.</blockquote>

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