Upgrade to new edition = World-Shaking Event

[thundershot]

Yep. I had one group playing the Apocalypse Stone, while the other did Die, Vecna, Die!. After it was over, everyone found themselves scattered throughout the land, with very little memory of what happened. It gave me an excuse to put them back at 1st level again, (the players were fine with it, but the characters were annoyed that they weren't as good as they used to be) and Halflings don't look like Hobbits, and Drow can't Levitate, and all of the other cosmetic and major changes happened...

It was a blast. Really! The PC's are the only ones who remember that things were different before, so it's also a bit of a learning experience. "Why is that dragon so damned small?" is an oft remembered quote when they first encountered a 3e dragon.



Chris

 

[Cor Azer]

World-shaking? Eh... not usually. The closest I've come to running a campaign through a rules change (edition or system) was the 3.0 to 3.5 changeover, and that didn't affect a whole lot.

Really, the only thing that changed was that one character switched his Eldritch Might II bard to the new 3.5 bard. So I timed the changeover with the party's goal of destroying an evil artifact. There was a flashback magical side affect to doing so, and the character changed. Nobody else in the world noticed a change.. well, not that change. Some significant time later other stuff starts going wierd, but it's from an unrelated plot hook that's becoming a world-shaking event.

 

[Thumper3333]

World-shaking? Eh... not usually. The closest I've come to running a campaign through a rules change (edition or system) was the 3.0 to 3.5 changeover, and that didn't affect a whole lot.

Really

Really? How did you explain all creatures over size medium growing?

When my long time group switched to 3e from 2e, we just started a new game. After a few months, I wanted to bring in my old 2e character, as we had gotten high enough level where he would fit with the party, and my charcater had just died a horrible death. I converted him over and introduced him.

I have not, and will never switch to 3.5 so there will be no world-shattering events for that either.

 

[Wormwood]

My friends and I hadn't played RPGs for years until 3e came along and reintroduced us to the hobby.

Sadly, between City of Heroes and X-Box live, we don;t do tabletop any more.

But I have high hopes for Eberron and/or WoD 2.0

/tangent

 

[Nightfall]

Considering Scarred Lands didn't even exist until 3.0, (to my knowledge), there's no world shaking event that I need to do.

Besides I was unhappy with the changes wrought by 2nd to 2nd revised when it happened to FR and DL. So don't expect the same this time around.

 

[haiiro]

"Other."

I wasn't involved in a campaign (as a player or DM) when 3e came out, and I started playing D&D seriously when 2e was first published.

Hypothetically, and depending on how major the edition change turned out to be (2e to 3e = fairly major, for example), I would probably just try to roll in the changes without any in-game rationale.

 

[jerichothebard]

Nope. The earth-shaking event was the release of 3e, which brought me back into playing RPGs in general and D&D in particular.


That said, a long time ago, when Palladium upgraded/revised Heroes Unlimited, we actually did do an earth-shaking event to explain the changes. It started when my character died in a horrible fiery explosion (an assassination by another PC - long story). Then the other PCs tried hunting him down, but he fought back, and a mutant war started. This was all written up as a short story by one of the other players (ironically, the player who whacked my character).

When all the dust settled, only one of our original characters was alive - my other character, who had no mutant/super abilities whatsoever. He was just this guy with some maxed-out thiefy skills and a habit of trying to remain out of sight and out of mind.


It was a pretty cool transition, actually.

 

[Evilhalfling]

1st to 2nd - erm changed groups, changed worlds, changed rules
2nd to 3rd - The week before the new ed came out there was a TPK - just luck
3 to 3.5 ignored the changes until the campaign ended, (1month approx)
then moved to the other continent and used new rules. I don't mind changing the world but each time the changes would have really damaged the characters.

 

[Iron Sheep]

During both the 1st-to-2nd and 2nd-to-3rd switches we simply started a new game with new characters. In both cases we tended to play many shorter games (often concurrently), rather than long, involved campaigns, so the old edition games tended to die a natural death shortly after they came out.

For the 3-to-3.5 switch, we just made the needed minor changes to the characters and kept right on going.

In neither case were there world-shaking events which explained any differences between how things worked before, and how they worked now, even if the same world was being used. Ever since the FR "Time of Troubles" change, I've found the whole "game system changes so the world must undergo cataclysm" thing to be really lame. It gets even lamer if cataclysms start to happen every few years (particularly in a world which had previously been cataclysm-free).

But this might be in part because as GM I think of rules systems as being descriptive, not prescriptive.

Corran

 

[akchf]

I was running a 3e game when 3.5 came out, I liked the updates so much, and didn't want to factor it into the game too much, so we kinda took the time to just clean up the characters. I let them remake their characters with the same classes and stuff, but let them switch up the levels, in the end it gave them a bit more freedom than the 3e characters had had.