Was there a real need for a fourth ed.? Or would tweaking 3.5 have done it for you?

[Silent Cartographer]

I'm a bit on the fence regarding whether a new edition was needed now or not. However, given that that there was going to be a new edition (now or in the future), that new edition needed to really offer major changes in order to be worthwhile. IMO.

Some of the issues surrounding the 3.0-to-3.5 release really pissed me off, and I didn't run/play D&D for almost 2 years after quickly burning out on 3.5. This came as a surprise, as I thought the idea of a mid-version upgrade sounded good. Instead, they changed just enought to really be irritating without providing enough improvements to make it worthwhile.

D&D's surviving sacred cows had thirty four years of developed support behind them. Personally, I was happy to see some fresh beef on the grill.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

No, tweaks would not have sufficed - there are simply too many other good RPGs out there that you can allow yourself to keep your core system unchanged for that long. And when i think about the flamewars that 3.5 generated - "they sold us errata!!!11!"

I´m just a lucky guy, because 4e is exactly the redesign i wanted. Especially the statblocks. Let me say it again: statblocks. There you have it.

 

[Tetsubo]

Tweaking 3.5 was all that was needed. 4E took the game into an entirely new and completely unneeded direction.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

I think 3.5 was "in too deep" to simply patch up. There were swarms of rules that simply didn't make sense, a positive sense of powercreep between PHB and other classes (ahem Bo9S)along with some wonky rules to handle general calls for spells in the game that were introduced with SPLAT suppliments. It reminds me a lot of what happened to the game whenever kits were introduced into AD&D (Justifier Ranger); it was fine on the surface level but entirely broken when you took into consideration the amout of post-publication suppliments that oftentimes trumped the given core rules.

Going back to the proverbial drawing board, I feel, was the best option. 4e is a different feel, but seems to be grounded with a more solid rulebase.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I'm firmly in the camp that D&D needed a complete overall--not because 3E was bad, but because the 3E design had been pushed about as far as it could be pushed.

Any substantial changes that were not a new design was simply rearranging deck chairs--but also moving doors to the staterooms and disagreeing about the number of engine room and other such changes that you really shouldn't mess with until you do a redesign.

Which brings me to the issue of timing. 2008 was too early for 4E, but only because 3.5 was too early/too much and thus poisoned the well. A modest tweak in 2005 to give us a more modest 3.5, followed by a complete redesign of 4E in 2008, would have been fine.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I voted scrap and restart.

I pseudo-follow the progress of the Warhammer 40k game. I quit playing right after 3ed came out, which was a major reboot in the rules system as compared to 2ed...which was in turn a major reboot from 1ed.

Now they are up to 5ed....which is a tweak of 4ed...which was a tweak of 3ed. Its a flat-out nightmare of repurchasing the same material over and over where the lines between the rules for 3-4-5ed are blurred at best and impossible to keep track of at worst.

We switched our DnD game to 3.5 as soon as it rolled out and still had "Huh...I didn't realize they changed that." moments when 4ed was ushered in. I would hate to think how bad it would be if they just "tweaked" some more and tried to re-release the same info a third time...Sword and Fist...Complete Warrior...Fighters Compendium.

DS

 

[joethelawyer]

Yeah. Um. Well, it's not that fast. I remember doing Tsojcanth in a day, but I also remember taking ALL SUMMER to do ToEE. We graphed every single 5' square in that dang adventure. Good times, good times.

WP

i also remember having TIME to play back then. we would spend 25 hours of a 48 hour weekend playing, a few weekends a month. now we're lucky to get in 3 hours a week, a few times a month.

 

[JoeGKushner]

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

I think 3.5 is fine. I don't feel as if 4th edition was necessary. I do feel that another "tweadition" (ie 3.75, or simply, as I've understood it, what Pathfinder is all about) would have been too much tweaking for what is basically a single edition (3.x).

Thus, I couldn't answer the poll.

AR

 

[Shroomy]

Tweaks would not have done it for me, because the underlying math of the game was one of the key problems I had with it. In order to fix what I felt was broken, the math had to be redone from scratch (as it has been).

I agree with this. The fundamental problem with 3.x was not conceptual, it was mathematical. Tweaking or patching won't fix that, though it can ameliorate some of the issues.