D&D 5E What Aspects of Every Edition Should be Included in 5e?

[Balsamic Dragon]

Here's what I feel is "D&D" from the various editions:

Basic D&D: Simple, straight-forward character creation. Having a race that was enough description that you didn't also need a class. Drawing your own maps on graph paper.

AD&D: Bunches of weird and interesting monsters, not just the same old goblins and skeletons. Lots of spells to choose from. An expectation that the game was _hard_ and many PCs would die.

2E D&D: Many different ways to play the same class, rather than just the standard template Fighter. An emphasis on amazing settings that existed outside the standard swords and sorcery/Tolkien universe.

3E D&D: Game balance. Options rather than penalties. Bringing logic and order to the massive ruleset. A real skill system. An attempt, both in rules and artwork, to be inclusive to a larger audience.

4E D&D: (caveat: I don't play much of this one) Larger than life battles. An emphasis on group tactics.

I don't see any reason why all of those things could not exist in Fifth Edition.

 

[TerraDave]

70’s D&D: challenge the player

80’s D&D: with awesome adventures and pour on the flavor

90’s D&D: give more options, including elaborate settings for those that want them

00’s D&D: then make the mechanics of all this work

10’s D&D: and remember, its just a game

 

[Pickles JG]

Basic D&D: Simplicity
AD&D: A Sense of Wonder
2e: Superb settings
3e: Coherent Rules
4e: Balance

 

[fletch137]

Basic D&D
The way adventuring changed over the life of the character. Rather than just levelling up to fight different monsters, PCs would pass through phases of dungeon-->wilderness-->kingdom building-->multi-planar-->godhood.

1st Ed.
Adventures based on self-serving dungeon looting rather than heroic village saving.

2nd Ed.
Rich settings and adventures to explore them. Al-Qadim particularly hit this bullseye for me, releasing bunches of great locales with epic, non-linear adventures.

3rd Ed.
Crafting rules. Not just being able to make your own sword (which I did like), but the recipe-based rules for building magic items still make me smile. So much more enjoyable to "earn" a magic item than just shelling out gold.

4th Ed.
Character roles. I liked knowing what my purpose was. I'd like to see that expanded to non-combat roles too, such as dungeoneering or social skills.

 

[Lwaxy]

Basic D&D: The minimalistic philosophy concerning character options. Dungeons & Dragons doesn't need a massive bloat of items, spells, powers, feats, races, classes and themes to be fun. Getting the options right is much more important than frantically churning them out. Sure, there should be enough to give your character a distinct feel, but do they really need dozens of new powers to choose from at every level? A handful is enough, so long as those powers are crafted with care.

Gods, no. I found this absolutely awful. The more choices the better, at least for me and my players. That is something which needs to stick around in my view.


What needs to go in is that the rules are more than secondary to the GM's decision. The less rules lawyering the better.

 

[haakon1]

Gods, no. I found this absolutely awful. The more choices the better, at least for me and my players. That is something which needs to stick around in my view.

Nod. I started with AD&D, so I never saw a need for BECMI (though I used some Basic modules).

 

[CleanCutRogue]

Basic D&D: Small quantity of rules resulted in reliance in DM judgement, giving an assumed authoritative role to the DM that today isn't there. When we played Basic D&D, there were no rules lawyers because the rules weren't so strict and we were playing in a story being constructed by our narrator, arbiter, and storyteller. If we could somehow re-capture the authoritative DM role by keeping the rules this lite, it would be a gift to the hobby that has been gone for a very long time. Also, in Basic, we had the strongest archetypical character classes. A fighter was a fighter. A thief was a thief. You oft found yourself hiring henchmen in towns when you lacked certain roles in your group and this helped lead to other types of adventure, intrigue, and roleplaying.

AD&D: This goes without saying, but of course the introduction of race vs class as two different concepts originated in this edition and should continue. Just sayin'. The idea of sub-classes existed here, where the main classes of fighter, thief, cleric, and magic-user formed a quartet of descriptive exhaustiveness that organized the other archetypes. The alignment compass was defined here and has been in use ever since. This edition gave great tables to roll on when your character gained "name" level (usually 9th) to gain followers. I always loved this about AD&D and AD&D2e - the game evolved when you gained name level and you become entrenched in your setting in a way that you don't get in other editions.

AD&D2e: I liked the schools of magic and spheres of influence for arcane and divine magic. It helped breathe life into settings while not really limiting anyone much. I liked what this edition did with rogues (thieves) too, allowing a great deal of customization. I don't think DnDNext should embrace old-school thief % abilities, but the concept of customizable characters should be a tradition fully embraced in all future editions.

D&D3.Xe: a lot can be learned from this edition, even though my heart lies in Basic and 1e. This edition gave us a unified mechanic... roll d20 for nearly everything, and roll it high. 3.Xe also mastered the multi-classing complexity that old editions were plagued with. Now you could take a level in anything you wanted when you gained a new level... woohoo! This allowed for complex character concepts that older editions didn't permit, while still providing an option for strong archetypes. DnDNext can certainly learn from this! Another thing that hit a winning note in my opinion was the embrace of AD&D (and 2e) alignment but given descriptive names that made sense (Why be "Chaotic Good" when you can write "Rebel"?) Despite it not being my favorite edition, I still like a lot of things that came from this version.

4e: I have only played this edition a handful of times. Each time I played it I felt structured and ordered and very limited. But this isn't a post about what we don't want to keep, it's a post about what we do want from each edition, so I'll leave critique out of it (in fact, there are things I could critique about each edition not just 4th). So... I love the small concise skill set; it seems that all the evolution of skill lists finally came down to a winning set, in my opinion. I would also like to see the concept of at-will, encounter (though I would change it to hourly, because "encounter" is an artificial measurement of time and has a board-game feel to it), and daily powers (though I would like to see these limited to spell caster types). The Warlord intrigued me as a class and I would like to see its abilities existing in DnDNext (though I'd prefer them folded into options for customizing a Fighter class, imo).
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