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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 5778767" data-attributes="member: 14159">Basic D&D: I tried to start playing D&D with the Black Box version of Basic D&D in '91, but my friends and myself just couldn't piece together THAC0 worked (we were 13, and reasonably bright, but it just didn't make sense to us), so we gave up on D&D.  I do wonder how many kids tried to get involved with D&D but found the rules too daunting. I played a couple of games of Basic D&D in later years run by a DM who was running for the retro/nostalgia appeal, since his normal game at the time was 2e (it was in '99).  It was fun, but seemed really limited in terms of what characters could do, since spell lists were tiny, there were no "skills" so no hard rules on what characters knew or didn't know, and the options in combat were essentially to move, attack, or cast a spell (if you knew any).  It felt like the tabletop equivalent of an 8-bit console RPG: good for a little fun but once you had played almost anything else you'd know the difference and miss the options and depth.AD&D 2e: The first D&D I ever really played at length.  It felt rich and complicated, but the rules felt outdated even at the time.  I only knew a couple of DM's who played 2e using the RAW.  Almost every DM I knew heavily house-ruled the game.  Some had a homebrew alternate skill/proficiency system, others completely re-wrote the multiclassing/dual classing rules, some changed the initiative and movement rules, others created chimeras blending 1e, 2e, Basic D&D and a pile of house-rules into something they still nominally called 2e.  Going from any one campaign to another meant essentially re-learning the game.  Everybody played it, but very few were happy with how it was in RAW/stock configuration.  D&D 3e:  A breath of fresh air.  Unlike the morass of various incompatible house-ruled editions of 2e, most DM's used 3e mostly as-written and it was good to have everyone more-or-less on the same page.Within less than a year every game I knew of had converted from 2e to 3e.  DM's might have huge piles of homebrew feats and Prestige Classes and spells, but people were speaking the same language of D&D, instead of twenty only vaguely compatible dialects.The big flaw was that D&D 3e was not Powergamer-safe.  It would work wonderfully if the PC's weren't trying to abuse/break the system and were having a fun, relaxed time.  The potential abuses in the rules (usually involving multiclass combos or being very literal with the wording of spells or feats) were huge, and I saw some people make the rules beg for mercy they bent and twisted them so hard.  D&D 3.5e:  An overzealous bug-fix for 3e.  It plugged the various holes I saw in 3e, but changed a lot of other little things too.  It was complex and intricate, but well balanced, especially at lower levels.  At higher levels combat could become ridiculously complicated and prohibitive, so I generally ran campaigns from 1st to 10th level, and 11th+ level characters were NPC's or for one-shot games.  It's biggest advantage, like 3e, was that it was so widely adopted.  I knew veteran 1e players who had played AD&D with their group since the early 80's that switched over to 3.5e.  Anywhere I went where there was gamers, everybody knew 3.5e.  It might not be their favorite game, or their favorite edition, but everybody spoke it.  It was like the Common Language of editions.  D&D 4e: It wasn't inherently bad, but it was horribly presented.  It got off to a bad start with the infamous "not fun" marketing, and throwing out a lot of beloved setting material/fluff like the Great Wheel.  If it was marketed better, and kept more "legacy" fluff, and the initial releases had more of the traditional "core" races and classes, and other steps to bridge the gap, it might have been received better.It's big downsides were that it was so unlike editions that came before in the feel and style, like it was designed to be a balanced and playable fantasy RPG first and foremost, and then afterwards slap the D&D name on it, and the way it was presented forced a schism in the fanbase.  The edition wars it created were a big problem.  Now there wasn't a common language anymore.  There were two completely incompatible editions out there with strong fanbases and just walking up to a bunch of gamers.This was the first edition I'd seen where I'd seen DM's tell me they just plain couldn't translate their homebrew settings to 4e, or at least do it faithfully to the setting.  I'd seen a homebrew setting that started out as a 1e AD&D setting the author started working on in his spare time as an undergrad, and transitioned to 2e AD&D in grad school, and had turned eventually into a thriving, hugely well documented and lavishly fleshed out 3e and later 3.5 game with lots of homebrew materials. . .and he looked at the 4e core books and realized that the setting just wouldn't be the same in 4e as it had been in 1e through 3.5e.  If he was going to run 4e, he would want to write up a completely new setting to use 4e from scratch instead of just update the setting he'd been running for almost 20 years.</blockquote>

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