Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="GregoryOatmeal" data-source="post: 5704362" data-attributes="member: 6667661">Apparently I'm not the only one that freely mixed 1E and 2E stuff...Without discussing the merits of the editions themselves - I feel that continuity and the utility value of products is very important to keeping the gaming community unified. Having thirty-one flavors of ice-cream is great, but if everyone at the table has to eat the same ice-cream things become problematic. Also ordering the flavor of ice-cream requires a significant one-time  buy-in fee and significant knowledge of said flavor of ice-cream is  required to enjoy it with your company. But anyway, back to utility.Going from 1E to 2E didn't entirely diminish the value of 1E gaming products. 1E monsters and modules were largely compatible with 2E. Character conversion was obvious. Rules were refined but not entirely rewritten. New campaign flavors were available. BECMI products were largely compatible with this other AD&D 1E and 2E products. In most cases 2E expanded on 1E so many 1E products continued to be useful in 2E.Going from 2E to 3E was a tougher pill to swallow. Crunch was entirely incompatible so lots of old products lost much of their utility value. On the other hand the OGL and D20 system added utility value to the base 3E rules system. A host of third party products flooded the market providing gamers with a lot of options for 3E. Also the D20 system was compatible with different games, allowing players to get outside the realm of fantasy gaming. The d20 system ensured a continuity of rules that could be directly applied to modern, sci-fi, and historical settings, reducing barriers of entry to new gaming experience. Also 3E monsters could be used in other d20 games - d20 modern characters can fight dragons from the monster manual if the DM wishes to mix and match. So 3E products had a lot of utility value across the d20 spectrum.I'm not talking about mechanics or gameplay innovations and I'm not trying to start an edition war here. All of my products from previous editions have no value besides fluff in 4E. 4E does not feature any new innovation like the d20 system that adds value to its products in terms of allowing for inter-compatibility with 3pp products or previous editions. The game has no mechanical continuity with any previous D&D so all of the crunch from previous editions loses value. Also the crunch hardly has any value outside of WOTC D&D 4E products (the new Gamma World is the exception and it's tons of fun...).  3rd party support is almost non-existent. If 4E is replaced before 2016 with a 5E that is incompatible with 4E then 4E products will be the least versatile products of any D&D edition yet.From the seventies through 2008 gaming was largely unified around the D&D brand. During this time TSR/WOTC produced products that were compatible with an extensive catalog of other products and had a lot of utility across different gaming scenarios. Their products had a lot of value in being at least somewhat continuous and compatible with previous editions and other games. I want that company back.</blockquote>

Verification