What is your favorite edition of D&D and why?

[UniversalMonster]

I've been playing since 1978, and I loved 3rd Edition and AD&D1e.

Neither of them are as awesome as my experience with 4th Edition. The reason is ease of use- for the first time.. ever- I can get a game together very quickly, the rules are easy to use and communicate even to new players, the tools have matured so that they are quick and useful, and for the last 6 months I have actually been running my games with no books at the table.

 

[avin]

I don't really have a favorite edition to play.

2E gave me Dark Sun and Planescape. While I hated Thac0, negative AC and racial limitations I loved to play Torment, Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. Love 2E Monstrous Manual.

3E is home of all my favorite characters. I had lots of solid campaigns and good memories of it. Sometimes powergamers (Frenzied Barbarian) and bad rules (hello grapple!) kill some fun of it but my 3E experience is largely positive on lower levels. After that, well, I play Fighter. Nuff said.

4E, I feel, is more balanced. Even if healing surges and other stuff killed a lot of suspension of disbelief, 4E combats are far better than 2E or 3E. Easy tu run and I got CB and MB to help me. Easiest DMing.

I'd say that my favorite system is GURPS. D&D remains without a favorite one to me.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

From the two editions I played, I think 4E is my favorite edition so far.

The primary reason for me is in how the game is designed to be played at a table. The most relevant decisions are always made at the table, not at home when building your character. In a way, you merely choose your "style" at home when you build your Guardian Fighter focusing on Spears or your Dragonmarked Halfling Cleric, but you bring it too life at the table, and your decisions there matter the most for how the game turns out.

I like the way it enforces team play - every character fulfills a role, and if you understand your role, work together and "apply" your role correctly to a given scenario, the whole team shines.

I like how simple running it as a DM can be - the mechanical tidbits are easy both in preparation and during play, giving more time for crafting adventures and campaigns and reacting to the players.

I also like the new cosmology. I didn't use to see cosmology as a "selling" point for D&D, since I fully expected to homebrew most of the time. But the 4E cosmology, and specifically the concept of the Feywild, resonate well with me, and now I don't really care to build a new cosmology and am instead looking forward to using the default one.

 

[Gilladian]

Wow, I have to say I agree almost exactly with what DannyAlcatraz had to say. I'm a 3e person all the way. I may not use a tremendous number of the options available myself, but other people do, and it makes for some very different games. I like that.

I also like that simply by picking and choosing among character creation options available to the PCs, I can create two totally different campaigns in very short order.

I'm also VERY FAMILIAR with the rules, by now. I don't have time to learn another system. I'm playing 4e, but I'm not becoming fluent with it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

3e by leaps and bounds (but not by a mile)

It is very hard to beat a game where I can do pretty much anything and have it work, that still maintains its own strong flavor, that encourages dungeon-plumbing adventure while maintaining a robust system for non-dungeon-plumbing adventures, that is specific without being overly so, that I can generate a living world with, and that makes it so easy as a DM to improvise or make certain mechanics prominent.

There's some issues with 3e, don't get me wrong. Part of the reason I'm not currently playing it: I'm OK trying something else for a while.

But 4e does not do it for me; at least, not as well. The shoot-from-the-hip ephemeralness of many of the rules leaves me stumbling in the dark when I need a light. The assumptions of player role and playstyle and world aspects leads me to think of this as a more marketing-produced, homogenized edition, where things were made for the greatest mass appeal, rather than for any inherent value they bring in and of themselves.

I am playing 4e. I am DMing 4e. I'm still fairly optimistic about 4e, and I think many of its problems are solvable because 4e did a few really smart things in laying a groundwork that 3e didn't do. This kind of relies on WotC to be willing to kill their own carefully constructed sacred cows, but it's certainly something they could do.

I'm picking up Pathfinder, but I'm a little afraid some of the latent 3e-isms (iterative attacks, spell level as DC-setter) and some missed opportunities made for the sake of compatability will leave me dry. I can house-rule it again, but I'm already eager to do that with 4e.

I have to make my own middle ground right now and it makes me a little grumpy.

 

[JediSoth]

Two years ago, this would have been a much easier question for me to answer.

Overall, I think my favorite edition was 3rd ed. Things made sense to me (especially after the bloated mess 2nd ed. became), and most of the rules changes from 2nd ed. were things I was starting to house rule in anyway. If it wasn't for the release of 3.5, I would have achieved Rules Mastery in a few more years.

I think 4E D&D is pretty easy to prep for and DM. I don't really like playing it, however. The electronic tools I've used so far are fantastic, though and something I'd really missed during 3.X.

2nd Ed. wasn't horrible at first, and the Core Rules CD-ROM made game prep easy. I had a nice handout made out with all the optional rules I had in my game and gameplay was smooth and flowed well. 2nd ed. also had some awesome settings. I wasn't familiar enough with 1st. Ed. to really be bothered by the switch to 2nd ed. (1st ed. AD&D and D&D kind of blurred for me since I was just learning the game at the time, and I had a lot of distractions like Paranoia, Star Frontiers, etc.).

 

[Clavis]

Confining myself to games branded "D&D", I would say my favorite edition mechanically is Classic (B/X, BECMI. & Rules Cyclopedia). My favorite edition favor-wise is 1st Ed. AD&D. My favorite fantasy game is actually Castles & Crusades, but since it's not technically "D&D" I'm excluding it.

I dislike "crunchy", rules-heavy games. I consider RPG rules to be a necessary evil. Played by the book, using all the rules, AD&D is admittedly a fairly crunchy game. Nobody I know ever played that way, and most importantly, the modular nature of the rules made it possible to play the game as rules-light or as rules-heavy as you wanted.

My love of Classic D&D comes primarily from the speed and ease of play, and the way that it makes adventure preparation a labor of creativity and imagination, rather than math. Forget about the 2 hour combats of 4th Edition - a large combat in Classic can be over in 15 minutes. High-level characters can be generated in 10 minutes once you know the system.

AD&D's flavor was great. The books read like they were aimed at adults. The assumed world was gritty Sword & Sorcery, a place were Thieves' Guilds had political power, Assassins were everywhere, and people actually died of disease. The DMG is filled with evocative Gygaxian prose, and the game had a true sense of the weird that I feel is missing from recent editions.

 

[FireLance]

4th Edition: Fewer rules, less work, more game.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Put me down for OD&D (1991). It was the first edition I'd ever played, so the nostalgia factor is there automatically. But the rules themselves also have a lot of advantages.

- OD&D in general is just a lot simpler than AD&D and d20, and the 5th and final version that came out in 1991 is the most streamlined of the lot, since all of the rules can be found in one Cyclopedia.

- People might talk about how easy it is to set up and DM a game of 4th edition, but 4e doesn't have anything on OD&D for quick and on-the-fly prep time. Oh, and most combats are over and done with in a couple of minutes (and I do use minis)!

- I've found, in my experience as both a player and a DM, that I don't like rules that cater to "building" characters. This is just my personal experience with the game, but it seems that when the game allows for customizing the character via game rules, those elements (skill point allocation, feat trees, multi and prestige class levels) tend to overwhelm and obscure the development of actual personalities for the characters. (YMMV. Maybe I just DM for a lot of munchkins.) If one were to base an analysis on this criterion alone, the good systems would OD&D, and AD&D w/o Skills & Powers; the bad systems would be AD&D w/ Skills & Powers, and the d20 System.

 

[williamhm]

4th edition. Mechanical reason balanced classes. I can finally play a fighter and not be useless half the game. Also no racial negatives means even a half orc wizard is a viable character, not the most optimal but is still viable.

Story reason. Lack of alignment rules means you can have more complicated characters its easier than ever to focus on the character rather than the mechanics of the character. Paragon paths and epic destinies provide flavour without taking anything away.