Hmm, interesting... I wasn't born yet when OD&D was readily available and have never had a copy of the rules so I can't directly dispute this but I've seen people prefer AD&D to OD&D or OD&D to AD&D in some discussions I've read and thus assumed there had to be differences... along with the fact that many retro-clones make the distinction that they are based on one or the other. Apparently my assumption was wrong.
Not wrong per-se. If you go over to rpg.net and find a thread that 'oldtimer' is in and say "nyaahhhhh 1e is just polished OD&D" you'll (after getting him banned when he tells you what he thinks of people that want to make him play AD&D) that indeed they are totally different games and he just loves the original game etc. HOWEVER, this guy played with Gary and all his buddies on a regular basis. The game he's talking about is basically not the same thing that people today know about. The game that people like me played, with Greyhawk, Blackmoor, etc and filtered through the lens of DMs and other players that just read the books, was a game very much like AD&D, just less polished and maybe a bit more 'wonky'. In its essence it was the same thing, though there is certainly a list of specific rules changes.
I feel like this is playing semantic games... they were built specifically to do things differently than D&D... thus my point still stands, their "innovations" were to be "not D&D" in various ways...
Well, perhaps, but these games brought truly different game play and very different rules, flavor, tone, etc. So you HAVE to call them really innovative. Traveller for instance is in some ways clearly something that Marc Miller wrote after he sat down and played D&D and decided he wanted to have an SF game and didn't like XY and Z about the way D&D worked. So its PARTLY a reaction, and partly just plain innovation and then he built a skill system, maybe the first one, I'm not sure, which is pretty innovative for the time period.
The interesting thing to observe is that D&D really didn't react much. It didn't absorb much of anything from other games. They kind if inched towards a skill system, but it wasn't until 2001, 24 years after Traveller, that it became a significant part of the game, and it was 1989 before it was even an optional rule in a core book.
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billd91 addresses this quite well IMO, but to add on to what he says... I think one of the greatest flaws of the community around 4e was the inability to accept that for some/many/a majority 4e wasn't more fun or even equal in fun to other editions of D&D and/or other games. This attitude that it was marketing, or adventures or a late-edition switch to new corebooks, or... well anything but the game is a little weird at this point. The game wasn't enough fun to capture a large enough marketshare (young and old)over it's run is one of the simplest answers to it being cut short and put away... and yet it's rarely if ever looked at by 4e fans as a legitimate reason to discuss, address, or try to understand.
Not all of us need be tarred with this wide brush. And I don't think 4e needed to be so unacceptable. I think the material that it came with wasn't great and it hurt a lot. I tend to think they could have stepped out a bit less far in some directions too. I think there's a '4e' that would have given a bit more service to the past and still done what I wanted. For instance I never understood why so many of the old classic 4e wizard and cleric spells don't show up as 4e spells. I mean they're generally THERE in some form, but they could have been there in much closer to the familiar form, the game could have been 18-20 levels instead of 30, and a few other things that just would have allowed it to feel more like D&D without really giving up what made it uniquely 4e. I guess the reason I mention that is WotC gave up the chance to do that with 5e entirely, and I really am not happy about that!
EDIT: To add to my final paragraph, I think there's a reason none of Ron Edward's games have sold anywhere near the number D&D has... and I think maybe instead of chalking it up to "Old grognards stuck in their ways" he should have maybe examined what the majority of people find fun in running and playing rpg's (and especially in D&D)... I (and I think most people) don't play a game just because it has the new shiny, I play it because it's fun and if the new shiny isn't adding to that or is in fact actively taking away from it I'm not going to play it... just a thought.
I think Ron Edwards just isn't that good a game designer. I mean I don't want to insult him or anything particularly but there are theorists and there are practical doers. Ron has a theory about what people want, but apparently his games aren't it, either because the theory is wrong or because he hasn't executed well enough. Most of what makes a game popular has to do with its 'ouvre', the feelings and ideas it evokes and not any sort of high concepts. If that weren't so OD&D would have bombed because it was objectively a terrible game, but it evoked something powerful. I cannot to this day forget sitting in a tent with a Coleman lantern at a little wooden table with my friends while we delved into our first dungeon.
