Which edition change changed the game the most?

[Kichwas]

The recent thread discussing changes between editions
. . .
Got me thinking. I wonder what edition change the folks here at ENworld believe to be the largest change in the game.

I'm curious because an assumption of mine has been challenged. I had always seen the biggest change being 4e (and, frankly, I considered that obvious). Some have posted they don't believe that to be the case.

I found 3e was an almost trivial change to DnD. It added a few embellishments on the top: skills and feats. But the change to 3e was less than the difference between DnD and ADnD.

4E though, has almost no game mechanics at all in common with anything before it. A few things had names that were the same as things in the other game - but 4E has less in common with past versions than those past version had in common with things like Palladium Fantasy and Arduin.

4E's biggest claim to similarity is that it was published by the company that bought the rights to all of TSR's brands.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

You don't get it because you have a radically different assessment of the changes between 2e and 3e that he does. Frankly, I find your assessment of them as mind bogglilng as you find his.

I have managed to convert 1e and 2e modules to 3e quite easily. While I have used some creative license from time to time to change the nature of an encounter, I have found that a 1-1 conversion works in the vast majority of cases. The only way your statement makes sense to me is to assume that you've never actually tried to do it and have, unfortunately, taken someone else's word for it.

Pretty much. I can and have taken a 3e module and ran it using 1e rules and vice versa. To do the same with a 4e adventure is harder than adapting a pre 4e adventure to Gurps or WFRP, which I have also done. I can't even imagine doing the same with a 4e adventure. You'd have to rewrite it from the ground up. The story might remain the same, but almost none of the mechanics can be translated over.

 

[Hussar]

Well, to be fair, 2ed just called them tanari and baatezu due to moral guardian hysteria.

To throw my 2 cp into this thread, it seems to me that 2e->3e changed a lot of the underlying assumptions of the game and its game engine, but most of that change was hidden to the casual eye because the designers painted everything over so it had a surface resemblance to 2e. For 3e->4e they changed a lot of the user interface and didn't bother to paint it to look like 3e, but the engine that runs the game is very similar to 3e. (I got some weird car model analogy going there...)

Sort of. You had to wait how many years before the Monstrous Compendium Appendix 8? Wiki says 1991, so it was 3 years before you saw the return of demons.

All of that cosmology stuff that people complained got changed by 4e? That wasn't there in 2e at the beginning. That was all added some years later.

Let's see you change an adventure with giants to 3e without changing the numbers. Considering every single monster got massive power bumps, I find it very doubtful that you can run a 1e or 2e module as is in 3e. Keep on the Borderlands has encounters with 15 or 20 orcs at a time. That's so far beyond a 1st level encounter it's not even funny. That's an instant death sentence for a 3e character.

Then again, when I look at the conversions that I ran that I got from that website whose name I forget - the one that had a bajillion conversions, veritually every one of them radically changed the number appearing. Maybe it was just selection bias.

So, we go from a system with no presumed setting at all, no presumed cosmology at all, to a system grounded in Greyhawk with a presumed cosmology, and presumed pantheon.

Never minding the whole presumed wealth by level, presumed wealth in towns, fungible magic items, monsters balanced in completely different ways, and entirely reworked character classes.

Yeah, no massive changes there.

 

[billd91]

Never minding the whole presumed wealth by level, presumed wealth in towns, fungible magic items, monsters balanced in completely different ways, and entirely reworked character classes.

Yeah, no massive changes there.

Not compared to 4e, they aren't. Presumed wealth in towns, yadda yadda, all part of the world building and not really affecting much of the the game as the players play it out. Reworked character classes - largely intended to keep the flavor of classes they reworked. Fungible magic items - a bit of a change from 2e, but not 1e (where they had prices).

There was a fairly big change in the ability to make magic items. 3e made it very easy and reduced the required levels (by 6 for scrolls, by a set of varying amounts for other items). That had significant repercussions... if players chose to take them. If they didn't (or the DM disallowed them), there was no significant change in the game.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Sort of. You had to wait how many years before the Monstrous Compendium Appendix 8? Wiki says 1991, so it was 3 years before you saw the return of demons.

2 years. AD&D 2nd Edition launched in 1989. (Closer to 1.75, actually--if memory serves, the 2nd Edition PH came out in May 1989, and MC8 was a February or March 1991 release.)

All of that cosmology stuff that people complained got changed by 4e? That wasn't there in 2e at the beginning. That was all added some years later.

A basic outline of the planar structure was included in the 2E DMG, and if you wanted more details, you could go to the 1E Manual of the Planes.
This is something that often seems to be forgotten about 2nd Edition--it didn't adopt the 'torch everything and start from scratch' approach to products that WotC has tried 2 and a portion times now. (3.0 to 3.5 counts as a fractional time because it only scrapped and redid a subset of the product line--the softcover supplements, primarily). 1st Edition products were kept in the distribution chain and perhaps even in print for several years. The Forgotten Realms didn't get a fully standalone 2nd Edition campaign set until 1993--until then, the 2E baseline was the 1st Edition set with the Forgotten Realms Adventures supplement for timeline and system updates and expansions.

On the main topic, I voted for 4th Edition, though I admit the 3E and 4E transitions are pretty close. 4th Edition edges it out by being more obvious and more conscious of itself. 3rd Edition may be as big a change, but I don't think anyone--even the designers--fully realized how much until several years in.

 

[Stormonu]

On the module building front, I've done both a conversion of a 1E adventure (Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan) to 3E and a conversion of a 2E adventure (Night of the Walking Dead - for Ravenloft) to 4E. It's hard to say which was harder or easier - they both had their challenges, but the results were completely polar opposites.

With the aid of MM1, MM2 and ToH, I was able to replace the 1E monsters straight with 3E versions (There was one or two monsters I had to hand-stat, like the Slug god). In most places, I could drop custom mechanics in the module with standard mechanics that ended up speeding play along. I'd say that 99% of Hidden Shrine remained the same, just the mechanics were updated (eh, and the $$ of treasure). In play, the adventure worked very well.

Not so for the 4E version of Night of the Walking Dead. Even ignoring the custom Ravenloft rules for fear and dark power checks (which I didn't use, even back in 3E), not a single encounter remained remotely the same. While the plot and story overall remained the same, the whole thing was basically a rewrite from the ground up. Nothing survived intact - and while you could tell I was working off the same skeleton, at the encounter/action level you'd never know these two modules were supposed to be the same - even though I tried to incorporate the same monsters as the module wherever possible. (And I didn't even bother with placing adventure packets, which would have really thrown the feel of the adventure...). Sadly, while the written adventure sounded (to me) excellent with the potential to really feel like a Left4Dead or modern-style zombie movie, it just sort of fell flat for my group. For whatever reason, the atmosphere of Ravenloft just never came through (and my group loved the previous run of I6/Expedition to Ravenloft I ran about 6 months earlier). Unfortunately, we never did finish the adventure (nor did I get the last act of the adventure written up).

 

[Hussar]

Well, Stormonu, all I can tell you is I'm a good way into my 4e conversion of the World's Largest Dungeon and it's been mostly a breeze. YMMV I guess.

Not compared to 4e, they aren't. Presumed wealth in towns, yadda yadda, all part of the world building and not really affecting much of the the game as the players play it out. Reworked character classes - largely intended to keep the flavor of classes they reworked. Fungible magic items - a bit of a change from 2e, but not 1e (where they had prices).

There was a fairly big change in the ability to make magic items. 3e made it very easy and reduced the required levels (by 6 for scrolls, by a set of varying amounts for other items). That had significant repercussions... if players chose to take them. If they didn't (or the DM disallowed them), there was no significant change in the game.

Really? Town wealth by level and whatnot had no effect on the game? Weren't you one these boards for most of the last ten years?

Meh, this isn't going to go anywhere. If completely reworking the way a campaign world works, completely rewriting the core cosmology, completely rewriting the history of the game doesn't count as a major change, well...

Matthew L. Martin - sorry, I thought we were comparing core to core. My bad.

This is going to end badly. You all have a good thread.

 

[Stormonu]

Well, Stormonu, all I can tell you is I'm a good way into my 4e conversion of the World's Largest Dungeon and it's been mostly a breeze. YMMV I guess.

The biggest problem I had initially with the 4E conversion (as far as design went) was filling up/out the XP budget - ended up with a lot of extra creatures in each encounter and had to do some head-scratching to fill in the holes. Also, the Ravenloft module originally had a lot of "scripted" events that were best converted into skill challenges. That took a fair bit of extra work (perhaps because I am unused to building skill challenges, at least in 4E terms).

With WLD, do you have to build specific encounters with an XP budget, or just fill an area with X number of Y creatures and are just converting basically stats? Are there any skill challenges you are prebuilding or just working them out on the fly when the PCs don't rush into combat? This is a case of I'm curious to know how your approaching WLD - I think our differences were that I was converting a story-based (story-first?) adventure whereas I would term what your working with as a location-based adventure (story just sort of evolves).

 

[Beginning of the End]

Explain.

If you can.

This is has been explained multiple times already in this thread. Just read it.

 

[Dice4Hire]

This is has been explained multiple times already in this thread. Just read it.

Not aimed at you. Why are you butting in?