Which edition change changed the game the most?

[FireLance]

Neither did PCs, unless they had ridiculously high stats.

Hey, that 18/00 Strength was rolled legitimately!

 

[GreyLord]

Neither did PCs, unless they had ridiculously high stats.

13 is ridiculously high [BECMI]???

You and I have different definitions of ridiculously high.

PS: I also should add, with the options that you could use to modify stats from character creation (increase of primes) it actually wasn't unusual for someone to be able to have an 18 in BECMI...percentile str need not apply however).

 

[FireLance]

On a slightly tangential point, this thread led me to think about the contrast in the advertising of 3e and 4e.

3e boldly proclaimed, "Challenge your perceptions" with an image of a priest (or at least, someone holding what looks like a holy symbol) lifting a key from a guard's belt.

[SBLOCK=Click for full sized image]

[/SBLOCK]
4e was quick to give assurance that "ze game is still ze same".

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

4e was quick to give assurance that "ze game is still ze same".

To which many of us replied,

[MONTYPYTHON]"Oh, NO, it isn't!!!"[/MONTYPYTHON]

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

hello,im a new here in this forum.




check this out:

Hello, wendyts7- you are reported.

 

[Lordhawkins9]

I'm not sure how others played 1E, but when XP was given for treasure...I STILL killed the monsters in the room! So I guess I don't buy the "big" change in the game when you stopped getting XP for treasure.

At the end of the day, I still killed all the monsters in the dungeon and took their stuff.

From Basic-3.5 a player only needed to read a few pages in their players handbook to build their fighter...which fit on an 8*11 sheet...everything you needed right there.

In 4th, the fighter chapter in the players handbook is 20+ pages long and you need multiple sheets and/or 20+ cards to play your character.

4E got my vote.

 

[Odhanan]

To me there are different ways to answer this question. The biggest changes in the rules of the game came with Third Edition D&D, if you consider that 4e is a refinement and extreme focus of basic d20 principles that came into play with Third Ed.

In terms of feel of the game, however, the biggest changes from my perspective were AD&D 2nd edition and Fourth Edition D&D. Both of these editions, as expressed in their relative core books, are those that focus the less on what I like when I think of "D&D."

 

[Sacrificial Lamb]

4e changed things the most. The changes are so drastic, that I can't use it to run the D&D campaign I created...way back in 1986.

3.5 and earlier had 9 levels of spells, Vancian magic, Clerics that act as healbots, a recognizable planar cosmology that existed back in the 1970's and managed to persist until 2008, 1 Hit Die mooks like Orcs, 4 Hit Die muscleheads like Ogres, fireballs and lightning bolts that inflict 1d6 damage per level, auto-hit magic missiles, rolled Hit Points for all classes, etc. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The list goes on and on.

4e is such an entirely different animal, that I don't even know what to do with it.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

And the other major change in 4e - it's harder to house rule, at least "officially". There is no real official forum for how to make changes to the rules, and that's a situation that has never really occurred previously.

OTOH, 4E is the most friendly edition to successfully house rule without help, in that it frequently tells you why things are the way they are--the famous transparency.

But mainly, I don't think you can say any edition (or most any system) is easier or harder to house rule, as a whole. It very much depends on what you want to do.

If I want to make a new class, you can't get much easier than Basic, whereas 4E is a nightmare (assuming I want to make the class print out like the official ones). If I want to change how skills work while maintaining the existing balance, 3E is a nightmare (very embedded in the system in surprising ways), 4E is somewhat easier, NWP is very easy, and in Basic it is either relatively hard (make up my own system) or not applicable.

In 4E, I can say that, "All skill checks made in a scene, with the same intent, by the same character, take a cumulative +5 to the DC." This is a very narrow but sharp house rule in 4E, almost surgical, but with wide-ranging implications. Yet, it is so transparent to our group, that it took me all of 2 minutes to introduce it, and they immediately grasped the implications and were able to intelligently decide whether to try it or not. A new Basic class is similarly easy to grasp, but not really at all the same in its effect on the game.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I'm not sure how others played 1E, but when XP was given for treasure...I STILL killed the monsters in the room! So I guess I don't buy the "big" change in the game when you stopped getting XP for treasure.

Which highlights an important point: If you change the XP awards but don't change your adventure design, very little or nothing will change. If "kill the monster" remains the easiest way to "get the treasure" in your adventures, then it doesn't matter which one you reward.

More importantly, changing your XP structure can only change PC behavior patterns if your adventure design allows the PCs to set their own goals. Otherwise the structure of the adventure will generally trump the incentive structure, and most adventures are built either explicitly or implicitly around the idea of "clearing dungeon". (It crops up everywhere.)