Why did you stay with an earlier edition?

[Serendipity]

Not sure how to answer. I played in a 3.5 Eberron game quite enthusiastically until a move in early 2008. After that, I started running a homebrew 3.0 game until sometime in mid-2009, at which point I jumped to Pathfinder, converting the homebrew game as we went.
And last year I said to hell with it and started running Swords & Wizardry/Oe, and I'm much happier now (though still curious about 5e).
So where on the curve does that put me?

 

[Lanefan]

It certainly is there now. Odd, isn't it?

It seems to be a glitch with how this system does polls; the post goes up while the OP is still working on putting the poll together (which must be done after the post), and the poll appears when the OP is done building it.

As for my answer to the question, there's an option missing:

"I redesigned a previous edition and stayed with that"

So I voted rules, and the fell-in-love option. That said, I've bought the core three on release for each edition except 3.5 (I already had 3.0, close enough) just to see what ideas they might hold.

Lan-"role-playing vs. roll-playing, is that like pole-dancing vs. poll-dancing"-efan

 

[Hassassin]

I would have, of course, switched if the rest of the group would have wanted to, but they didn't. The main reason was that we felt the old rules were better.

Another important factor was the campaign setting. We play in the Realms and everyone hated what happened in 3e->4e. Still, if the rules would have been excellent we might have played 4e rules in 3e FR. (Now we use a 3e/PF hybrid.)

 

[mkill]

What if you play *gasp* the current edition and a certain derived 3rd party system at the same time? Is this more like cheating on your wife or more like bisexuality?

 

[Dice4Hire]

I went with the last option, but 3.5 was the only edition since the red book that I kept playing after moving on. Up to then I always switched over 100%.

I still play both 3.5 and 4E.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What if you play *gasp* the current edition and a certain derived 3rd party system at the same time? Is this more like cheating on your wife or more like bisexuality?

I know a lot of people who do this. Though in most cases they still have a clear preference for one or the other.

 

[StarFyre]

After friends and I tried 4e for a while, we came across an issue (well, what we thought as an issue):

In our style of game (and my style of DM'ing) any rule will be broken/put aside in favour of story and what seems fun for the players. (mainly fun factor actually)

My players, being a heavy actor/simulationist style group, would try stuff that makes sense, but rulewise, it would make certain 4e powers (and even 3.5e) feats pointless (since they are something that their character would be able to do on a whim anyways). What this meant was, we were just adhocing stuff as we saw fit (and they prefer that). It makes the game a lot faster as well, but it's not for everyone. (a couple of my group are pro a very structured game like 4e or a video game or even a board game and they werent too happy about it but deal with it since they like to play moreso than the care for the system)

What this resulted in was ignoring the rules completely for some stuff or just layers of house rules.

We then compared the house rules we use, and we ended up using less in 3.5e, so we ended up switching back to 3.5e/pathfinder and are quite happy.

To be fair, i think 4e is a good system, but it totally depends on the play style of the players. For me/my group; 4e just won't work; if a game system is supposed to be pretty much exactly balanced, and your players want to ignore all that for the sake of fun/story, etc, then the system just has no use to that group (balance only matters, if the effects of the apparent non-balance is adversly affecting the players), and if 5e doesn't work as well for them either (won't know until it's released and we try it), we'll still stick with 3.5e/pathfinder.

Sanjay

 

[Aeolius]

I selected "I stayed with an older edition because I felt the new rules weren't as good as the old" because it was the closest option for "I was in the middle of a campaign that I did not want to end. The new ruleset was incompatible with my game and/or did not offer a compelling Conversion Manual"

 

[delericho]

I wanted to like 4e, I really did. But then, about halfway through the development cycle, WotC revealed a couple of things that I really didn't like. Still, I tried to give the game a fair shake.

I've run exactly two sessions in 4e, and that was enough to convince me never to run it again. I'm happy to play it (and with the right DM it runs very well), but won't run it again.

With Pathfinder, I bought the Core Rulebook and read it, and concluded that it is an incremental improvement on 3.5e. However, it's not "better enough" to compel me to switch, especially as my tastes have changed so that I now prefer much simpler games - it is only the 8 years of accumulated system mastery that makes 3.5e bearable for me. Pathfinder changes just enough to negate that, so I won't be switching.

With 5e, I'll check it out, but won't buy sight-unseen (as I would have for 3e or 4e). But if, as I'm starting to suspect, it's just another 1,000 monster that will allow me to do basically the same thing as 3e but in a slightly different way, I'll pass. (Conversely, if it turns out to be "D&D Saga Edition", I'll be delighted.)

 

[Khaalis]

This is a "select all that apply" poll; but if you select the last option, please don't select anything else, and don't select #7 if you selected anything else (because if you do I'll know you're chaotic neutral).

Not true. I did just this because it is the only thing that comes close to my answer. Our group DID switch over to 4E when it first came out. As with anything in life, you have to try something before you can know if you like it or not. Well... we did 4E for 2 years, decided we didn't like it and went back to d20 we "felt the new rules weren't as good as the old". 4E had some great ideas, but the overall package just didn't work for us.