Why do people still play older editions of D&D? Are they superior to the current one?

[Greg K]

I started with Holmes and then moved to AD&D 1e, AD&D 2e, and then 3e. I had also played occasional sessions of B/X and BECMI basic. I stick with 3e when I run D&D for several reasons

a. Many of my house rules for pre-3e were default for 3e.
b. Some other changes that I wanted were default in 3e including a skill point system, the save categories
c. Using some options from the DMG and Unearthed Arcana, I could reintroduce a tone or feel that I liked about AD&D and early 2E as played by my friends and I and from which we felt 3e began to deviate away.
d. Unearthed Arcana and third party options provided me options to further tailor the game to my liking.
e. Much of what i dislike about 3e is easily ignored because they are optional in core (e.g. PrCs) or appeared in supplements
f. Oriental Adventures provided me with a replacement for the monk class that is easy to modify to fit my campaigns.
​

4e had several things that I liked (e.g. rangers as non-spellcasters, magic missile needing a to hit roll, the Feywild, removal of the Great Wheel, p.42 (in theory). However, despite picking up PHB2 and Martial Power, I ended up not running it. The default feel (to me) was not the fantasy that I wanted. I did not like several of the classes (e.g. cleric, barbarian, sorcerer). I also did not want to play paragon and epic levels. Then, looking at the things that I wanted to change, my house rule list would have been the size of 3e.

5e looked good at the start out of the basic box and SRD. There are even a few additions that I like in the PHB. The main things that I like are the Battlemaster Figher, Bard as full caster, spell progression for full casters, backgrounds, Inspiration, advantage/disadvantage. However, there is still much that I dislike including

a. the design of many classes (e.g. cleric, barbarian, monk, sorcerer)
b. most classes receiving their subclasses at second or third level. Potential issues that I foresaw during open playtesting have arisen in Mearls Happy Fun Hour when he has come across the creation of certain subclasses breaking design considerations that they came up with later in the design process after several classes were created. The design consideration was mentioned in a Warlock episode where it was noted that the Valor Bard broke those design rules. In a more recent episode, his Urban Ranger broke it again requiring him to make some additions to the ranger class. The Rogue Scout breaks this design consideration as well. Also, all classes receiving their subclasses, in my opinion, would have made creating class variants much easier (including a non-spellcasting Ranger).
c. I don't like the design of the majority of WOTC's subclasses. Some issues are mechanical (including introducing class elements that I disliked about pre-3e D&D) and most create a specific type of fantasy "feel" that I don't like about default WOTC D&D.
d. I don't like the unified level based attack bonus (based upon being trained or untrained)
e. It is another edition that I do not want to run past levels 10-12.
f. There is much that I want to house rule and my house rule list would be long as my 3e. It would be easier to bring what I like about 5e to 3E​

 

[Staffan]

Yet it's utterly awful in modelling injuries. Get mauled to within an inch of your life? Rest for a while, you don't even need healing magic. . .just rest and camp and you get everything back (thanks to so many non-magical healing abilities) you can be back in action in no-time. In prior editions, if you were seriously wounded and didn't have magical healing available, it would take days (and in some cases weeks) of rest and non-magical treatment to get back in action, not just a good night's sleep.

I blame 3e's wand of cure light wounds. Its existence and cheap price meant that you could expect to be at full hit points shortly after the end of every fight that didn't bring you to 0 hit points, which in turn made spell slots the primary means of attrition, and those recover with a night's rest. So we might as well recover the hit points as well.

4e actually made things a little more short-term attrition-based than 3e, because you didn't have nigh-infinite wands to deal with hp loss. Almost every ability that recovered hit points used healing surges, which limited the number of hp you could recover in a day to a large but still finite number.

 

[wingsandsword]

I blame 3e's wand of cure light wounds. Its existence and cheap price meant that you could expect to be at full hit points shortly after the end of every fight that didn't bring you to 0 hit points, which in turn made spell slots the primary means of attrition, and those recover with a night's rest. So we might as well recover the hit points as well.

4e actually made things a little more short-term attrition-based than 3e, because you didn't have nigh-infinite wands to deal with hp loss. Almost every ability that recovered hit points used healing surges, which limited the number of hp you could recover in a day to a large but still finite number.

I keep hearing that, but you know what. . .I never ran across such casual use of CLW wands in the 3e games I played in. It was always something people would bring up online (mostly here), but I didn't see it at the table in actual everyday gameplay.

I always hear that as a complaint about 3e. . .but like many other "complaints" (elaborate powergaming "builds" ect.) about 3e, I never saw it in actual gameplay with actual players in a regular game.

Maybe the groups I played with had a different mentality, but people weren't buying bulk CLW wands and insta-healing after every encounter. When they bought magic items from NPC's, they were buying new weapons and armor, and consumable items were usually healing potions and maybe some scrolls of utility spells that would be nice to have on hand but often weren't worth keeping a spell slot devoted to them constantly.

I knew one guy, ONE, who even tried any of that powergaming stuff. . .and most of his little "tricks" were things that were patched going from 3.0e to 3.5e (I never played with him after 3.5e came out, so I don't know what he did then). I saw a lot of the changes going to 3.5e as being superfluous, but gaming with that one guy showed me that they were done to put a stop on some very specific rules exploits being used by some players apparently.

 

[Celebrim]

I blame 3e's wand of cure light wounds.

I agree. I very quickly banned all divine wands as soon as I noted the issue. Although the CLW wand is the worst offender, the problem isn't specific to it.

A quick perusal of the wand, staff, rod options available to clerics in 1e shows that this is a major oversight, as the sort of cheap spell on a stick devices the rules generalization made available just don't exist in earlier editions. This was part of the stack of rule changes that lead to CoDzilla. Other major changes included 5' step out of melee while spell-casting, no casting time, chance to save decreases with spell level, and overcompensation for the relative weakness of the cleric class in 1e (where it was almost strictly limited to being the Band-Aid).

However, the offense of the CLW wand was generally overlooked by players of RAW 3.5e because encounter balance was generally set on the assumption of frequent and continuously available healing, and the CLW wand was the only thing in the RAW that allowed you to play a party without a dedicated healer. Of course, at that point the CLW wand's justification was in part circularly the CLW wand.

I've seen the 'short-term attrition based' concept you mention in 4e, but only in some rather experimental dungeon designs that pushed the boundaries heavily on what you could do with the system and the healing surge as resource. However, my suspicion is that that sort of play was as rare in practice as my house rule eliminating the CLW wand (or a social contract/lack of system mastery not to abuse it that did the same thing). Both tweaked the system in one way or another, either with a rules change or a different approach to play than the default, in order to achieve a result that the system normally didn't.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I keep hearing that, but you know what. . .I never ran across such casual use of CLW wands in the 3e games I played in. It was always something people would bring up online (mostly here), but I didn't see it at the table in actual everyday gameplay.

I didn't see it at all while I was playing 3.x, but I saw it immediately when I switched to a Pathfinder group. It had everything to do with the players, and the fact that one of the players in that group had already accepted the trick as fundamental to their way of playing.

Once you know of the trick, it becomes hard to justify ignoring it, unless the GM does something to house rule it out. I can't convincingly role-play a character who is so incompetent as to not take advantage of something that beneficial when it is presented. I tried to house rule them out of existence when I ran Pathfinder, but the kinds of players who like that game tend to focus strongly on RAW, so it was politically untenable in the long run. Nowadays, I only run Gishes & Goblins, which doesn't have that problem.

 

[wingsandsword]

I didn't see it at all while I was playing 3.x, but I saw it immediately when I switched to a Pathfinder group. It had everything to do with the players, and the fact that one of the players in that group had already accepted the trick as fundamental to their way of playing.

Once you know of the trick, it becomes hard to justify ignoring it, unless the GM does something to house rule it out. I can't convincingly role-play a character who is so incompetent as to not take advantage of something that beneficial when it is presented. I tried to house rule them out of existence when I ran Pathfinder, but the kinds of players who like that game tend to focus strongly on RAW, so it was politically untenable in the long run. Nowadays, I only run Gishes & Goblins, which doesn't have that problem.

If I ever had that come up in a 3.5 game I was running I'd be quickly to house-rule healing wands, either to say that spells with the (Healing) descriptor either can't be put into a wand, or they have a substantial cost multiplier to do so. It's never come up for me. It certainly seems like a more elegant solution than completely rewriting the rules on regaining HP and healing to make healing so ubiquitous in response.

It's been a LONG time since I've played with any group that was fanatical about the RAW. The idea that the DM may need to change things to fix any broken parts of the game that may creep up, or adjust it to fit the campaign ect. seems pretty much like an accepted social norm of the gaming groups I know.

 

[Tony Vargas]

This is a common mistake, and understandable. I know a lot of 1st edition games that played exactly thus. That impression has led to a whole host of players moving to skill based systems over the decades.

Treating the rules of any edition of D&D (OK, other than 3.x/PF/4e/E) as if they were, well, /rules/, is a lamentable lapse in judgment, in that sense. Even 'guideline' is pushing it.

In the shell-game of DM Illusionism, the rules are just the shells, their purpose, misdirection.

;P

I blame 3e's wand of cure light wounds. Its existence and cheap price meant that you could expect to be at full hit points shortly after the end of every fight that didn't bring you to 0 hit points, which in turn made spell slots the primary means of attrition, and those recover with a night's rest. So we might as well recover the hit points as well.

4e actually made things a little more short-term attrition-based than 3e, because you didn't have nigh-infinite wands to deal with hp loss. Almost every ability that recovered hit points used healing surges, which limited the number of hp you could recover in a day to a large but still finite number.

And non-surge healing tended to be a Daily resource, as well. Though there were a few small, circumstantial non-surge healing effects that were limited in other ways (Astral Seal, I think it was, which got errata'updated' at least once to avoid abuse).

The WoCLW in 3.x, seemed endemic and apparently assumed, AFAICT. In 3.0 it looked like it might have been an oversight, but 3.5 didn't do a thing to limit them, and doubled down with Lesser Vigour. PF1, as well, seemed to continue to embrace low-level healing wand spam (I recall the first time I saw flyers for a Pathfinder Society convention, the advice included something along the lines of "don't bother showing up with a character that doesn't have his own healing, such as a wand or at least potions").

Of course, 5e does give everyone some native healing in the form of HD, so surges & wands aren't necessarily a reason to prefer a prior WotC ed, by themselves, anyway.

But, even in TSR eds, spell slots were still the primary limiter, because cleric spells were converted into hps via cure..wounds, once your cleric was tapped out, you rested until he could heal you all up - through several days and full slates of healing if necessary. Rest & time was largely moot.

 

[Celebrim]

Treating the rules of any edition of D&D (OK, other than 3.x/PF/4e/E) as if they were, well, /rules/, is a lamentable lapse in judgment, in that sense. Even 'guideline' is pushing it.

In the shell-game of DM Illusionism, the rules are just the shells, their purpose, misdirection.

;P

Yeah, well don't let your players know that.

...but 3.5 didn't do a thing to limit them, and doubled down with Lesser Vigour.

From a balance perspective, 3.5 was terrible. Before it came out, the big arguments were over whether or not Haste and Harm were broken as written and needed errata (remember those?).

3.5 came down on the side of nerfing the spells, so my expectation was that 3.5 would take a look at overall spell power (clearly the worst designed part of 3.0e) and roll it back wherever the spells were abuseable - Force Cage and Find the Path would be cases that immediately came to mind as needing attention. Instead, 3.5 implemented the worst slate of unplaytested rules errata I had ever seen, turning what had already been a shaky balance between casters and non-casters into a joke. Virtually every change to every spell other than Haste and Harm had to be undone - Blasphemy, Polymorph, Ray of Weakness, Alter Self, etc., etc., etc. It was so blatantly unprofessional and ill-considered, that I never bought a 3.5 book - all my purchases for D&D after that were from third parties. Even a decade later, I'm still finding tiny changes that 3.5 made in the rules that just make my jaw drop, in a "What the heck where they thinking?" way. It was like some eager but ill-seasoned rulesmith was handed the keys to the game's canon with zero oversight.

At that's before the rules bloat choked the life out of what had been a decent system, and is still even with its blemishes my favorite system of all time.

 

[Tony Vargas]

From a balance perspective, 3.5 was terrible. Before it came out, the big arguments were over whether or not Haste and Harm were broken as written and needed errata (remember those?).

3.5 came down on the side of nerfing the spells, so my expectation was that 3.5 would take a look at overall spell power (clearly the worst designed part of 3.0e) and roll it back wherever the spells were abuseable - Force Cage and Find the Path would be cases that immediately came to mind as needing attention. Instead, 3.5 implemented the worst slate of unplaytested rules errata I had ever seen, turning what had already been a shaky balance between casters and non-casters into a joke. Virtually every change to every spell other than Haste and Harm had to be undone - Blasphemy, Polymorph, Ray of Weakness, Alter Self, etc., etc., etc. It was so blatantly unprofessional and ill-considered, that I never bought a 3.5 book - all my purchases for D&D after that were from third parties. Even a decade later, I'm still finding tiny changes that 3.5 made in the rules that just make my jaw drop, in a "What the heck where they thinking?" way. It was like some eager but ill-seasoned rulesmith was handed the keys to the game's canon with zero oversight.

3.5 did introduce repeated saves vs Hold and eventually nerf Polymorph.

But, yes, even minor-seeming, subtle, changes and changes to spells that seemed to decrease their power actually favored casters. The one that stuck out, for me, was Bull's Strength/Cat's Grace/Bear's Endurance. In 3.0 they had very long durations and gave a random bonus. (So if you had an odd stat, half the time, the spell would help you out a little more than if you'd had an even stat, and they made the stat-booster items a little less must-have, at the same time.) But, the main point was that they were very powerful for 2nd level spells, and casters would be fools not to pass them out, even though they didn't much benefit most casters.
3.5 'nerfed' those spells, significantly cutting their duration, so a mid-high level caster couldn't casually pass them out to his friends. But they also filled out the stat 'grid' with Fox's Cunning/Eagle's Splendor/Owl's Wisdom, and, boom, casters began to use their 2nd level slots to buff their own caster stat all day with repeated pre-castings instead of helping out their whole party.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I keep hearing that, but you know what. . .I never ran across such casual use of CLW wands in the 3e games I played in. It was always something people would bring up online (mostly here), but I didn't see it at the table in actual everyday gameplay.

I always hear that as a complaint about 3e. . .but like many other "complaints" (elaborate powergaming "builds" ect.) about 3e, I never saw it in actual gameplay with actual players in a regular game.

Maybe the groups I played with had a different mentality, but people weren't buying bulk CLW wands and insta-healing after every encounter. When they bought magic items from NPC's, they were buying new weapons and armor, and consumable items were usually healing potions and maybe some scrolls of utility spells that would be nice to have on hand but often weren't worth keeping a spell slot devoted to them constantly.

I saw this all the time, and if I was in a group that didn't do this, I told them to do it. (Buy wands, craft wands... if I were the cleric I would be crafting wands.) Sorry, but starting combat, half-dead, is just not sensible for a mortal PC. If D&D wants to "fix" this, they needed to fix the high attack bonus vs relatively low AC and low starting hit points issue. (4e pretty much solved all of those issues.)

I knew one guy, ONE, who even tried any of that powergaming stuff

I wouldn't consider that power gaming. I had been in too many pre-3e D&D games where we never even thought about that, and don't want to go through that again.