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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7568221" data-attributes="member: 4937">First, before I answer your question, the most important thing to realize about RPG's is that your processes of play are more important than your rules.  That is to say, how you choose to play the game actually dominates over the experience of play compared to what rules you use to adjudicate the dicey stuff.   You can play basically the same game with every edition of the game.So beware arguments that revolve around how the rules force some particular process of play on to the game inevitably, especially if the person is not talking about 4e, which is the edition where the designers most tried to entwine the process of play and the rules together and most tried to tell the table how to play the game.  (Certainly other editions have done so, as there are notable 'how to play right' comments in the 1e and 2e DMG, but they were mostly ignored.)   While it may be true that the rules tend to cause groups to think about play differently, how you play D&D in any edition is very open ended.The main reason that that people stick with an edition is familiarity.  That is to say, once you are really comfortable with a system, it's just a lot easier to turn out content and run it smoothly than it is to pick up a new set of rules and map everything you did in one edition over to a new edition.   Add to that that groups may have a lot of money invested in an edition, and they just don't have any reason to move. Notalgia can be an important and related issue.  While the 1e rules are kludgy, inelegant, incomplete, and often downright incomprehensible, the very fact that I spent 15 years playing the game that way gives me a warm glow when thinking about them.   And there are a lot of attractions still with 1e.  The very incomprehensibility gives the 1e game a certain arcane appeal, as if its very lack of clarity contributes to its mysterious air.   Reading a 1e rule book is less like reading a rule book than it is like reading a guide to some fairy tale world of which mortals have only a dim report.  The vast majority of 1e tables not only evolved unique processes of play, but they evolved unique house rules that contributes to the particular flavor of the table.  It's an organic and very modular play style, and it has almost all the defining IP of D&D.  It's extremely basic character generation means its pretty quick to roll up a character, and equally quick to stat out unique foes.  And it's the only system which has an attempt to model the effectiveness of medieval weaponry versus different types of medieval armor.   It also has one of the best balances between casters and non-casters straight out of the box, as spell options are limited, casting in combat quite restrictive, and non-casters are vastly less squishy at high levels of play, balancing well with the M-U's ability to create dramatic effects.It also has a ton of problems that will probably force you to keep houseruling for decades.Right now I play 3.X and I've really never been happier with any RPG system I've played than my houseruled version of 3.X D&D.  While 5e doesn't seem like a bad system, and I'd play it, I probably would never run it because I'm just so comfortable with my 3.X rules.  If I played 5e, I'd almost certainly soon find problems I had with it along with things I'd like and wish I could steal.  The advantage and disadvantage concept for example, is simultaneously the mechanics I most envy about the 5e design because its so elegant, and the mechanics that I think I would be most frustrated with where I playing 5e.</blockquote>

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