D&D General Why Editions Don't Matter

[EzekielRaiden]

I know the original post seems like the distant past for this thread but I finally watched it and have some thoughts.

I mostly agree with the video.

I've run 1e adventures in 5e without meaningful prep, just converting them on the fly, without players noticing.

I've run PF1 adventures in 5e without meaningful prep, just converting them on the fly, without players noticing.

I've one 2e adventure (an edition I never played) in 5e without meaningful prep, just converting them on the fly, without players noticing.

There are minor tweaks here and there that you need to do, but none of those tweaks is super meaningful to the game experience. The systems are all flexible enough that the system they were built on has a lot less meaning to the play experience, at least based on our results.

The only edition where I looked at an adventure and decided it would take longer to tweak it to fit a 5e game was a 4e adventure. And that's because the premise of encounters in 4e was meaningfully different enough from 5e assumptions that I would need to take more time to tweak that. Not a LOT more time though, just enough that I didn't want to try it on the fly. Maybe I could. But my first blush reaction was I'd want to spent a tad more time prepping that to try it. I still hope to do that some day (it was Madness at Gardmore Abbey, a good adventure). Though there is a conversion doc online to convert it to 5e I need to check out.

Does this mean edition doesn't matter? Or does it mean that adventures don't matter? Or maybe that for some people, conversion-on-the-fly is a perfectly functional thing for any system they're passably comfortable with, and for other people it's really, really not. (I'd consider myself in the latter camp. Converting a PF module to 4e, or a 1e module to 5e, or stuff like that--all sounds nightmarish to my ears.)

I just don't think "this means edition is completely irrelevant most of the time" is the correct conclusion to draw from "Mistwell is very good at adapting adventures across editions on the fly."

 

[FrogReaver]

I just don't think "this means edition is completely irrelevant most of the time" is the correct conclusion to draw from "Mistwell is very good at adapting adventures across editions on the fly."

IMO. Almost nothing when put in such absolute terms is ever true.

IMO. Whether editions matter at all isn’t a very good question. The better question is - how much do editions matter. And with that @Mistwell’s response is in line with many here. Editions matter much less than other factors.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

IMO. Almost nothing when put in such absolute terms is ever true.

IMO. Whether editions matter at all isn’t a very good question. The better question is - how much do editions matter. And with that @Mistwell’s response is in line with many here. Editions matter much less than other factors.

What other factors are those? Genuine question.

Because stuff like martial/caster balance, IMO, makes edition matter a whole heck of a lot. Some editions are great for it, if you buy into their premises and actually use their rules as intended (ironically, 4e is more Old School in that sense than 3e was.) Others, like 3e, are absolute rotten garbage--to the point that even Paizo's own designers eventually admitted, "We cannot solve this problem without rewriting the game. Will you stick with us long enough to let us try?" Editions of D&D intentionally have a great deal of thematic symmetry, but often break on mechanical symmetry--and it is the mechanics that matter most when one is comparing editions IMO.

 

[Micah Sweet]

IMO. Almost nothing when put in such absolute terms is ever true.

IMO. Whether editions matter at all isn’t a very good question. The better question is - how much do editions matter. And with that @Mistwell’s response is in line with many here. Editions matter much less than other factors.

But again, @Mistwell was posting in the context of adventures. There are others aspects of the game where edition matters much more.

 

[Oofta]

IMO. Almost nothing when put in such absolute terms is ever true.

IMO. Whether editions matter at all isn’t a very good question. The better question is - how much do editions matter. And with that @Mistwell’s response is in line with many here. Editions matter much less than other factors.

The campaigns that I run now don't feel all that different to me. There has been shifting focus for published mods and general fluff text and advice. But it's always been up to make the game their own.

The mechanical bits and details change, sitting around with friends rolling dice while making puns in bad accents have not.

 

[FrogReaver]

But again, @Mistwell was posting in the context of adventures. There are others aspects of the game where edition matters much more.

IMO. If one can run an adventure from much older edition with only slight modification then that’s evidence that edition doesn’t matter much.

 

[Imaro]

What other factors are those? Genuine question.

Because stuff like martial/caster balance, IMO, makes edition matter a whole heck of a lot. Some editions are great for it, if you buy into their premises and actually use their rules as intended (ironically, 4e is more Old School in that sense than 3e was.) Others, like 3e, are absolute rotten garbage--to the point that even Paizo's own designers eventually admitted, "We cannot solve this problem without rewriting the game. Will you stick with us long enough to let us try?" Editions of D&D intentionally have a great deal of thematic symmetry, but often break on mechanical symmetry--and it is the mechanics that matter most when one is comparing editions IMO.

Do you think the vast majority of gamers are actually concerned with this to the level that it impacts their enjoyment? Serious question.

 

[Thomas Shey]

IMO. If one can run an adventure from much older edition with only slight modification then that’s evidence that edition doesn’t matter much.

Eh. I can run adventures from entirely different game systems and make them work, but all that says is they have some broad similarities in assumption. I suspect if you tried to do that without adjusting for assumptions about encounters in one way or another you'd run into some serious problems (and I suspect that's more and more true the higher level the adventure was written for).

I also have to point out there's some important elements about how well you expect it to work out.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Do you think the vast majority of gamers are actually concerned with this to the level that it impacts their enjoyment? Serious question.

I think if you remove the word "vast" from that sentence its true.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Do you think the vast majority of gamers are actually concerned with this to the level that it impacts their enjoyment? Serious question.

I believe that most groups run into some kind of trouble with it sooner or later, yes.

It's why you get complaints from people who play other games--like Shadowrun fans, or White Wolf fans--of the same color as what you see with D&D, for example.

If the game sells itself as a cooperative exercise that everyone contributes to, but players B and C contribute 90% of the work combined and players A and D contribute 10%, people are gonna notice. Hell, there's a HUGE brouhaha going on right now in the FFXIV comunity because one job (Machinist) is doing about 8% less damage than the top-end jobs. That 8% is enough to ignite a firestorm. So yeah, I do think there's a significant chunk of people who care about this sort of thing. The overlap between "people who play video games" and "people who play D&D" is pretty significant, and video gamers tend to respond very poorly to egregious balance issues.