D&D 5E You can't necessarily go back

[Scylla]

... it seems like WotC is trying to deliberately recreate that happenstance.

What you call "recreating the happenstance" I'd call recapturing the magic. (IMHO of course)

Your post seems to imply that anyone that played, or, perish the thought, enjoyed, earlier editions was a poor, country bumpkin, wallowing in their own ignorance. But maybe it's the way I'm reading it.

Have there been improvements? Sure. I'll take the new AC system over THAC0 any day. But newer isn't always better, and fewer hard rules doesn't mean a system is primitive or inferior. Gygax made clear he left out a lot of rule detail on purpose. Clearly something was right with 1e, or we wouldn't still all be here debating about our preferred editions several decades later.

 

[slobster]

IME the big problem with 4e is not that it is more polished than OD&D, but that it lacks OD&D's content generation tools, especially random tables - encounter tables, treasure tables, et al. Without these there is no 'default play mode' where PCs decide to do whatever and an unprepared GM can simply roll dice and generate content for a night's play. IMO it was the content generation tools that were OD&D's biggest innovation. This thought struck me recently as I have been using the Pathfinder Beginner Box in Gygax's Eastmark, and having all those tables to hand means I need never fear not knowing what to do next. Whereas with 4e I always worry about being unprepared, I have no way to easily generate new material at-table.

That's interesting, because I had the opposite experience. The encounter building tools in 4E were so great that I spent maybe an hour preparing for an adventure's worth of combats, and the combats tended to be more dynamic and interactive than encounters I do in other games.

Older editions of D&D, by contrast, had me spending an hour or so per combat, which added up to a dozen or so hours per adventure, just selecting and statting up the bad guys. The difference is night and day. I far and away prefer 4E for the ease of prep, the ease of throwing together an encounter ad hoc, and the ease of creating custom baddies and custom situations to challenge my group.

I suspect the difference is largely one of playstyle; I tend to tailor encounters to challenge both my players and characters. Others prefer a more freeform system of random or mostly random encounters, where some battles may be a walk in the park where others are extremely difficult. To each his own, and where 4E had fewer tools for the sandbox style, it was an evolutionary leap for the tailored challenge style.

I suppose this is where I add the obligatory hope that the 5E designers will note what each previous edition did best and give us a game that does everything they all did, but better.

Play what you like, of course!

 

[triqui]

To the OP:

Just go and play 4th edition because it's obvious by your many threads that D&D Next isn't for you. That's okay because there was a lot of us who sat out of 4th after trying it.

I was going to say exactly this. Now I don't have to.

To the OP: have fun playing 4e, or any of the other non d20 alternatives there are out there.

 

[dagger]

That's interesting, because I had the opposite experience. The encounter building tools in 4E were so great that I spent maybe an hour preparing for an adventure's worth of combats, and the combats tended to be more dynamic and interactive than encounters I do in other games.

Older editions of D&D, by contrast, had me spending an hour or so per combat, which added up to a dozen or so hours per adventure, just selecting and statting up the bad guys. The difference is night and day. I far and away prefer 4E for the ease of prep, the ease of throwing together an encounter ad hoc, and the ease of creating custom baddies and custom situations to challenge my group.

I suspect the difference is largely one of playstyle; I tend to tailor encounters to challenge both my players and characters. Others prefer a more freeform system of random or mostly random encounters, where some battles may be a walk in the park where others are extremely difficult. To each his own, and where 4E had fewer tools for the sandbox style, it was an evolutionary leap for the tailored challenge style.

I suppose this is where I add the obligatory hope that the 5E designers will note what each previous edition did best and give us a game that does everything they all did, but better.

Play what you like, of course!

I can whip up an encounter for a 15th+ party in 1e in about 10 min max and even do it on the fly. I don't even need to open the books.....

 

[Hussar]

I can whip up an encounter for a 15th+ party in 1e in about 10 min max and even do it on the fly. I don't even need to open the books.....

Granted, about 30 years of experience does perhaps help just a little.

Do you think someone could do the same after reading the AD&D books one time?

 

[triqui]

Granted, about 30 years of experience does perhaps help just a little.

Do you think someone could do the same after reading the AD&D books one time?

Well, to be fair, 1e didn't have CR or anything like that, so it's quite trivial for a newbie to build an encounter in 10 minutes. Open the Monster Compendium, take three monsters, and go and play.

The charaters surviving such encounter, or the encounter being boring, is a different story, though

 

[Raith5]

I don't think 4Es problems were because of the stuff being added, but because of the stuff they left out.

Mechanically I think each edition of D&D has been an improvement on the one before because they expressly addressed the main problems that existed in the previous edition.

But I agree that the main problem with 4th was with what they left out - especially early on where they left the bard and druid out for example. But also there was the problem that key archetypes were 'off' in my view (eg druid and barbarian) even once they were introduced. Some races too were off.

Some ideas like rituals, multiclassing and skill challenges were also clearly not well tested.

I also think the 'everything is core' philosophy was a key problem which unnecessarily antagonized many - which DDN is thankfully addressing by putting control of this in DM and players hands.

 

[slobster]

I can whip up an encounter for a 15th+ party in 1e in about 10 min max and even do it on the fly. I don't even need to open the books.....

I could too. When I did, my party tended to walk all over it. The problem was mainly that I couldn't keep track of all their disruptive abilities (and a full party of high level characters had a lot of those). I could get together a group of enemies whose ACs and attacks were about in line with what should be challenging . . . but I forgot that the wizard had prepared improved invisibility. A few rounds of curbstomping later, and my melee guys were in a disorganized pile of limbs on the ground and the party was ready to move on.

I could go on at great length, but I'll restrain myself. It wasn't always that bad, of course. Most encounters were fun and at least a little challenging, and its fulfilling in its own way to completely dominate an encounter by surprising your GM with lateral thinking. I don't begrudge my players that. But I do like to challenge them a little more directly in most instances, and for that goal I find the 4E encounter design mechanics extremely useful.

I'm not saying you're wrong if you disagree, just airing my own personal experiences.

 

[Mattachine]

I found 1e AD&D to be incredibly detailed, possibly needlessly so. Definitely, it was as least as detailed and comprehensive as 3e, but not streamlined at all.
I know it may have seemed otherwise, but I believe that is because many people simply ignored or didn't understand a lot of those detailed rules. That's especially true for folks that ran 1e games when in middle or high school back in the day.

 

[underfoot007ct]

To the OP:

Just go and play 4th edition because it's obvious by your many threads that D&D Next isn't for you. That's okay because there was a lot of us who sat out of 4th after trying it.

The exact same thing can be said about yourself. You have numerous posts about omitting ALL thing 4E. Maybe D&D Next is not for you either. That said, D&D Next's design goal is to "unite" ALL the previous editions. Not just editions you like.