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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 5997293" data-attributes="member: 5100">That's a good question. I can only speak from my own experience. I started playing AD&D in the summer of 1983 -- and by "play", I mean I was the primary DM in very short order. I can distinctly remember planning out most of an adventure as my mom drove me to a game. Based on where we lived and my being young enough to not drive myself, that gives me roughly 4-5 years of experience at that time. By the time I started college, in 1991, I rarely bothered prepping -- I was familiar enough with all the 1e source books (I continued with 1e and just used 2e as supplemental material) that I could run a marathon, 10-12 hour session with almost no need to look at the books, with the exception of some of the random tables.We started playing 3e immediately when it came out, with me as primary DM. We stopped playing about the time 4e came out. IIRC, that'd be about 2008. The 3e campaign actually collapsed under the weight of its own prep time. No matter how many corners I cut, I still seemed to spend as much time prepping for games as I did actually running them, if not more. There were also more times I felt like I was just missing a rule or treading on shaky ground that required a rules reference during play.So, 8 years with 1e and I could practically show up without doing homework and also leave my books at home. 8 years of 3e and my game collapsed because of how much prep time I had to do and the number of times rules were referenced or there were rules arguments.Yeah, you might want to blame the players for being rules lawyers, except that the core of the groups were the same folks. That's also the same group I'm doing the 5e playtest with and things are looking a ton more like AD&D, in terms of prep work and rules. Sure, we're still looking up a few things, but they're easy to remember once we have them. So, yeah, I think the actual rules make more of a difference than just experience, though I don't discount experience. I also think that, sometimes, you can go back.</blockquote>

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