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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 7975621" data-attributes="member: 5948">I had nothing to do with 1e and haven't played enough 5e to decide whether it's my favourite or not over 3e, so I'm going to cheat a little...2e - the settings and the willingness to throw the base game assumptions completely out the window for them.  Dark Sun?  Your weapon will break at any time and so many of your characters will die of thirst that you're actually required to bring a bunch of backups to each session and there's only one dragon and it's so absurdly powerful you will never, ever, ever be able to slay it.  Zakhara?  Here's a peaceful multiracial society united by a single religion with things like pacifist hill giant priests, and dwarves happily married to orcs.  Planescape?  Well, I know usually only high-level characters do planar travel but now walking through the wrong doorway while carrying a ham sandwich could drop you unceremoniously in Belial's linen cupboard, and there's a bunch of debating societies that would like to kill you over the finer points of philosophy and you might quite possibly be a mechanical cube with eyes.3e - the rationalisation of the hundred different mini-systems, the removal of a lot of arbitrary restrictions, the ability to actually choose who your character was going to be through the skill/feat/prestige class system.  Sure it was gameable if the DM didn't keep an eye on things, but there's been no better D&D system for designing a character whose mechanics fit a particular concept.4e - the reboot of Dark Sun with most of the Prism Pentad wound back, the introduction of a nice simple system for ritual magic, and at-will magic abilities for spellcasters that meant that they actually felt like spellcasters and were less crossbow-prone at low levels5e - mapping saving throws to all six abilities finally means that there's mechanical benefit to having decent scores in every stat no matter what your class - dump stat at your own risk!  Massively smoothed out maths over 3e, especially at high levels.  Dice remain relevant all thr way through.  The Inspiration system finally giving D&D a bit of a nudge in the direction of mechanics working in support of character and narrative.</blockquote>

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