LITERALLY EDITION WARS THREAD

At least Gygax is readable

I'll take that red box, right there on the right. Run me through the same small dungeon countless times with 7 different characters. So much fun.

This, basically. Though really have little familiarity with OD&D outside of retroclones. AD&D is a fun time, and 5e is kinda shitty but still one of the best things on the market as sad as it is to say. Definitely easy as fuck to write new shit for, which I take as a strength. My personal favorite would be 4E just for the mechanics and gameplay, and because I'm not an autistic baby that needs rules for literally everything. I always loved when 3.5 fags whine about 4E being rollplaying when the actual roleplaying is handled a lot more organically than 3.5 attempts.

If I want old school adventures with weird mechanics like a Bend Bars stat, AD&D. If I want to play Final Fantasy Tactics-style combat and play as a group of badass adventurers in a world filled with danger, 4E. And if I want to play with living people, 5E.

BCEMI or bust. Models from 1st AD&D are okay too. Settings from 2nd ed can be cool like Dark Suns, Spell Jammer, parts of Ravenloft.

3pf for being a dumbass 13 yearold, not knowing any better and having lots of fun with my friends despite the rules.

4th for a really weird and apparently somewhat well received attempt to mesh mmorpg/esports mechanics with tabletop. Not my thing but interesting to see how they did it. 13th Age seems like a slicker version, or Strike! even.

5th if you can't convince your group to play osr.

2nd ed ad&d and 3pf are the most annoying mechanically. Shit's all over the place. You can make it work, but that's more a testament to the people you play with than the games.

>attempt to mesh mmorpg/esports mechanics with tabletop
Kill yourself.

They're all mediocre but AD&D 2E seems to appeal to me the most.

THEY ALL SUCK FOR DIFFERENT REASONS, ESPECIALLY 5E!!!!!

>THE BEST D&D IS D20 MODERN

This post is in poor taste.

>Kill yourself.

What did he mean by this?

prove him wrong faggot

D&D 4TH EDITION IS THE BEST MADE GAME IN THE FRANCHISE BUT IT ISN'T D&D. A SOLID 8/10. IF IT WERE RELEASED WITH ANY OTHER NAME IT WOULD HAVE BEEN HAILED AS THE GAME THAT WOULD FINALLY KNOCK D&D FROM ITS THRONE. BUT HAVING THE NAME D&D IT MEANS BEING AN OKAY GAME AND CONTINUING A TRADITION. 4E DID NOT DO THAT. IT SACRIFICED TRADITION FOR QUALITY AND WHERE ITS GREATEST BREAKS ARE (BEFORE ESSENTIALS) ALL APPEAR WHERE THE GAME TRIED TO FOLLOW TRADITION IN SOME SMALL WAYS.

3.5 is best, and all the hate on Veeky Forums is made by irrational people who do not play any games.

3.5 embraced open gaming, making it the most customised and content-rich game on the planet.

3.5 had a solid skill system with many defined uses, which gives the players a meaningful ability to know what their characters can do and the DM guidance to set DCs by comparing to similar tasks. 2e's skill system (NWP) was too inconsistent, 5e's basically does not exist, and 4e had 3e's except with less skills and with less defined uses for them. I can understand reducing the skill list, but the way they removed nearly everything the skills can do made it a tacked-on afterthought.

Through Tome of Battle, 3.5 had the best martial mechanics. All the griping about 3e martials is done by pretending Tome of Battle never happened.

Finally, the beloved spell list. So many pieces to play, its like M:tG but built into an RPG! What's not to love?

I disagree. 4e was clearly a development of 3.5, from its ability score dependencies to its skill system to its powers basically being spells by another name. It was not particularly clever or innovative, and what little it had was merely cutting away most of 3.5's content and re-formatting it into a narrow system with strict rules for what can be done by a power.

>3.5 had a solid skill system with many defined uses
>Finally, the beloved spell list. So many pieces to play, its like M:tG but built into an RPG! What's not to love?

No edition of D&D has good "roleplaying mechanics" because roleplaying by definition is not a mechanic.
3._ whatever is just splashbook selling garbage for munchkins.
4e is for fagorts who want to play Roleplaying Games like a Vidya Gaem.

5e is a nice slimming of the rules with piss-poor editing/organization and a wtf CR system.

I have too much nostalgia for the older editions to weigh on them impartially.

>Finally, the beloved spell list. So many pieces to play, its like M:tG but built into an RPG! What's not to love?

Exactly this is not to love. The appeal of 3.5 is the capability to build broken as fuck spell-casters and legally pulling crazy shit with them. Good for the wizard's player. Shit for everybody else. Only worked well for CRPGs like NWN.

5E is best singularly because it's not 3.5 or 4 or 2 or any of the others

They all blow, take way too long to get anywhere as a character or do anything, and attract the worst breeds of powergaming min-maxing magical realm douchebag grognards to the hobby and they stay

5E 4 lyfe, fuckos

13th Age is the best high fantasy style game with lots of powers and toys for character classes without bogging the GM in a world of shitty calculations and bullshit.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess is the best old school version of the game, with clean mechanics, good encumbrance rules and great support with adventures.

5E is a GREAT place between these two styles of play.

Filthy casual.

If my "shit for everybody else" you mean shit for people who insist on playing obsolete classes, then sure.

But here's the wonderful part: Nobody is Forcing You to roll a Fighter or Rogue. If you want to play a non-magical character, play Tome of Battle, and you can pull off plenty of crazy shit yourself.

another marketing victim

Say that to my face fucker not online see what happens

>implying that D&D is only for people who want crazy as fuck PCs

That is the problem.

You going to jail? Or you pussying out because you don't want to go to jail?

Ha. I play all three pretty regular. It's still D&D though, and not Runequest 6 so --- all D&D is still sort of shit because it's D20 but this isn't a thread for such things.

I'm already there, meet me in the courtyard in 5 minutes if u want an ass kicking

OD&D with the 1st Ed. Monster manual and players handbook is best. Fight me m8

Why with the AD&D Players Handbook? What you are describing is how we played as children in the early 80's.

GOTTA LOVE THE BLUE ON WHITE SHIT AND THE ELMORE SHIT AND THE 2E FOREVAR!!!!!!!!

Love it. still play it.

You don't think I'd stain my hands by touching you, you dirty lowlife? I'd pay people to take you out with the trash instead.

EVERY EDITION IS SHIT JUST USE THE SETTINGS IN A BETTER ENGINE LIKE FATE

If you want to play NOT crazy as fuck PCs, then 3.5 can accommodate you as well. Just stick to tier 4 and below.

Though it was an accident, 3.5's variance in class power turned into a strength of the system: it can welcome different playstyles into one game. Just not into the same table at the same time, of course.

I'll be sure to bring all the non-5E books I can find, since they belong there too

4e is total trash
2e has good points
3.5 is the giant in the room but is mostly mediocre
5 is the least smelly turd

5e for me

>BLUE ON WHITE

This man understands.

>unable to play fairly low-powered campaign with wizards
>strength

ok

I love these guys. Fate is a gimmicky pile of shit.

4E would have been great competition for DESCENT. But they didn't box it up that way.

If you get a table of players together, and the rule system will allow someone to play something retardedly powerful, at least 2 of them will want to do that.
And at Least one of them will throw a fit if they can't.

Ah, but you can play a fairly low-powered campaign with wizards. You just have to broaden your understanding of "wizard". A warlock, a dragonfire shaman, or even an adept in a pinch: all of these can fill the classic "wizard" concept.

Spoken like a person who does not play any games. It is common, even normal, to use a subset of the game and not all of it.

3.5 haters just can't detach class from name, mang. They HAVE to play the "Fighter" class, and HAVE to play the "Wizard" class, and arbitrary declare that both have to be together or else. There's no reasoning with them, give up.

I likely set around the gaming table more than you.
It's an unusual group that doesn't have at least one guy who doesn't want to play the most broken thing the system has to offer.

Veeky Forums gets daily threads from these people complaining that their DMs won't let them play "this interesting class".

Well there you have it! Anti-3.5ers have shit groups to go along with their shit tastes, and cannot imagine that other groups are more fortunate than they. I have yet to see a tier restriction cause more of a reaction than a shrug, but hey, I'm not this guy.

Which threads are those? 'cause we have an archive, and I ain't seeing any.

In my opinion, the Moldvay/Cook B/X is the best D&D, and the 3.5 one is the worst. Haters gonna hate, no doubt.

> Obsolete classes
That's bad. That's a bad thing to be in a game.

No, it really is not. You just... don't play them! That's negative effort required. Their existence has no effect on tables where they are not used. A game is good based on what it is in play, not what it is in theorycrafting by forumites who obsess over the features that do not matter.

For me it's a competition between Mentzer and 5e if we're not allowed retro clones, otherwise Basic Fantasy RPG and 5e.

5e is the best of OSR and 3.5 mixed together and modernized. It has Mentzer's simple rules and 3.5's character creation. The character creation is bloated, but it's not as bad as 3.5's and the simple rules help to balance it out.

Honestly 5e is probably the best out of all of them. It's a return to form or at least a very good attempt.

5e is pretty good

Frankly the best edition of D&D is whatever you're having fun with at the moment. In straight hours of enjoyment, BECMI takes the cake for me. Your mileage may vary. I'm currently enjoying a 5e game.

OD&D is shit. I found 2e to be clunky as hell but better organized than adnd. 3.x was fun but led to character-building wankery. 4e was an interesting reaction to the problems of 3.x, but doesn't feel like D&D to me.

Which is, in it's modern form, Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

People saying 4E is the best are obviously forgetting how terrible the game was at release, its biggest problem being the first Monster Manual. The monsters in that book are bloated with HP but deal sweet fuck all damage (as well as missing most of the time) that it slows down combat to a snail's pace and kills any drama to the combat. Combat was pretty much a tactical miniatures game anyway so that didn't help to make the fights interesting either, and the focus of the game was obviously supposed to be on its combat. It's strange that they spent so long balancing that game that they didn't realise how boring a regular fight would become.

The later monster manuals and especially the essentials monster manual which I used for my non-Essentials campaigns helped to fix this to an extent, but don't try to tell that 4E was good out of the gate back in 08. I don't buy the argument of "B-but DMs can just change the stats" if we're comparing systems. First of all the DMG gave no rules on how to change monster stats, secondly if we follow that logic to its extreme then GURPS or some shit is the best version of D&D ever made because the DM can fix all of the problems.

It was still better than 3.X though which is the fucked up thing. As 4E went a long it got a lot better, while all versions of 3.X started shit and got shittier as fuck the party splatbooks started to surface.

4e was very heavy on math, everybody had an aura. The player handbook was also split into 3 books. It was horribly bloated. Great for war gaming though.

I'll only comment on editions I've played

2e
I love it, truly, but even I have to admit its problems. Granted, the culture of the game was different, and it was taken as par for the course that players and GM's would get together to house-rule the ever loving fuck out of the game until it did what they wanted. Granted, nothing is stopping players of any other editions from doing the same, but the culture surrounding 2e (at least the culture I encountered in my local area before the internet was ubiquitous) seemed more open to it. Non-combat proficiency system was really bad, but eventually we got used to actually role-playing out of combat to compensate.

3e
Hated it the moment I came out. Warmed up a little after the first few months, because the game ran smoother out of the box. However, my friends and I had a harder time house-ruling it into what we wanted. Not sure whether it was the system itself, or the culture behind it, or a little from both. Also, once all the ivory tower charop tricks were discovered, it became much more about individual power-characters independently doing their thing instead of the teamwork-based-play that I remembered and loved. However, character building is an independently satisfying game, similar to deck-building in MTG... appropriate since it was the first branching-out of a developer who until then had mostly just made MTG,

3.5
Indistinguishable from 3e. We had went back to our house-ruled 2e by then.

PF
Indistinguishable from 3e

4e
We LOVED it. The teamwork-based play was back. The game did out of the box what we had house-ruled 2e to do (simulate fantasy novel feels.) Every character class felt useful in combat. We were already used to throwing out non-combat, because 2e proficiencies were such utter shit.

5e
Distinguishable from 3e, but still at its core still feels like 3e, just with some band-aids on the most widely known problems. If I'm with a group that only plays OGL, 5e is a compromise.

>Dungeons & Dragons
>IEU O'INITIATION
What the fuck am I looking at dot jpg?

If Fighter and Rogue were put in the NPC classes section, instead of being marketed as a fully functioning PC class, your argument might have some merit. Unfortunately, the game was fallaciously marketed,

>5E is best singularly because it's not 3.5
Yes it is. it's like 90% 3.5. I mean the 10% is all improvements, but still, let's call a spade a spade, even if they added a laser pointer to the handle.

>0e
Bad but it kickstarted everything
>1e
Literally just Gygax trying to play up more rules and cut Arneson out of royalties...
>2e
... Which funilly enough is what happened to him. That said, the AD&D line did introduce a fuckton of awesome settings, a wide variety of new (and closer to modern) rules.
>Basic/BECMI/RC
A game originally meant to guide players into AD&D, then changed several times (so Arneson could keep getting paid) through different authors to make one of the most robust games on the market. Only real drawback imo is race-as-class.
>3.P
WotC attempting to mass market appeal the game and it worked (to varying results). Heavy with rules, bloated with errata and casters dominated, the game designers later apologized about designing it with "system mastery" focus (SEE: Ivory Tower Design).
>4e
AAn attempt to step back and overhaul the system for ease of play, classes became far more balanced at the expense of a large and cumbersome system. Still, not a bad game imho, but it was bad in sparking the dreaded Edition Wars.
>5e
Fearing Pathfinder and other games, WotC attempts to capture what people liked from previous editions and merge them together. Largely successful, my only issue is the fact casters are again supreme. That said, there are really only three tiers in the game - Great, Good and Nice (not counting Hunter Ranger or 4Elements Monk). Personally my fave system of core D&D.

THIS GUY GETS IT

>3.5 haters
>There's no reasoning with them, give up.

This.
There is literally no group on all of Veeky Forums that is more mindlessly convinced that their minority opinions are objective facts, and the only way to deal with them is to treat them like they have a scandalous disease.

DISAGREEMENT AND A CORDIAL TONE DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE CORRECT. WHILE THERE ARE SHADES OF THE CORE D20 SYSTEM UNDER THE 4E RULESET, IT IS STILL HANDLING THOSE THINGS IN VERY DIFFERENT WAY, AND TREATED CARRIED A TONE THAT DEVIATED FROM THE D&D TRADITION IN SUCH A WAY AS TO BE A RADICAL DEPARTURE. REMEMBER, UNTIL THE RELEASE OF PSIONICS IN THE PHB3, EVERYONE USES ONLY MINOR VARIATIONS OF THE SAME RULES TO HANDLE EVERYTHING. HOWEVER, EVEN AS LATE AS THE BOOK OF NINE SWORDS, D&D REVELED IN USING MECHANICAL VARIATION TO MAKE UP FOR A LACK OF VARIATION IN THEME AND TONE. 4E WAS A D&D-ESQUE SPINOFF OF D&D, NOT A SEQUEL. MORE OF A DEEP SPACE NINE, LESS OF A VOYAGER.

I love 2e and 4e. I've noticed a lot of people who still count 4e as their favorite are from the "started witn 2e" crowd like myself.

I like 4e, for a number of reasons

D&D has never been particularly good at noncombat, so the best noncombat has been mostly freeform RP, and 4e was spent all of its effort perfecting combat, and largely ignoring noncombat as an afterthought that we threw out anyway (just like how we threw it out in every other edition)

Every character contributes meaningfully to combat

Character optimization is a thing, but the difference between mid-op and high-op is enough for the mid-pp to still be signifigant.

When HP are used as they were always intended (i.e. not meat points) a 4e fight genuinely feels like a fight scene from a fantasy novel or movie.

The PC's while still vulnerable thanks to diminishing resources, feel genuinely like the protagonists of their story

The fluff crunch separation makes a literally staggering number of character concepts viable through refluff.

Similarly, refluff on the DM end makes DMing a breeze, because making an encounter becomes a breeze. You can make an encounter with the PDF's on a laptop in the time it takes the players to get themselves into trouble.

A functioning encounter balancing system... literally no other edition has this. Hitting the sweet spot between "the players trounce the encounter without using any resources" and "TPK, story over, everyone stop playing and having fun" is easy without having to fudge dice.

The combat, by itself, is fun enough to be a game. Even if the DM sucks, combat is still independently satisfying, meaning it's even MORE fun when the DM is good, and can make the stuff between encounters fun.

But I hate all of Deendee.

>And if I want to play with living people, 5E.
Shit user, how do you animate your skeletons with high enough mental stats to run 4e?

>3.5 had a solid skill system

I did a literal spit take on this

It must be really difficult to design a corebook with semi-balanced martials and magic users.

>4e was very heavy on math, everybody had an aura.

wat

>The player handbook was also split into 3 books

wat

>It was horribly bloated.

True

>Great for war gaming though.

I think being a really bloated RPG makes it bad at wargaming.

>admitting and discussing the faults of a game obviously makes you a hater

This reminds me of the Paizo boards where anyone calling core rogue or monk weak is a "hater" (eventhough they usually like those classes and want them to be good, which is why they make not of the imbalance).

Both LL and LotFP are slightly different, though. I'd say that LL complicates things a bit, for no real reason, and that LotFP could probably be some kind of improvement of the B/X system. To be honest, I'd still stick with my modded B/X game. In the eyes, the real power of B/X D&D is its ability to be easily modified. The reason I dislike (not hate) v3.5 D&D is that you can't modify it, without fucking up something (if not everything) else.

4e.
Way superior to 3rd, current ed with support, ditched the silly passive defense concept, and still mostly compatible with 3rd ed fluff books. Also, the gurpscharactersheet program is great.

It's a GURPS thread, right?

Sure. I'd enjoy seeing a GURPS edition war for once. HERO, too.

In the eyes => In my eyes
(Samefagging like a boss.)

THE NEWEST ONE IS ALWAYS THE BEST ONE HURRAH FOR CHANGE

3.5e is great once you realize that you're supposed to run it like Mutants and Masterminds: don't let one guy make Superman while the other makes Aquaman.

There can't be a GURPS edition war, pre-3rd barely exists, and 4e is just an improvement on 3rd (which was an improvement of 2nd, etc, hell some of Man to Man's (ie, proto GURPS) rules can still be found in 4e, because they already worked, among them the strength attribute and associated damages), mostly in rewriting the Basic Set with the most useful "side" rules introduced in other books and compendia, giving it all a better layout and having the stuff in a different, better order. (Notably, separating it in two, with one book helping players build their char with the basics for combat, and the GM's one having well, everything the GM'd need)
The difference are somewhat superficial, except for passive defence I mentioned (which kinda exists in 4e as defence bonus, granted by shields), snap shots disappearing, and a globally lowered accuracy on guns.

Jesus all the red underlining is really getting annoying. Computer's language isn't English. Really fucking annoying, making it hard to type and reread myself.

D&D is shit, my least favorite RPG system by far. It's simply dreadful, especially 4e. Only 5e is somewhat tolerable.

Strength in numbers!
strawpoll.me/10696118

tzeentch pls go and stay go

Why would I play anything but 5e?

OD&D = groggy trash.

AD&D = slightly different groggy trash, grogs pretend there is a huge difference.

AD&D 2e = hipster edition, nice amount of features ... always funny to see how hipsters think they are playing old school.

3e/3.5e = broken edition, elevated player agency to the highest levels yet ... which is why DMs hate it, they're all railroading trash.

4e = tactical wargame edition, not a bad game but had no continuity with previous editions ... which was objectively stupid. Telling 3e gamers they were doing it wrong added some nice insult to injury.

5e = lets have another go at 3e, but with less player agency. Telling 4e gamers they were doing it wrong made for some nice sour grapes.

3.5e and 4e objectively the best.

>all this bait
0/10

This man has the best taste in the thread, because it is identical to mine.

OD&D is the best one

>first game of tabletop roleplaying is 3.5 dnd
>told by DM it's the "only good system"
>play it for years, reject 4e outright
>drama goes down in life, DM rapes one of hte players(her dad was fairly abusive, so she went to his house because he was around 6+ years older than us and had his own place, we were all 17 and he basically told her that she had to fuck him to stay. she refused so he uh, well...you know) and the group disbands
>get into college and play pathfinder
>getting sick of the constant rules lawyering
>the endless bitching and bickering about rules
>the constant metabuilding and metagaming in every game
>get massively burnt out of tabletop games
>end up playing shit like World of Darkness, Numenera, Dungeon World and other shit like that
>realize that tabletop RPGs are not literally slower video games and aren't actually meant to be
>realize that my blessed youthful years were fucking stolen by DnD 3.5 and it ruined an entire generation of gamers
>5e releases and it encourage fast and loose interpretation of the rules on the fly
>metagaming featfapping has been rolled into archetypes
>start liking DnD again
>currently running a game, playing in another

fuck I love me some 5e. I just want some god damn, mother fucking, dark sun content, for fuck's sakes.

>5e releases and it encourage fast and loose interpretation of the rules on the fly
>metagaming featfapping has been rolled into archetypes
Exactly this, well said.

Your criticism of 3. is right on as well, it just encouraged munchkins to get uppity with bullshit character design with the one person doing the real work.

gavin, is that you?

>what do you do?
>screams and throws its skull at me
>jerry....you faggot

You both have shit taste though.
RQ is like D&D's retarded cousin that no one likes to talk about.

They're all kinda bad, because DND has a bad resolution mechanic.