What edition of dnd is best?

The one you and your friends have the most fun with.

>They asked for Best, not Worst
But nobody mentioned 4e.

Definitely not 3.PF

The one you can find a good GM for. Any addition with a shit GM is shit. Any addition with a good GM can be fun.

loftp osr

It depends entirely on what kind of game you want to play, each version D&D is a completely different game, despite each calling themselves Dungeons and Dragons.
It's a exactly like asking which Final Fantasy game is best.

Best lore, inclusion, lack of redundancies in lore and player character choice to ensure that there are no leftover tidbits, and in addition, the most concise and compiled of content? 4e. They rewrote everything, included stuff from new and old, went back and covered things they did in 3.5 near the end of of it's lifetime, made a number of lesser known subjects core to the universe and made them fit better or detailed them in a finer manner opposed to how they were treated prior, made psions core again, tackled the Warlock build limitation problem, offering them flavour and variance, and added to their core races to appeal to a more accepting crowd.

Best marketing? 5e, is the only one that really got normalfags to care, and actually graps some degree of social media, unfortunately proving how-ill advised letting normies into the hobby is with how piss poor the detail and lore got as a result. 5e has functionality at cost of Quality and Quantity.

Best lore? 2e.

3e-3.5/PF is in effect the best at probably custom ability and the fact that it did not abandon 2e entirely lore-wise in it's various IPs, but this was also a weakness because cross-referencing 3.5 with 2e is a necessity at times, and this even effects the like of how poorly put-together it was as a released product and a system for DM's to use because of how poorly organized was the constant reformatting of how stablocks were to be presented, errata, (Still not solved) Reliance on 3rd party products for some areas of fluff or functionality not covered beyond text which mentions it's use/canonicity, and even the fact that some content is directly reliant if not subsumed by magazine articles not everyone would have had the chance to own physically opposed to what is in a splatbook.

I've been constantly screenshotting stuff for subjects that often suffer from this jigsaw puzzle of rules, lore and houserules for everything under this fucking edition and it's neither a pain nor joy, but an interest.

4e

3.5 for mechanics
PF fixed some stuff and broke others
FC likewise made some things better and others worse
if you could take the best parts of them and make it one game, that'd be ideal

I personally prefer 4e because it's the most mechanically robust monster fighting RPG experience. I know people expect D&D to be more than that for some reason, but I've always liked it for the whole monster killing thing. I have other games for deep narrative mechanics or complex systems for governing problem solving. 4e tells big dumb stories about fantasy people killing shit, and it does it in a way I enjoy. I don't think it's strictly the best, mind, merely the one most suited to my preferences and therefore having a larger place amongst the systems I spend time with.

>3.5 had the best mechanics
>PF fixed anything

8/10, I honestly thought you were retarded.

Thematically, 1st.

Stylistically, 2nd.

Mechanically... none of them? 3rd I guess. Don't know about 5th ed. mechanics.

whichever one you most enjoy.

Martial Edition

Boy howdy I bet this thread isn't just a pointless question about an extremely subjective topic designed to bait idiots like me into responding

Depends on what you need it for, your group and preferences.

When it comes to short campaigns, one-shots and overall not very serious campaigns, 5e works great for me. With some changes, it can support longer campaings just fine, but it's not really designed for that. It's kinda limiting when it comes to character customization, but it's definitely very fun.

I don't have many experiences with dnd overall with long campaigns. Pathfinder is definitely sustaining our long-ass campaign but it's so bloated with noncontent and extra rules that it's almost not fun at all.

I played a long-ish campaign with 3e and it was pretty okay too.

Haven't really DnD outside of that.

>6

I will never understand how anyone could prefer 4e, the generic korean MMORPG of PnPs, to the systemic freedom of 3.5

Because system and narrative have nothing to do with each other, you don't particularly care about charop, and you want a vague semblance of balance and tactical consideration to your system needs.

It's bad in entirely different ways and appeals to a different type of player.

D&D is bad.

Because the only 'freedom' inherent in 3.pf is the rules being so garbage anything you homebrew or make up on the fly can't be much worse.

Next time at least try to include an argument.

Everything worth doing in 3.5 can be done in 4e, but better. Everything not worth doing in 3,5 can be made worth doing in 4e.

The same applies to all versions of D&D.

You're not really worth the time or effort user.

i prefer 2e over 5e and 3.5. i only have limited experience with 5 and 3.5 though.

2e has the best handbook, hands down. not whatever version got reprinted, that shits a mess. i got a well loved copy for like two bucks and it feels like an old friend each time i sit down with a new 2e campaign. its got blue ink on all the headers. my dm sent me a link to it after i kept using his copy rather than the spiffy new reprinted copy i wasted like 50 on.

this is the one!

Agreed: 4e

>BECMI or 4e
This is interresting. I've noticed for a long time that players who actually played DURING the time period before TSR was bought by Wizards tend to give 4e much more of a chance than people who started playing after that moment in history. It's totally anecdotal, but if you (rightly) mark the cut-off date for the title "grognard" at 1999, then grognards tend to actually like 4e quite a bit. As someone who started with AD&D, I've noticed that despite the low lethality, something in the FEEL of 4e scratches a certain itch that old TSR editions scratch and that 3e-PF just couldn't. Wonder what that is all about?

I started with 2e. Went back to 2e when 3e flopped for our group. Continued with 2e and played 4e at the same time. Tried 5e, am sticking with 4e for new groups, 2e for my old group if I ever play with any of those old timers again.

Looking into OSR ATM, but I mostly play Burning Wheel now.

If I want nostalgic clunk and clutter, I stick with what I started with, 2e, because what I want is a nostalgic mess of memories. 3e Just gives me clunk and clutter, and nothing more.

4e is just fun and well built. It FEELS like heroic super hero fantasy, where 3.X just never felt close.

>systemic freedom of 3.5
>Roughly 5 classes in any given tier, half of which are in splat books the DM is unlikely to use/allow
>Freedom
lolwut? The thing you're forgetting about 3e is that it's not really a unified game, any more than oWoD is a unified game, they just didn't tell the readers which classes were in the same game as each other, and let them figure that out for themselves. It'd be like if White Wolf just threw Werewolves, Vampires, Changelings, and Mages all in the same core book and never told the players that they can't compete with each other: they're different games. Each tier has extremely limited options if you want to remain at that tier, and for most, your post-creation choices like spells and feats are very much pre-decided if you want to maintain viability. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of these options are VERY fluff-specific, very much proscribing the role-play of any character who wants to maintain tier-viability.

4e on the other hand has fewer total options, but more of them are viable, they don't proscribe role-play (especially when you consider the ease of refluff in 4e,) and the utility-gap between high optimnization and mid-optimization isn't that big, and lets even sub-optimal characters still participate in a mechanically meaningful way to encounters. For all PRACTICAL purposes, that's much more system freedom.

>4e is just fun and well built. It FEELS like heroic super hero fantasy, where 3.X just never felt close.
This rings true, though I have no supporting evidence. I remember when 3e came out, and people complained that it was anime superhero Diabloshit (pic related.) Maybe the problem wasn't that it was superhero fantasy, but that it was superhero fantasy done POORLY.

People have been comparing tabletop and vidya rpgs since the 80s. Hell, maybe before that, but I wasn't alive in the 70's so I wouldn't know.

But yeah, it felt like someone on the design team didn't want to leave behind 2e, and held everyone back from creating a proper heroic fantasy game, so we got left with the crumbling mess that was 3e. 3.5 and PF are just attempts to fix it by painting it a different color and plastering over stains.

The problem is that 4e had less options, but all those options are fairly balanced and work well together, so all but maybe 2-3 classes are bad. Not unviable, just bad.

3.x has literally thousands of options and hundreds of classes to choose from, but they're unplayably bad compared to the CoDzilla and Wizards.

>it felt like someone on the design team didn't want to leave behind 2e
Most people on the design team.

The problem was they overhauled the mechanics from 2e and tweaked them, but still playtested as if they were playing 2e: Tanky fighter, sneaky rogue, fireball throwing wizard, healbot cleric. This is a big reason of how a lot of the awful broken shit got through.

5e.

6e

>wildly disparate things
no hyperbole at all, buddy. no hyperbole at all.

Every single edition transition did vastly different things than the edition before it. The outlier is the recent edition change from 4th to 5th, where instead of doing something new, it did 3.PF but better. If you've only lived through the 3>4 and 4>5 transitions you can be forgiven for not understanding.

>4e scratches a certain itch that old TSR editions scratch and that 3e-PF just couldn't. Wonder what that is all about?
gamism

4e

>unironically liking bounded accuracy
>unirinically approving of level caps and restrictions
4e and 5e are for casuals who don't actually play and run campaigns that last for years..

>vastly different things than the edition before it
>vastly different things
>vastly different

>gamism
doesn't that just mean "stands up to scrutiny when judged purely as a game in a vacuum"?

Granted that IS something that 2e and 4e have that 3e doesn't, but there has to be something more than that.

I know you didn't actually live through any edition transitions pre-OGL-dominance, but no, every edition does not in-fact do nothing but "muh OGL feels," that's JUST 3e and 5e.

I think he's laughing at you because the majority of D&D editions (0e, 1e, 2e if you poke it right, Holmes, B/X, BECMI, and RC) do basically the same damn thing, just with varying degrees of complexity.

This.

it means that a number of grognards not only do not care about realism, they relish in mechanics that are a bit detached from merely trying to model in-game events. remember: they grew up with the first generation of games which weren't accurately simulationist by modern standards. so when 4e says: fuck realism, we're just giving you some cool mechanics, that strikes home for them.

the 90s (and late 80s) school of gamers cares more about simulationism (in that era games tried to be realistic and were marketed as such, a reaction to the inaccuracies of the first wave). and for them a lot about 4E makes no sense, the mechanics don't even try to model plausible in-game physics, it's like a boardgame (or like WoW) instead.

>go on quest
>kill monsters
>take their stuff
>level up

>the 90s (and late 80s) school of gamers cares more about simulationism (in that era games tried to be realistic and were marketed as such, a reaction to the inaccuracies of the first wave). and for them a lot about 4E
But in my experience it is the 90's and late 80's gamers who enjoy 4e the most... you know, guys and gals who spent their childhoods playing AD&D 2e... in the late 80's and early 90's. Right now they'd be in their early-to-mid 30's, or maybe their late 20's if they started gaming early, and that pretty much describes all my tables. It's the early 00's gamers (who for-the-record outnumber the rest of us combined, and have an even bigger voice than that online) who grew up on OGLd20 [insert IP]D20 games that I've seen hating 4e.

i keep forgetting that for D&D the clocks are ticking differently than for the overall gaming community. what i described was accurate for the overall gaming community... where you had simulationist games like CP2020, Shadowrun or god forbid Phoenix Command while AD&D fell behind times. 3.0 was WOTC's reaction to general RPG developments. 3.0 didnt bring anything new to the RPG world but it updated D&D to recent developments.

If "siumlationism" and "creating an in-game physics with the system mechanics" at the expense of making a game that stands up as a game is "progress" then I'll gladly stay retro forever.

well, different strokes for different folks. some people just can't stand
>You spend a healing surge, regain additional hit points equal to 2d6 + your Constitution modifier, and make a saving throw against one effect that a save can end.
...as it makes no sense to them and ruins their suspension of disbelief.

Tactics (psx version with War of the lions translation patch) is best final fantasy.

Second best is ffvi.

These are the objectively correct answers.

Most will agree it's 5e.

I'll go one further and tell you it's actually gurps dungeon fantasy with sorcery instead of magic, using the sorcery spell collection from the universal eggplant blog, +martial arts, and powers for when you want to make more stuff - there are many d&d things already built for gurps you can grab online

>best lore inclusion
>4e
Lay off the crack, buddy. 4e is missing a ton of stuff from previous editions, just totally absent. It can't even do most of the standard forgotten realms races.

The god of magic had his staff stolen by the god of murder while he and the goddess of magic were watching the goddess of evil dance, and the god of murder killed the goddess of magic using the god's of magic staff while they were still watching the goddess of evil dance.

The Raven Queen is one of the female lead designers personal self insert character and that's why she's so powerful and good.

The world is a lot of little points of light of civilization in the big bad world of evil and danger.

Tieflings made a deal with devils and got their city transplanted into hell, but they all came back and no one likes them anymore.

Great fucking lore, that 4e.

>Lay off the crack, buddy. 4e is missing a ton of stuff from previous editions, just totally absent.
Completion and quantity aren't quality
>It can't even do most of the standard forgotten realms races.
Name a standard FR race for which there aren't stats, and anyone with any experience with 4e can easily tell you which race you should use.

Well , that's pretty easy to do since they literally made all the races utterly generic in 4e.

>Most will agree it's 5e.
I hardly know anyone who cites 5 as their favorite.

I know some who pike 3rd as their favorite, but are willing to settle for 5e

I know some who cite 4th as their favorite, but are willing to settle for 5e

I know some who cite OD&D and clones as their favorites, but are willing to setting for 5e.

I know some who hate all D&D, but they're at-least willing to try 5e

you see a pattern here?

5e is the Dennys of D&D. It's almost nobody's favorite, but it's generic enough to be inoffensive to everyone, there's always one whenever you want it, and while it's not great it's always "good enough"

The base classes outside phb have support in more than the book they're first published in. That's a thing they fixed.

Best inclusion = has the most official d&d IP prebuilt. If "best inclusion" meant something else, then you should have been much more clear. 3.5 has the best inclusion, even if it's not the most fun to play or best designed.
Regarding races, I shouldn't have to refluff or houserule content in d&d, for a major official d&d setting, particularly for bog standard stuff like races.

So everything worth doing in 4e can be done better in 3.0 or 3.5, too?

5e is "good enough" for anyone, and can easily be a favorite of DM's who didn't much enjoy 4e. 3.X is fun-ish. Too much between session work trying to avoid all the traps and meet your prerequisites without crippling yourself in the process.
5r isn't especially exciting in any way, it's a cleaned up and streamlined 3e lacking in character customization opportunities, but it doesn't have the glaring problems the other editions have.
It's less of a slog and much better balanced than 3e. It can handle more d&d settings out of the box than 4e with its missing d&d content, and isn't a completely different kind of game like 4e is. It's more coherent and less kludgy than pre-3e's mishmash of uncoordinated mechanics. And if you do have a gap in content to fill, odds are there's at least a DMsG product for it if nothing else.

But:
Best D&D is GURPS.
2nd best D&D is Ghosts of Albion + Dungeons & Zombies.
3rd Best D&D is probably 5e.

>Well , that's pretty easy to do since they literally made all the races utterly generic in 4e.
I literally can't tell how much 4e hate is brain damage and how much is false flagging anymore. This is a really weird Twilight Zone episode.

You know, I'm genuinely interested and open to hearing your reasoning. In what way is...
>You spend a healing surge, regain additional hit points equal to 2d6 + your Constitution modifier, and make a saving throw against one effect that a save can end.
More immersion breaking than.

>When laying your hand upon a living creature, you channel positive energy that cures 1d8 points of damage +1 point per caster level (maximum +5).
or
>A creature you touch regains a number of hit points equal to 1d8 + your spellcasting ability modifier. This spell has no effect on undead or constructs.
>At Higher Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the healing increases by 1d8 for each slot level above 1st.
or
>When casting this spell and laying his hands upon a creature, the priest causes 1d8 points of wounds or other injury damage to the creature's body to be healed. This healing cannot affect creatures without corporeal bodies, nor can it cure wounds of creatures not living of of extraplanar origin.
or the bit that always broke MY immersion the most
>In order for the party to continue to be a party, the ungodly powerful reality warping demigod must find a contrived in-character excuse to continue working with trivial mundanes who add nothing to their ability to adventure.

Genuinely curious.

>a favorite of DM's who didn't much enjoy 4e
Okay, I know some... well a fair number of... players who really didn't like 4e, but on the DM side of things, it was a literal DREAM. 4e was DM edition by a LONGSHOT. The system bends over backwards to make encounter/adventure building easy.

>So everything worth doing in 4e can be done better in 3.0 or 3.5, too?
Not making the PC's feel like the actual protagonists of the fantasy novels/films that inspired D&D to begin with and drew us to the hobby in the first place. 4e is literally the best edition I've ever encountered at doing THAT.

Because the second ones bake the fluff in with the mechanics (you left out the fluff line from the first one).

That's apparently really all it takes to shatter immersion for some.

9

I was drawn into the hobby by eye of the beholder, dungeon hack, and later Baldur's Gate 1, when i was a little kid, long before I started getting into fantasy novels. I mostly liked the animated hobbit film and the last unicorn and the dark crystal at that point.

DMs who didn't like the player's side of 4e. The DM side of 4e is fantastic, but if you don't like the player side of the system or 4e's combat, you're not going to choose it, no matter how fantastic the monster stats are.

>Best inclusion = has the most official d&d IP prebuilt. If "best inclusion" meant something else, then you should have been much more clear. 3.5 has the best inclusion, even if it's not the most fun to play or best designed.
I never once used the the term "best inclusion" though personally, in a vacuum, as applied to TTRPG, to me it would probably mean "the widest variety of character concepts are doable and mechanically viable," which would put 4e WAAAAAAY on top.
>Regarding races, I shouldn't have to refluff or houserule content in d&d, for a major official d&d setting, particularly for bog standard stuff like races.
You actually WANT to run D&D RAW and Fluff-AW, with no alterations? Really? Why? That just sounds more like an excuse to ignore ease of refluff and ease of house-ruling than an actual thing any RL DM would want to do..

Every DnD is the worst and best edition of DnD, most of them are completely different games to one another and if you don't understand this you're a drunk confused retard.

Basic DnD is the best because you get Dark Souls: The RPG, except you roll new characters when you die. Monsters mechanically react to you and can be persuaded to fight for you or scared off if you bash them enough. Heroes are weak as fuck until at least level 4, but that's okay because just getting into a battle is the fail state. You win by looting tombs, not killing cults.
It's also shit because Gold for XP makes no sense, you're essentially playing a stealth game and if your DM forces fights on you then it turns into LE MEAT GRIND SIMULATOR XDDDD

1e ADnD is the best because it has the best narrative and mechanical blending. Monks need to beat up other super monks to level up, for example, thieves need to build up a thieves guild and then wipe out another thieves guild to hit those god-tier levels. It's also shit because it's got so many fucking rules that it's actually fucking obtuse at some points, and it only exists so Gary could run tournaments and make sure nobody showed up with god-tier doom machines.

2e is the best because it has the best settings and the ridiculous amount of setting content, holy shit.
It's also HOT FUCKING GARBAGE, because the settings are SHIT and most of them are GIMMICKS that require you to buy OTHER SYSTEMS to play them, like psionics and battlesystem for Dark Sun. Also while many systems are amazing on paper they're trash in concept(le dark sun metaplot adventures)

3e and 3.5 brought us character customization, which is both awesome arguably and also arguably ruined DnD.

4e was great if you want a legit game, and its shit if you want an RPG.

5e is a lukewarm compromise

But baking the fluff in makes it harder for players to change the fluff, thus arbitrarily limiting their role-play options, and makes it harder for DM's to change the fluff, thus arbitrarily limiting the things he can easily throw at the party.

You tried to be compromising and instead revealed that you don't know shit.

>want to run it RAW
I want running official D&D settings to require as little homebrewing/hunting for the right thing to refluff as possible.

If I'm going to put homebrewing effort, I'd rather it be for a system I enjoy playing more, not just "the one with the best monster creation rules"

>hunting for the right thing to refluff
Ah, you're refluffing inefficiently. You first build a mechanically good and interresting adventure/encounter, THEN refluff it into the setting, not start with the setting, and hunt down what you CAN refluff things into.

In my experience, "breaking immersion" is usually code for "I don't like it." If you want something to make sense, you can usually figure out a good enough explanation or not worry about it so much. If you don't like something in the first place, you've got an incentive to not want it to make sense, because that gives you an extra argument (explicitly or internally) against it existing.

Consider how often you hear people griping about how X doesn't make sense, breaks immersion, is totally stupid, etc and they hate it. Now consider how often you hear that followed by "which is a shame because I really like it anyway." The former happens all the time, while the latter... the closest you usually get is someone admitting that something they like is also dumb, but noting alongside that it didn't reduce their enjoyment of the thing. "Immersion breaking" is almost exclusively for the things they didn't like anyway.

about what faggot? I've played every single edition for 40+ sessions each. Fuck off kid

Yeah, that might be more efficient, but it would result in much less setting coherency. Odds are I'm designing the encounter to be interesting in the context of what makes sense in-setting, or in reaction to what the pcs have done.

There is a reasonable chance I'm having to improv stuff on the fly, with some flexible pre-prepared encounter/npc/opponent templates adjusted for the situation at hand.

Immersion breaking means "has more of a separation between player decisions and character actions than I find fun."

It's a complaint about a game not being simulationist enough.

>There is a reasonable chance I'm having to improv stuff on the fly, with some flexible pre-prepared encounter/npc/opponent templates adjusted for the situation at hand.
Wouldn't having solid uniform monster templates that are easily refluffable make that a shitload easier? I've always found as a DM that it makes EXACTLY that easier.

I can't actually speak much to running pregenerated settings or modules though: I usually use 4e to run "generic 1980's B movie pulp fantasy that's largely defined by the PC's backstories, and fleshed out by whatever's convenient for driving the plot and action forward. So honestly, you could be right about what's better for running pre-generated modules and settings.

Monster templates are good, yes.

But I want things like races and character archetypes that fit the setting in advance., and they're going to be things I would use to modify the creature template. So using 4e examples, all my 'eladrin' npcs can teleport, etc.

The missing content for 4e is largely on the player side. Generic monster blocks arent that hard to customize. How easy they are to customize is the best part of 4e.

Strange, because what I've always found "immersion" breaking is too much simulationism. Whenever someone tries to make rules that are literally in-game physics, it's never successful or believable, but I've grown up on action movies, TV shows, and pulp novels, and am used to the tropes, conceits, and suspensions necessary for such things as a matter of fact. It's sort of like a TTRPG mechanical version of the uncanny valley.

IT depends. I managed to get a lot of love from my players by running DnD as it would actually be in a feudal society.

As in.
>you found gold in a cave? I'm the baron. It's my cave and that's my gold.
>BUUUUUUT because you found me 1000 gp I never thought I had, here, have a minor fief, you're all anointed knights now.

Simulationism isn't about trying to perfectly model reality, it's about simulating the setting. Not the same thing.

>But I want things like races and character archetypes that fit the setting in advance.,
You mean like backgrounds and themes?
>and they're going to be things I would use to modify the creature template. So using 4e examples, all my 'eladrin' npcs can teleport, etc.
Ah, I see what you're talking about, and it's very much the opposite of how I run games. I always assumed that the ability to teleport was universal amongst Eladrin PC's, and eladrin exceptional enough to have names the audience would know. Like it's an ability that the race is predisposed to, but PC's are by definition a cut above the rest, and quite frankly the destined heroes that the "camera" of the movie is going to focus on. Making any single mechanic apply all the time, no matter what, because of a direct 1-to-1 setting-mechanic correlation feels reductionist, like the mechanic can TRULY represent what's a fascett of the world, rather than just how the PC's interact with that fascet of the world. I'm not saying your way is wrong, just that it's now how I run games.

>it was anime suoerhwro diabloshit
>also done wrong
FTFY
I'm an old fart. I've been playing D&D since roughly '81. I personally would go with 1.5e ad&d as my fag
>1.5e... fucking newfags, there is no such thing!
All I have to say is Oriental Adventures & wilderness/dungeoneers survival guides.
>what?
Those three volumes, starting with OA, introduces proficiency slots and some clarifications that are all what 2e wanted to be, without 10 billion splat books

I know that, it's not even the same as 3.5 because there was always a follow-up between those editions, you could easily cross-reference between them. 4e Re-invented the wheel and did it's own cut-off thing that only had a few references to older stuff, but it was concise in itself. What I was getting at is that 4e didn't require you to be an oldfag to play it and truly appreciate it, you could be a filthy secondary introductory srub from playing Elder scrolls titles and enjoy D&D 4e as it existed as it's own thing, they managed to completely separate themselves from association with older additions which how different the changes were.

This did fuck the entire series, lore, continuity and long term evolution they've stayed roughly accurate to with a family of employees staffing, editing, writing, and even marketting, but they certainly made a decent product.

Besides, I wouldn't want to see 4e cover the stuff from older editions, it'd be a clusterfuck worse than cross-references 2e-3.5 and the way they rewrote things sometimes downplayed lore by accident and narrative with their cosmology and how they treated deities, Dragonborn were supposed to be redeemed people atoning through dedicating thsmelves to Bahamut to kick evil ass, and now they're a race to fill in for the scalie lovers, despite the like of Dragonkin, and many other Draconic species covered exorbantly over DMG ecology and splatbook, 4e did it's own thing that was independent of the other editions as much as it possibly could.

Though I can't speak for the design department and development of 4e, I can say that given just how fucking unkempt 3e-3.5 was it was good that they cut their losses in the attempt to appeal to the older markets with the hybrid of lore and adaption of it to the way they presented functionality in 3.5 because if they continued, people would end up with a repeat of what happened in 3.5 with how it was presented in multiple echelons of information giving.

In effect, 4e came to terms with the fact that they simply weren't capable of uplifting Old D&D from what it was, salvaged what they could and built something worth it's own merit.

>standard forgotten realms races.
>forgotten realms
>standard
You mean Ed Greenwoods magical realm of wizards and other mary sue faggotry?
Greenwood and all of the FR are cancer

>implying missing some things from FR/not being able to run it 100% from the book is on the same level as 3.5 missing Planescape and Dark Sun.
>4e even has the best setting from 3.5, Eberron
>4e has the best default setting too

Yes, it is the most complete WotC edition up to date. Only AD&D has better selection of worlds/settings, and even that is debatable.

In terms of delivering the intended experience - probably Rules Cyclopedia.

In terms of rules largely actually working, and producing interesting, if not always intended, results - 3.0.

In terms of support, available material, and convenience - Pathfinder.

>Best lore,
>4e.

Please lay off those drugs. 4E was the worst thing to ever happen to lore hands down. What they did to FR was one of the biggest blunders in the history of RPGs (particularly considering the fact that for the sake of exploding the world once again they've effectively crashed the novel production, which for a long time was more profitable and better know than actual RPG supplements). As about the overall DnD cosmology, they've replaced the old shitty one with the new equally shitty one, alienating nostalgia people for no benefit.

>Best marketing? 5e, is the only one that really got normalfags to care

That's the funny way to spell 3.0. 5E is a zombie game that has no sales to speak of (as evidenced by its incredibly anemic release schedule) and only shambles along because of grognards.

>So everything worth doing in 4e can be done better in 3.0 or 3.5, too?
Not in the slightest.

Who gives a shit what 4e did to FR, FR is shit.

Too bad there wasn't anything in 4e that had merit except big numbers and wargaming nonsense.

>insert 5e outselling PF lies here
"It's the most popular game on roll20" means dick for sales, guys.