Is AD&D better than 5e?

>le 4E is an TTMMORPG meme

If anything, it's closer to a tabletop Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy: Tactics, or Tactics Ogre than an MMORPG.

I prefer 1e myself.

AD&D has some quirks of rules design that show its age, such as having roll-over, roll-under and percentiles all over the place, or the inequal character XP tracks that in theory were a balancing factor but at the table were a bit of a pain in the ass. On that front, 5e is a lot more polished, even if I personally don't like the way it scales.
That said, I'll leave the maths aside and go with my feels. 5e to me has felt artificial from day 1, like those shows that want to recapture the 80es kids audience by shoving in as many references to Back to the Future and He-man as they can. That's what a lot of people wanted, and that explains its current success, but it's missing a bit of soul.

1e is mostly compatible with 2e, in a way that subsequent editions are not. I think it's fair to lump them together

They literally designed 3e to be unbalanced to sell more supplements, AND 4e still outsold it. Fuck off.

I probably prefer 2e just because of all the nice material that came out for it.

You don't remember the last days of 3.5. it was clear that the game had nowhere else to go, it was unsustainable the way it was going.

Yeah, but disassociated mechanics allow parts of the game to be overhauled without breaking everything and overwriting vast other portions of the game that were dependent on that mechanic in a way that unified systems like d20 or 5e can't.

4e saw far better sales for the start then 3e did, and we still don't have the figures on the online subscription fees.
Rumor has it Hasbro was mostly hands off on D&D until near the last year of 4e when they realized the money they were giving to WotC was going into experimenting with digital features (that never got off of the ground for a variety of tragic reasons) for this product that wasn't even making 20% of what mtg makes.
Presumably this is why the entirety of the D&D deparment at WotC got cut down to 5 people, and they were celebrating when they got 2 more hires like a year and a half ago.

It has it's problems but I like it more

it's hard to explain I liked reading through the old books but 5th edition I barely managed once

Wasn't there a suicide or murder/suicide involved?

I agree. Also, occasionally a player will have to roll 1d100 for a table or something, and none of the new players know what the fuck is going on. At least in AD&D they would be used to them.

>But 4e was more financially successful that 3.5
>They literally designed 3e to be unbalanced to sell more supplements, AND 4e still outsold it. Fuck off.

Citation fuckin needed. 4e did so badly that for the three years it was in print the person in charge was fired every year, then it would be another three years before WotC printed another RPG product.

>4e saw far better sales for the start then 3e did, and we still don't have the figures on the online subscription fees.
Even if the initial sales were better they clearly didnt last, and if the online subscription numbers were good they would've been announced.

The Good:
> Best campaign settings
> Consistently good art from 2E on
> Nostalgia factor

The Bad:
> Every mechanic sucks. I'm fucking serious, wipe that goddamn smirk off your fat fucking face. Nonweapon proficiencies are fucking bullshit and you know it, and the "optional" part became effectively mandatory once the splatbook creep happened. And even the implementation of nonweapon proficiencies was bullshit -- remember kite flying in Complete Ninja?
> Linear warrior quadratic mage was a rule from the very beginning, but at least it was baked into the XP tables.
> Complete Elves
> AC as a bonus to attack rolls is so ass-backward that it's amazing no one fixed it in core before 2000

The Ugly:
> NOVELSNOVELSNOVELSNOVELSPOORLYWRITTENDRIVEL
> All support went to Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and MAYBE Ravenloft, rather than supporting lesser-loved stuff like Mystara (which got like 1 video game)

Dude, all supplements for 4e until Divine Power were on the NYTimes bestseller list...

And yet, that didn't save the edition from getting shitcanned after only three years. And they wouldn't have something to replace it with for another three years; they would rather have spent that time making no money on D&D books at all than continue supporting 4e. Why would they do that to a successful product?

> AC as a bonus to attack rolls is so ass-backward that it's amazing no one fixed it in core before 2000

But descending AC is still a roll-high system.

d20+Bonuses-Penalies >= THAC0 - AC

In combat, the only person that needs to care about THAC0 is the DM

>Citation fuckin needed.
For what? From who?

>Even if the initial sales were better they clearly didnt last
Fair enough, but D&D wasn't a "golden goose" prior to 4e even by a galactic reacharound-tier stretch.

>if the online subscription numbers were good they would've been announced.
First off, why? Second off, the internet grogs switched back to 3.PF. We all know that, but it doesn't mean people weren't buying the books. Their intent was to try and launch a huge online explosion of players so they could get more funding, not to brag about numbers.

Honestly though, mechanically it feels better for a player to focus on raising all of their numbers than lowering one while raising others. To hit bonus and AC now just make things a bit easier on bookkeeping.

>Why would they do that to a successful product?
Because MtG and colourful little horses are a better return on investment.
>And yet, that didn't save the edition from getting shitcanned after only three years.
Work on 3.5 started almost immediately after 3e was published, and work on 4e two years after 3.5e came out. Fourth edition wasn't that short in comparison.

>5e to me has felt artificial from day 1, like those shows that want to recapture the 80es kids audience by shoving in as many references to Back to the Future and He-man as they can. That's what a lot of people wanted, and that explains its current success, but it's missing a bit of soul.
Nails down my thoughts entirely. It's a better designed system in some respects...but it feels hollow.

But TSR D&D's AC has the advantage of being bounded, which restricts some of the big-number infinite scaling found in 3e. There are certainly tradeoffs, but I find descending AC to be a non-issue: especially since the enemy AC has been behind the DM's screen since forever.

Yes. You might remember they had a load of advertising in how the digital subscription would tie into gaming software, a virtual table, and so on. Then a murder-suicide literally killed that project after it had already had money poured into it but before it had anything to show.
Whether that would have been successful or not is another question, but the situation didn't help.

>All support went to Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms and MAYBE Ravenloft, rather than supporting lesser-loved stuff like Mystara (which got like 1 video game)

Mystara got support but died because they tried to sell people both basic and advanced and instead of buying both like idiots they bought the one that sounded newer. It also had two videogames.

Most of the time when we played the DM would announce any penalties which we'd take from whatever bonuses we had then roll. The attacker would say what AC he hit, for instance if my THAC0 was 14 and my adjusted roll was 12 I'd say "I hit AC 2, is that enough?" If it was the DM would say that I hit, if not he'd say I missed. Over the course of the next few rounds we'd home in on the actual AC of the target and by the end would know without the DM's input.

>First off, why?
If your product is doing well you want people to know it. People are more likely to buy a product when they know that other people like it, especially when it's a product whose use requires other people who like it.

I honestly think instead of just hoping for people to not break the numbers 5e just needed to say "by the way ac never goes higher than 24" or some shit.

Actually it had more than that. It had Tower of Doom and Shadow Over Mystara in the arcades. It also had three home games, Fantasy Empires (PC), Order of the Griffon (Turbo-Graphix 16), and Warriors of the Eternal Sun (Sega Genesis).

That's functionally the limit for AC anyway, and that's really only only gimmick builds that exist entirely to max out AC. The limit on using a single AC equation has probably saved a lot of trouble

Yes, if only because AD&D was written by people who had a full grasp of the original design goals of every mechanic included in it whereas later editions are a pastiche.

>Yes and no.
>No and yes.

Pick one.

Yes in that 5e will never be playing DnD when you were twelve
No in that it is less mechanically sound

All of this is 2E stuff though?
1E doesn't have any of that aside from the nostalgia factor. (and I guess campaign settings if you count Judge's Guild stuff)

>Fair enough, but D&D wasn't a "golden goose" prior to 4e even by a galactic reacharound-tier stretch.
It was back in the AD&D 1E days actually.
Back when it was still being sold in Walmart.
But then in it's heyday it sort of dwarfed the entire current RPG industry in size.

The 3e bubble DID burst, and it is completely WotC’s fault.
By doing the OGL and allowing open usage of the d20 system thing suddenly there were HUNDREDS of D&D derivatives using D&D rules on the market. Most sold poorly but it basically drowned the entire edition in copies and copies of copies and gave it an awful reputation overall of poor quality control.
There logic was that everyone would keep buying Core books for all these new settings and material that they didn’t have to pay for, but they neglected to recognize that D&D ISN’T a CCG and that Core books AREN’T booster packs.

Sure it seems like a stupid thing to not realize, but WotC is controlled by executives, not creators. Executives don’t really understand the things they sell, they just understand selling things. When something doesn’t work out, they underwrite it and find a new method because they never really “got” it in the first place.

>4e did so badly that for the three years it was in print the person in charge was fired every year, then it would be another three years before WotC printed another RPG product.

The issue was more that Hasbro had difficulty grasping that D&D was never going to sell as much product as a collectible card game because unlike a CCG you don’t need to keep constantly buying new shit for it. So they kept firing folks and reassigning them to try and “improve” the numbers (which actually were fairly solid for a tabletop rpg) without really understanding why it wasn’t working.

Better than AD&D in terms of crunch - no racial class restrictions, no level limitations, no absurdly complicated multiclassing rules - but worse in terms of available setting material.

Inferior in both fields to 4e.

They are selling reprints of it all already.
dmsguild.com/m/product/17267

Why would they make a 5e version?

>no absurdly complicated multiclassing rules
AD&D's multi-classing is absurdly simple. Pick a Demihuman, look at list of allowed multiclass combos, pick one, done. You get the best saves of your classes, roll all hit dice for your classes and average them, and divide your exp evenly between your classes level up accordingly. Armor is restricted to the lightest armored class to cast spells with the exception of elves being allowed to cast in whatever.

Dual-classing is just as easy, though more difficult to qualify for. Choose your starting class, level in that class until you feel like changing, change to the second class you qualify for. Until your new class is equal or higher than your old class, using your old class negates any exp gained. Once it is equal or higher you can mix and match class features as you see fit. Your first class is permanently frozen at the level you changed classes.

Don't get me wrong, I liked AD&D multiclassing a lot more than 3e's version. I just find the dual-classing mechanics stupid and unnecessary, when you might as well have just let everybody do the multiclassing.

Christ, the people that think they know business in this thread is ugly.

3.5 was financially fine. Normal. Not special.

The end of 3.5 and 4e made a lot more money, but shoveled money into a furnace faster than any that could be brought in - huge staff (3.5 was still being developed and published during the 4e R&D phase), tons of first-party add-on crap, etc. 4e never had a chance to make money being run so poorly, and it is obvious to anyone that have been through a cash-rich product cycle. The next generation is always massively smaller - especially in today’s corporate strategies with an established market dominance. It was literally the same problems that ran TSR into the ground in the 90s.

5e is basically Crawford, Perkins, that lore nerd on the podcasts, and Mearls. They farm out writing and pre-publication reviewing to well-known DMs, but handle the rules stuff themselves and the direction the lore goes. They take a very data driven approach to what to do and why, and made a super cheap clean edition of D&D for the most amount of people to enjoy with less staff than Paizo had on Starfinder. Even the other stuff they do they farm out entirely, like D&D Beyond being run by Curse. During 4e that was 100% WotC made and managed instead of being shuffled to a company that does it on the cheap. And since 5e has outsold the previous WotC editions combined, they are doing something right.

This is extremely basic shit.

Having played both, I strongly prefer 5e. Others have different opinions.

I'll just leave this here. God you're a colossal faggot.

This was unironically a solid game. A shame I could never find a ton of people to play with me.

Seriously, this was a great game, and in many ways far better than the actual vidya ended up being. My only problem is that it's all but impossible to find the Blood Elf racial stats online anymore and that they didn't last long enough to bring in the Draenei, who I view as one of WoW's few enjoyable additions to the setting.

...What? Come on, the series started with orcs invading Azeroth from another planet; paladin-esque neo-demon alien refugees aren't really treading that new a ground in the setting. Besides, if anything, they're expies of the Diaboli from Basic D&D, who were Chaotic Good refugees from the Plane of Dreams who happened to look like bluish-purple devils.

The simpler explanation is that they just have like 5 people on the entire team and regardless realised how quickly splat books killed all the other editions so are leaving it be.

That I will agree with you. In fact many DM disposed of Dual Classing completely and just let humans Multiclass two "basic classes," any two of Fighter, Thief, Cleric, or Mage. No multiclass Rangers or Paladins or the like.