What would you rather play:

>mad druid gaybeard
kek

5e because I’m familiar with it, the system is far less cluttered than Pathfinder, and making homebrew stuff for it is ez.

what speaks against OSR and 4e?

"Tries to be all-things-to-all-people, ends up being no-things-to-no-people" is the primary DnD design failure mode. 4e/OSR/Dungeon World are the workarounds for people who don't want to marry themselves to Very Specific Setting.

The picture but with d&d

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yeah I have, so what..

>OP asks what flavor of D&D would people play and why?
>hur dur don't play D&D guys!

I'm currently running a 4e game and have an OSR one in the pipeline after that, so that answers part of your question.

As to why: I decided for 4e because I was coming out of a Fate game and felt the need for some crunch, and 4e is the edition I like best when running D&D. However, I planned a medium-length game, and after that I want to take my friends on a nostalgia ride because this year marks my 20th anniversary as a GM.

>5e doesn't do anything I can't do better with another system, aside from maybe from roping in newbies (but BECMI works fine for that too)

This is exactly my conclusion after 6 months of 5e.

OP here, I understand the appeal for 5e and OSR, but I want hardcore 3eaboos and 4erries to tell me why they prefer their systems, preferred if they tried the other systems.
I won't judge or flame you. I'm here to learn.

what do you mean by it doesn't do anything better? Like what?

4E because I appreciate what it's trying to do more than any of the other editions listed and my issues with its rules were either officially fixed or are much easier to fix than my issues with other editions' rules.

B/X baby. I'd kinda like to give a 4e game a try as it's the only edition I haven't played, but 5e bores me and 3e was so not my thing that it turned me off D&D for almost a decade.

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what does it try to do? what are the issues with the other editions?

what do you dislike about 3e?

anyone even liking 3e/3.5/pathfinder here?

For me, a veteran 4rry, the point is what other anons said: the game is designed around certain assumptions, and works great for those. It's an action fantasy romp, with heroic characters who are competent but also have limits. It makes all the players feel good because every character has a few cool things he can do even if you're not obsessed with "builds", and as a DM it's a game I can trust - in the sense that it's got very solid guidelines for prep - but at the same time it's also fun to run. It has a limited range of whats good for, but I don't see it as a problem because I usually cycle between two or three different RPGs per year.

alright I heard pretty sound arguments for 4e, but what would you say, memes aside, is totally wrong with 4e?

For me it felt simplified to the point of being limited. It's rules light but not enough compared to the old-school games, and it's missing a lot of character depth compared to the previous two editions, and despite the lip service to the three pillars, there isn't really a lot of support for things to do outside combat, and there isn't a lot of support for things to do IN combat if you're a martial or the DM (really, how many monsters are there with no interesting traits?). At the end of the day, it felt like a middle-of-the-road between all previous editions, without shining in any of the things that were their strong suits. I ran it for about six months when the three core books came out, and later played in a game for a few sessions, so I can say that it doesn't cut it for me with a bit of first-hand experience.

so what do you like to play now?

Feat bloat, lots of modifiers to keep in mind, needs at least some experience or it can drag on a bit.

I'm most comfortable with 3.5e, so i'd take pathfinder. But i've never played it so that might be a big mistake.
Though, core rulebooks and pre-approved supplement races/classes only. I don't want to have to go through too many books just to make sure i'm not mechanically irrelevant.

why do you prefer 3.5e over all else?

Depends on who I'm playing with and who's DMing.

wow

Well... for one, having a lot of stuff means that it'stoo much stuff sometimes, and the terse, mechanical language 4e uses for its presentation isn't always friendly. I've introduced a lot of people to 4e, but from time to time you get a player who doesn't get into it and struggles with managing a complex character.
The fact that the game is focused on a specific playstyle also means that the game doesn't work at its best for something that's not in that vein. 4e has some subsystems that could work in different situations, so it doesn't have to be all combat all the time, but I wouldn't use it for an old-school hexcrawl or something like tomb of horrors, and if you don't care about detailed tactical combat then it's clearly not the game for you.
Personally I never cared too much about optimization or perfect mathematical balance so I don't think that some of the issues that usually are bandied about are as relevant as they're made to be, but I'm aware this is a minority opinion even in the 4e general.
Another thing they got almost always wrong are the published adventures. In a rules-heavy game, those are useful, and the first two years of modules they put out were generally awful.

Too much time spent building characters, not enough on actual play. Too many obscure rules, not enough freedom for the GM. Too much focus on preconceived story and combat encounters, not enough on the party and on exploration of a world.
To me it seems like the later editions are all about playing the character builder minigame, then you show off your build when the DM puts some monsters in front of you. Sometimes the DM railroads you through a story, but nobody's paying attention because they've all got their own stories they're trying to spotlight all the time.

shit, this is the kind of stuff that drove me away from pathfinder, which I started with.

Oh this is specifically in response to "what I don't like about 3e."

oh alright.
4e and 3.5 seem pretty similiar in that regard.

Yeah, I'd still like to give 4e a go, though, as I hear it's got a stronger push towards parties working together, and I'd like to see that.

I actually don't know shit about 2e.
What can you guys tell me about 2e d&d?

In short, i like 3.5 for the reasons people dislike it. The subsystems in core are admittedly very intimidating to newer players in just the skill ranks alone. But that amount of customisation means quite a lot. One of the things i was surprised was removed in 5th edition was armour penalties were nowhere near as bad, which i actually preferred the penalties to be there. And a lot of what said.

I like my subsystems to be a series of penalties and bonuses, not a bunch of bonuses balanced with the bloat of the things you use them on. I mean, whats the point of dealing double damage if all the monsters have double health anyway. Even little associative mechanics like the strength penalties to bows despite them being a dex weapon.

What is really true, but like he said
>the later editions are all about playing the character builder minigame
was pretty much my experience with 5e so when that was simplified down even further it lost a lot of the charm that 3.5e's, albeit excessive, complexity had.

It clarified AD&D, which was not a bad thing since AD&D is a very murky system, but it lost much of what was great about the 1e DMG. (Seriously, sit down and give that a read sometime, it's ace) It was also a bit sanitized, in a delayed reaction to the Satanic Panic.
It also bought into the increasingly railroady "story focused" adventure modules, and involves a few fixes to things that weren't broken. (Shifting XP for GP to an optional rule, introducing the murderhobo who kills everything because XP, accelerating dungeon exploration speed by 10x to get players through the dungeon much faster and to the next story point -- hey you weren't planning on making your own dungeons, were you?) 2e wanted to be a game of heroic fantasy and grand tales, but it was still married to a gritty sword & sorcery system where you died suddenly and without warning at early levels, which is kind of at crosspurposes -- it's the first D&D that didn't know what it wanted to be.

It's also known for having some of the biggest and most beautiful setting box sets ever, TSR spent lavishly on these things and they're great.

The tail end of 2e brought some awful expansions, from some of the Complete books, to the Player's Option books, of which Combat and Tactics is just about decent, Spells and Magic has some good bits, and Skills and Powers is like a terrible attempt at 3e that manages to be even more broken and badly designed.
This thread cap also discusses the gradual shift away from the original playstyle that happened during 2e.

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>was pretty much my experience with 5e

Yeah, that's why I said "the later editions" because 5e is very much that.

I can see what you dig about 3e. It's not for me, but hey, you have fun your way, I'll do it mine, 3e bro.

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4e because i didn't play it and yet to be disappointed by it.

4E BEST E

I'd say 3.5

Not because I think it's better than the others, but rather because I'm in a 4e game and a 5e game now and I'm growing nostalgic for it

cute!
what disappoints you in the other editions?

and I have heard pretty much only praise for OSR. what does OSR do wrong?

3e or pathfinder

>and I have heard pretty much only praise for OSR. what does OSR do wrong?

I think there's two things to say here.
The first one is that OSR too focuses on a specific playstyle, or at least a few variations on that playstyle. If you want to play that it's great, if you want something else you're going to have trouble.

Second, and please take this with a grain of salt, is that there is a reason why it's called "old school". Not saying that new = better all the time, but you can trace an evolution of some design decisions. For example, most old editions are a bit piecemeal, with ad-hoc subsystems for several specific things that often don't interact well or need the input of a referee, while "modern" game design in general moved towards unified mechanics. That's relative, because under the OSR label you find a ton of different variations, as many authors took the old rules and added their own spin - but that could also be an issue sometimes, because you'll have to have a DIY attitude to sort things out. Mind you, all this I said is also one of the big drives of OSR, it all comes down to the sort of approach you have to a ruleset.

do you seriously not have tg_complaints_department

What is why 3.5e/PF conti ues to be my favorite DnD edition, though there are things that he didn't mention as well.

The ridiculous customization that 3.5e/PF with 3pp offers is also a boon for GMs as well. With PF's splats and a bit of creativity, you can make some really dynamic battles with neat tricks that aren't possible to balance in other systems. I've seen, for instance, the BBEG trying to trick our split parties against each other with silent image, or snipers that use reflected shots to conceal his location. These battles are far more memorable than the numbers game that 4e and even 5e often turns into.

Basically, what PF lacks in balance it offers in spades in flexibility. A single encounter can be appriached in so many different ways aside from just reducing opponent HP to zero, that you can actually, really roleplay character personalities in combat. That really helps make it a premier narrative-based game compared to the more wargame-inspired later editions.

>That really helps make it a premier narrative-based game compared to the more wargame-inspired later editions.

Look, I like how this thread managed to stay positive until now, and we're just exchanging opinions, but "premier narrative-based game" is really, really, really not something you can say about Pathfinder. You should try some *actual* narrative games to get a comparison.

what would be a good narrative game?

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OSR. Make me suffer.

You are right. I should have said in comparison to the other games listed, since there are many games that do it far better without clunky systems (WoD, for instance).

It's just much better at it than its DnD bretheren.

Fate, Fiasco, DitV, Apocalypse World and its offspring (not everyone is good), Dread, Ten Candles, Polaris. I'm sure there's a few others.

All right. I see where you're coming from, but let me just say that I still don't agree.

PF, because despite it's many flaws, it's still pretty much D&D

If I had a good PF DM, I think I'd be objectively happy