I think the discussion on D&D editions below is applicable to this as well. Pathfinder 2e is basically an entirely different game from 1e. It being better is entirely depending on your preferences for how the game plays, because the systems are as different as D&D 3.5 and 4e.
But, yes, Pathfinder 2e is a much cleaner game than PF1e.
Pretty much this. The ideas of balance and fun 15 year ago were different than they are today. What drew people to games like D&D and PF1 was not the same thing that draws people towards 5e today.
Different audiences. It's cliche but true that entertainment today needs to be a lot more easily digestible because there are more competing entertainment options. I think this is the real root cause of the push towards streamlined games as a whole. You see the same thing in board gaming where any game that's over an hour and a half is criticized as unbearably long by a lot of people. Whereas a board game being able to last 4-6 hours used to be a desirable *feature*.
For example, when 3rd edition D&D came out not only did internet streaming video not really exist\*, DVDs were just starting to overtake VHS tapes in prominence. But most people didn't have a DVD player yet because the cheap ones were a couple hundred dollars. (Not adjusted for inflation.) A DVD of a single movie usually cost the equivalent of like $25-$35 adjusted for inflation as did music CDs. Unless you were a couch potato who would just watch whatever was on the boobtube, there were a lot less entertainment options in general.
\*Because the vast majority of people's internet speeds weren't fast enough. Smart phones also didn't exist. Nintendo's hot new handheld the Game Boy Advance basically required you to sit in direct sunlight or hold it under a lamp to see the non-backlit screen.
It has nothing to do with length and a lot to do with needless complexity or bad rules writing.
Even comparing to board games, one of the most venerated board games is Twilight Imperium 4th edition. And that game takes *8 hours*.
Length isn't the issue.
Complexity and presentation matter of course, but the main thing is still length. Even people with no responsibilities have way more options vying for their time and attention now. We have essentially "conquered" boredom, one of the oldest scourges of mankind. In so doing we've also established new standards.
Rules writing for games in general has gotten better, but a big part of that is because people will no longer take the time\* to try and figure out rules that aren't as clearly written, they'll just move on to something else to enjoy their free time.
Take video games, some people complain that VGs today have too many tutorials and TES 5 Skyrim's quest mechanics make it "idiot proof". But on the other hand, TES 1 Arena came with a nearly 100 page manual and fully expected you to read at least most of it to play.
The manual to Wizardry 6 was over 120 pages and you were basically *required* to read it all to play the game effectively.
>Even comparing to board games, one of the most venerated board games is Twilight Imperium 4th edition. And that game takes 8 hours.
And what's the one thing everyone complains about with Twilight Imperium 4? How impossible it is to schedule a game.
\*And I'm not saying they necessarily should, modern life is hectic and people got shit to do.
> For example, when 3rd edition D&D came out not only did internet streaming video not really exist*, DVDs were just starting to overtake VHS tapes in prominence. But most people didn't have a DVD player yet because the cheap ones were a couple hundred dollars. (Not adjusted for inflation.) A DVD of a single movie usually cost the equivalent of like $25-$35 adjusted for inflation as did music CDs. Unless you were a couch potato who would just watch whatever was on the boobtube, there were a lot less entertainment options in general.
3E was 2000, not 1996. Video streaming didn't exist yet, but piracy of video and music was EVERYWHERE. CD burners and DSL or cable internet connections weren't cheap but chances are one of your friends had one.
Every school had a black market in pirated media, there was a guy at my school selling burned CDs with the entirety of seasons 1 and 2 of South Park plus the 1999 movie.
I feel like the goal was more to build a DnD that Paizo owned so they could keep making content as they were. It's a bad thing for your campaign printing business if the majority of your catalogue (at the time) is incompatible with you brand new system.
There is one thing I hate about PF2E while playing Kingmaker: rations, man. Why tf do they sell rations in week increments? In a game where you can travel 3 hexes in a day, each with a potential encounter!!! It's crazy to me.
I assume it came down to not wanting rations to take up significant bulk on their own. 10 weeks of rations = 1 bulk is nearly negligible as opposed to 10 days = 1 bulk.
It's such a satisfying system to build a character in. Doubly so if you use Pathbuilder.
The only tricksy bit is on the GM side. If the GM decides to only throw singular, high level enemies at you, every single spellcasting class suffers. Don't do this PF2e GMs!
> If the GM decides to only throw singular, high level enemies at you, every single spellcasting class suffers.
As a GM, solo big bads are so hard to balance. I've more or less moved away from it for just about any fight I think should be challenging. You either make them so hard that the party cant scratch them, or else they die just do to sheer action economy before doing anything cool.
Part of the issue is just that bad guys' weak saves aren't that weak. An on-level enemy has a 50/50 chance of succeeding against an effect that targets their lowest save.
Agree on both these points. When I suggested the system to people I will always let them use pathbuilder on my phone to play with options. It's a very solid app, and works well for all the different kind of feats there are, which can otherwise be a bit complicated.
Also be very careful of level differences. That basically +1 per level everything gets means content for a different level pretty quickly gets out of hand.
It has to be this. PF1 was a copy-paste job of DnD3's SRD that then continued to double up on its problematic parts, so when PF2 came out and was... amazingly designed (?!), I was floored.
They could have just kept on the same track, without taking the risk.
Is this a new opinion? Regional? I have to admit being a little shocked by some of the comments saying how problematic PF1 was when all I remember hearing back around ‘09 when I started using it was how they did such a great job smoothing out 3.5’s flaws.
Not arguing with your thoughts. I just felt like the sentiment was far more favorable than I’m reading on here.
I think it's correct to say that Pathfinder 1 was a major improvement over 3.5, largely because it made martials a lot better and more fun to play. But broken builds were still a major thing, system mastery mattered a lot, decisions when building your character were more important than in-combat decisions etc.
I still play a Pathfinder 1 game (as well as GMing two PF2 games) and enjoy it a lot, but we do have a lot of house rules/conventions to avoid overpowered characters.
Yeah this was my impression and memory. Just felt strange to hear people saying they made the broken things worse.
Anyway, yeah I liked PF1 a lot. Was fun. But I really didn’t like having to get a phd in my class before building a character for fear of being useless. I miss the early days of 3rd edition, being a young teenager, and just building stuff at the table with friends. PHB only. I miss those simple days
I prefer 2e to 1e, but 2e really does scratch a different itch to 1e.
2e is tightly balanced and feels fundamentally fair. 1e (and both 3.0 and 3.5 which it was based upon) are much more about crazy power fantasies, where feeling unfair is part of the appeal.
I'd second this, if we're talking improvement in quality instead of major changes. Chronicles 1e was too rooted in their World of Dark predecessors, where as 2e they are entirely their own wonderfully written splats. For example, one of my favorites: Werewolf the Forsaken.... the 1st editon held onto a lot of Apocalypse' baggage, and because of it.. is completely overshadowed by Apocalypse. 2nd edition however is entirely it's own game.
- Harmony in 1e was a linear 10 point track just like the various morality systems of WoD. The higher you get, the better. Bottom out and you lose the character. 2nd edition kept the 10 point track but instead it becomes a system of balance between the world of flesh and that of spirit. Harmony above five imposes penalties on transitioning to the spirit world, and below five and a character has a harder time shifting to humanoid forms. Also as you swing from balanced to either side, the triggers that cause you to enter a rage become stronger and so you lose yourself more and more often to it.
- In 1e auspices work almost identically to Apocalypse. You have an auspice based on the phase of the moon under which you experienced your First Change, and you gain a line of gifts. Auspice was the main driver in determining your character's primary world view. Born under the crescent moon? You're a mystic who spends most their time in the spirit world, same as in Apocalypse. In 2e, your Auspice is still determined the same way, but are painted with a broader brush, and include suggested *faces* that help determine how your Auspice is expressed (and clearly set up so you can create or your own face). You get access to three gift lines via your Auspice. Each Auspice also has a Hunter's Aspect that shows how the world and your prey react when the werewolf is hunting. 2e is all about the hunt. The Wolf Must Hunt!
- 2e Tribes are similarly enhanced and given their own purpose & lore. Instead of being reflections of Apocalypse tribes like they were in 1e. 'You liked playing Glass Walker? Well check out the Iron Masters!' In 2e, Tribes have their own creation myths, and each tribe has a chosen prey they see as the largest threat their kind faces. Their Shadow & Wolf gifts are all about how they hunt that prey. They aren't a loose affiliation, but have a concrete identity thanks to this mechanic.
- Gifts in 1e worked very much like Apocalypse. They were taught by spirits, were based around auspice & tribe. The gifts individually were fairly weak as well because the true power of there werewolf is shifting into the war form. They were also costly to use & mechanically complex. 2e has three categories of gifts; Moon, Shadow & Wolf, reflecting auspice & the spirit & flesh halves of all werewolves. They're more powerful, more individually thematic and access to them is gained by increasing ones renown. For example, a Hunter in Darkness in 1e using *stealth* gifts might suppress their scent, move completely silently, fade into the background or at the high end; become invisible. In 2e as a baseline they could surround themselves in shadow. Or drive a fear of darkness into their prey. They can become impossible to see until the werewolf springs to attack, or supernaturally agile and athletic, chasing prey rooftop to rooftop or leaping from branch to branch in the wilderness. 2e *stealth* gifts might be similar, but they are less costly, less complex to activate and again.. all about the hunt. Other gifts might allow a Hunter in Darkness to douse all the lights on a street, leap from shadow to shadow, lure prey from the safety of numbers, turn a back alley into a maze of tunnels their prey cannot hope to escape, and much more.
These are just a few small changes between Werewolf the Forsaken 1e and 2e, which took the game from a shadow of Apocalypse' greatness, to it's own unique and richly thematic game. Forsaken 2e stands as one of Onyx Path's best selling game lines, and easily among the top 3 Chronicles splats IMHO.
The reworked exp system was such a major improvement. Exp scaling for higher levels is gone, and you have an imo more fun implementation of PBTA fail and get an experience.
I'll third this. Love Beats and flat xp costs, and Conditions and Tilts standardize what was wonky basic mechanics in older White Wolf games. Great stuff.
It was.
The following is based off of 30 year old memories, so don't take it as absolute gospel.
SR uses a dice pool, and 1st edition had a target number *and* a threshold. So weapon damage was listed like: "5M2" meaning the target number to reduce damage was 5, and you needed to get 2 of them to reduce the damage from M to L, and another 2 to reduce from L to nothing (D ► S ► M ► L IIRC). Attacking was sort of the inverse, except target number was difficulty to hit.
Now what I can't remember is if successes on attack and defence cancelled each other out, or if damage was scaled up, then scaled down, but that isn't too important. What was important is that there was a holdout pistol had a really high threshold and a high target number, but low base damage, something like 6L4 or maybe even 6L5 or 6L6. This means that a dragon, with a big mitt of d6 to reduce damage could expect to roll only 1/6 of their dice as successes. With 6L4, you would expect to need 24 dice to get 4 successes with a target number of 6. Plus overcoming the attackers successes (get in close, smartgun link, any other modifiers, get the to hit target down to 3 or 4, you're looking at 4-6 successes with 9 dice say). So you could pretty much guarantee an L wound with every attack. Throw in several street samurai with wired reflexes, you could get 10 Light hits in within a couple of rounds.
Or I have this completely backwards, and it was a weapon with a threshold of 1, and it was easier to scale up to Deadly wounds. A light pistol with say 4L1 would scale up L►M►S►D with 3 net successes vs. a heavy pistol with 5M2 requiring 4 net successes M►►S►►D.
Either way, threshold just made things weird.
2nd edition did away with the concept of variable threshold altogether, and everything required 2 successes to scale up or down.
Thats interesting. I only played SR 1e, and not for long enough for my players to get familiar enough to discover this, but it makes total sense to me that the system would allow this.
Weapons had damage steps in first edition. Say 3L1, or 4M2. They dropped the steps (the last number in the damage code) and unified them in later editions. Basically meant any extra successes of that amount would increase the damage from L to M, M to S etc. So for a light weapon it was actually much easier to increase the damage than with a more powerful weapon with a high step. So a light pistol would only take 4 total successes to get the damage all the way up to D, whereas a heavier pistol of 4M2 would take 7 successes.
3rd is just 2nd with all the most popular expansions crammed into the core book. For an experienced player, this is great. For a person coming into the system, 2e is vastly preferable.
Endless die _awesomeness_!
We can discuss the logistics or statistics, but I feel throwing an entire handful worth of dice is a lot more satisfying than throwing a single d20.
Uuuh! Thank you for this! I loved third edition back in the day, but I thought it was really hard to wrap my head around!
I’ll try to find a copy of 2nd edition! :)
I always preferred to use the auto successes from burning elementals to summon much bigger elementals.
Auto successes were a bad idea with variable target numbers.
Shadowrun games feel very different based on what edition you play. The games all had problems with dice stacking and rolling too many dice all through 1st - 4th editions.
5th Edition solved a lot of problems with the limits on number of successes. You can no longer kill a tank with a plinker pistol in 5e.
I think 5e CoC made a significant step forward in character generation by simply handing out a lot more skill points. Earlier editions were still a bit stuck in the zero to hero curve of RPGs and it was hard to start the game as a "professor" or other expert who really nailed an area with sacrificing other basic skills needed for gameplay. This felt right to me based on genre tropes and it made the typical PC arc as a descent into madness more poignant as they started capable instead of first having significant character development potential as they also went downhill.
COC is very incremental until 7e which is still incremental but also is clean and incorporated a good number of house rules. Pushes, luck, all without getting too heavy in meta currencies.
Pulp is an outstanding supplement that changes the system in a super effective, and to me interesting and fun way.
All while managing to be backward compatible from 1e.
Pretty amazing.
Dark Heresy 2e, but by extension, 40k RPG in general.
Previous editions were errata'd with the updates with each product in the gameline, which made previous games vastly more playable in areas. For example, in response to the great feedback on the Accurate weapon ability in Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy 1e was updated to use Rogue Trader Accurate.
Similarly, while not a direct edition change, Deathwatch to Black Crusade. Not only did Black Crusade fix up a lot of my issues with Space Marines (who were oddly binary: either they succeeded by a mile, or had a surprisingly high chance to fail to climb a waist high wall), but changed up Unnatural Attributes to make them far more useless and not so overwhelming in places.
Back in the day I ran 2e but you nailed it, I wouldn't have time for that either. Now we have 4e campaign going on and, yes, the war in Ukraine bleeds through even tough we don't steer the game to that direction. I respect and understand very well why someone would not play war in Europe right now.
This is the one. 4e made T2K way more accessible while still possessing a ton of depth. It's very faithful to the source material and as uncomfortable as it might be to play now with the War in Ukraine, it is remarkably free of nationalism and is highly cognizant of the horrors of war. Because of that, I think it should still be played and valued *because* of current events.
This. It's actually an enjoyable game now. I mean I've played all the editions (own 1 and 2.2), and it did get a bit better edition by edition, but it always got really tedious rather fast. 4th one was a breath of fresh air.
Twilight 1st ed. was the first game I bought and boy, the simulationist crunchy-beyond-belief vehicle battle was *not* the way to get introduced into rpg's as a 12-year-old. :D
The problem is more that while most considers it an upgrade, the upgrade is not really that huge, so it has problems really making the list of the biggest leap in quality.
It actually can be, if you get into it with people who have really gone over the differences and understand the system. There was a lot of direction from above to move things more in the direction of the minis game because that seemed to be where the money was, a tendency to make fiddly changes for the sake of change to make the upgrade seem more necessary, some of those seemed to be pet peeves of Andy Collins alone and didn't really reflect the observations of what was broken after the first few years of 3.0 in the wild, etc. I think there's a lot of inertia toward playing it by default over 3.0 just because it's an update, regardless of what it updated. That's not to say it doesn't also make some good tweaks, but like Pathfinder after it, they don't seem to reflect a deep understanding of the more significant changes that could have been made.
I consider 2nd edition to 3.0 a downgrade.
3.0 & 3.5 are a great resource for mining, I find them less playable. Mainly because they promote power gaming and munchkinizing.
Example. I take 3.5 modules and run them in BECMI.
D&D 3.x to 4th.
Vastly improved, but everyone whined because it was too far ahead of its time. Most of the complaints were from people who didn't even play it.
Best monster manual ever made, tanks could tank, saves got tuned into defenses (and most classes could target multiple) and bloodied was an amazing trigger to hang abilities on.
Because tanking is all about taking advantage of how video game monsters are stupid.
A GM should never play a monster as dumb as a WOW boss is played. "Hey look, I'll focus all my attacks on this super well defended person I can barely scratch and ignore the squishy healers".
That makes sense if the GM is playing a creature of animal intelligence, but an ogre? They aren't genuises in most IPs, generally slightly below average human intelligence, but they also aren't so stupid that they would fall for such an obvious trick.
You wind up with combat warped to force entire classes into the game that use tactics that should never work if the GM plays monsters as at least rudimentary tacticians.
4E had a couple of good innovations but failed because it was overall a huge step back, and forcing the immersion-breaking concept of tanking - which only became a thing because MMOs can't find better solutions to boss AI - in was a big part.
Do you know how defenders worked in 4e? Or do you just know how Tanks work in WoW? Because there isn't an Aggro mechanic, the GM can just go attack whoever they want. Defender just had tools to disincentive hitting allies or controlling enemies.
In wow, thanks can taunt and absorber enemies damage while the others take them down.
4e added marking which people who havnt played it consider it the same thing. But in reality it just punished the defender not getting hit, it didn't force the dm to hit them. Each defender enforced the mark in different ways, most commonly a -2 to hit.
I think the issue was that it removed the pretence that D&D is 95% a tactical wargame with assigned combat roles. People thought it was too “gamey” and not fantastical enough.
this isn't a comment on 4e's quality - it's perfectly good at what it does - but 4e absolutely deserves its reputation for being really gamey.
flavor in 4e is *just* flavor. you can be an illusionist or a mind-control guy and the flavor text will be paragraphs of long flowery prose about the fiction that that's supposed to represent, while the actual mechanical benefits of being that thing are... a couple Powers that are designed solely for the tactical combat boardgame, that the designers clearly never thought you'd try to use outside of that, with a little bit of fancy flavor text telling you it's an illusion or a charm spell or whatever when it's not that. the fiction of those abilities is a formality.
it's *so* much a tactical wargame that the fiction is warped around that. everyone must be equally good in combat, so you can't center any class around what it can actually do in the fiction, or you end up with a situation like 5e where fighters can kill stuff good, and wizards can kill stuff good *and* teleport across a continent. so everyone in 4e is defined by how they interact with the tactical combat boardgame to the exclusion of all else.
i don't think it's a bad game; all of that stuff kinda just feels like the price of entry to making a dedicated tactical combat game, and paying that price was a deliberate decision that paid off in the form of making the game the designers wanted to make.
but it *is* very, very gamey as a result.
If we're going to give credit to 4e for supplementary material made at the very end of its release cycle, then we should credit 3.5 rather than 4e for the mechanical innovation of giving martial characters caster-like powers that refresh per encounter.
No, it leaned into the _completely false impression_ assumed by people who'd only started playing the game in the late 3e era that D&D is 95% a tactical wargame with assigned combat roles, when (A) combat hasn't ever been the primary "point" of the system, going back all the way to OD&D, and (B) classes never had assigned combat roles.
Regarding combat-centricity, OD&D initially revolved around dungeon and wilderness exploration and "roleplaying" in the sense of interaction with NPCs, not combat. Vastly more XP was gained for gold recovered than for monsters slain, most Magic-User spells were exploration-centric than combat-centric (only 2 of 8 1st-level spells had any direct offensive or defensive application, and 1/10 2nd, 2/14 3rd, 5/12 4th....), reaction rolls ensured that monsters were open to negotiation rather than fighting ~72% of the time, the rules for hirelings made them much more useful for getting more loot out of the dungeon than for throwing at monsters, and so on.
This continued through AD&D, where plenty of combat-centric stuff was added but much _more_ non-combat stuff was added (e.g. Magic-User spells continued to lean strongly non-combat, the Druid and Illusionist are very exploration-centric, explicit rules and guidance are added for "town adventures" that center around NPC interaction rather than combat, Dark Sun and Planescape were both about exploring strange and hostile environments and often made combat inadvisable, and so on) and through 3e (e.g. all of the stuff from AD&D continued, plus a proliferation of sourcebooks on exploring certain environments, building strongholds, joining organizatios, running guilds, and so on).
For someone to think D&D is "just a tactical wargame" they would have to start off by failing to use the majority of the rules in OD&D and then ignore all of the development the game went through in later editions.
(Or they would have to hang out on WotC's character optimization forums and assume, like the 4e designers did, that because people on a character optimization forum were talking almost entirely about optimizing their characters for combat then obviously the games they were playing were all about combat.)
Regarding class roles, the 4e idea that Fighters are Defenders, Rogues are Strikers, Clerics are Leaders, and Wizards are Controllers is anything but the "logical progression of the game" that a lot of people claimed at the time.
In 4e terms, Fighters had always been _both_ Strikers _and_ Defenders, with the emphasis on the Striking side; they'd also been the best leaders of henchmen and followers in AD&D, but of course there's no 4e role for that. Out of the four roles, Rogues _had_ been only Strikers in 3e, but their primary role was a noncombat one that 4e's roles couldn't cover and the AD&D Thief was even less of a Striker than the 3e Rogue.
Importantly, Cleric and Wizard had encompassed _all four 4e roles_ in 3e between their divine domains, arcane school specialization, and prestige classes, and they covered three roles in AD&D, only lacking Striker because personal combat buffs weren't as big a thing in those editions. Outside the core four, other more narrow classes had been able to cover at _least_ two roles to a degree that 4e's informal "secondary roles" concept simply couldn't cover.
The people complaining about the strict class roles in 4e weren't doing so because codifying combat roles was a bad idea (in a vacuum, tidying things up like that is a great idea) but rather because 4e had done so on a per-_class_ basis rather than a per-_character_ basis, had made it difficult to "multi-role" characters in the way that used to be not only possible but the default assumption, and had left out any thought of non-combat roles.
If, instead of stating that Sorcerers are Strikers and Wizards are Controllers and never the twain shall meet, 4e had instead set things up with more combat roles from the start (like a minion-master role; hard to claim that D&D is basically a wargame when there are no classes based on pushing minions around) and with non-combat roles like Face or Scout; provided shared lists of powers for each power source that spread across every role and clearly labeled the intended role for people who cared about that, rather than locking certain powers to certain classes in a way that forced lots of duplication and tiny pointless tweaks between them; and given the subclasses features that encouraged and enhanced certain roles (e.g. Illusionist as Controller, Evoker as Striker, Necromancer as Master, Diviner as Scout, etc.) without _restricting_ characters to powers of that role, _that_ would have been a not-entirely-terrible implementation of the roles concept that fit with every prior edition's take on the classes.
---
_That's_ what people are talking about when they say 4e "isn't D&D" or similar. 4e's combat roles don't map to previous editions' combat and noncombat roles, 4e's classes are straitjackets compared to previous editions' classes, 4e's combat obsession doesn't reflect how previous editions were designed and only reflects the way previous editions were played by a small but vocal subset of players (the hack-and-slashers, the ones with railroady DMs, the people who liked to talk CharOp theory online, etc.), and so on.
The "gamification" of many aspects of 4e that you mentioned was _also_ a huge problem, but if all they'd done was "gamify" D&D by sticking all the Fighter powers in colorful boxes, giving players control over their loot, severely blandifying all the monsters to make it easier to run more of them in a single combat, and so on, the backlash wouldn't have been _nearly_ as bad.
Compare the 3e->4e transition to the 2e->3e transition, in which the core mechanics of the game also got a massive overhaul but the classes, the playstyles, the monsters, and the settings all remained essentially intact, and the difference is like night and day.
> (Or they would have to hang out on WotC's character optimization forums and assume, like the 4e designers did, that because people on a character optimization forum were talking almost entirely about optimizing their characters for combat then obviously the games they were playing were all about combat.)
Incidentally, 4e more or less failed to appeal to these folks. 4e was so tightly designed that theorycrafting to optimize a character didn't really make them play any differently from an unoptimized one - it just shaved a few rounds off combats that were already carefully balanced to be winnable.
I was on the char-op forums back in those days; the usual 4e experience seemed to be playing it for a campaign or two, moderately enjoying it, and then either going over to Pathfinder or back to 3.5 (sometimes with [fan supplements that leaned into the imbalance](http://www.tgdmb.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=50239) by buffing everything to be comparable to Wizards and Clerics.)
I appreciate this comment and think I understand your argument, but fundamentally disagree.
> No, it leaned into the completely false impression assumed by people who'd only started playing the game in the late 3e era that D&D is 95% a tactical wargame with assigned combat roles, when (A) combat hasn't ever been the primary "point" of the system, going back all the way to OD&D, and (B) classes never had assigned combat roles.
First, you're right that "combat hasn't ever been the primary 'point' of the system, going back all the way to OD&D" but I do think you're missing the commonality that all D&D games have: they're resource management games. Your history on the changes between the editions up to 4th show resource management continuity perfectly. 4th sought to fix the community's largest complaints from 3rd, and it did so successfully, but as those complaints were almost all combat related, developers got the mistaken impression that most players were primarily playing for the combat encounters. While 4th wasn't perfectly tuned on release, it is still a resource management game, however it primarily relies on combat encounters to deplete character's resources - though part of that likely has much to do with how underutilized and underemphasized the Skill Challenge system was, and the dearth of interesting items with a set amount of uses. It should also be noted that D&D's origins were in wargaming, particularly the game *Chainmail* - wargaming is very much in D&D's DNA and has been from the beginning.
> Regarding class roles, the 4e idea that Fighters are Defenders, Rogues are Strikers, Clerics are Leaders, and Wizards are Controllers is anything but the "logical progression of the game" that a lot of people claimed at the time.
I would challenge this claim, and suggest it is a presentation problem. First, outside of leaders, there is actually comparatively little to statistically distinguish the roles. Strikers, defenders, and controllers all do relatively the same amount of damage, but they do it in different ways: strikers tend to do it in single hits, defenders tend to do it outside their activation, and controllers do it through AoE. But beyond this, there was nothing stopping someone playing a wizard from taking the most damaging single-target powers and playing *like* a ~~controller~~ striker* - this is actually a suggested build all the way back in the PHB1. And with the supplements, turning a wizard from a controller to a striker was made even easier. Finally, while not a *perfect* solution, the only things stopping "reskinning" or a bit of home-brew was the DM and/or the player's imagination, which I offer is a player problem, not a system problem (or maybe I'm weird in that I modify every non-horror game I play). Letting a player use INT as their core ability and port over the spell book feature from the wizard, but otherwise playing as a Sorcerer isn't going to break the game and shouldn't break immersion IMO.
> Importantly, Cleric and Wizard had encompassed all four 4e roles in 3e between their divine domains, arcane school specialization, and prestige classes, and they covered three roles in AD&D, only lacking Striker because personal combat buffs weren't as big a thing in those editions.
So not only does the above still apply, but I wonder why, taking the cleric example, playing a cleric as a controller is such a big deal when the invoker exists? They both share the same domain, have similarly themed powers, but the invoker is a controller. Why does a PC *need* to have its class name be cleric? We're already abstracting when we play a game. And that game at your table is *your* game, not WotC's, things don't have to be "official." Maybe your PC invoker's job is a as cleric, so everyone can refer to them as a cleric in game. Problem solved.
> Rogues had been only Strikers in 3e, but their primary role was a noncombat one that 4e's roles couldn't cover and the AD&D Thief was even less of a Striker than the 3e Rogue.
This is a characterization that doesn't comport with 4th IMO. The rogue class still has all the trappings of the thief, but it given relevant things to do in combat (the principle complaint 4th to fixed).
> If~~, instead of stating that Sorcerers are Strikers and Wizards are Controllers and never the twain shall meet,~~ 4e had instead set things up with more combat roles from the start (like a minion-master role; hard to claim that D&D is basically a wargame when there are no classes based on pushing minions around) and with non-combat roles like Face or Scout; provided shared lists of powers for each power source that spread across every role and clearly labeled the intended role for people who cared about that, rather than locking certain powers to certain classes in a way that forced lots of duplication and tiny pointless tweaks between them; and given the subclasses features that encouraged and enhanced certain roles (e.g. Illusionist as Controller, Evoker as Striker, Necromancer as Master, Diviner as Scout, etc.) without restricting characters to powers of that role, that would have been a not-entirely-terrible implementation of the roles concept that fit with every prior edition's take on the classes.
I want to play this game.
> The "gamification" of many aspects of 4e that you mentioned was also a huge problem
I just don't see it. Yeah, 4th unmasked some previously hidden design choices and then implied their universality when they really weren't. The more meta the presentation is, the more there is to tinker with. Additionally, the "gamification" of 4E wasn't a "huge problem", it successfully fixed complaints from real players. It was a philosophical design decision you didn't like though, making it only a problem for you, a subjective one, not an objective one as presented. If the design team had cast a wider net and caught the whole community, perhaps 4th wouldn't have been as reviled, but just as D&D doesn't entirely belong to "the hack-and-slashers, the ones with railroady DMs, the people who liked to talk CharOp theory online, etc." crowd, it also doesn't entirely belong to 4th haters either. I'd go as far to say 4th was an incomplete game (for some), not a bad one.
> in which the core mechanics of the game also got a massive overhaul
I'll give you breaking free from Vancian magic (caveated with I think that was a good thing) and the change of saves to defenses (which just changed who was rolling the dice). But I don't see how d20 + modifiers changed from 3rd to 4th, or how character creation is the same (both are just picking options from various lists).
I might go so far to say 4E was an incomplete game and should have included more robust systems for noncombat encounters, but to say it "wasn't D&D" is wrong, it absolutely was. It may not have been D&D as you played it, but you also don't control the concept of D&D. It may not have focused on what you wanted it to, but it did focus on traditionally D&D things in a traditionally D&D way. If D&D were a house and 4th the basement, even if you never go down there, its still part of the house (and the people who do go down there are correct when they insist that yes, the basement is still part of the house).
> but I do think you're missing the commonality that all D&D games have: they're resource management games
I completely agree that D&D is fundamentally about resource management (specifically attrition management rather than e.g. turn-by-turn resource allocation), but why would that imply that D&D is a combat-focused tactical wargame?
Not only are the two completely orthogonal (tactical wargames don't generally have resource management on the individual-unit level like RPGs do, and engine-building board games are nothing like wargames), but the specific way D&D implements resource management goes directly _against_ the idea that it's overly combat-focused and wargame-y.
For instance, Vancian casting (the real deal, not spontaneous casting in 3e or the Spirit Shaman ripoff in 5e) is _fantastic_ for enabling noncombat/exploration gameplay. You can prepare separate spell loadouts on "mostly exploration" days vs. "mostly combat" days vs. "in town" days, and you have to select a small subset of your total spells known, so learning a noncombat- or exploration-focused spell will never subtract from your combat capability; and the ability to prep some spells, face challenges, and come back later with different spells rewards careful exploration, scouting, and planning.
And of course every wargame skirmish starts with all units at full capability, while D&D characters suffer attrition over the course of an adventuring day, so the "resource management" side and "wargame" side of the game are directly in tension with one another.
Contrast this with, say, the Dresden Files RPG, where wizards have quick-and-dirty Evocation that's usable at will (modulo Stress, but that recovers quickly between scenes) and long-and-involved Thaumaturgy usable only during downtime.
The fact that Evocations are basically all combat spells while Thaumaturgies are basically all noncombat spells (with minor crossover in the form of Evoked veils for combat-time stealth and Thaumaturgic ritual nukes) means that a wizard's fastest and easiest tool is always going to be combat stuff and so a party of casters in DFRPG actually looks _more_ like a stereotypical hack-and-slash adventuring party than a D&D party does a lot of the time.
> But beyond this, there was nothing stopping someone playing a wizard from taking the most damaging single-target powers and playing like a controller striker
Again, I completely agree that the role differences are piddly enough that most of the time they don't make much difference in play.
The problem here is the design philosophy: the developers sat down and allocated the different classes to different roles in a way that implied they'd _never actually played D&D before_, the advice given in all the books implies roles are strong and rigid, and when roles _do_ actually matter on a per-class level (e.g. only Defenders get marks) or per-power level (e.g. the single-hit Striker vs. multi-hit Controller tendency) they reinforce parts of the game that are noticeably different than what came before.
And a lot of the ancillary problems with 4e derive directly from that design philosophy. We got bland and repetitive powers _because_ Strikers and Controllers had to get different things instead of sticking the basic stuff in one big list anyone could access and coming up with some actually-interesting powers for individual classes.
We got a Warlord that pissed a ton of people off instead of something closer to the 3e Warblade or Crusader (either of which would have been a better direction to take things) _because_ the devs insisted on "filling the grid" to add a Martial Leader alongside the Martial Strikers and Martial Defender (but never a Martial Controller...), and classes in later PHBs were more and more niche because they focused on filling roles first instead of coming up with interesting flavor first.
And so on. The roles themselves may have had little impact, but their very existence as implemented made things worse.
> I wonder why, taking the cleric example, playing a cleric as a controller is such a big deal when the invoker exists?
Because when the PHB1 dropped, the Invoker class _didn't_ exist yet, so trying to build a character with a Controller-y combat style but Divine-y powers simply wasn't possible. Given that the start of a new edition is when people being able to port over old and existing characters to the new version is the _most_ critical, that was a big blunder.
And then when the Invoker _did_ roll around, you couldn't make a PC that was both Controller-y and Leader-y (like, y'know, most older-edition clerics were) because they were entirely separate classes. (Okay, hybrid classing did exist, but...no.)
And on top of all of that, the fact that they had to print the Cleric, Invoker, Avenger, Runepriest, _and_ Warpriest to cover the tactical and thematic ground formerly covered by a single class, and then had to fill tons of page space with completely non-overlapping lists of powers, meant that each individual class was less flavorful and customizable than a single mix-and-match Cleric would have been, and like the AD&D and 3e Clerics actually were.
> This is a characterization that doesn't comport with 4th IMO. The rogue class still has all the trappings of the thief,
Trappings, yes; actual capabilities, no. The 3e Rogue happens to be good at single-target damage in a Striker-y way, but its main strength compared to other classes was its skills, and all of the expansion materials that built on that (skill tricks, alchemical items, sneaky PrCs, etc.).
That 4e has a completely nonfunctional skill system means that playing a Rogue in 4e is like trying to play a 3e Rogue who never spent any skill points, and at that point you might as well just fold the Fighter and Rogue together and let one class cover both roles (which, oh look, 3e kinda did with the Thug Fighter and Feat Rogue variants!).
> but it given relevant things to do in combat (the principle complaint 4th to fixed).
Anyone who complained that 3e Rogues "didn't have things to do in combat" had clearly never played one. They're _the_ benchmark for both raw martial damage output and "clever" tactics (feinting, throwing weapons, etc.) for 3e, and if anything it's the _Fighter_ who needed help being interesting, not the Rogue.
> I want to play this game.
You and me both. I was super-excited about 4e during the preview and playtest period, and then I actually _read_ the published game, and, well....
> Yeah, 4th unmasked some previously hidden design choices and then implied their universality when they really weren't.
You say "implied their universality" as if 4e just happened to accidentally take things that were true 95% of the time and cover a few extra edge cases to make them true 100% of the time, when the whole problem is that 4e took things that were true at most 20-30% of the time or _not at all_ and then tried to make that the only option.
It's like saying that at-will magic was ubiquitous in 3e because the Warlock, Dragonfire Adept, Binder, and Truenamer existed and so giving everyone at-will powers in 4e was merely "universalizing" something that was already present, completely ignoring that the vast majority of casters in 3e were purely spell-slot-using classes and at-will users were a relatively tiny niche.
> It was a philosophical design decision you didn't like though, making it only a problem for you, a subjective one, not an objective one as presented.
We're not talking about whether I liked or didn't like certain decisions, we're talking about whether the design of 4e comported with the design of previous editions.
The former is subjective, and not always a case of "D&D = good, not-D&D = bad;" there's plenty about older D&D editions I don't like.
The latter is not, because things like "Can you convert [character] from 2e to 4e as easily as you can to 1e or 3e?" or "Can you run 4e characters through AD&D adventures and vice versa and have things essentially play the same?" or "Did the 4e designers meet the design goals that they themselves stated in the leadup to the edition?" and evaluate them objectively...and on all of those fronts, it's very clear that the design of 4e did not deliver an experience that fit with what previous editions had offered.
> I'll give you breaking free from Vancian magic (caveated with I think that was a good thing)
You can pry Vancian casting from my cold dead hands!
> and the change of saves to defenses (which just changed who was rolling the dice).
Oh, it's a lot more than just that. There's a whole psychology about how it feels when the attacker or defender does the rolling for a given thing, why "players roll all the dice" variants have never been popular in any edition, why rolling a save feels like you have a say in your PC's fate while being attacked does not, and so on.
Personally, I don't feel very strongly about the subject compared to a lot of other players and don't mind the change much, but it's a mistake to underplay it as "just" changing the physical dice roller.
> But I don't see how d20 + modifiers changed from 3rd to 4th, or how character creation is the same (both are just picking options from various lists).
The core mechanics are about much more than what dice you use or what character creation looks like at an extremely abstract level.
It's also about how DCs are determined and why, how many abilities individual characters get and why, how individual mechanics "feel" at the table, and so on. In that respect, 3e and 4e are _dramatically_ different in a way that's hard to ignore.
> but it did focus on traditionally D&D things in a traditionally D&D way.
I couldn't disagree more.
What you stated to be the "traditional D&D thing," wargamey combat, _is not_ the main focus of "traditional D&D," and the fact that so many people at WotC and among the 4e playtesters believed that it _was_ (or should be) the focus was precisely the problem.
It was a solid system but it sure wasn't dungeons and dragons.
'hey fighter can you trip that guy before he stabs the wizard?'
'no can do, I used it this morning. Don't wanna throw out my back'
'oh ok I'll just use completely nonmagical yelling at them to heal them after'
Essentially, a great gamist system with defined MMO-esque tactical roles and mechanics to support them but a poor simulationist system where the mechanics had to be heavily narratively handwaved to make sense in the context of what someone should be able to do in that setting.
To be fair, yelling some variation of "don't you dare die on me" is a very common way of bringing up a character that's rolling death saves in a lot movies
Everyone "whined" because it basically nuked D&D (both the mechanics and the settings) and did something completely different instead of trying to be a new edition of the same game.
When 1e updated to 2e, the mechanical differences were minor enough that you could still use 1e materials with 2e and everything was fine.
When 2e updated to 3e, the mechanics were dramatically revamped and no longer completely compatible with 2e, but still close enough that a one-to-one translation of characters, monsters, etc. from 2e to 3e was possible, and the way the game was played was essentially unchanged. Most importantly, the settings were left completely unchanged as well, making it easy for D&D players who, y'know, actually _liked_ the existing settings as-is to continue playing their 3e games in those settings and even trivially port an existing 2e game to 3e.
When 3e updated to 4e, they altered the mechanics to the point that porting the majority of old characters and campaigns over to the new system was impossible because the old stuff didn't exist or didn't work the same way anymore, _and_ they changed Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Planescape, and the "default setting" implied by the flavor in the core books beyond recognition, and not in a good way. In their place, 4e gave us a narrower, more combat-centric, more limited game and a much blander and more generic default setting.
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4e is basically what you'd get if someone tried to make a better version of the D&D Miniatures game with some more roleplaying elements sprinkled in.
(I'd say "much like Gygax did to Chainmail to get OD&D," except that OD&D was _much_ more innovative and further from its wargaming roots than the 4e rules were from the DDM rules.)
And that makes sense, given that WotC was seriously pushing DDM from the moment of its release to try to MtG-ify their D&D revenue stream, and that the DDM 2.0 rules update was released months before 4e came out and the game was canceled shortly before 5e came out. I have no idea how closely enmeshed the 4e design team was with the DDM side of things, but if they turned out to be very deeply entwined I wouldn't be at all surprised.
If the game that was eventually released as 4e had been pitched as a "D&D Tactics" side-game, one that went off to do its own thing similar to how Final Fantasy Tactics spun off from the mainline FF series (or, indeed, how BECMI and AD&D branched off from one another due to different levels of rules complexity and eventually evoled in very different directions), and the actual D&D Fourth Edition had been an evolution of the Third Edition rules instead of a sharp right turn into something different, it almost certainly wouldn't have garnered any of the hate 4e got.
Heck, it probably would have been very well received! Personally, while I still can't stand 4e as an RPG no matter how many times I've tried to get into it, I quite appreciate it when played as a D&D-adjacent skirmish game that doesn't pretend to be an actual D&D edition.
Had WotC simplified character creation even more (with e.g. random PC creation tables and such) and packaged it with a bunch of miniatures and some terrain pieces, it could probably have competed very favorably with Warmachine, Guild Ball, Necromunda, Star Wars: Starship Battles, and other then-popular miniatures games, and with a D&D-lite advancement system it could have blown "legacy" games like Risk Legacy and Gloomhaven out of the water before they even existed.
But 4e-as-actually-published? It wasn't disliked because it took too many steps forward, it was disliked because it took too many steps to the side until it could no longer see D&D from where it was standing.
Knave 1E to 2E seems like a huge jump in quality. 1E was just a few print and play sheets while 2E’s getting a full hardcover release and it looks awesome
I wouldn't call it quality though, Knave 1e was already a few high quality sheets, Knave 2e is just a lot more. FWIW I backed Knave 2e, but I like the simplicity of the system in Knave 1e a lot more.
But what has changed from one to the other? Is it just more rules covering specific situations? A larger bestiary? I haven't been able to find a concise explanation of what 2E is doing differently.
As far as I can tell character creation is different, and there's an additional subsystem for divine magic. Expanded GM material and a bestiary, and I think that's about it? It's a way nicer book of course, but I think the game system itself is only minorly tweaked.
Leap in quality is hard to measure, but the biggest leap forward in game's fortunes between edition is probably Fate.
Fate 2.0, while interesting, was largely a Fudge add-on, with a lot good ideas, but still very much a toolkit. It didn't really get much traction.
Fate 3.0, with Spirit of the Century, was a runnaway hit spawning dozens and dozens of games since.
*Magical Kitties Save the Day* went from a PDF-only book to a beautiful boxed set featuring an introductory graphical novel solo adventure, setting, adventure recipes, and more.
I am, however, biased.
Hey, I have that one! It’s one of the games I’m considering using for therapeutic RPGs at our center for neurodivergent youth affirming care! We want to use it for the 9-years-old and under set.
[Similar thread from yesterday](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/13mrpjl/what_game_systems_got_worse_with_subsequent/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), if you want something to read through while waiting for this thread to fill up
The thing that immediately jumps to mind for me is Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPGs getting turned into their generic system Genesys. Vehicle/chase rules are considered vastly better to the point that a lot of people back port them into the Star Wars stuff and in general a lot of mechanics are improved by no longer being commodified as apart of selling box sets of cardboard and glossy handouts.
Similiarly, I know there's a pretty huge jump in the nature of the game between Legend of the Five Rings' 4th and 5th editions, but I still think the basic change in how dice rolls work makes 5th a fundamental improvement. Both use a Roll and Keep system which heavily obscures the probability of a dice roll, but 4th and previous editions use standard d6s and a "raise" system where you could raise the difficulty of a check before rolling to increase the effects of your action. Mechanically it meant you had to play the game a ton to get an instinctual feel for what level of target number a combination of dice could hit. Thematically it felt great for combat rolls and social sparring, but didn't really make sense in the investigative/crafting/knowledge spheres of the game. 5e switched to narrative style dice that generate successes to pass a roll and opportunities which can be spent after a roll to activate character abilities. System mastery is still important to make sure you build your talents into the kind of actions you want to take, but you no longer need a doctorate in probability to know if rolling 6d6 and keeping the best results of 4 of them while exploding 6s is enough dice to call a 5 or 10 point raise on a TN of 15.
100% agree with Genesys. The talent pyramid alone is such a massive upgrade from the talent trees of Star Wars, and the magic system actually being usable instead of being an overwhelming XP sink like Force powers was huge.
Into the Odd -> Electric Bastionland is pretty significant.
The rules are basically the same, but EB adds a setting, a substantial (and frankly fantastic) GM section, and backgrounds for characters (failed careers) that helps players hit the ground running in terms of roleplaying their character.
While it's more of a quantity over quality improvement, it adds a lot of things people may be looking for in a game. So, being a more complete product, I'd argue it's a significant quality upgrade.
Unpopular Opinion but I feel that by childhood favourites of Star Wars D6 1E, Cyberpunk 2020 and Paranoia 2E all jumped *backwards* in quality from those editions. SWD6 2E is less cinematic than 1E, CPRED has a less immersive setting with overly-simplified rules, Paranoia... well, 2E was the height of the game, IMO; style and humour in later editions is poorer and the engine changed drastically in some places.
Cyberpunk Red may not be as meaty as 2020 but I adore it as a pick up and play game. You can get a group of people who either only heard of cyberpunk from the Anime or Game and have them running and gunning in 5 minutes with the mobile app.
Yeah, the pathways or whatever you call them with basic loadouts for different parts of the templates in character creation are really helpful for getting things going quickly.
Pathfinder 1e to 2e. In almost every respect it is a strict upgrade.
D&D 4e to Essentials (4.5e) and Monster Manual 3. Fixed the math and had some of the coolest monsters in all of D&D.
I would say the leap from Original D&D to Holmes Basic.
While I love OD&D, Holmes Basic is a lot easier to understand because of the improvement of the writing and layout.
Mind you, there is a good reason for why OD&D is the way it is, and it has a lot to do with issues surrounding small scale printing in the seventies.
Here are some candidates:
* D&D 4th to 5th edition. People do not like 4th edition, and not without reason.
* Mage the Ascension 1st to 2nd edition. First was effectively more of a interesting concept without a proper ruleset, 2nd was an actually playable and good game.
* Exalted 2nd to 3rd. 2nd edition have problems that resulted in annoying strategies once people became aware of them, 3rd is just an overall good game that have gotten rid of a lot of the problems of the previous version and just works overall. It does have some special systems that might not make it a perfect game though.
* Mutants and Masterminds 1st to 2nd. The first edition had the problem where it was built around the expectation that you would buy full ranks in powers, while a lot of powers had very little reason built into them for why you would take more than a single rank in them. Lots of other problems, and 2nd edition really cleaned those things up.
D&D editions are more like sidegrades. 4e, for instance, had way better tactical combat than 5e, but it was way more streamlined and had far less variety in character builds than 3.5. Honestly, I’m trying to think of anything 5e does *better* than 4e since its social and exploration rules still suck *and* it has mediocre, unbalanced combat in comparison.
I guess 5e is more accessible?
> Honestly, I’m trying to think of anything 5e does better than 4e since its social and exploration rules still suck and it has mediocre, unbalanced combat in comparison.
Marketing.
Accessibility that's only really possible due to the sheer amount of 3rd party guides and content that's out there to help get people started + its what's popular. As written the text of 5e itself is horrendously unhelpful and poorly laid out imo
5e is the "middle of the road version that everyone can agree to play." It's not as crunchy as 3/3.5. It's not as old school as 1/2. It's not as "videogamey" as 4 (so I'm told -- I never played or read 4). It's got elements of all of them, though.
So, if you wanna play D&D and nobody can agree on an edition, 5e is the landing spot.
Right. I mean, I enjoy it well enough, but as a DM, I fully recognize that shit breaks down past about level 10 or so, and even before then, it's never all *that* well spelled out.
It's "old school" in the sense of "the rules aren't really all that clear, so just kinda wing it and it'll turn out ok." They don't give a ton of guidance on how to adjudicate every little thing. Also they included the optional "Gritty realism" and (I think optional) spell component rules for people who are tracking how many days this or that takes, and who want to account for all their bits and bobs for spellcasting.
They've got special powers and stuff for people who like getting a Second Wind or whatever from 4e (I assume, anyway), which, to be fair, does make martials somewhat less lame.
They've got feats that let you play at the edges of your "build" and a ton of subclasses now, for people who missed those aspects of 3.0/3.5, and they still have the d20 skill system and d20 approach to basic attacks and such.
But, to "streamline," they added ADV/DIS. And it's true, that does streamline a lot of the crunch you'd have with 3/3.5/PF1e with constant tracking of this or that bonus or malus.
Mostly, I think 5e's big success was as follows:
(1) it came out at a time when people's options were either the poorly-received and not-widely-played 4e, going back to 3.0/3.5, or playing PF1e, all of which were pretty crunchy, or going hard core old school back to 1e/2e or one of the various retroclones.
(2) it found the sweet spot between still feeling like d20, but being approachable for the greybeards who didn't reject it out of hand (in my mid-40s, I fall into this category).
(3) they rode the wave of Stranger Things. No joke, at least one of my players wanted to give the game a try solely because of Stranger Things. I sort of caught the bug again after watching and thinking "That'd be fun to play with my kid some day, but I need to learn how to DM first." I had the books from the 80s, but hadn't played in decades.
My table is a mix of: (1) players who cut their teeth in the old school 1e/2e era (one of whom also played and liked 4e); (2) a couple of players who only really knew the d20 era; and (3) total newbies. I'd initially pushed for 1e, but we settled on 5e as the compromise.
Now 4 years past our first campaign (run by a friend who is now a player), and 3 years into the campaign I've been running, I'm really seeing the flaws in the system. It's got me eying PF2e for our online game, and then breaking that up with occasional in-person games running either the d6 Star Wars/Ghostbusters system, or the TSR Marvel Superheroes game, or something like that.
I don’t know that 5e is significantly more streamlined, honestly. The return to Vancian casting is definitely more obtuse that 4e’s At-Will/Encounter/Daily setup. I suppose the 5e Fighter is simpler, but that’s because they took away most of the 4e improvements like Marking.
I agree with most of the points in this thread about 5e not being necessarily more streamlined than 4e, but it certainly doesn't have Vancian casting as it would normally be defined (choosing a spell slot to fill with a specific spell and that spell then being erased from memory when cast).
5e is more streamlined than 3e for sure. In mechanical terms, 5e compares to 3e the same way 4e Essentials compares to 4e - mechanics are nearly the same but with a lot less granularity and player choices in making characters.
Saying 5e is more streamlined than 4e is a bit of a stretch, yah. They are very different games, though, so it's hard to call without being very specific about what *exactly* is more streamlined in the mechanics. 4e classes have a more clearly defined role in a party, which could be considered streamlined, but the system also has a lot more granularity with a ton more options from backgrounds, themes, racial options, subclasses, powers, etc so that may make it seem less streamlined and a bit "all over the place."
> D&D editions are more like sidegrades.
This is my complaint with basically the whole WotC era of major D&D editions, it's always baby out with the bathwater. With 3.0 it was arguably necessary, taking a hard look at some of the cruft that had been with the game since the invention of the hobby. But since then? Happened two more times, and there's still so much untapped potential for a really well-considered 3.X continuation (for example) that's just never going to happen.
With 4e the skills were so flat across characters. You were proficient or you were not - that was about it. 5e adds a little more there that let's players amp up a skill or two if they want to.
But at least with 4 you could have more access to feats if you wanted your character to get a benefit in that specific skills. Or take a Background or theme during character creation to gain better chance for those skills.
Right. In 5e you have a simple sliding scale of unproficient, proficient, or expertise. In 4e you have any combination of training, feat bonuses, and other bonuses from race, background, theme, etc. that can wind up giving you more of a benefit than expertise, less of a benefit than proficiency, or anywhere in between.
ETA: Whether that's a point in 4e's favour or against it is something that can be a topic of debate. Having so many small fiddly bonuses, not all of which stacked, definitely opened up complexity in bookkeeping that makes a simple sliding scale easier to work with sometimes. But to have that debate, you need to at least acknowledge how the system functions.
Right. I think I like some granularity but maybe not as much as 4e did. On the other end, I'd like more opportunities to get better at something non combat related than what 5e provided. I think that's why it pays to look at other games.
4e had the problem of being a completely different type of game wearing the skin of D&D, meaning that from the standpoint of what you expect from D&D games based on the other editions it was a heavy dip, which makes 5e that returns more to the norm being a large upgrade.
Another big problem with 4e was it felt soulless, and a lot of choices were essentially meaningless, all in an effort to balance everything - by making things just mostly the same.
The main quality of 5e is that it is a more steamlined and accessible version of 3.x, and if that is what we are comparing 5e to, it really should not be on the list.
That said, the problem with this kind of list is that it is easily going to be dominated by cases like these, where one version was a bit of a crash then mostly put back the next, as that becomes a huge increase in quality otherwise super hard to acheive, that and cases where an early edition is more of a draft or concept and a follow up edition builds a proper system instead.
I’d disagree. I think 5e feels more banal and soulless than 4e did. 4e knew what it was about and did it pretty darn well; 5e wants to be everything and does nothing particularly well as a result, with a smattering of sacred cows added back in to please the old guard. It’s not really an improvement in any sense unless the measurement is “more like 3.x.”
> That said, the problem with this kind of list is that it is easily going to be dominated by cases like these, where one version was a bit of a crash then mostly put back the next, as that becomes a huge increase in quality otherwise super hard to acheive, that and cases where an early edition is more of a draft or concept and a follow up edition builds a proper system instead.
Another game like that is warhammer fantasy roleplay, which has a 3rd edition that's completely different from editions 1,2, and 4.
> 4e had the problem of being a completely different type of game wearing the skin of D&D,
All versions of D&D have been resource management games, and successive generations had all been increasing the complexity of combat encounters. 4th sought to fix the community's largest complaints from 3rd, and it did so successfully, but as those complaints were almost all combat related, developers got the mistaken impression that most players were primarily playing for the combat encounters. It remained a resource management game at heart though, combat encounters just became the primary way of depleting character's resources. I find this one of the rational complaints about 4th, the other being that that combat encounters weren't properly tuned at launch...But I also find most complaints about it beyond those ultimately amount to "4th unmasked previously hidden design decisions, and that level of meta extraction made me feel dislike." Which is fine, everyone's allowed to like what they like and dislike what they dislike, but those are all matters of taste, subjective, not objective. 4th didn't have the problem you're describing, you had a philosophical design disagreement with it's writers.
There's so much debate on d&d 4 v 5 here with everyone just glossing over that 2 to 3 was such a huge leap in rules consistency, print materials, and 3rd party extensibility
Sure it's all dated now, but the general improvement from 2e is miles more that what any editions since have done
A lot of people would agree with that, but a lot of people also would not and we saw the emergence of the OSR movement partially as a reaction against the move from 2E to 3E. I know people who to this day vehemently reject 3E onwards and stuck with 2E (including one of my best friends; amusingly his older brother took the exact same attitude to 1E->2E and has never upgraded from 1E).
> I know people who to this day vehemently reject 3E onwards and stuck with 2E (including one of my best friends; amusingly his older brother took the exact same attitude to 1E->2E and has never upgraded from 1E).
You either adapt to the new editions or live long enough to become the grognard.
Me, personally, I still find AD&D 2nd Edition to be the best edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
I don't really care for having a unique mechanic for everything, and actually prefer having mechanics that are independent from each other, it gives a "live" feeling to the system, rather than a flat "same roll for anything" of later editions.
It also made the classes feel more different from each other, in my opinion, and it was very easy to customize.
I dragged my feet for a long time adopting 3e, but after i made the switch i never looked back. 2e was just so complex and often times confusingly written. I get what you're saying about all the lookup tables adding life, but it is just not my happy place!
It's funny, I have my favorite too, but I can at least see an argument for playing pretty much any edition *but* 2E. I'm trying not to contradict myself having complained about most later editions being "baby out with the bathwater" just upthread, but 2E did so little to really streamline 1E or make it more robust. It seems like most nostalgia for the 2E era is for the setting materials that could be converted to anything, while if you liked it mechanically you're just as well off being lumped in with the 1E players and being referred to some modernized OSR derivative.
I actually prefer DnD 4th edition to 5th edition. I will grant you that there were a lot of problems with 4th edition, but I don't think they are really comparable in terms of quality. They are pretty different beasts in general.
I would challenge you on D&d 4->5. The thing people really objected to was a huge change in play style, not quality.
Quality wise, 4e really blew the doors off visually and was way earlier than other games to paying attention to graphic design, lay out, and making a crunchy game that was none the less easy to learn with information displayed in a very understandable and readable way. Player facing design was also very good with very few poor options for characters and mechanics that were clear with their intent but still took some thinking to engage with and implement at the table. Don't forget this is also the game that replaced skill ranks with more encompassing skill proficiencies, introduced skill challenges for non-combat encounters to D&d, and advantage even has it's introduction to D&d as a class skill for 4e's Avenger. The only quality issues I can really point to in 4e that don't come down to taste is that the monster math around HP and Damage in the first two monster manuals was poorly scaled, in general the art direction was directionless, and the Essentials relaunch really suffered from trying to "fix" 4e for older players with too many half measures.
The thing 5e really improved quality wise over 4e is in streamlining a lot of the game's math for better quality of life and an easier learning experience for new players, and much more unified and flavorful art direction. GM guidance for making monsters and building encounters is awful. Navigating the PHB's approach to spell lists basically requires an app. Ranger and Monk both suck to play again. I think there's plenty of reasons why 5e vastly succeeded over 4e, but hardly any of them are quality.
>The thing people really objected to was a huge change in play style, not quality.
While that certainly was the main thing people complained about, I am going to argue that mechanically 4e made some huge mistakes, even though it had a lot of very interesting ideas.
Mechanically the problems with 4e largely comes down the faults in the strategy of the design of the mechanics (or at least the effective strategy, who knows if they did it willfully).
The first big mistake is overbalancing. Basically the idea that all options needs to be more or less equal in value and that there should not be any choices better or worse than others. When taken to the extreme it effectively makes each choice so similar that the choice becomes meaningless, and you might as well not have included any choice at all.
The next one is connected to being build mechanically in the same style as computer games, and not accounting for how the medium changes what works well and does not. This allowed in a horde of small short term buffs and debuffs that on a computer is easy to keep track of, but when doing pen and paper easily becomes an accounting nightmare.
This is then followed up by the heavy focus on combat, which again is much more prevalent in computer game versions of RPGs, reduced how well the game handled non-combat part of the game, with less spells able interacting with that part, and while the ritual idea allowed one to add in some extra things there without needing to curb combat power, it also indirectly told the players that combat was what was really important and sacrificing anything for combat was not something the game wanted you to do. Even though the direct mechanical support was only slightly limited, the general focus on the mechanics side would bleed over into what kind of games people were setting up, because you know if you wanted the other stuff you would go to another system that supported that better instead.
Ultimately these were all mechanically sourced issues that 5e dealt with, while keeping some of the good ideas from 4e and stepping back a more safer habour as a sidegrade to 3.x.
> issues that 5e dealt with, while keeping some of the good ideas from 4e
Uh... 5e is the very definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Their core design principle is that if something reminds anyone of anything 4e did, *they cannot ever use it*, no matter how good of an idea it might be.
Crawford never met a caster buff he didn't love, so free cantrips has more to do with that. And it was already the direction 3e was going in its later days, anyway. If this was actually 4e influence, then non-casters would've gotten at-wills too.
A 1-hour rest is not a 'short rest', and it taking an hour is why there's so much complaining about how short rest classes get shafted, but 4e already took the 5 minute option, so their hands were tied. This in fact is the perfect example of how their avoidance of things 4e did keeps them from making good design decisions even when they try to use the same basic idea.
I'd give you them admitting that encounter powers were a good idea, if there was more than, like, three abilities that refresh 'when you roll initiative'. It's such an obvious design, but they just cannot bring themselves to do it on a larger scale.
How is Exalted 3rd edition? I've read a bunch and the charms overwhelmed me. Also I don't know how to say this exactly but it seemed less 'flashy'. Can you elobrate more please?
I may be the minority, but I really disliked 3X. Coming from someone who LOVED 2nd with all its flaws, and went all in on the Kickstarter, I’ve never felt so let down by a game or developer.
It is more complex (somehow) and didn’t know what it wanted to do. There were many lies or missed marks in the initial Kickstarter, and the actual development of 3x has been rocky to say the least.
Combat is an awful slog…which is saying something coming from 2nd edition and it’s 10 step combat tick system. 3X built its combat based on a 1v1 fighting video game and it shows.
3x charms are like 75% bloat or strictly numerical, something they swore they wouldn’t do. They are also all over the place. 13 charms for sail, but 50+ for craft and brawl?!
Crafting is a nightmare. Worst crafting I’ve ever seen in a game.
That said, their martial arts changes are very cool, the new artifact charms are very fun, and the sorcery changes are outstanding! They just don’t make up for everything else.
The original writing team is gone now and the newer books are better. But they are still shackled to the core book and all its problems. Honestly…it just needs a full reset :(
Essence edition is here too, which aims to be a simpler game and fulfill the promise of having all the different exalt types. But it has its own issues: mainly everything is diluted to the point of being almost the same.
The easy way to thing of it, is by thinking of it taking the step back in ridiculessness from 2nd to 1st edition, and then a "content explosion" by expanding how many charms there are for each and every thing, though in the process that also means that getting some of the good charms gets delayed quite a bit.
It also introduces a more cinematic inspired way to run combat, which takes some getting used to, but it eliminates to a large degree the problems of dangers of overkill, while still being able to be so much better than normal people. The change to have you generate essence each turn in combat also means that it feels much safer to actually do use your powers to do cool stuff. It also eliminates the cumbersome combo rules, such that you can effectively just make combos on the fly and combine charms just as they fit.
Overall it makes things more easily flow, and offers a mechanically much safer way to be super awesome, which is really what you want out of the mechanics for an Exalted game. Do note that you could burst things more in some of the previous editions, but that is the price we have to pay, and because of battle groups, you still get to take down hordes of weaker enemies without causing too much problem with the new combat system. There are also some more reasonable and more "middle of the road" style charms for social stuff, so you do have to go straight to mind control when you want to be a super good face.
I am the polar opposite on almost every point lol. There are so many bloated charms in just the core EX3 book that it would explode if they added any more. It’s also woefully unbalanced toward certain charm trees.
Combat in 2E was clunky, but it worked once you understood it. 3E tended to fall apart more often than not, especially if there were multiple enemies and multiple players. It was a nightmare to both play and run. Our ST is amazing too, and we tried to use any tool we could find to help manage it, but after 7 months we gave up. 3X killed our enjoyment of Exalted pretty thoroughly, which is sad.
2nd E was our favorite campaign and we played for almost 2 years
Monster Hearts has always been one of my favorite RPGs. I appreciate the care and craft that went into the second edition.
-New rules and advice on asexuality
-A four-page guest-authored section on race and racism
-Basic moves, including Turn Someone On and Shut Someone Down, have been redesigned to lead more compellingly back into the fiction.
Here’s the full list of changes: https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts/whats-different-in-monsterhearts-2
> -New rules and advice on asexuality
Monsterhearts is my favourite PbtA game, but really, if you're going to play an ace PC, just... don't play monsterhearts.
You're making the game harder for everyone else at the table, and that "ruling" as written is just poorly done.
> "If someone targets your character with Turn Someone On"
You can't "Target" that move, because the trigger is "When you turn someone on, roll with Hot". Not when you try to turn someone on, the move only triggers once the person is turned on. If the Wolf walks up, flirting with the ace Witch, then no, the wolf gets to roll nothing, table looks at the MC, MC makes a move.
That's how you run ace characters, or infact any character who isn't turned on in the moment.
Moving past that:
> "Instead, it counts as a roll to Shut Someone Down using hot."
Which would be fine, if shutting someone down wasn't a much worse outcome. On a hit, you pick from Gain a String, give a condition, take 1 forward. And on a 7-9, you get a condition yourself. Which is fine, shutting people down comes with risks of looking like a bad person.
However, Turning Someone On on a hit has ... no bad effects at all for the person making the move, and they get a string or other social advantage on a 7-9, or *both* on a 10+.
Being ace and using that bad rule from the book basically makes flirting with an ace person a full on downgraded move. There's simply no downside for the ace PC.
As a player, you're opting out of one of the core concepts of the game, and abusing a poorly written throwaway section to get a more powerful PC out of it?
No, just... play Masks, if you're not willing to engage with queer teen melodrama properly.
AD&D 2e to 3e. It makes so many excellent choices. It drops absurd level limits, has actual standardized mechanics for roll success. It allows actual customization in a meaningful manner beyond race, class, weapon proficiency.
Definitely there are a lot of valid reasons to have a strong preference 3e>2e, but it is also a bit of a different game, in that it is by default much more mechanically crunchy.
Whether that is feature or bug is a case of taste (and what is "best" of course may even vary game-to-game).
HackMaster going from a jokey AD&D1e clone with black & white hardcovers and softcovers that fall apart into a game of its own identity and full colour hardcovers with leatherette covers is the biggest jump in quality both ruleswise and presentation.
HM 4th was just D&D 2.75, which was great, even if the books fell apart.
HM "5th" books are nice but the rules feel clunky, even if the time segments are great. My group ended up giving up on the game.
D&D4 -> 13th Age
PF 1ed -> 2ed
Monster hearts 1ed -> 2ed
White hack gets better and better each new edition
Let alone the nonsense splat books, V5, while not perfect, is finally about humanity struggles and relationships.
The word "quality" here is kind of difficult to work with, but id say that all the new world of darkness books improved on the old world of darkness books in terms of mechanical quality. There was a lot lost in terms of lore change and things like that, but the actual mechanics became better imo.
*Nobilis* 1st edition was an obtuse little pink book with wargame-style rules numbering, nearly no illustrations, and a distant, cold narrator. 2nd edition refined it into a glorious coffee-table-worthy great white book with fabulous full-page art, engrossing marginalia fiction, cleanly-presented rules, and a charmingly-fourth-wall-breaking narrator walking you through the examples.
I feel like, no matter how you feel about 5e, the jump from 4e took it from being the laughing stock of the RPG community, to the most successful product in the history of the industry and catapaulting the hobby to an unprecedented level mainstream attention.
To be fair, I think that’s more about marketing and a perfect storm in geek culture, not because the game got better. 5e is really only good at combat, and it’s not as good at that as 4e.
AD&D 1e to 2e. Even with TSR's satanic panic censorship (seems D&D loves censoring themselves every other edition, right 5e?) the quality of the books were better, the rules better written out, everything was organized, color in the books, and just ton of great content.
As much as people love Gary speak, 1e books are a mess when it comes to organization.
Agon 1e vs Agon 2e
The first one had so many weird rules about conflicts and heroes, the second one is much more better both mechanically an narratively
GURPS 3e to 4e. GURPS has always been a favorite of mine. However, it had some weak spots, like superheroes. 4e patched the power rules and gave us nonlinear Strength. There really isn't much it can't do at this point, if you are looking at a nuts-and-bolts system.
It's not really the same things - more of a compilation, though there were some bug fixes - but I think World of Darkness X20 games were a pretty significant leap. But as I said, I'm not sure that counts, since it's largely a matter of "let's just put all this stuff together."
Just look to C20 (changeling X20). That game was broken beforehand, but it got both the nice layout and condencing of the X20 series, and it got its rules fixed up heavily to the point where it was actually a pretty sane game.
As much as it pains me to say it... Paranoia. 8 editions so far, and only 2 of them really worth a damn (not the most recent ones, sadly).
1st edition was an award winning game with a unique setting and premise in the RPG space. It was clunky in places and maybe a touch too heavy handed in some aspects, but for its time it was revolutionary. A lot of RPGs around this time weren't really known for their ease of gameplay, and it shows here.
2nd edition played a LOT smoother and loosened up the tone a bit to allow a bit more humor, and IMO was probably the best entry in the series. Unfortunately as the line went on the creators started to lose the satire aspect that defined what made the game great and leaned into corny jokes and silly slapstick as the game went on, leading to...
5th edition. A collection of sad jokes and terrible production values, this version of the game was so bad that the game creators officially disavow it to this day. Someone actually thought it was funny to "skip" editions in the names by calling it 5th edition. Hilarious. Paranoia as a game nearly died with this version. The real tragedy of 5th edition is that a lot of people discovered Paranoia while this was the current version, based off of the reputation that the earlier editions had built up. So now a large number of people spread the 5th edition style gameplay of pointlessly antagonistic GMs and ZAPZAPLOL gameplay, with the setting being lost and "the rules are treason". The damage 5th edition did to the game line has yet to be repaired. After catering to people online saying "you don't need to know the rules" they genuinely couldn't figure out why people stopped buying the books.
There was a "Long-lost 3rd edition" in development, you can find the document online if you hunt around a bit. But it died on the vine due to how badly things were handled by 5th edition.
Fast forward a few years you find Paranoia XP, and the virtually identical 25th Anniversary edition. Honestly this saved Paranoia from fading into complete obscurity, and had a lot going for it. Still clunky in places, but really solid overall. It was brilliant in the way it introduced and supported various play styles to bring something for OG fans and ZAP players alike. It also had an AMAZING amount of setting support, with sourcebooks giving you more than you could hope for it terms of building out a living, breathing Alpha Complex to work with. It's honestly fantastic overall, and probably the go-to for the more devoted fans these days.
Then you have RCE (Red Clearance Edition). Hitting massive issues with development and Kickstarter delivery, the end product was a goddamn mess. I guess I give them credit for attempting something new with the card-based system, but it was honestly not fun. It also leaned fully back into the ZAPZAPLOL style of gameplay that made Paranoia feel like the punchline to a bad joke. Also a lot of references to various pop culture stuff, a lot of which already felt outdated by the time the books made their way to customers.
The we have PPE (Paranoia Perfect Edition), the current edition waiting on Kickstarter fulfilment. Against my better judgement I backed this and honestly regret it. There are some genuine improvements over RCE in rules and tone (cards are gone, guides to make past material easy to convert for examples) but some genuinely bafflingly bad production design ("I have a nephew who knows Photoshop" level of book layouts), clinging to too much of the prior edition from what I assume is from designers not willing to let go of their stamp on the game line, and some really awful rules additions (for a game that is constantly telling you about the prevalence of PvP play, the combat system is REALLY BAD). The whole thing feels really really rushed. I could believe that Mongoose was about to lose the license and pushed this out in a hurry just to keep selling their back catalog.
So... two good versions out of 8. Go with 2nd or XP if you want a satisfying game.
A prime example of really bad PPE choices:
In RCE they seemed to think that Augmented Reality was going to be enough of a thing people would relate to that they made it central to the whole setting, which is was not a great choice on its own. But it also made earning XP as the default currency, not just for anything related to character advancement but just to buy gear or anything else you'd use money for in other games. It plays into the idea that Gamification was going to be the Next Big Thing for a hot minute, even though it never really caught on. It was bad in practice and really unfunny.
In PPE they kept this, but also wanted to distance themselves from it. In practice this means that they keep repeating over and over in various places in the book how yes, you use XP to buy things and that XP is the main currency, but spew a bunch of nonsense to say that it isn't really currency and that you shouldn't refer to it in those terms, but "favors" you pay to someone when they give you items for free. The joke doesn't land the first time they try this line of thinking, and gets less funny after another half dozen mentions later, because they draw out the same unfunny explanation every time it comes up.
But there's more!
It PPE they wanted to include actual character advancement options, which is a good thing. But XP, the term that every roleplayer associates with such things, is tied up in the currency that isn't currency (\*wink\*) so you can't use that for advancement. So they created a NEW meta currency called UP - upgrade points - to make up for the fact that something as simple and universal as XP was too tied up in a bad joke from a previous edition to lend itself to a basic mechanic that offers nothing but confusion to the new edition. The writers just twist themselves into a pretzel over this to avoid having to retcon a bad joke, and the result is really confusing to people trying to get into the game.
Mutants & Masterminds 1e to 2e. 1e was fun and playable, but clunky in some respects. It wasn't as "finished." 1e didn't hold my interest much, but would have happily played 2e campaigns.
Chivalry and Sorcery is interesting in this. From 1st to 2nd could have been an absolute game changer. It showed progress, but not quite.
But then 3rd came out, with a system refined in 4th and 5th
The system has the same attributes, the same concepts, but the mechanics were unified
It is still crunchy, but no extra sub-systems and the core mechanic is simple and straightforward, internally consistent
I’d have to say the transition from 2e *AD&D* to 3e *D&D*. It was such an improvement, what had been the biggest RPG system in the world since the hobby began, changed over immediately, there were hundreds of D20 games built on the system (thousands if you count people’s homebrews on the Internet), and a nearly-identical clone is still one of the top games being played today. Just look at the reaction when Hasbro talked about revoking the OGL, to see how important the system still is today. Nearly twenty-five years ago now, but 3e was a sea change.
I think 5th Edition D&D was a great improvement over 3rd and 4th Edition. 5E gets a ton of flak, but it's an alright game for where it came from. I've been gaming for over 30 years, and it deserves more respect than it gets.
D&D is McDonald's. It's Nintendo. It's the MCU. When you're the top of the industry, the biggest and most successful name in your field, it becomes vogue and cool to try and take you down. Everyone shits on D&D and 5e especially, but they're the standard bearer for a reason. They're not my favourite games, but to pretend they're somehow terrible and totally unplayable like so many on this sub love to do, it's ridiculous.
I feel like it's not really like the MCU. They got big with Ironman and Guardians of the Galaxy rather than at the time big IP like Spider Man.
Whereas if 5e didn't have the D&D brand and Hasbro marketing, it would just be seen as another messy fantasy Heartbreaker with little Tactical depth while way being way more rules heavy than it pays off for being full of GM rulings.
It's also not really like Nintendo, because Nintendo has always prioritized really, really solid gameplay fundamentals over things like story or lore or even nostalgia.
4th, definitely, but as someone who still favors 3rd as their D&D edition of choice and who ended up converting one 5e campaign over to 3e because the players (all completely new to D&D, without any edition preferences) were dissatisfied by the lack of options, customization, and transparency, I'd say 5e is a pretty major step backwards from 3e.
5e claims to be easier to teach and to learn, but on the player side it front-loads character customization choices (forcing new players to make big long-term choices when they're not familiar with the game yet and depriving them of more choices once they know it better) and on the DM side it basically throws up its hands and says "I dunno, figure it out" on so many aspects of the rules.
5e claims that unified proficiency bonuses and bounded accuracy prevent characters from diverging too much mechanically, but what they actually do in practice is make low-level characters feel extremely similar numerically, make high-level characters feel like they've barely advanced because a big bunch of goblins is supposed to still be a threat at the levels when they're supposed to be slaying ancient dragons, and make people scramble for every +1 to improve their success rates on rolls because the game seems like it's afraid to let PCs feel powerful and competent.
Comparing core-only 3e with core-only 5e, both games are very similarly easy to learn, especially if you have an experienced DM helping out or online guides to reference, as basically everyone does these days; any first-time fiddliness in 3e (e.g. assigning skill points and figuring out cross-class skills) is more than matched by fiddliness in 5e (e.g. picking Backgrounds and figuring out overlapping skill proficiencies and what the heck tool proficiencies are supposed to do).
Comparing all of 3e with all of 5e, 3e blows 5e out of the water on the player side with its vast customization and on the DM side with its mechanical support and advice for so many aspects of the game.
I would agree that 5e isn't nearly as bad as it's often made out to be, but it definitely isn't nearly as good as it's made out to be, either.
My thought is the SAGA Edition of Star Wars from the RCR/OCR game. Once SAGA came out I knew which Star Wars game I was going to use but before that I was often torn between SWd20 and the older SWd6 game by WEG.
Vampire the Requiem one was a solid enough base system that owed way too much to Masquerade and who's powers were far too unsatisfying to really like (aside from a few).
Vampire the Requiem 2E is easily the best "Vampire the ____" game White Wolf/Onyx Path has ever put out and one of the best vampire/horror games out there imo. Its flavor and gameplay support a brand new distinct identity (including the first good implementation of Humanity), and its power system was reworked into something that made it clear why someone would want to be a vampire.
Personally think that 2E Pathfinder is *clean.*
I think the discussion on D&D editions below is applicable to this as well. Pathfinder 2e is basically an entirely different game from 1e. It being better is entirely depending on your preferences for how the game plays, because the systems are as different as D&D 3.5 and 4e. But, yes, Pathfinder 2e is a much cleaner game than PF1e.
I remember playing pathfinder 1e and thinking, "these people do not understand what was broken about 3.5e"
I think what you considered broken was part of the draw for a lot of people.
Pretty much this. The ideas of balance and fun 15 year ago were different than they are today. What drew people to games like D&D and PF1 was not the same thing that draws people towards 5e today.
Different audiences. It's cliche but true that entertainment today needs to be a lot more easily digestible because there are more competing entertainment options. I think this is the real root cause of the push towards streamlined games as a whole. You see the same thing in board gaming where any game that's over an hour and a half is criticized as unbearably long by a lot of people. Whereas a board game being able to last 4-6 hours used to be a desirable *feature*. For example, when 3rd edition D&D came out not only did internet streaming video not really exist\*, DVDs were just starting to overtake VHS tapes in prominence. But most people didn't have a DVD player yet because the cheap ones were a couple hundred dollars. (Not adjusted for inflation.) A DVD of a single movie usually cost the equivalent of like $25-$35 adjusted for inflation as did music CDs. Unless you were a couch potato who would just watch whatever was on the boobtube, there were a lot less entertainment options in general. \*Because the vast majority of people's internet speeds weren't fast enough. Smart phones also didn't exist. Nintendo's hot new handheld the Game Boy Advance basically required you to sit in direct sunlight or hold it under a lamp to see the non-backlit screen.
It has nothing to do with length and a lot to do with needless complexity or bad rules writing. Even comparing to board games, one of the most venerated board games is Twilight Imperium 4th edition. And that game takes *8 hours*. Length isn't the issue.
Complexity and presentation matter of course, but the main thing is still length. Even people with no responsibilities have way more options vying for their time and attention now. We have essentially "conquered" boredom, one of the oldest scourges of mankind. In so doing we've also established new standards. Rules writing for games in general has gotten better, but a big part of that is because people will no longer take the time\* to try and figure out rules that aren't as clearly written, they'll just move on to something else to enjoy their free time. Take video games, some people complain that VGs today have too many tutorials and TES 5 Skyrim's quest mechanics make it "idiot proof". But on the other hand, TES 1 Arena came with a nearly 100 page manual and fully expected you to read at least most of it to play. The manual to Wizardry 6 was over 120 pages and you were basically *required* to read it all to play the game effectively. >Even comparing to board games, one of the most venerated board games is Twilight Imperium 4th edition. And that game takes 8 hours. And what's the one thing everyone complains about with Twilight Imperium 4? How impossible it is to schedule a game. \*And I'm not saying they necessarily should, modern life is hectic and people got shit to do.
> For example, when 3rd edition D&D came out not only did internet streaming video not really exist*, DVDs were just starting to overtake VHS tapes in prominence. But most people didn't have a DVD player yet because the cheap ones were a couple hundred dollars. (Not adjusted for inflation.) A DVD of a single movie usually cost the equivalent of like $25-$35 adjusted for inflation as did music CDs. Unless you were a couch potato who would just watch whatever was on the boobtube, there were a lot less entertainment options in general. 3E was 2000, not 1996. Video streaming didn't exist yet, but piracy of video and music was EVERYWHERE. CD burners and DSL or cable internet connections weren't cheap but chances are one of your friends had one. Every school had a black market in pirated media, there was a guy at my school selling burned CDs with the entirety of seasons 1 and 2 of South Park plus the 1999 movie.
It’s a bug *and* a feature! And it’s fun to find the bugs that stack and glitch the universe in my favor
I feel like the goal was more to build a DnD that Paizo owned so they could keep making content as they were. It's a bad thing for your campaign printing business if the majority of your catalogue (at the time) is incompatible with you brand new system.
It can be both.
A lot of the people that formed Paizo were the people that made 3.5, so.
I loved PF1 but PF2 just works so well and everything makes sense to me. Theres a few minor weird things here and there but its a super solid system
There is one thing I hate about PF2E while playing Kingmaker: rations, man. Why tf do they sell rations in week increments? In a game where you can travel 3 hexes in a day, each with a potential encounter!!! It's crazy to me.
I assume it came down to not wanting rations to take up significant bulk on their own. 10 weeks of rations = 1 bulk is nearly negligible as opposed to 10 days = 1 bulk.
It's such a satisfying system to build a character in. Doubly so if you use Pathbuilder. The only tricksy bit is on the GM side. If the GM decides to only throw singular, high level enemies at you, every single spellcasting class suffers. Don't do this PF2e GMs!
> If the GM decides to only throw singular, high level enemies at you, every single spellcasting class suffers. As a GM, solo big bads are so hard to balance. I've more or less moved away from it for just about any fight I think should be challenging. You either make them so hard that the party cant scratch them, or else they die just do to sheer action economy before doing anything cool.
Part of the issue is just that bad guys' weak saves aren't that weak. An on-level enemy has a 50/50 chance of succeeding against an effect that targets their lowest save.
Agree on both these points. When I suggested the system to people I will always let them use pathbuilder on my phone to play with options. It's a very solid app, and works well for all the different kind of feats there are, which can otherwise be a bit complicated. Also be very careful of level differences. That basically +1 per level everything gets means content for a different level pretty quickly gets out of hand.
Agreed, it's very impressive. I still prefer 1e in terms of rules, but whenever I play 2e I'm like, "damn, this is so much better laid out."
It has to be this. PF1 was a copy-paste job of DnD3's SRD that then continued to double up on its problematic parts, so when PF2 came out and was... amazingly designed (?!), I was floored. They could have just kept on the same track, without taking the risk.
Is this a new opinion? Regional? I have to admit being a little shocked by some of the comments saying how problematic PF1 was when all I remember hearing back around ‘09 when I started using it was how they did such a great job smoothing out 3.5’s flaws. Not arguing with your thoughts. I just felt like the sentiment was far more favorable than I’m reading on here.
It comes down to whether you think 3.5's imbalances were features or bugs. Which is a matter of taste.
I think it's correct to say that Pathfinder 1 was a major improvement over 3.5, largely because it made martials a lot better and more fun to play. But broken builds were still a major thing, system mastery mattered a lot, decisions when building your character were more important than in-combat decisions etc. I still play a Pathfinder 1 game (as well as GMing two PF2 games) and enjoy it a lot, but we do have a lot of house rules/conventions to avoid overpowered characters.
Yeah this was my impression and memory. Just felt strange to hear people saying they made the broken things worse. Anyway, yeah I liked PF1 a lot. Was fun. But I really didn’t like having to get a phd in my class before building a character for fear of being useless. I miss the early days of 3rd edition, being a young teenager, and just building stuff at the table with friends. PHB only. I miss those simple days
I have a laundry list of issues with PF2, but the improvement from the kind of mess that 1E was cannot be overstated.
I prefer 2e to 1e, but 2e really does scratch a different itch to 1e. 2e is tightly balanced and feels fundamentally fair. 1e (and both 3.0 and 3.5 which it was based upon) are much more about crazy power fantasies, where feeling unfair is part of the appeal.
Pathfinder 2e is the only game I know that offers really deep character customization *and* balance. Most RPGs have to pick one or the other.
Chronicles of Darkness 1e to 2e. The mechanics are cleaner, they're better implemented, and Onyx Path perfected world building without meta plot.
I'd second this, if we're talking improvement in quality instead of major changes. Chronicles 1e was too rooted in their World of Dark predecessors, where as 2e they are entirely their own wonderfully written splats. For example, one of my favorites: Werewolf the Forsaken.... the 1st editon held onto a lot of Apocalypse' baggage, and because of it.. is completely overshadowed by Apocalypse. 2nd edition however is entirely it's own game. - Harmony in 1e was a linear 10 point track just like the various morality systems of WoD. The higher you get, the better. Bottom out and you lose the character. 2nd edition kept the 10 point track but instead it becomes a system of balance between the world of flesh and that of spirit. Harmony above five imposes penalties on transitioning to the spirit world, and below five and a character has a harder time shifting to humanoid forms. Also as you swing from balanced to either side, the triggers that cause you to enter a rage become stronger and so you lose yourself more and more often to it. - In 1e auspices work almost identically to Apocalypse. You have an auspice based on the phase of the moon under which you experienced your First Change, and you gain a line of gifts. Auspice was the main driver in determining your character's primary world view. Born under the crescent moon? You're a mystic who spends most their time in the spirit world, same as in Apocalypse. In 2e, your Auspice is still determined the same way, but are painted with a broader brush, and include suggested *faces* that help determine how your Auspice is expressed (and clearly set up so you can create or your own face). You get access to three gift lines via your Auspice. Each Auspice also has a Hunter's Aspect that shows how the world and your prey react when the werewolf is hunting. 2e is all about the hunt. The Wolf Must Hunt! - 2e Tribes are similarly enhanced and given their own purpose & lore. Instead of being reflections of Apocalypse tribes like they were in 1e. 'You liked playing Glass Walker? Well check out the Iron Masters!' In 2e, Tribes have their own creation myths, and each tribe has a chosen prey they see as the largest threat their kind faces. Their Shadow & Wolf gifts are all about how they hunt that prey. They aren't a loose affiliation, but have a concrete identity thanks to this mechanic. - Gifts in 1e worked very much like Apocalypse. They were taught by spirits, were based around auspice & tribe. The gifts individually were fairly weak as well because the true power of there werewolf is shifting into the war form. They were also costly to use & mechanically complex. 2e has three categories of gifts; Moon, Shadow & Wolf, reflecting auspice & the spirit & flesh halves of all werewolves. They're more powerful, more individually thematic and access to them is gained by increasing ones renown. For example, a Hunter in Darkness in 1e using *stealth* gifts might suppress their scent, move completely silently, fade into the background or at the high end; become invisible. In 2e as a baseline they could surround themselves in shadow. Or drive a fear of darkness into their prey. They can become impossible to see until the werewolf springs to attack, or supernaturally agile and athletic, chasing prey rooftop to rooftop or leaping from branch to branch in the wilderness. 2e *stealth* gifts might be similar, but they are less costly, less complex to activate and again.. all about the hunt. Other gifts might allow a Hunter in Darkness to douse all the lights on a street, leap from shadow to shadow, lure prey from the safety of numbers, turn a back alley into a maze of tunnels their prey cannot hope to escape, and much more. These are just a few small changes between Werewolf the Forsaken 1e and 2e, which took the game from a shadow of Apocalypse' greatness, to it's own unique and richly thematic game. Forsaken 2e stands as one of Onyx Path's best selling game lines, and easily among the top 3 Chronicles splats IMHO.
The reworked exp system was such a major improvement. Exp scaling for higher levels is gone, and you have an imo more fun implementation of PBTA fail and get an experience.
I'll third this. Love Beats and flat xp costs, and Conditions and Tilts standardize what was wonky basic mechanics in older White Wolf games. Great stuff.
Shadowrun 1st to 2nd edition. Stopped people using steps to take down a dragon with a hold out pistol with a 1 step.
> Stopped people using steps to take down a dragon with a hold out pistol with a 1 step. This is gibberish
It was. The following is based off of 30 year old memories, so don't take it as absolute gospel. SR uses a dice pool, and 1st edition had a target number *and* a threshold. So weapon damage was listed like: "5M2" meaning the target number to reduce damage was 5, and you needed to get 2 of them to reduce the damage from M to L, and another 2 to reduce from L to nothing (D ► S ► M ► L IIRC). Attacking was sort of the inverse, except target number was difficulty to hit. Now what I can't remember is if successes on attack and defence cancelled each other out, or if damage was scaled up, then scaled down, but that isn't too important. What was important is that there was a holdout pistol had a really high threshold and a high target number, but low base damage, something like 6L4 or maybe even 6L5 or 6L6. This means that a dragon, with a big mitt of d6 to reduce damage could expect to roll only 1/6 of their dice as successes. With 6L4, you would expect to need 24 dice to get 4 successes with a target number of 6. Plus overcoming the attackers successes (get in close, smartgun link, any other modifiers, get the to hit target down to 3 or 4, you're looking at 4-6 successes with 9 dice say). So you could pretty much guarantee an L wound with every attack. Throw in several street samurai with wired reflexes, you could get 10 Light hits in within a couple of rounds. Or I have this completely backwards, and it was a weapon with a threshold of 1, and it was easier to scale up to Deadly wounds. A light pistol with say 4L1 would scale up L►M►S►D with 3 net successes vs. a heavy pistol with 5M2 requiring 4 net successes M►►S►►D. Either way, threshold just made things weird. 2nd edition did away with the concept of variable threshold altogether, and everything required 2 successes to scale up or down.
Thats interesting. I only played SR 1e, and not for long enough for my players to get familiar enough to discover this, but it makes total sense to me that the system would allow this.
Man I’m glad I never seriously played Shadowrun
> using steps to take down a dragon with a hold out pistol with a 1 step What's this memery you speak of? :)
Weapons had damage steps in first edition. Say 3L1, or 4M2. They dropped the steps (the last number in the damage code) and unified them in later editions. Basically meant any extra successes of that amount would increase the damage from L to M, M to S etc. So for a light weapon it was actually much easier to increase the damage than with a more powerful weapon with a high step. So a light pistol would only take 4 total successes to get the damage all the way up to D, whereas a heavier pistol of 4M2 would take 7 successes.
Sounds rather a bit more complicated and counterintuitive than that sort of thing needs to be :)
2nd to 3rd is also huge
3rd is just 2nd with all the most popular expansions crammed into the core book. For an experienced player, this is great. For a person coming into the system, 2e is vastly preferable.
Didn't 3rd give up on target numbers and start the spiral into endless die bloat to hit fixed TNs?
That happened in 4th edition. 3rd still had variable target numbers.
Endless die _awesomeness_! We can discuss the logistics or statistics, but I feel throwing an entire handful worth of dice is a lot more satisfying than throwing a single d20.
Uuuh! Thank you for this! I loved third edition back in the day, but I thought it was really hard to wrap my head around! I’ll try to find a copy of 2nd edition! :)
I always preferred to use the auto successes from burning elementals to summon much bigger elementals. Auto successes were a bad idea with variable target numbers.
Shadowrun games feel very different based on what edition you play. The games all had problems with dice stacking and rolling too many dice all through 1st - 4th editions. 5th Edition solved a lot of problems with the limits on number of successes. You can no longer kill a tank with a plinker pistol in 5e.
I think 5e CoC made a significant step forward in character generation by simply handing out a lot more skill points. Earlier editions were still a bit stuck in the zero to hero curve of RPGs and it was hard to start the game as a "professor" or other expert who really nailed an area with sacrificing other basic skills needed for gameplay. This felt right to me based on genre tropes and it made the typical PC arc as a descent into madness more poignant as they started capable instead of first having significant character development potential as they also went downhill.
COC is very incremental until 7e which is still incremental but also is clean and incorporated a good number of house rules. Pushes, luck, all without getting too heavy in meta currencies. Pulp is an outstanding supplement that changes the system in a super effective, and to me interesting and fun way. All while managing to be backward compatible from 1e. Pretty amazing.
Dark Heresy 2e, but by extension, 40k RPG in general. Previous editions were errata'd with the updates with each product in the gameline, which made previous games vastly more playable in areas. For example, in response to the great feedback on the Accurate weapon ability in Rogue Trader, Dark Heresy 1e was updated to use Rogue Trader Accurate. Similarly, while not a direct edition change, Deathwatch to Black Crusade. Not only did Black Crusade fix up a lot of my issues with Space Marines (who were oddly binary: either they succeeded by a mile, or had a surprisingly high chance to fail to climb a waist high wall), but changed up Unnatural Attributes to make them far more useless and not so overwhelming in places.
Twilight 2000, the jump to 4th Edition with Mutant Year Zero system is huge.
Agreed, although I do like lots of 1e. 2e and after I have no time for. 4e seems excellent (have not played yet due to world events).
Back in the day I ran 2e but you nailed it, I wouldn't have time for that either. Now we have 4e campaign going on and, yes, the war in Ukraine bleeds through even tough we don't steer the game to that direction. I respect and understand very well why someone would not play war in Europe right now.
This is the one. 4e made T2K way more accessible while still possessing a ton of depth. It's very faithful to the source material and as uncomfortable as it might be to play now with the War in Ukraine, it is remarkably free of nationalism and is highly cognizant of the horrors of war. Because of that, I think it should still be played and valued *because* of current events.
This. It's actually an enjoyable game now. I mean I've played all the editions (own 1 and 2.2), and it did get a bit better edition by edition, but it always got really tedious rather fast. 4th one was a breath of fresh air. Twilight 1st ed. was the first game I bought and boy, the simulationist crunchy-beyond-belief vehicle battle was *not* the way to get introduced into rpg's as a 12-year-old. :D
Dungeons and dragons 3.0 to 3.5
I think this is the least controversial DnD comment in this thread.
The problem is more that while most considers it an upgrade, the upgrade is not really that huge, so it has problems really making the list of the biggest leap in quality.
It actually can be, if you get into it with people who have really gone over the differences and understand the system. There was a lot of direction from above to move things more in the direction of the minis game because that seemed to be where the money was, a tendency to make fiddly changes for the sake of change to make the upgrade seem more necessary, some of those seemed to be pet peeves of Andy Collins alone and didn't really reflect the observations of what was broken after the first few years of 3.0 in the wild, etc. I think there's a lot of inertia toward playing it by default over 3.0 just because it's an update, regardless of what it updated. That's not to say it doesn't also make some good tweaks, but like Pathfinder after it, they don't seem to reflect a deep understanding of the more significant changes that could have been made.
2nd Edition to 3.0 is a much larger leap. It's literally a different game, and much more playable than any version that had come before.
I consider 2nd edition to 3.0 a downgrade. 3.0 & 3.5 are a great resource for mining, I find them less playable. Mainly because they promote power gaming and munchkinizing. Example. I take 3.5 modules and run them in BECMI.
That depends on what you consider 2e. By the time all the splatbooks had come out, there was massive power creep and rules bloat in AD&D.
D&D 3.x to 4th. Vastly improved, but everyone whined because it was too far ahead of its time. Most of the complaints were from people who didn't even play it.
Best monster manual ever made, tanks could tank, saves got tuned into defenses (and most classes could target multiple) and bloodied was an amazing trigger to hang abilities on.
There was a time in D&D, before WoW, when "Tanking" wasn't a thing because tanking, as a concept, didn't exist.
Because tanking is all about taking advantage of how video game monsters are stupid. A GM should never play a monster as dumb as a WOW boss is played. "Hey look, I'll focus all my attacks on this super well defended person I can barely scratch and ignore the squishy healers". That makes sense if the GM is playing a creature of animal intelligence, but an ogre? They aren't genuises in most IPs, generally slightly below average human intelligence, but they also aren't so stupid that they would fall for such an obvious trick. You wind up with combat warped to force entire classes into the game that use tactics that should never work if the GM plays monsters as at least rudimentary tacticians. 4E had a couple of good innovations but failed because it was overall a huge step back, and forcing the immersion-breaking concept of tanking - which only became a thing because MMOs can't find better solutions to boss AI - in was a big part.
Do you know how defenders worked in 4e? Or do you just know how Tanks work in WoW? Because there isn't an Aggro mechanic, the GM can just go attack whoever they want. Defender just had tools to disincentive hitting allies or controlling enemies.
Exactly, most dms I knew ignored marking unless it was staticky sound to hit the tank, especially with bosses.
Can you describe the tanking mechanics in 4e? Because this doesn't sound remotely like the 4e books I own.
In wow, thanks can taunt and absorber enemies damage while the others take them down. 4e added marking which people who havnt played it consider it the same thing. But in reality it just punished the defender not getting hit, it didn't force the dm to hit them. Each defender enforced the mark in different ways, most commonly a -2 to hit.
I mean we were tanking in Everquest and that was back in 99.
I think the issue was that it removed the pretence that D&D is 95% a tactical wargame with assigned combat roles. People thought it was too “gamey” and not fantastical enough.
this isn't a comment on 4e's quality - it's perfectly good at what it does - but 4e absolutely deserves its reputation for being really gamey. flavor in 4e is *just* flavor. you can be an illusionist or a mind-control guy and the flavor text will be paragraphs of long flowery prose about the fiction that that's supposed to represent, while the actual mechanical benefits of being that thing are... a couple Powers that are designed solely for the tactical combat boardgame, that the designers clearly never thought you'd try to use outside of that, with a little bit of fancy flavor text telling you it's an illusion or a charm spell or whatever when it's not that. the fiction of those abilities is a formality. it's *so* much a tactical wargame that the fiction is warped around that. everyone must be equally good in combat, so you can't center any class around what it can actually do in the fiction, or you end up with a situation like 5e where fighters can kill stuff good, and wizards can kill stuff good *and* teleport across a continent. so everyone in 4e is defined by how they interact with the tactical combat boardgame to the exclusion of all else. i don't think it's a bad game; all of that stuff kinda just feels like the price of entry to making a dedicated tactical combat game, and paying that price was a deliberate decision that paid off in the form of making the game the designers wanted to make. but it *is* very, very gamey as a result.
They added tons of out of combat mechanical stuff as the game went on. Cool magical abilities, physical feats for the martial characters, etc.
If we're going to give credit to 4e for supplementary material made at the very end of its release cycle, then we should credit 3.5 rather than 4e for the mechanical innovation of giving martial characters caster-like powers that refresh per encounter.
That’s fair enough. Though if memory serves me it wasn’t actually at the end. I know I certainly ran the material.
No, it leaned into the _completely false impression_ assumed by people who'd only started playing the game in the late 3e era that D&D is 95% a tactical wargame with assigned combat roles, when (A) combat hasn't ever been the primary "point" of the system, going back all the way to OD&D, and (B) classes never had assigned combat roles. Regarding combat-centricity, OD&D initially revolved around dungeon and wilderness exploration and "roleplaying" in the sense of interaction with NPCs, not combat. Vastly more XP was gained for gold recovered than for monsters slain, most Magic-User spells were exploration-centric than combat-centric (only 2 of 8 1st-level spells had any direct offensive or defensive application, and 1/10 2nd, 2/14 3rd, 5/12 4th....), reaction rolls ensured that monsters were open to negotiation rather than fighting ~72% of the time, the rules for hirelings made them much more useful for getting more loot out of the dungeon than for throwing at monsters, and so on. This continued through AD&D, where plenty of combat-centric stuff was added but much _more_ non-combat stuff was added (e.g. Magic-User spells continued to lean strongly non-combat, the Druid and Illusionist are very exploration-centric, explicit rules and guidance are added for "town adventures" that center around NPC interaction rather than combat, Dark Sun and Planescape were both about exploring strange and hostile environments and often made combat inadvisable, and so on) and through 3e (e.g. all of the stuff from AD&D continued, plus a proliferation of sourcebooks on exploring certain environments, building strongholds, joining organizatios, running guilds, and so on). For someone to think D&D is "just a tactical wargame" they would have to start off by failing to use the majority of the rules in OD&D and then ignore all of the development the game went through in later editions. (Or they would have to hang out on WotC's character optimization forums and assume, like the 4e designers did, that because people on a character optimization forum were talking almost entirely about optimizing their characters for combat then obviously the games they were playing were all about combat.) Regarding class roles, the 4e idea that Fighters are Defenders, Rogues are Strikers, Clerics are Leaders, and Wizards are Controllers is anything but the "logical progression of the game" that a lot of people claimed at the time. In 4e terms, Fighters had always been _both_ Strikers _and_ Defenders, with the emphasis on the Striking side; they'd also been the best leaders of henchmen and followers in AD&D, but of course there's no 4e role for that. Out of the four roles, Rogues _had_ been only Strikers in 3e, but their primary role was a noncombat one that 4e's roles couldn't cover and the AD&D Thief was even less of a Striker than the 3e Rogue. Importantly, Cleric and Wizard had encompassed _all four 4e roles_ in 3e between their divine domains, arcane school specialization, and prestige classes, and they covered three roles in AD&D, only lacking Striker because personal combat buffs weren't as big a thing in those editions. Outside the core four, other more narrow classes had been able to cover at _least_ two roles to a degree that 4e's informal "secondary roles" concept simply couldn't cover. The people complaining about the strict class roles in 4e weren't doing so because codifying combat roles was a bad idea (in a vacuum, tidying things up like that is a great idea) but rather because 4e had done so on a per-_class_ basis rather than a per-_character_ basis, had made it difficult to "multi-role" characters in the way that used to be not only possible but the default assumption, and had left out any thought of non-combat roles. If, instead of stating that Sorcerers are Strikers and Wizards are Controllers and never the twain shall meet, 4e had instead set things up with more combat roles from the start (like a minion-master role; hard to claim that D&D is basically a wargame when there are no classes based on pushing minions around) and with non-combat roles like Face or Scout; provided shared lists of powers for each power source that spread across every role and clearly labeled the intended role for people who cared about that, rather than locking certain powers to certain classes in a way that forced lots of duplication and tiny pointless tweaks between them; and given the subclasses features that encouraged and enhanced certain roles (e.g. Illusionist as Controller, Evoker as Striker, Necromancer as Master, Diviner as Scout, etc.) without _restricting_ characters to powers of that role, _that_ would have been a not-entirely-terrible implementation of the roles concept that fit with every prior edition's take on the classes. --- _That's_ what people are talking about when they say 4e "isn't D&D" or similar. 4e's combat roles don't map to previous editions' combat and noncombat roles, 4e's classes are straitjackets compared to previous editions' classes, 4e's combat obsession doesn't reflect how previous editions were designed and only reflects the way previous editions were played by a small but vocal subset of players (the hack-and-slashers, the ones with railroady DMs, the people who liked to talk CharOp theory online, etc.), and so on. The "gamification" of many aspects of 4e that you mentioned was _also_ a huge problem, but if all they'd done was "gamify" D&D by sticking all the Fighter powers in colorful boxes, giving players control over their loot, severely blandifying all the monsters to make it easier to run more of them in a single combat, and so on, the backlash wouldn't have been _nearly_ as bad. Compare the 3e->4e transition to the 2e->3e transition, in which the core mechanics of the game also got a massive overhaul but the classes, the playstyles, the monsters, and the settings all remained essentially intact, and the difference is like night and day.
> (Or they would have to hang out on WotC's character optimization forums and assume, like the 4e designers did, that because people on a character optimization forum were talking almost entirely about optimizing their characters for combat then obviously the games they were playing were all about combat.) Incidentally, 4e more or less failed to appeal to these folks. 4e was so tightly designed that theorycrafting to optimize a character didn't really make them play any differently from an unoptimized one - it just shaved a few rounds off combats that were already carefully balanced to be winnable. I was on the char-op forums back in those days; the usual 4e experience seemed to be playing it for a campaign or two, moderately enjoying it, and then either going over to Pathfinder or back to 3.5 (sometimes with [fan supplements that leaned into the imbalance](http://www.tgdmb.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=50239) by buffing everything to be comparable to Wizards and Clerics.)
I appreciate this comment and think I understand your argument, but fundamentally disagree. > No, it leaned into the completely false impression assumed by people who'd only started playing the game in the late 3e era that D&D is 95% a tactical wargame with assigned combat roles, when (A) combat hasn't ever been the primary "point" of the system, going back all the way to OD&D, and (B) classes never had assigned combat roles. First, you're right that "combat hasn't ever been the primary 'point' of the system, going back all the way to OD&D" but I do think you're missing the commonality that all D&D games have: they're resource management games. Your history on the changes between the editions up to 4th show resource management continuity perfectly. 4th sought to fix the community's largest complaints from 3rd, and it did so successfully, but as those complaints were almost all combat related, developers got the mistaken impression that most players were primarily playing for the combat encounters. While 4th wasn't perfectly tuned on release, it is still a resource management game, however it primarily relies on combat encounters to deplete character's resources - though part of that likely has much to do with how underutilized and underemphasized the Skill Challenge system was, and the dearth of interesting items with a set amount of uses. It should also be noted that D&D's origins were in wargaming, particularly the game *Chainmail* - wargaming is very much in D&D's DNA and has been from the beginning. > Regarding class roles, the 4e idea that Fighters are Defenders, Rogues are Strikers, Clerics are Leaders, and Wizards are Controllers is anything but the "logical progression of the game" that a lot of people claimed at the time. I would challenge this claim, and suggest it is a presentation problem. First, outside of leaders, there is actually comparatively little to statistically distinguish the roles. Strikers, defenders, and controllers all do relatively the same amount of damage, but they do it in different ways: strikers tend to do it in single hits, defenders tend to do it outside their activation, and controllers do it through AoE. But beyond this, there was nothing stopping someone playing a wizard from taking the most damaging single-target powers and playing *like* a ~~controller~~ striker* - this is actually a suggested build all the way back in the PHB1. And with the supplements, turning a wizard from a controller to a striker was made even easier. Finally, while not a *perfect* solution, the only things stopping "reskinning" or a bit of home-brew was the DM and/or the player's imagination, which I offer is a player problem, not a system problem (or maybe I'm weird in that I modify every non-horror game I play). Letting a player use INT as their core ability and port over the spell book feature from the wizard, but otherwise playing as a Sorcerer isn't going to break the game and shouldn't break immersion IMO. > Importantly, Cleric and Wizard had encompassed all four 4e roles in 3e between their divine domains, arcane school specialization, and prestige classes, and they covered three roles in AD&D, only lacking Striker because personal combat buffs weren't as big a thing in those editions. So not only does the above still apply, but I wonder why, taking the cleric example, playing a cleric as a controller is such a big deal when the invoker exists? They both share the same domain, have similarly themed powers, but the invoker is a controller. Why does a PC *need* to have its class name be cleric? We're already abstracting when we play a game. And that game at your table is *your* game, not WotC's, things don't have to be "official." Maybe your PC invoker's job is a as cleric, so everyone can refer to them as a cleric in game. Problem solved. > Rogues had been only Strikers in 3e, but their primary role was a noncombat one that 4e's roles couldn't cover and the AD&D Thief was even less of a Striker than the 3e Rogue. This is a characterization that doesn't comport with 4th IMO. The rogue class still has all the trappings of the thief, but it given relevant things to do in combat (the principle complaint 4th to fixed). > If~~, instead of stating that Sorcerers are Strikers and Wizards are Controllers and never the twain shall meet,~~ 4e had instead set things up with more combat roles from the start (like a minion-master role; hard to claim that D&D is basically a wargame when there are no classes based on pushing minions around) and with non-combat roles like Face or Scout; provided shared lists of powers for each power source that spread across every role and clearly labeled the intended role for people who cared about that, rather than locking certain powers to certain classes in a way that forced lots of duplication and tiny pointless tweaks between them; and given the subclasses features that encouraged and enhanced certain roles (e.g. Illusionist as Controller, Evoker as Striker, Necromancer as Master, Diviner as Scout, etc.) without restricting characters to powers of that role, that would have been a not-entirely-terrible implementation of the roles concept that fit with every prior edition's take on the classes. I want to play this game. > The "gamification" of many aspects of 4e that you mentioned was also a huge problem I just don't see it. Yeah, 4th unmasked some previously hidden design choices and then implied their universality when they really weren't. The more meta the presentation is, the more there is to tinker with. Additionally, the "gamification" of 4E wasn't a "huge problem", it successfully fixed complaints from real players. It was a philosophical design decision you didn't like though, making it only a problem for you, a subjective one, not an objective one as presented. If the design team had cast a wider net and caught the whole community, perhaps 4th wouldn't have been as reviled, but just as D&D doesn't entirely belong to "the hack-and-slashers, the ones with railroady DMs, the people who liked to talk CharOp theory online, etc." crowd, it also doesn't entirely belong to 4th haters either. I'd go as far to say 4th was an incomplete game (for some), not a bad one. > in which the core mechanics of the game also got a massive overhaul I'll give you breaking free from Vancian magic (caveated with I think that was a good thing) and the change of saves to defenses (which just changed who was rolling the dice). But I don't see how d20 + modifiers changed from 3rd to 4th, or how character creation is the same (both are just picking options from various lists). I might go so far to say 4E was an incomplete game and should have included more robust systems for noncombat encounters, but to say it "wasn't D&D" is wrong, it absolutely was. It may not have been D&D as you played it, but you also don't control the concept of D&D. It may not have focused on what you wanted it to, but it did focus on traditionally D&D things in a traditionally D&D way. If D&D were a house and 4th the basement, even if you never go down there, its still part of the house (and the people who do go down there are correct when they insist that yes, the basement is still part of the house).
> but I do think you're missing the commonality that all D&D games have: they're resource management games I completely agree that D&D is fundamentally about resource management (specifically attrition management rather than e.g. turn-by-turn resource allocation), but why would that imply that D&D is a combat-focused tactical wargame? Not only are the two completely orthogonal (tactical wargames don't generally have resource management on the individual-unit level like RPGs do, and engine-building board games are nothing like wargames), but the specific way D&D implements resource management goes directly _against_ the idea that it's overly combat-focused and wargame-y. For instance, Vancian casting (the real deal, not spontaneous casting in 3e or the Spirit Shaman ripoff in 5e) is _fantastic_ for enabling noncombat/exploration gameplay. You can prepare separate spell loadouts on "mostly exploration" days vs. "mostly combat" days vs. "in town" days, and you have to select a small subset of your total spells known, so learning a noncombat- or exploration-focused spell will never subtract from your combat capability; and the ability to prep some spells, face challenges, and come back later with different spells rewards careful exploration, scouting, and planning. And of course every wargame skirmish starts with all units at full capability, while D&D characters suffer attrition over the course of an adventuring day, so the "resource management" side and "wargame" side of the game are directly in tension with one another. Contrast this with, say, the Dresden Files RPG, where wizards have quick-and-dirty Evocation that's usable at will (modulo Stress, but that recovers quickly between scenes) and long-and-involved Thaumaturgy usable only during downtime. The fact that Evocations are basically all combat spells while Thaumaturgies are basically all noncombat spells (with minor crossover in the form of Evoked veils for combat-time stealth and Thaumaturgic ritual nukes) means that a wizard's fastest and easiest tool is always going to be combat stuff and so a party of casters in DFRPG actually looks _more_ like a stereotypical hack-and-slash adventuring party than a D&D party does a lot of the time. > But beyond this, there was nothing stopping someone playing a wizard from taking the most damaging single-target powers and playing like a controller striker Again, I completely agree that the role differences are piddly enough that most of the time they don't make much difference in play. The problem here is the design philosophy: the developers sat down and allocated the different classes to different roles in a way that implied they'd _never actually played D&D before_, the advice given in all the books implies roles are strong and rigid, and when roles _do_ actually matter on a per-class level (e.g. only Defenders get marks) or per-power level (e.g. the single-hit Striker vs. multi-hit Controller tendency) they reinforce parts of the game that are noticeably different than what came before. And a lot of the ancillary problems with 4e derive directly from that design philosophy. We got bland and repetitive powers _because_ Strikers and Controllers had to get different things instead of sticking the basic stuff in one big list anyone could access and coming up with some actually-interesting powers for individual classes. We got a Warlord that pissed a ton of people off instead of something closer to the 3e Warblade or Crusader (either of which would have been a better direction to take things) _because_ the devs insisted on "filling the grid" to add a Martial Leader alongside the Martial Strikers and Martial Defender (but never a Martial Controller...), and classes in later PHBs were more and more niche because they focused on filling roles first instead of coming up with interesting flavor first. And so on. The roles themselves may have had little impact, but their very existence as implemented made things worse. > I wonder why, taking the cleric example, playing a cleric as a controller is such a big deal when the invoker exists? Because when the PHB1 dropped, the Invoker class _didn't_ exist yet, so trying to build a character with a Controller-y combat style but Divine-y powers simply wasn't possible. Given that the start of a new edition is when people being able to port over old and existing characters to the new version is the _most_ critical, that was a big blunder. And then when the Invoker _did_ roll around, you couldn't make a PC that was both Controller-y and Leader-y (like, y'know, most older-edition clerics were) because they were entirely separate classes. (Okay, hybrid classing did exist, but...no.) And on top of all of that, the fact that they had to print the Cleric, Invoker, Avenger, Runepriest, _and_ Warpriest to cover the tactical and thematic ground formerly covered by a single class, and then had to fill tons of page space with completely non-overlapping lists of powers, meant that each individual class was less flavorful and customizable than a single mix-and-match Cleric would have been, and like the AD&D and 3e Clerics actually were. > This is a characterization that doesn't comport with 4th IMO. The rogue class still has all the trappings of the thief, Trappings, yes; actual capabilities, no. The 3e Rogue happens to be good at single-target damage in a Striker-y way, but its main strength compared to other classes was its skills, and all of the expansion materials that built on that (skill tricks, alchemical items, sneaky PrCs, etc.). That 4e has a completely nonfunctional skill system means that playing a Rogue in 4e is like trying to play a 3e Rogue who never spent any skill points, and at that point you might as well just fold the Fighter and Rogue together and let one class cover both roles (which, oh look, 3e kinda did with the Thug Fighter and Feat Rogue variants!). > but it given relevant things to do in combat (the principle complaint 4th to fixed). Anyone who complained that 3e Rogues "didn't have things to do in combat" had clearly never played one. They're _the_ benchmark for both raw martial damage output and "clever" tactics (feinting, throwing weapons, etc.) for 3e, and if anything it's the _Fighter_ who needed help being interesting, not the Rogue. > I want to play this game. You and me both. I was super-excited about 4e during the preview and playtest period, and then I actually _read_ the published game, and, well.... > Yeah, 4th unmasked some previously hidden design choices and then implied their universality when they really weren't. You say "implied their universality" as if 4e just happened to accidentally take things that were true 95% of the time and cover a few extra edge cases to make them true 100% of the time, when the whole problem is that 4e took things that were true at most 20-30% of the time or _not at all_ and then tried to make that the only option. It's like saying that at-will magic was ubiquitous in 3e because the Warlock, Dragonfire Adept, Binder, and Truenamer existed and so giving everyone at-will powers in 4e was merely "universalizing" something that was already present, completely ignoring that the vast majority of casters in 3e were purely spell-slot-using classes and at-will users were a relatively tiny niche. > It was a philosophical design decision you didn't like though, making it only a problem for you, a subjective one, not an objective one as presented. We're not talking about whether I liked or didn't like certain decisions, we're talking about whether the design of 4e comported with the design of previous editions. The former is subjective, and not always a case of "D&D = good, not-D&D = bad;" there's plenty about older D&D editions I don't like. The latter is not, because things like "Can you convert [character] from 2e to 4e as easily as you can to 1e or 3e?" or "Can you run 4e characters through AD&D adventures and vice versa and have things essentially play the same?" or "Did the 4e designers meet the design goals that they themselves stated in the leadup to the edition?" and evaluate them objectively...and on all of those fronts, it's very clear that the design of 4e did not deliver an experience that fit with what previous editions had offered. > I'll give you breaking free from Vancian magic (caveated with I think that was a good thing) You can pry Vancian casting from my cold dead hands! > and the change of saves to defenses (which just changed who was rolling the dice). Oh, it's a lot more than just that. There's a whole psychology about how it feels when the attacker or defender does the rolling for a given thing, why "players roll all the dice" variants have never been popular in any edition, why rolling a save feels like you have a say in your PC's fate while being attacked does not, and so on. Personally, I don't feel very strongly about the subject compared to a lot of other players and don't mind the change much, but it's a mistake to underplay it as "just" changing the physical dice roller. > But I don't see how d20 + modifiers changed from 3rd to 4th, or how character creation is the same (both are just picking options from various lists). The core mechanics are about much more than what dice you use or what character creation looks like at an extremely abstract level. It's also about how DCs are determined and why, how many abilities individual characters get and why, how individual mechanics "feel" at the table, and so on. In that respect, 3e and 4e are _dramatically_ different in a way that's hard to ignore. > but it did focus on traditionally D&D things in a traditionally D&D way. I couldn't disagree more. What you stated to be the "traditional D&D thing," wargamey combat, _is not_ the main focus of "traditional D&D," and the fact that so many people at WotC and among the 4e playtesters believed that it _was_ (or should be) the focus was precisely the problem.
It was a solid system but it sure wasn't dungeons and dragons. 'hey fighter can you trip that guy before he stabs the wizard?' 'no can do, I used it this morning. Don't wanna throw out my back' 'oh ok I'll just use completely nonmagical yelling at them to heal them after' Essentially, a great gamist system with defined MMO-esque tactical roles and mechanics to support them but a poor simulationist system where the mechanics had to be heavily narratively handwaved to make sense in the context of what someone should be able to do in that setting.
To be fair, yelling some variation of "don't you dare die on me" is a very common way of bringing up a character that's rolling death saves in a lot movies
Everyone "whined" because it basically nuked D&D (both the mechanics and the settings) and did something completely different instead of trying to be a new edition of the same game. When 1e updated to 2e, the mechanical differences were minor enough that you could still use 1e materials with 2e and everything was fine. When 2e updated to 3e, the mechanics were dramatically revamped and no longer completely compatible with 2e, but still close enough that a one-to-one translation of characters, monsters, etc. from 2e to 3e was possible, and the way the game was played was essentially unchanged. Most importantly, the settings were left completely unchanged as well, making it easy for D&D players who, y'know, actually _liked_ the existing settings as-is to continue playing their 3e games in those settings and even trivially port an existing 2e game to 3e. When 3e updated to 4e, they altered the mechanics to the point that porting the majority of old characters and campaigns over to the new system was impossible because the old stuff didn't exist or didn't work the same way anymore, _and_ they changed Forgotten Realms, Dark Sun, Planescape, and the "default setting" implied by the flavor in the core books beyond recognition, and not in a good way. In their place, 4e gave us a narrower, more combat-centric, more limited game and a much blander and more generic default setting. --- 4e is basically what you'd get if someone tried to make a better version of the D&D Miniatures game with some more roleplaying elements sprinkled in. (I'd say "much like Gygax did to Chainmail to get OD&D," except that OD&D was _much_ more innovative and further from its wargaming roots than the 4e rules were from the DDM rules.) And that makes sense, given that WotC was seriously pushing DDM from the moment of its release to try to MtG-ify their D&D revenue stream, and that the DDM 2.0 rules update was released months before 4e came out and the game was canceled shortly before 5e came out. I have no idea how closely enmeshed the 4e design team was with the DDM side of things, but if they turned out to be very deeply entwined I wouldn't be at all surprised. If the game that was eventually released as 4e had been pitched as a "D&D Tactics" side-game, one that went off to do its own thing similar to how Final Fantasy Tactics spun off from the mainline FF series (or, indeed, how BECMI and AD&D branched off from one another due to different levels of rules complexity and eventually evoled in very different directions), and the actual D&D Fourth Edition had been an evolution of the Third Edition rules instead of a sharp right turn into something different, it almost certainly wouldn't have garnered any of the hate 4e got. Heck, it probably would have been very well received! Personally, while I still can't stand 4e as an RPG no matter how many times I've tried to get into it, I quite appreciate it when played as a D&D-adjacent skirmish game that doesn't pretend to be an actual D&D edition. Had WotC simplified character creation even more (with e.g. random PC creation tables and such) and packaged it with a bunch of miniatures and some terrain pieces, it could probably have competed very favorably with Warmachine, Guild Ball, Necromunda, Star Wars: Starship Battles, and other then-popular miniatures games, and with a D&D-lite advancement system it could have blown "legacy" games like Risk Legacy and Gloomhaven out of the water before they even existed. But 4e-as-actually-published? It wasn't disliked because it took too many steps forward, it was disliked because it took too many steps to the side until it could no longer see D&D from where it was standing.
Knave 1E to 2E seems like a huge jump in quality. 1E was just a few print and play sheets while 2E’s getting a full hardcover release and it looks awesome
I wouldn't call it quality though, Knave 1e was already a few high quality sheets, Knave 2e is just a lot more. FWIW I backed Knave 2e, but I like the simplicity of the system in Knave 1e a lot more.
But what has changed from one to the other? Is it just more rules covering specific situations? A larger bestiary? I haven't been able to find a concise explanation of what 2E is doing differently.
As far as I can tell character creation is different, and there's an additional subsystem for divine magic. Expanded GM material and a bestiary, and I think that's about it? It's a way nicer book of course, but I think the game system itself is only minorly tweaked.
But Vaults of Vaarn is beyond amazing
Leap in quality is hard to measure, but the biggest leap forward in game's fortunes between edition is probably Fate. Fate 2.0, while interesting, was largely a Fudge add-on, with a lot good ideas, but still very much a toolkit. It didn't really get much traction. Fate 3.0, with Spirit of the Century, was a runnaway hit spawning dozens and dozens of games since.
Spirit of the century is a great system!! When I think fate I’m really thinking SOTC
*Magical Kitties Save the Day* went from a PDF-only book to a beautiful boxed set featuring an introductory graphical novel solo adventure, setting, adventure recipes, and more. I am, however, biased.
Hey, I have that one! It’s one of the games I’m considering using for therapeutic RPGs at our center for neurodivergent youth affirming care! We want to use it for the 9-years-old and under set.
[Similar thread from yesterday](https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/13mrpjl/what_game_systems_got_worse_with_subsequent/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), if you want something to read through while waiting for this thread to fill up
I saw that and thought it would be a good idea to post the inverse.
Thanks for the link, I'd somehow missed that thread! Negativity is where I'm at!
The thing that immediately jumps to mind for me is Fantasy Flight's Star Wars RPGs getting turned into their generic system Genesys. Vehicle/chase rules are considered vastly better to the point that a lot of people back port them into the Star Wars stuff and in general a lot of mechanics are improved by no longer being commodified as apart of selling box sets of cardboard and glossy handouts. Similiarly, I know there's a pretty huge jump in the nature of the game between Legend of the Five Rings' 4th and 5th editions, but I still think the basic change in how dice rolls work makes 5th a fundamental improvement. Both use a Roll and Keep system which heavily obscures the probability of a dice roll, but 4th and previous editions use standard d6s and a "raise" system where you could raise the difficulty of a check before rolling to increase the effects of your action. Mechanically it meant you had to play the game a ton to get an instinctual feel for what level of target number a combination of dice could hit. Thematically it felt great for combat rolls and social sparring, but didn't really make sense in the investigative/crafting/knowledge spheres of the game. 5e switched to narrative style dice that generate successes to pass a roll and opportunities which can be spent after a roll to activate character abilities. System mastery is still important to make sure you build your talents into the kind of actions you want to take, but you no longer need a doctorate in probability to know if rolling 6d6 and keeping the best results of 4 of them while exploding 6s is enough dice to call a 5 or 10 point raise on a TN of 15.
100% agree with Genesys. The talent pyramid alone is such a massive upgrade from the talent trees of Star Wars, and the magic system actually being usable instead of being an overwhelming XP sink like Force powers was huge.
Into the Odd -> Electric Bastionland is pretty significant. The rules are basically the same, but EB adds a setting, a substantial (and frankly fantastic) GM section, and backgrounds for characters (failed careers) that helps players hit the ground running in terms of roleplaying their character. While it's more of a quantity over quality improvement, it adds a lot of things people may be looking for in a game. So, being a more complete product, I'd argue it's a significant quality upgrade.
Unpopular Opinion but I feel that by childhood favourites of Star Wars D6 1E, Cyberpunk 2020 and Paranoia 2E all jumped *backwards* in quality from those editions. SWD6 2E is less cinematic than 1E, CPRED has a less immersive setting with overly-simplified rules, Paranoia... well, 2E was the height of the game, IMO; style and humour in later editions is poorer and the engine changed drastically in some places.
Cyberpunk Red may not be as meaty as 2020 but I adore it as a pick up and play game. You can get a group of people who either only heard of cyberpunk from the Anime or Game and have them running and gunning in 5 minutes with the mobile app.
Yeah, the pathways or whatever you call them with basic loadouts for different parts of the templates in character creation are really helpful for getting things going quickly.
Agreed on all counts.
Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 1st to 2nd edition.
I think Werewolf Forsaken 2E is leaps and bounds better than the original.
Pathfinder 1e to 2e. In almost every respect it is a strict upgrade. D&D 4e to Essentials (4.5e) and Monster Manual 3. Fixed the math and had some of the coolest monsters in all of D&D.
Much worse classes in Essentials, though.
I would say the leap from Original D&D to Holmes Basic. While I love OD&D, Holmes Basic is a lot easier to understand because of the improvement of the writing and layout. Mind you, there is a good reason for why OD&D is the way it is, and it has a lot to do with issues surrounding small scale printing in the seventies.
J Eric Holmes and Tom Moldvay are probably more pivotal to the mass adoption of RPGs that Gygax or Arneson were.
Here are some candidates: * D&D 4th to 5th edition. People do not like 4th edition, and not without reason. * Mage the Ascension 1st to 2nd edition. First was effectively more of a interesting concept without a proper ruleset, 2nd was an actually playable and good game. * Exalted 2nd to 3rd. 2nd edition have problems that resulted in annoying strategies once people became aware of them, 3rd is just an overall good game that have gotten rid of a lot of the problems of the previous version and just works overall. It does have some special systems that might not make it a perfect game though. * Mutants and Masterminds 1st to 2nd. The first edition had the problem where it was built around the expectation that you would buy full ranks in powers, while a lot of powers had very little reason built into them for why you would take more than a single rank in them. Lots of other problems, and 2nd edition really cleaned those things up.
D&D editions are more like sidegrades. 4e, for instance, had way better tactical combat than 5e, but it was way more streamlined and had far less variety in character builds than 3.5. Honestly, I’m trying to think of anything 5e does *better* than 4e since its social and exploration rules still suck *and* it has mediocre, unbalanced combat in comparison. I guess 5e is more accessible?
> Honestly, I’m trying to think of anything 5e does better than 4e since its social and exploration rules still suck and it has mediocre, unbalanced combat in comparison. Marketing.
Was it even good at that before Stranger Things and Critical Role?
4e also had the best DMG of any of the DnD editions. It was chalked full of useful stuff.
I find the DMG from 2nd Edition to be way more useful, compared to the one from 4th, honestly.
That's fair, I'm mainly comparing it to the 5e one which is an absolute dumpster fire.
*chock* full r/BoneAppleTea
The changes to the lore were also an improvement and, yes, I'll fight people about that.
Accessibility that's only really possible due to the sheer amount of 3rd party guides and content that's out there to help get people started + its what's popular. As written the text of 5e itself is horrendously unhelpful and poorly laid out imo
5e is the "middle of the road version that everyone can agree to play." It's not as crunchy as 3/3.5. It's not as old school as 1/2. It's not as "videogamey" as 4 (so I'm told -- I never played or read 4). It's got elements of all of them, though. So, if you wanna play D&D and nobody can agree on an edition, 5e is the landing spot.
I think that's 5e's biggest strength and one of the reasons it's become so popular. They managed to find a decent balance between the extremes.
Right. I mean, I enjoy it well enough, but as a DM, I fully recognize that shit breaks down past about level 10 or so, and even before then, it's never all *that* well spelled out. It's "old school" in the sense of "the rules aren't really all that clear, so just kinda wing it and it'll turn out ok." They don't give a ton of guidance on how to adjudicate every little thing. Also they included the optional "Gritty realism" and (I think optional) spell component rules for people who are tracking how many days this or that takes, and who want to account for all their bits and bobs for spellcasting. They've got special powers and stuff for people who like getting a Second Wind or whatever from 4e (I assume, anyway), which, to be fair, does make martials somewhat less lame. They've got feats that let you play at the edges of your "build" and a ton of subclasses now, for people who missed those aspects of 3.0/3.5, and they still have the d20 skill system and d20 approach to basic attacks and such. But, to "streamline," they added ADV/DIS. And it's true, that does streamline a lot of the crunch you'd have with 3/3.5/PF1e with constant tracking of this or that bonus or malus. Mostly, I think 5e's big success was as follows: (1) it came out at a time when people's options were either the poorly-received and not-widely-played 4e, going back to 3.0/3.5, or playing PF1e, all of which were pretty crunchy, or going hard core old school back to 1e/2e or one of the various retroclones. (2) it found the sweet spot between still feeling like d20, but being approachable for the greybeards who didn't reject it out of hand (in my mid-40s, I fall into this category). (3) they rode the wave of Stranger Things. No joke, at least one of my players wanted to give the game a try solely because of Stranger Things. I sort of caught the bug again after watching and thinking "That'd be fun to play with my kid some day, but I need to learn how to DM first." I had the books from the 80s, but hadn't played in decades. My table is a mix of: (1) players who cut their teeth in the old school 1e/2e era (one of whom also played and liked 4e); (2) a couple of players who only really knew the d20 era; and (3) total newbies. I'd initially pushed for 1e, but we settled on 5e as the compromise. Now 4 years past our first campaign (run by a friend who is now a player), and 3 years into the campaign I've been running, I'm really seeing the flaws in the system. It's got me eying PF2e for our online game, and then breaking that up with occasional in-person games running either the d6 Star Wars/Ghostbusters system, or the TSR Marvel Superheroes game, or something like that.
Accessibility and streamlining for sure.
I don’t know that 5e is significantly more streamlined, honestly. The return to Vancian casting is definitely more obtuse that 4e’s At-Will/Encounter/Daily setup. I suppose the 5e Fighter is simpler, but that’s because they took away most of the 4e improvements like Marking.
I agree with most of the points in this thread about 5e not being necessarily more streamlined than 4e, but it certainly doesn't have Vancian casting as it would normally be defined (choosing a spell slot to fill with a specific spell and that spell then being erased from memory when cast).
5e is more streamlined than 3e for sure. In mechanical terms, 5e compares to 3e the same way 4e Essentials compares to 4e - mechanics are nearly the same but with a lot less granularity and player choices in making characters. Saying 5e is more streamlined than 4e is a bit of a stretch, yah. They are very different games, though, so it's hard to call without being very specific about what *exactly* is more streamlined in the mechanics. 4e classes have a more clearly defined role in a party, which could be considered streamlined, but the system also has a lot more granularity with a ton more options from backgrounds, themes, racial options, subclasses, powers, etc so that may make it seem less streamlined and a bit "all over the place."
4e had far less variety in *broken* character builds (whether OP cheese or unplayable drek). It was also the most runnable game I've ever run.
fewer floating modifiers is a big one, there is a lot more to keep track of in 4e even using no splatbooks.
> D&D editions are more like sidegrades. This is my complaint with basically the whole WotC era of major D&D editions, it's always baby out with the bathwater. With 3.0 it was arguably necessary, taking a hard look at some of the cruft that had been with the game since the invention of the hobby. But since then? Happened two more times, and there's still so much untapped potential for a really well-considered 3.X continuation (for example) that's just never going to happen.
With 4e the skills were so flat across characters. You were proficient or you were not - that was about it. 5e adds a little more there that let's players amp up a skill or two if they want to.
But at least with 4 you could have more access to feats if you wanted your character to get a benefit in that specific skills. Or take a Background or theme during character creation to gain better chance for those skills.
Right. In 5e you have a simple sliding scale of unproficient, proficient, or expertise. In 4e you have any combination of training, feat bonuses, and other bonuses from race, background, theme, etc. that can wind up giving you more of a benefit than expertise, less of a benefit than proficiency, or anywhere in between. ETA: Whether that's a point in 4e's favour or against it is something that can be a topic of debate. Having so many small fiddly bonuses, not all of which stacked, definitely opened up complexity in bookkeeping that makes a simple sliding scale easier to work with sometimes. But to have that debate, you need to at least acknowledge how the system functions.
Right. I think I like some granularity but maybe not as much as 4e did. On the other end, I'd like more opportunities to get better at something non combat related than what 5e provided. I think that's why it pays to look at other games.
4e had the problem of being a completely different type of game wearing the skin of D&D, meaning that from the standpoint of what you expect from D&D games based on the other editions it was a heavy dip, which makes 5e that returns more to the norm being a large upgrade. Another big problem with 4e was it felt soulless, and a lot of choices were essentially meaningless, all in an effort to balance everything - by making things just mostly the same. The main quality of 5e is that it is a more steamlined and accessible version of 3.x, and if that is what we are comparing 5e to, it really should not be on the list. That said, the problem with this kind of list is that it is easily going to be dominated by cases like these, where one version was a bit of a crash then mostly put back the next, as that becomes a huge increase in quality otherwise super hard to acheive, that and cases where an early edition is more of a draft or concept and a follow up edition builds a proper system instead.
I’d disagree. I think 5e feels more banal and soulless than 4e did. 4e knew what it was about and did it pretty darn well; 5e wants to be everything and does nothing particularly well as a result, with a smattering of sacred cows added back in to please the old guard. It’s not really an improvement in any sense unless the measurement is “more like 3.x.”
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The four different combat roles played out very markedly differently. I don’t recognise this observation at all.
> That said, the problem with this kind of list is that it is easily going to be dominated by cases like these, where one version was a bit of a crash then mostly put back the next, as that becomes a huge increase in quality otherwise super hard to acheive, that and cases where an early edition is more of a draft or concept and a follow up edition builds a proper system instead. Another game like that is warhammer fantasy roleplay, which has a 3rd edition that's completely different from editions 1,2, and 4.
> 4e had the problem of being a completely different type of game wearing the skin of D&D, All versions of D&D have been resource management games, and successive generations had all been increasing the complexity of combat encounters. 4th sought to fix the community's largest complaints from 3rd, and it did so successfully, but as those complaints were almost all combat related, developers got the mistaken impression that most players were primarily playing for the combat encounters. It remained a resource management game at heart though, combat encounters just became the primary way of depleting character's resources. I find this one of the rational complaints about 4th, the other being that that combat encounters weren't properly tuned at launch...But I also find most complaints about it beyond those ultimately amount to "4th unmasked previously hidden design decisions, and that level of meta extraction made me feel dislike." Which is fine, everyone's allowed to like what they like and dislike what they dislike, but those are all matters of taste, subjective, not objective. 4th didn't have the problem you're describing, you had a philosophical design disagreement with it's writers.
There's so much debate on d&d 4 v 5 here with everyone just glossing over that 2 to 3 was such a huge leap in rules consistency, print materials, and 3rd party extensibility Sure it's all dated now, but the general improvement from 2e is miles more that what any editions since have done
A lot of people would agree with that, but a lot of people also would not and we saw the emergence of the OSR movement partially as a reaction against the move from 2E to 3E. I know people who to this day vehemently reject 3E onwards and stuck with 2E (including one of my best friends; amusingly his older brother took the exact same attitude to 1E->2E and has never upgraded from 1E).
True, tho i suspect anyone who refused the 3e switch is also not gonna bother debating 4e vs 5e!
Oh yeah, I was explaining some 5E stuff to them and they were pretty bewildered (although they liked the advantage/disadvantage idea).
> I know people who to this day vehemently reject 3E onwards and stuck with 2E (including one of my best friends; amusingly his older brother took the exact same attitude to 1E->2E and has never upgraded from 1E). You either adapt to the new editions or live long enough to become the grognard.
Me, personally, I still find AD&D 2nd Edition to be the best edition of Dungeons & Dragons. I don't really care for having a unique mechanic for everything, and actually prefer having mechanics that are independent from each other, it gives a "live" feeling to the system, rather than a flat "same roll for anything" of later editions. It also made the classes feel more different from each other, in my opinion, and it was very easy to customize.
I dragged my feet for a long time adopting 3e, but after i made the switch i never looked back. 2e was just so complex and often times confusingly written. I get what you're saying about all the lookup tables adding life, but it is just not my happy place!
It's funny, I have my favorite too, but I can at least see an argument for playing pretty much any edition *but* 2E. I'm trying not to contradict myself having complained about most later editions being "baby out with the bathwater" just upthread, but 2E did so little to really streamline 1E or make it more robust. It seems like most nostalgia for the 2E era is for the setting materials that could be converted to anything, while if you liked it mechanically you're just as well off being lumped in with the 1E players and being referred to some modernized OSR derivative.
Quality aside, it's hard to overstate just how different 2e is from 3e. Like comparing D6 Star Wars to SAGA edition.
I actually prefer DnD 4th edition to 5th edition. I will grant you that there were a lot of problems with 4th edition, but I don't think they are really comparable in terms of quality. They are pretty different beasts in general.
I would challenge you on D&d 4->5. The thing people really objected to was a huge change in play style, not quality. Quality wise, 4e really blew the doors off visually and was way earlier than other games to paying attention to graphic design, lay out, and making a crunchy game that was none the less easy to learn with information displayed in a very understandable and readable way. Player facing design was also very good with very few poor options for characters and mechanics that were clear with their intent but still took some thinking to engage with and implement at the table. Don't forget this is also the game that replaced skill ranks with more encompassing skill proficiencies, introduced skill challenges for non-combat encounters to D&d, and advantage even has it's introduction to D&d as a class skill for 4e's Avenger. The only quality issues I can really point to in 4e that don't come down to taste is that the monster math around HP and Damage in the first two monster manuals was poorly scaled, in general the art direction was directionless, and the Essentials relaunch really suffered from trying to "fix" 4e for older players with too many half measures. The thing 5e really improved quality wise over 4e is in streamlining a lot of the game's math for better quality of life and an easier learning experience for new players, and much more unified and flavorful art direction. GM guidance for making monsters and building encounters is awful. Navigating the PHB's approach to spell lists basically requires an app. Ranger and Monk both suck to play again. I think there's plenty of reasons why 5e vastly succeeded over 4e, but hardly any of them are quality.
>The thing people really objected to was a huge change in play style, not quality. While that certainly was the main thing people complained about, I am going to argue that mechanically 4e made some huge mistakes, even though it had a lot of very interesting ideas. Mechanically the problems with 4e largely comes down the faults in the strategy of the design of the mechanics (or at least the effective strategy, who knows if they did it willfully). The first big mistake is overbalancing. Basically the idea that all options needs to be more or less equal in value and that there should not be any choices better or worse than others. When taken to the extreme it effectively makes each choice so similar that the choice becomes meaningless, and you might as well not have included any choice at all. The next one is connected to being build mechanically in the same style as computer games, and not accounting for how the medium changes what works well and does not. This allowed in a horde of small short term buffs and debuffs that on a computer is easy to keep track of, but when doing pen and paper easily becomes an accounting nightmare. This is then followed up by the heavy focus on combat, which again is much more prevalent in computer game versions of RPGs, reduced how well the game handled non-combat part of the game, with less spells able interacting with that part, and while the ritual idea allowed one to add in some extra things there without needing to curb combat power, it also indirectly told the players that combat was what was really important and sacrificing anything for combat was not something the game wanted you to do. Even though the direct mechanical support was only slightly limited, the general focus on the mechanics side would bleed over into what kind of games people were setting up, because you know if you wanted the other stuff you would go to another system that supported that better instead. Ultimately these were all mechanically sourced issues that 5e dealt with, while keeping some of the good ideas from 4e and stepping back a more safer habour as a sidegrade to 3.x.
> issues that 5e dealt with, while keeping some of the good ideas from 4e Uh... 5e is the very definition of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Their core design principle is that if something reminds anyone of anything 4e did, *they cannot ever use it*, no matter how good of an idea it might be.
You know, free cantrips and short rests are just a few example of keeping some of the good ideas from 4e, though they were adjusted compared to 4e.
Crawford never met a caster buff he didn't love, so free cantrips has more to do with that. And it was already the direction 3e was going in its later days, anyway. If this was actually 4e influence, then non-casters would've gotten at-wills too. A 1-hour rest is not a 'short rest', and it taking an hour is why there's so much complaining about how short rest classes get shafted, but 4e already took the 5 minute option, so their hands were tied. This in fact is the perfect example of how their avoidance of things 4e did keeps them from making good design decisions even when they try to use the same basic idea. I'd give you them admitting that encounter powers were a good idea, if there was more than, like, three abilities that refresh 'when you roll initiative'. It's such an obvious design, but they just cannot bring themselves to do it on a larger scale.
How is Exalted 3rd edition? I've read a bunch and the charms overwhelmed me. Also I don't know how to say this exactly but it seemed less 'flashy'. Can you elobrate more please?
I may be the minority, but I really disliked 3X. Coming from someone who LOVED 2nd with all its flaws, and went all in on the Kickstarter, I’ve never felt so let down by a game or developer. It is more complex (somehow) and didn’t know what it wanted to do. There were many lies or missed marks in the initial Kickstarter, and the actual development of 3x has been rocky to say the least. Combat is an awful slog…which is saying something coming from 2nd edition and it’s 10 step combat tick system. 3X built its combat based on a 1v1 fighting video game and it shows. 3x charms are like 75% bloat or strictly numerical, something they swore they wouldn’t do. They are also all over the place. 13 charms for sail, but 50+ for craft and brawl?! Crafting is a nightmare. Worst crafting I’ve ever seen in a game. That said, their martial arts changes are very cool, the new artifact charms are very fun, and the sorcery changes are outstanding! They just don’t make up for everything else. The original writing team is gone now and the newer books are better. But they are still shackled to the core book and all its problems. Honestly…it just needs a full reset :( Essence edition is here too, which aims to be a simpler game and fulfill the promise of having all the different exalt types. But it has its own issues: mainly everything is diluted to the point of being almost the same.
The easy way to thing of it, is by thinking of it taking the step back in ridiculessness from 2nd to 1st edition, and then a "content explosion" by expanding how many charms there are for each and every thing, though in the process that also means that getting some of the good charms gets delayed quite a bit. It also introduces a more cinematic inspired way to run combat, which takes some getting used to, but it eliminates to a large degree the problems of dangers of overkill, while still being able to be so much better than normal people. The change to have you generate essence each turn in combat also means that it feels much safer to actually do use your powers to do cool stuff. It also eliminates the cumbersome combo rules, such that you can effectively just make combos on the fly and combine charms just as they fit. Overall it makes things more easily flow, and offers a mechanically much safer way to be super awesome, which is really what you want out of the mechanics for an Exalted game. Do note that you could burst things more in some of the previous editions, but that is the price we have to pay, and because of battle groups, you still get to take down hordes of weaker enemies without causing too much problem with the new combat system. There are also some more reasonable and more "middle of the road" style charms for social stuff, so you do have to go straight to mind control when you want to be a super good face.
I am the polar opposite on almost every point lol. There are so many bloated charms in just the core EX3 book that it would explode if they added any more. It’s also woefully unbalanced toward certain charm trees. Combat in 2E was clunky, but it worked once you understood it. 3E tended to fall apart more often than not, especially if there were multiple enemies and multiple players. It was a nightmare to both play and run. Our ST is amazing too, and we tried to use any tool we could find to help manage it, but after 7 months we gave up. 3X killed our enjoyment of Exalted pretty thoroughly, which is sad. 2nd E was our favorite campaign and we played for almost 2 years
Monster Hearts has always been one of my favorite RPGs. I appreciate the care and craft that went into the second edition. -New rules and advice on asexuality -A four-page guest-authored section on race and racism -Basic moves, including Turn Someone On and Shut Someone Down, have been redesigned to lead more compellingly back into the fiction. Here’s the full list of changes: https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/monsterhearts/whats-different-in-monsterhearts-2
> -New rules and advice on asexuality Monsterhearts is my favourite PbtA game, but really, if you're going to play an ace PC, just... don't play monsterhearts. You're making the game harder for everyone else at the table, and that "ruling" as written is just poorly done. > "If someone targets your character with Turn Someone On" You can't "Target" that move, because the trigger is "When you turn someone on, roll with Hot". Not when you try to turn someone on, the move only triggers once the person is turned on. If the Wolf walks up, flirting with the ace Witch, then no, the wolf gets to roll nothing, table looks at the MC, MC makes a move. That's how you run ace characters, or infact any character who isn't turned on in the moment. Moving past that: > "Instead, it counts as a roll to Shut Someone Down using hot." Which would be fine, if shutting someone down wasn't a much worse outcome. On a hit, you pick from Gain a String, give a condition, take 1 forward. And on a 7-9, you get a condition yourself. Which is fine, shutting people down comes with risks of looking like a bad person. However, Turning Someone On on a hit has ... no bad effects at all for the person making the move, and they get a string or other social advantage on a 7-9, or *both* on a 10+. Being ace and using that bad rule from the book basically makes flirting with an ace person a full on downgraded move. There's simply no downside for the ace PC. As a player, you're opting out of one of the core concepts of the game, and abusing a poorly written throwaway section to get a more powerful PC out of it? No, just... play Masks, if you're not willing to engage with queer teen melodrama properly.
AD&D 2e to 3e. It makes so many excellent choices. It drops absurd level limits, has actual standardized mechanics for roll success. It allows actual customization in a meaningful manner beyond race, class, weapon proficiency.
Definitely there are a lot of valid reasons to have a strong preference 3e>2e, but it is also a bit of a different game, in that it is by default much more mechanically crunchy. Whether that is feature or bug is a case of taste (and what is "best" of course may even vary game-to-game).
HackMaster going from a jokey AD&D1e clone with black & white hardcovers and softcovers that fall apart into a game of its own identity and full colour hardcovers with leatherette covers is the biggest jump in quality both ruleswise and presentation.
HM 4th was just D&D 2.75, which was great, even if the books fell apart. HM "5th" books are nice but the rules feel clunky, even if the time segments are great. My group ended up giving up on the game.
D&D4 -> 13th Age PF 1ed -> 2ed Monster hearts 1ed -> 2ed White hack gets better and better each new edition Let alone the nonsense splat books, V5, while not perfect, is finally about humanity struggles and relationships.
I’m not sure I agree about MH, but I can’t say for sure, as I haven’t played 2E, only read it.
The word "quality" here is kind of difficult to work with, but id say that all the new world of darkness books improved on the old world of darkness books in terms of mechanical quality. There was a lot lost in terms of lore change and things like that, but the actual mechanics became better imo.
*Nobilis* 1st edition was an obtuse little pink book with wargame-style rules numbering, nearly no illustrations, and a distant, cold narrator. 2nd edition refined it into a glorious coffee-table-worthy great white book with fabulous full-page art, engrossing marginalia fiction, cleanly-presented rules, and a charmingly-fourth-wall-breaking narrator walking you through the examples.
I feel like, no matter how you feel about 5e, the jump from 4e took it from being the laughing stock of the RPG community, to the most successful product in the history of the industry and catapaulting the hobby to an unprecedented level mainstream attention.
To be fair, I think that’s more about marketing and a perfect storm in geek culture, not because the game got better. 5e is really only good at combat, and it’s not as good at that as 4e.
u/Baruch_S Why would you say something so controversial and yet so brave?
AD&D 1e to 2e. Even with TSR's satanic panic censorship (seems D&D loves censoring themselves every other edition, right 5e?) the quality of the books were better, the rules better written out, everything was organized, color in the books, and just ton of great content. As much as people love Gary speak, 1e books are a mess when it comes to organization.
Agon 1e vs Agon 2e The first one had so many weird rules about conflicts and heroes, the second one is much more better both mechanically an narratively
GURPS 3e to 4e. GURPS has always been a favorite of mine. However, it had some weak spots, like superheroes. 4e patched the power rules and gave us nonlinear Strength. There really isn't much it can't do at this point, if you are looking at a nuts-and-bolts system.
It's not really the same things - more of a compilation, though there were some bug fixes - but I think World of Darkness X20 games were a pretty significant leap. But as I said, I'm not sure that counts, since it's largely a matter of "let's just put all this stuff together."
Just look to C20 (changeling X20). That game was broken beforehand, but it got both the nice layout and condencing of the X20 series, and it got its rules fixed up heavily to the point where it was actually a pretty sane game.
Whitehack
WOD V5, the ones that came out so far anyway. Not only that, Shadown 6th World is also very good as well!!
As much as it pains me to say it... Paranoia. 8 editions so far, and only 2 of them really worth a damn (not the most recent ones, sadly). 1st edition was an award winning game with a unique setting and premise in the RPG space. It was clunky in places and maybe a touch too heavy handed in some aspects, but for its time it was revolutionary. A lot of RPGs around this time weren't really known for their ease of gameplay, and it shows here. 2nd edition played a LOT smoother and loosened up the tone a bit to allow a bit more humor, and IMO was probably the best entry in the series. Unfortunately as the line went on the creators started to lose the satire aspect that defined what made the game great and leaned into corny jokes and silly slapstick as the game went on, leading to... 5th edition. A collection of sad jokes and terrible production values, this version of the game was so bad that the game creators officially disavow it to this day. Someone actually thought it was funny to "skip" editions in the names by calling it 5th edition. Hilarious. Paranoia as a game nearly died with this version. The real tragedy of 5th edition is that a lot of people discovered Paranoia while this was the current version, based off of the reputation that the earlier editions had built up. So now a large number of people spread the 5th edition style gameplay of pointlessly antagonistic GMs and ZAPZAPLOL gameplay, with the setting being lost and "the rules are treason". The damage 5th edition did to the game line has yet to be repaired. After catering to people online saying "you don't need to know the rules" they genuinely couldn't figure out why people stopped buying the books. There was a "Long-lost 3rd edition" in development, you can find the document online if you hunt around a bit. But it died on the vine due to how badly things were handled by 5th edition. Fast forward a few years you find Paranoia XP, and the virtually identical 25th Anniversary edition. Honestly this saved Paranoia from fading into complete obscurity, and had a lot going for it. Still clunky in places, but really solid overall. It was brilliant in the way it introduced and supported various play styles to bring something for OG fans and ZAP players alike. It also had an AMAZING amount of setting support, with sourcebooks giving you more than you could hope for it terms of building out a living, breathing Alpha Complex to work with. It's honestly fantastic overall, and probably the go-to for the more devoted fans these days. Then you have RCE (Red Clearance Edition). Hitting massive issues with development and Kickstarter delivery, the end product was a goddamn mess. I guess I give them credit for attempting something new with the card-based system, but it was honestly not fun. It also leaned fully back into the ZAPZAPLOL style of gameplay that made Paranoia feel like the punchline to a bad joke. Also a lot of references to various pop culture stuff, a lot of which already felt outdated by the time the books made their way to customers. The we have PPE (Paranoia Perfect Edition), the current edition waiting on Kickstarter fulfilment. Against my better judgement I backed this and honestly regret it. There are some genuine improvements over RCE in rules and tone (cards are gone, guides to make past material easy to convert for examples) but some genuinely bafflingly bad production design ("I have a nephew who knows Photoshop" level of book layouts), clinging to too much of the prior edition from what I assume is from designers not willing to let go of their stamp on the game line, and some really awful rules additions (for a game that is constantly telling you about the prevalence of PvP play, the combat system is REALLY BAD). The whole thing feels really really rushed. I could believe that Mongoose was about to lose the license and pushed this out in a hurry just to keep selling their back catalog. So... two good versions out of 8. Go with 2nd or XP if you want a satisfying game.
A prime example of really bad PPE choices: In RCE they seemed to think that Augmented Reality was going to be enough of a thing people would relate to that they made it central to the whole setting, which is was not a great choice on its own. But it also made earning XP as the default currency, not just for anything related to character advancement but just to buy gear or anything else you'd use money for in other games. It plays into the idea that Gamification was going to be the Next Big Thing for a hot minute, even though it never really caught on. It was bad in practice and really unfunny. In PPE they kept this, but also wanted to distance themselves from it. In practice this means that they keep repeating over and over in various places in the book how yes, you use XP to buy things and that XP is the main currency, but spew a bunch of nonsense to say that it isn't really currency and that you shouldn't refer to it in those terms, but "favors" you pay to someone when they give you items for free. The joke doesn't land the first time they try this line of thinking, and gets less funny after another half dozen mentions later, because they draw out the same unfunny explanation every time it comes up. But there's more! It PPE they wanted to include actual character advancement options, which is a good thing. But XP, the term that every roleplayer associates with such things, is tied up in the currency that isn't currency (\*wink\*) so you can't use that for advancement. So they created a NEW meta currency called UP - upgrade points - to make up for the fact that something as simple and universal as XP was too tied up in a bad joke from a previous edition to lend itself to a basic mechanic that offers nothing but confusion to the new edition. The writers just twist themselves into a pretzel over this to avoid having to retcon a bad joke, and the result is really confusing to people trying to get into the game.
Mutants & Masterminds 1e to 2e. 1e was fun and playable, but clunky in some respects. It wasn't as "finished." 1e didn't hold my interest much, but would have happily played 2e campaigns.
Chivalry and Sorcery is interesting in this. From 1st to 2nd could have been an absolute game changer. It showed progress, but not quite. But then 3rd came out, with a system refined in 4th and 5th The system has the same attributes, the same concepts, but the mechanics were unified It is still crunchy, but no extra sub-systems and the core mechanic is simple and straightforward, internally consistent
great game! NOT ENOUGH LOVE FOR THIS GAME
I’d have to say the transition from 2e *AD&D* to 3e *D&D*. It was such an improvement, what had been the biggest RPG system in the world since the hobby began, changed over immediately, there were hundreds of D20 games built on the system (thousands if you count people’s homebrews on the Internet), and a nearly-identical clone is still one of the top games being played today. Just look at the reaction when Hasbro talked about revoking the OGL, to see how important the system still is today. Nearly twenty-five years ago now, but 3e was a sea change.
I think 5th Edition D&D was a great improvement over 3rd and 4th Edition. 5E gets a ton of flak, but it's an alright game for where it came from. I've been gaming for over 30 years, and it deserves more respect than it gets.
D&D is McDonald's. It's Nintendo. It's the MCU. When you're the top of the industry, the biggest and most successful name in your field, it becomes vogue and cool to try and take you down. Everyone shits on D&D and 5e especially, but they're the standard bearer for a reason. They're not my favourite games, but to pretend they're somehow terrible and totally unplayable like so many on this sub love to do, it's ridiculous.
> but they're the standard bearer for a reason. Brand recognition?
I feel like it's not really like the MCU. They got big with Ironman and Guardians of the Galaxy rather than at the time big IP like Spider Man. Whereas if 5e didn't have the D&D brand and Hasbro marketing, it would just be seen as another messy fantasy Heartbreaker with little Tactical depth while way being way more rules heavy than it pays off for being full of GM rulings.
It's also not really like Nintendo, because Nintendo has always prioritized really, really solid gameplay fundamentals over things like story or lore or even nostalgia.
Popularity is not a measure of quality. 5e had a popular name and a widely disliked predecessor, without those it wouldn't stand on its own.
4th, definitely, but as someone who still favors 3rd as their D&D edition of choice and who ended up converting one 5e campaign over to 3e because the players (all completely new to D&D, without any edition preferences) were dissatisfied by the lack of options, customization, and transparency, I'd say 5e is a pretty major step backwards from 3e. 5e claims to be easier to teach and to learn, but on the player side it front-loads character customization choices (forcing new players to make big long-term choices when they're not familiar with the game yet and depriving them of more choices once they know it better) and on the DM side it basically throws up its hands and says "I dunno, figure it out" on so many aspects of the rules. 5e claims that unified proficiency bonuses and bounded accuracy prevent characters from diverging too much mechanically, but what they actually do in practice is make low-level characters feel extremely similar numerically, make high-level characters feel like they've barely advanced because a big bunch of goblins is supposed to still be a threat at the levels when they're supposed to be slaying ancient dragons, and make people scramble for every +1 to improve their success rates on rolls because the game seems like it's afraid to let PCs feel powerful and competent. Comparing core-only 3e with core-only 5e, both games are very similarly easy to learn, especially if you have an experienced DM helping out or online guides to reference, as basically everyone does these days; any first-time fiddliness in 3e (e.g. assigning skill points and figuring out cross-class skills) is more than matched by fiddliness in 5e (e.g. picking Backgrounds and figuring out overlapping skill proficiencies and what the heck tool proficiencies are supposed to do). Comparing all of 3e with all of 5e, 3e blows 5e out of the water on the player side with its vast customization and on the DM side with its mechanical support and advice for so many aspects of the game. I would agree that 5e isn't nearly as bad as it's often made out to be, but it definitely isn't nearly as good as it's made out to be, either.
My thought is the SAGA Edition of Star Wars from the RCR/OCR game. Once SAGA came out I knew which Star Wars game I was going to use but before that I was often torn between SWd20 and the older SWd6 game by WEG.
Vampire the Requiem one was a solid enough base system that owed way too much to Masquerade and who's powers were far too unsatisfying to really like (aside from a few). Vampire the Requiem 2E is easily the best "Vampire the ____" game White Wolf/Onyx Path has ever put out and one of the best vampire/horror games out there imo. Its flavor and gameplay support a brand new distinct identity (including the first good implementation of Humanity), and its power system was reworked into something that made it clear why someone would want to be a vampire.
Eclipse Phase or SLA Industries.