Quote from: Peregrin;415274I thought they just dropped the 'A' to avoid a perceived brand confusion, not divorce it from the AD&D legacy. :hmm:

Yeah, that's what I thought too when I read Frank's post, but I can't bring myself to completely disagree with his point. There's something to it, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Quote from: Hairfoot;414649I reckon my logged Nethack hours would hold up favourably against anyone else's record, so I'm not dismissing any of that.

I don't know about that.  I've been playing Nethack extremely regularly for the last 23 years.  The beauty of the game is that I've never actually managed to beat it.

Its pretty much the only computer RPG I play.  I dabbled with diablo 2 briefly, and went back to Nethack as vastly superior.  I've played a few other roguelikes too.  Aside from that, the only other things I ever play as games on the computer are stupid puzzle games like bejeweled.

RPGPundit

Ok, now I'm going to just admit that I haven't had time to read all of this thread. I just read the first few pages and then the last five or so.   In any case, to me its pretty clear that the "connectedness" of D&D is as follows:

"old" D&D, AD&D1e, and the RC (or B/E/C/M if you prefer) are all EXTREMELY similar. They're basically the same thing.  These are what I'd call the "cluster of awesome".  Different people will have different preferences (to me, the RC is god), but they're basically all great.

2e was a very unfortunate whitewashing of AD&D1e; I personally hated it, but its also not fundamentally dissimilar to the other editions mentioned above.

3e was of course notably different from what came before, but it was still similar enough that you could still feel like you were playing a D&D game.  This became less so as 3.x went on, however, and more and more bloat and bullshit got added into the game, and there was also some kind of a shift in the "mentality" of the game, so that people were no longer running it in the same way in later years than in earlier years (in later years, "character build" became a disgusting obsession to many).

4e bears extremely little resemblance to any of these.

So to make a line-of-connection as was done earlier in the game, I would say the more correct way of portraying this would be:

D&D
AD&D1e---AD&D2e------------D&D3e-----------------------------------------------------------------------4e
RC D&D

RPGPundit

Quote from: Melan;414280I am accepting an award for young researchers today

Hey -- Congratulations!

Quote from: Melan;414881All right, people: head over to my site to read the strange tale of Tegel Manor - how the Necromancer edition was conceived, what considerations were involved in the design effort, and what became of the project. It is a long read.

And thanks for putting this up.  I hope to read this at some point when I have some free time (most likely over the X-mas holiday).

Quote from: RPGPundit;415432...
So to make a line-of-connection as was done earlier in the game, I would say the more correct way of portraying this would be:

D&D
AD&D1e---AD&D2e------------D&D3e-----------------------------------------------------------------------4e
RC D&D

Yeah, that looks about right to me.

The important thing to note though is that it's not a line. 3e D&D did not make the same changes to D&D as 2nd Edition AD&D did, it went in an entirely different direction. There were things that were wrong with that direction, but there were also things very right with that direction. And the really important thing is that it wasn't the same direction as 2nd edition AD&D.

The point is not that 3rd edition AD&D is more similar to AD&D than 2nd edition AD&D is to AD&D - the point is that 3e is more similar to AD&D than 3e is 2nd edition AD&D. Which is true, because it diverged from D&D in a different direction.

Interestingly, I think 4e actually is the spiritual successor to 2nd edition AD&D. The "builds" it keeps adding look an awful lot like "Kits".

-Frank

Quote from: Akrasia;415436Hey -- Congratulations!

Thank you! This is the award of the Regional Academic Committee; I also submitted a bid for the annual Academy Youth Award, and if I could win that, that would be something. Perfect CV fodder.

I dislike 2e more than I dislike 3e - in fact I share some of Melan's nostalgia for the early days of 3.0 - for a few brief moments the Dream lived again, for some of us at least, I know not all - but I cannot agree that it is less like 1e than 3e is. The 2e mechanics are much closer to the 1e mechanics, the OD&D mechanics, the Holmes, Moldvay, and Mentzer mechanics, than the 3e mechanics are.

3e is D&D d20, a more-than-competent recreation of the older game within the Runequest/Champions/GURPS/White Wolf 'main line' framework of game design that held sway over the hobby's imagination from the early eighties to the late nineties.

Melan is right that esp. at lower levels you can more or less play 'real D&D' with it - I did. And Delver is right that there are many systemic elements - non-world-based generic prestige classes, open multiclassing, feat optimization which incentivizes minimaxing from as early in the game as possible, superfine ability differentiation and alchemical ability combination with only the roughest sorts of surface balancing mechanism, expected treasure values by level, challenge ratings, buying magic items, etc. - which ultimately make the game less and less supportive of that kind of play over time and as PCs get to higher levels as you figure out how the system really works. And Melan and Delver both know that what the other says is right as far as it goes.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415441the point is that 3e is more similar to AD&D than 3e is 2nd edition AD&D. Which is true, because it diverged from D&D in a different direction.

This both is and isn't true. While I think 3e was a deliberate attempt to return to many aspects of 1e, it also takes a lot of influence from, for example 2e's "combat and tactics" book. The argument is stronger when you compare 1e core to 2e core, but I think 2e's 'specialist wizards' concept for example is the forerunner of 3e's approach to wizards, 2e's bards to 3e's bards, 2e's cleric births the 3e 'master of all trades' cleric (due largely to spell list expansion.)

Maybe we need sort of an edition planetarium to make an effective diagram

Quote from: FrankTrollman;415441Interestingly, I think 4e actually is the spiritual successor to 2nd edition AD&D. The "builds" it keeps adding look an awful lot like "Kits".

-Frank

I disagree that 'builds' are like "kits," moreso like the "templates" of many 'buy a la carte' character creation systems. However, I do often think it's in some ways the spiritual successor of 2e, in others to a revisionist misunderstanding of 'basic' D&D.

Like any good philosopher with Forger sympathies, the shilling must under all circumstances be in the post.

Okay that was petty. But it IS getting on my nerves. Same with the stupid Gnomes.

No, I think this is another case of mistaking a par for course statement for shilling. An uncharitable reading.

Quote from: Cole;415553This both is and isn't true. While I think 3e was a deliberate attempt to return to many aspects of 1e, it also takes a lot of influence from, for example 2e's "combat and tactics" book. The argument is stronger when you compare 1e core to 2e core, but I think 2e's 'specialist wizards' concept for example is the forerunner of 3e's approach to wizards, 2e's bards to 3e's bards, 2e's cleric births the 3e 'master of all trades' cleric (due largely to spell list expansion.)

Maybe we need sort of an edition planetarium to make an effective diagram

The conventional wisdom states that the Option books were a run-up to 3.x, and were designed to test the mechanics before implementing them.  Taken in that light, the changes made at the time were  unsurprising; had WotC not taken them over, I think we would have seen a 3rd edition not too different than the one we have.

QuoteI disagree that 'builds' are like "kits," moreso like the "templates" of many 'buy a la carte' character creation systems. However, I do often think it's in some ways the spiritual successor of 2e, in others to a revisionist misunderstanding of 'basic' D&D.

Well, in that 'builds' are not as strongly supported by the rules like kits were, I agree.  On the other hand, 'builds', 'kits', 'templates' and 'prestige classes' fall along a continuum of customization within a class based system, as you appear to note.

Quote from: StormBringer;415701The conventional wisdom states that the Option books were a run-up to 3.x, and were designed to test the mechanics before implementing them.  Taken in that light, the changes made at the time were  unsurprising; had WotC not taken them over, I think we would have seen a 3rd edition not too different than the one we have.

Well, in that 'builds' are not as strongly supported by the rules like kits were, I agree.  On the other hand, 'builds', 'kits', 'templates' and 'prestige classes' fall along a continuum of customization within a class based system, as you appear to note.

Both good points.

Quote from: StormBringer;415701Well, in that 'builds' are not as strongly supported by the rules like kits were, I agree.  On the other hand, 'builds', 'kits', 'templates' and 'prestige classes' fall along a continuum of customization within a class based system, as you appear to note.

Multclassing rules and the opportunity to make your own classes in OD&D (the part talking about how you could potentially play a dragon if you'd want to at the beginning of Men & Magic) are part of the same continuum, then.