D&D General What Have You Liked Most About Each Edition (+)

[Jack Daniel]

The best thing about each edition, eh? That's tough.

White Box— The open-endedness of the rules: it's not a game, it's a kit for making a game, and whatever you do with it is all yours. Also, castle encounters! Random knights and wizards and patriarchs on the hex-map that will challenge you to jousting matches or geas/quest your party into doing their dirty work because they can. The original D&D rules imply a seriously weird High Medieval / sword & sorcery / Lost World / Barsoomian setting.

Blue Box— Daggers attack twice per round for 1d6 damage per hit? And great swords attack once every other round for 1d6 damage when they hit? Alrighty then, gimmie a bunch o' them there daggers!

Advanced D&D— That Dungeon Masters Guide. I still maintain that you can't understand how to play any edition of D&D until you've read the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide.

Pink Box— So let me get this straight. In this edition, and this edition alone, magic-users can't know more spells of a given spell-level than they can cast in a day, and they can't learn new spells from scrolls or captured spell-books without leveling up first? And this is the OSR's darling edition, the one that all the hipsters and faux-grogs treat as the idealized platonic form of pure, uncut, mainlined D&D? Cool. Cool-cool-cool-cool-cool…

Red Box— If you said that Aleena is the best part about this edition, congratulations, you're a mensch. If you said Bargle, congratulations, you're either a bastard or a Dungeon Master. As if the Elmore art wasn't awesome all on its own, this edition also gives us Gazetteers and Creature Crucibles, so… yeah, this edition pretty much is D&D.

Advanced D&D 2nd Edition— Those leather-cover splats… there's just something ineffable about those. The blue and green ones are top tier, but they're all useful in their own way. If you're very careful about using kits. Also… Caldwell and Easley art. This is where the aesthetic peaked, people.

Black Box— I couldn't tell you which has been more useful to me down through the years, Zanzer Tem's Dungeon or the Rules Cyclopedia. But let's give it to the Cyclopedia because of that iconic Dykstra lineart.

D&D 3rd edition— Well, I do have to admit that I have some nostalgia for the faux-tome core rulebook cover art. Seeing that 3rd edition Player's Handbook on the shelf of a shopping-mall Waldenbooks was a watershed moment, that's for sure. I'm not fond of these rules anymore, but I could still be persuaded to pick up and play a game of core-only 3.0, which isn't something you could say about 3.5, so… best if I end my list right here. The best thing about the edition? No question: Meepo the kobold.

 

[teitan]

1e: it's AD&D. That's why. It defined everything that made the game we love today.

2e: expanded on it and streamlined it a great deal. Moved the game away from dungeon crawls and provided a broader narrative through the different settings, the only one of which I followed was Planescape with some FR supplements on occasion for a generic homebrew. Making it so thieves weren't all vanilla and customizable. Rangers too.

3e: streamlined and a cohesive system. Made the Forgotten Realms cool, best art in any campaign setting, the trade dress on FR books was amazing and made them stand out like they hadn't before. I'd always been kind of bored by the Realms but the 3e version really made them cool.

4e, never got to play it but I love the lore changes they made with Nentir Vale. Such a great setting that I wish they would put out again. It's ripe for development and with just one book models they use today it wouldn't be a big team thing. JUst some cool stuff and put it all in one place as opposed to across several sourcebooks with tidbits here and there.

5e... brought the game back to a level where both sides of the screen are fun. Gave the DM back their power and bounded accuracy brought the game back down to original era power levels. Class design has been a lot more consistent, monsters are simple with enough complexity to be interesting. Orcs, Gnolls etc are no longer just the same stats with different artwork. Even the lore changes have been cool. You can make the game as simple or complex as needed with Feats, Minis, OA being optional rules. Basic D&D being FREE. Unless 6e is just amazing or a slight revision I think 5e is the end of the road for me.

 

[Guest 6948803]

Black Box or just basic D&D: First rpg book I actually read. Those rules were plain and simple, but opened whole new world. Before it we played homemade rpgs with rules based on "Citadel of Blood" and "Melee" boardgames, but D&D was the thing.

AD&D 1e: Compared to 2nd ed it was, as Gollum would say "raw and wiggly". I missed that in 2nd edition.

AD&D 2e: Omg, settings. Ravenloft, Al-Quadim, Planescape. Rules were already not up to par with RPGs of the 90s but sheer wealth of settings and level of support for them was enough to win me.

D&D 3e: SRD, reinventing whole engine and keeping a lot of system identity at the same time. It was my fast-burning love, but love nonetheless.

D&D 4e: Was going to skip, because I only read the rules and never had any inclination to play it, but after a thought - Nentir Vale. From what I read, liked the setting a lot.

D&D 5e: All around winner. Feels like AD&D of old, has clean and fun rules, amazing level of production quality. Captured the D&D spirit while being modern and playable game.

 

[cavalier973]

B/X and BECMI:
I like "race as class". Makes things simple for playing the game. Instead of fiddling with multiclassing, play an elf. A dwarf can find structural traps like a thief, and the dwarf and halfling saving throws means those characters should be the ones opening the possibly trapped treasure chest or sipping the possibly poisoned potion that was in the box.

"XP for treasure". The DM has the ability to speed up or slow the characters' level progression without throwing them into battle or inventing story reasons. Also, it means that players can get can gain levels without having to clear the dungeon.

In Moldvay, the "these are suggestions, not hard and fast rules" section gives "permission" for implementing houserules

In the DM section (B/X) and DM Book (BECMI), there are concrete steps given for making adventures and for running them.

Using the Caller and Mapper rules trains players to be DMs.

Having morale rules for monsters and NPCs means not every encounter is a fight to the death.

The lethality of the game being balanced by the ease with which new characters can be made.

4th Edition:
The "Points of Light" setting assumptions, but, at the same time, "it's your world", with suggested alternative assumptions.

The ease of encounter creation, for combat and noncombat situations. The ability of the DM to throw a lot of stuff at the players without it seeming unfair.

The monster variety--a fight with five goblins, but each goblin does a different thing.

Hit point damage being described as the character's ability to continue fighting, implying that hit points represent the character's frame of mind as well as physical wounds. The "bloodied" condition implies the point at which the character suffers actual physical injury.

The Warlord. Not "shouting your arm back on", but telling you to shake it off, and where to position yourself to keep from getting hit again, or where to strike next.

The Paragon Tier "prestige classes", which opens up new options. Every class has a choice of at least three.

Descriptions of powers. "Bad Idea, Friend"; "the Hunger of Hadar".

The Four Defenses. Very elegant way to handle "saving throws", and allows differentiation of attack powers. Cant hit the villain's AC? Try attacking a different defense.

Roles. A character of a given class has a particular job to do, which is important to the success of the team. Each class has a main role, and a secondary role, in case some role isn't covered by a different character.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

BECMI: This was my first exposure to D&D. With B2 I absolutely was hooked.

1E: A step up and most of my early D&D was with 1E. D1-3, G1-3, Q1, S1, T1, Temple of Elemental Evil. I loved the adventures!

2E: Played this for a while in a few friends homebrews. Hated the Skills and Powers Splat books. Wasn't a fan of the various other settings. Didn't care for the rise of FR either. This is where I started to branch out and play other games.

3E - 3.5 - My return to D&D and my favorite edition. Played and ran games from this edition for a long time. The third party support was of questionable quality at the beginning but when the wheat was separate from the chaff? There was some GREAT product for 3.5.

This edition also gave us Pathfinder which up to this day is my preferred TTFRPG.

4E: My favorite thing about this edition was the monster stat blocks. I also really liked the DMG. Didnt like this edition so I didnt play it much. Played ALOT of Pathfinder instead.

5E: Have the core rulebooks + 3 other books but have not played it. it's the first edition of the game that I've never played. Also? unlikely to as it doesn't have the complexity and customization that I tend to like in my games.

 

[ART!]

1E: I probably spent more hours per month playing 1E than any other edition. This was the edition I started on, discovering this weird, b&w-illustrated world of cheaply-printed possibilities. Then AD&D was all hardcovers and expanded this and that, and I played SO much of that i can't even tell you.

2E: It had skills? Those are good? And...kits? I played very little of this. I remember the layout and design of the books better than than the mechanics, if that tells you anything.

3E: It gave us Mutants & Masterminds other amazing OGL stuff, so although I played very little of D&D 3E, I'm very fond of this edition's existence.

4E: I was kind of thrilled when the DM told me that playing a spellcaster was not much more complicated that playing a non-spellcaster in this edition. I had mostly avoided spellcasters in previous D&D games, because I didn't like messing with all the options, i.e. spells. So, I played a cleric! That was pretty cool.

5E: Did some early playtests, a very short campaign after the release in 2015, and then almost exclusively and weekly since January 2017 - including a fair amount of DMing. More than 2E-4E, playing 5E reminds me of AD&D, and that's a good thing for me.

My sense of enjoyment has rarely been about the mechanics, but more the feel of the edition - which granted is in part created by the mechanics. AD&D was a more fully-realized version of the D&D I had been playing, and felt huge and epic and mythological as a result. As I noted, I can't comment on the contents of 2E and 3E much. 4E's intense tactical focus eventually burned me out. 5E has been absolutely great for our group, and I think the simplified/streamlined tactical stuff has been a big part of that.

 

[cbwjm]

Becmi. This was the first time I played DnD having bought the rules cyclopedia. It was mostly just my cousin and I playing but it was a lot of fun. Later I got a group of friends at highschool playing. Race as class is something that I still like, though it got a little diluted with the gazetteers.

2e. Next after becmi came 2e, this edition is still probably right up there as my favourite. I loved the kits that could change a class, the settings, many of which had their own unique classes or add-ons like planescape factions which were something which could be layered over any class/kit. I probably place 2e as one of the high points of DnD in general.

3e. I loved this edition, though I missed some aspects of 2e. Prestige classes were a great idea until they became an expected part of builds. I liked the way they took the old bonus spells for high wisdom priests had and made it a part of spellcasters in general. Feats provided a lot of customisation for each class so that two fighters or two wizards would look different from each other.

I tend to combine 3e and 3.5, so not much else to add here.

4e. I liked the tougher level characters, healing surges, rituals. The world axis was pretty cool and the dawn war resonated with me as it was similar to real world mythology, just replace gods and primordials with gods and giants or gods and titans.

5e. Loving the simplification of the system, its fun and simple to play. Advantage/disadvantage, while sometimes a little strange is so much better than keeping track of multiple small bonuses. Spell preparation for casters, no more locking in a single spell into a single spell slot. Bounded accuracy means that you no longer need an excessive number of skill points in a skill and keeps smaller enemies still dangerous if they gang up on you (though they probably still need to worry about a fireball wiping them out and removing that danger).

I will probably think of more for each edition but these are what jump out at me at the moment.