38 ms·

The history of Dungeon and AD&D is an interesting lesson in licensing and IP ownership. Also a lesson in power of brands and marketing. Pathfinder is the real

by Paul_S 6y ago

The history of Dungeon and AD&D is an interesting lesson in licensing and IP ownership. Also a lesson in power of brands and marketing. Pathfinder is the real successor to AD&D and Paizo had the subscribers communication channels to fans and yet people remained with WotC and moved on to the new WotC system whose only connection with AD&D was the name. Back when I was a more active DM this puzzled me to no end.

sillyquiet 6y ago
This was briefly not true during the 4th edition years. A LOT of people moved to Pathfinder as a kind of 3.75th edition, rather than picking up 4th edition. It was only when 5th edition came out and it became popularized in the mainstream that WotC regained its seeming ascendency. And I get it, 5th edition is much more streamlined and accessible than its predecessors (not that they were Fate-level challenging or anything). Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed.
- VonGuard 6y ago
  I hear you, I grew up playing 2nd edition, and somehow the 5th stuff started off feeling empty for me, though I have to admit the rules are so much better and rolling is so much easier. Pathfinder is like doing math homework, every roll... 5th is finally starting to get some better flavor, however, now taht 3rd parties, and WotC seem to be filling in the gaps. Goodman Games has a line of reissued classic adventures, like Castle Amder and Barrier Peaks, and these books are fabulous. They're updated for 5e, so they offer that old school charm in 5e rules. Additionally, 5e has so little in the way of specializations and customizations for characters, but that's being cleared up in the newest official D&D book, Tasha's Caldron of Everything. It's got a bunch of specialized subclasses, like the Bladesinger, and a lot of more flavorful text and items to go with your campaigns. I feel like 5e started off kinda bland, but has been becoming significantly more fleshed out and living over time. And that makes sense: it takes time to add to these worlds. Oh, also, Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts 1 & 2 are also fantastic 5e books. Great monsters.
  - FeloniousHam 6y ago
    I can't put my finger on why I dislike 5e, other just having a "corporate polish". Maybe the rules are too articulated, over-specified, or maybe it's just too clean and modern. In any case, Dungeon Crawl Classics[1] is like a mainlining RPG nostalgia. It's the one product that put me in the back of the bus with my 4th grade buddies working their way through the Caves of Chaos. The art, rules and just general vibe are so Old School metal, you can practically hear Zeppelin playing in the background. Magic is uncertain and rare, and death in DCC is the natural result of real danger. Encounters are not gradually scaled to fit the current Challenge Rating of the party. Can't say enough about how much fun this game is. Great community too. [1] https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/ https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). It's a different style of play for people who came out of AD&D or who took to the OSR style games. DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.
      - pdonis 6y ago
        > My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.
      - FeloniousHam 6y ago
        > it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.
- smogcutter 6y ago
  Personally I like 5e, but I know what you mean. I think part of it is just us getting older. DnD is one thing when you’re a bunch of 12 year olds eating cheetos in a basement, and it’s something else when you’re a bunch of 30-somethings with families and jobs carving 4 hours out of a Sunday afternoon. It helps to have a more well-defined and approachable game. That said, the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. I have the same feeling; I had it with 4e as well. I can see why, given that the target audience is much wider and, as you point out, often has much tighter time constraints. I can't even begin to estimate how many hours I spent as a teenager doing world building for our D&D campaign (which started with 1st Edition Advanced D&D), hours I couldn't possibly spend today.
  - sillyquiet 6y ago
    Yeah, I feel like the creators have already created the world for you and are just giving you a rule set to have adventures in that world. Which, like you mention, is fine.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”. 3e was the first open core version (and the first version designed from the ground up at WotC, rather than pre-WotC TSR), and WotC learned a lot about the first/third-part split and what worked well in core/supplement split between 3e and 5e. What they had for this in the core in 3e wasn’t really adequate for people who wanted rules for it (and there was a first-party supplement for it). By 5e, this kind of subsystem isn’t the kind of thing that they really do much in first-party supplements, but there is prominent third-party support leveraging the open-core nature of 5e (a feature it shares with 3e): https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-followers-pdf https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-follow...
- lakkal 6y ago
  WotC has been dead to me since 4.0. I stayed on 3.5 and switched to Pathfinder for some new games. I don't particularly want to learn 5.0, but I'm feeling I might be forced to if I want to join/start any current games...
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    One of the awesome things about published content is that you are never forced to do anything if you can form your own group. And even then, there are lots of people in many cities and online willing to play just about any system out there. My friends and I still play AD&D (run by a couple of the guys), or OSR systems if run by myself and the other guys. I've played 5e and 4e, but never felt like it was forced on me, because, you know, I own books for other systems and so do my friends. And since I didn't enjoy 4e, I just dropped that game. I haven't played 5e since the playtest days, but with OSR systems out there that already covered the same terrain, it held no appeal to me or my group.
    - lakkal 6y ago
      Yeah - and I get the impression that 5.0 isn't anything like 4.0, so maybe it wouldn't be as unpleasant as I've been fearing. I had been with two very long-lasting gaming groups (~35 years each) which both dissolved in the last couple of years, so maybe it's time to modernize.
      - cwyers 6y ago
        D&D 5e basically acts like 4th Edition never existed, and you will find it very familiar as someone who ahs played 3rd Edition.
        dragonwriter 6y ago
        Mechanically at its core, 5e is has a very close similarity to 4e with encounter powers becoming recharge on short or long rest and daily powers becoming recharge on long rest, and a few similar translations; it's much closer to 4e in that regard than to any earlier edition. And the catalog of classes, and other options, and their design doesn't throw out 4e heritage entirely, either. But it manages to avoid, IMO, the super-metagamey feel of 4e.
- smrq 6y ago
  Strange; I grew up with 3rd and I have the impression that 5th is much less prescriptive than its predecessor (I'm ignoring 4th entirely as an anomaly; I never played more than two sessions of it so I don't have any insight about it). 3rd had oodles of rules, prestige classes, feats, etc. whereas 5th to me has more of a "make stuff up for flavor" intent behind it. I think this is a direct result of 5th edition's focus on streamlining. This could be because I was involved with Living Greyhawk in 3rd edition, which was by its nature bound pretty strictly to RAW; or because I came into 5th edition when it was brand new and rules-barren. But I feel like they lifted a lot of restrictions in 5th edition. Example: alignment restrictions on classes. These days I don't even play with alignments at all, but the chaotic good paladin of freedom that I rolled in 5th edition would explicitly contradict the 3rd edition rules. And spells that used to interact with alignments have now been rewritten to target more objective things like creature type instead.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed. I think that’s true in a superficial way that helps people new to it get into it, but I also think the core is more streamlined and easily adaptable than the earlier versions (particularly the pre-3e versions), and there’s quite a diversity of different-setting-and-flavor options in the core (primarily, in the DMG), and a good diversity of both generic tools and specific built settings and reusable setting elements, both first- and third-party, so even if the core doesn’t push as hard for “build it yourself”, the support for that is as good as earlier editions.
mcv 6y ago
Pathfinder 1st edition was a direct successor (near-clone, even) of D&D 3, which was created by WotC. That's where the big break from AD&D happened. D&D 5 has about as much in common with AD&D as D&D 3 and Pathfinder have. Perhaps more, because D&D 5 was in some ways (though not all) an explicit attempt to go back to earlier, less complex editions of D&D.
- 131012 6y ago
  To me, d&d 5 is like python3: never gonna look back! Just better in almost all, but don't expect it to support all your niche needs, but you can still try anyway.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > earlier, less complex editions of D&D I'm not sure I would characterize 1st Edition AD&D as "less complex". In many ways the evolution of the D&D ruleset has consisted of removing unnecessary complexity to make the game easier to manage. For example: a standardized simple formula for computing attack rolls instead of pages and pages of "to hit" tables (I remember when bootleg copies of the tables in the 1st Edition DMG were passed around in my school because the book had just come out and not everyone had it yet); standardized experience points to gain each level instead of class-specific; a more standardized pattern to class progressions instead of a hodgepodge of ad hoc rules; standardized mechanics like skills and feats instead of class-specific ones.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Pathfinder 1st edition was a direct successor (near-clone, even) of D&D 3 Without going back and checking, wasn't PF a fork of the open core of D&D/3.5e? > Perhaps more, because D&D 5 was in some ways (though not all) an explicit attempt to go back to earlier, less complex editions of D&D. D&D/4e and 5e are pretty clearly the most simple versions outside of the simplified versions after OD&D and in parallel with AD&D (B/X, BECMI, Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia), and in many ways both newer versions are simpler so long as you only consider similar similar scope, though they have broader (but not a superset, because neither has domain management or divine ascension as a first-party subsystem, while BECMI has both and the Cyclopedia retains BECMI’s coverage of the former) scope. 5e seemed to be more an effort to restore flavor elements many perceived as lost from the very complex AD&D/1e through D&D/3e than to revert to simplicity lost (since the opposite was true) in 4e.
mistrial9 6y ago
on the US West Coast, at the early D&D time, there were a dozen other systems in varying states of completion, required learning skills and lots of other differences. Without trying to enumerate all the pithy distinctions, I preferred the Arduin Grimoires.. all hand-typed photocopies as they were.. D&D proper was always viewed with some scepticism by most of the intellectuals involved, whatever the age. Thanks Internet Archive once again!
ajross 6y ago
Hah, I love when HN strays into obscure RPG industry flame war. See, I think this is wrong. People didn't, in fact, stick with D&D at the point where Pathfinder launched. Pathfinder was (relative to the third party RPG market) a huge success. And 4e D&D was objectively a failure in the market (though sure, it sold more than Pathfinder). Where Wizards won was with the 5e rules. And the 5e rules are better than Pathfinder in fundamental ways that lead to higher sales and more player satisfaction. And the reason is that 5e is, really for the first time since the Holmes Basic Set of 1978, accessible to the mass market. Kids like D&D again! Prior to covid, I ran a 2-year campaign for my 10-12 year old son and a bunch of his friends and they loved it. Some of them are hooked hard now. Likewise, couples play 5e; random groups in offices. You can watch people play it on the internet, and apparently that's a big thing too. There are communities of women and queer folks plugging a game that used to be associated mostly with unwashed cloistered incels. It's a straightforward, easy game that gets out of the way and exposes the actual fun part of in-person RPGs to people who would never have had the patience to read through the tomes full of prestige classes and feats that 3.x/Pathfinder require. Basically: with 5e WotC finally got back to the promise we all saw in the early 80's. Pathfinder is a fine game, but it's really just trying to hang on to a player culture from 2004 that doesn't have a lot of growth in it.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  I'd personally attribute far more of that to the cultural zeitgeist of (a) name brand power and (b) a variety of streamers using 5e for streams of real games, than to any inherent property of the actual rules.
  - ajkjk 6y ago
    Well... 4e's failure was due to its actual rules. I might have been too young to see all the details, but my impression is that they tried to turn D&D into tabletop World of Warcraft, and it just didn't feel like the same game, or any sort of good one, anymore.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >a game that used to be associated mostly with unwashed cloistered incels. In the same way that "pro-life" does not literally mean anyone who is in favor of life generally, I think you're misusing that term, which refers to a particular culture that did not exist in 1978 or even 2004. Come on, somebody has to defend 80s nerds. ;)
cwyers 6y ago
This isn't really accurate. So, a brief history: Once Upon A Time there was TSR, which published two lines of D&D books, based on the original D&D: Dungeons and Dragons (which started with the Basic Set and added other sets over time) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which got two editions. TSR went bankrupt and was bought by Wizards Of The Coast, which was flush with cash from the success of Magic: The Gathering. They put out a Third Edition for D&D, which unified both lines but kept the AD&D numbering, hence Third Edition. It was a rather thorough reworking of the rules to D&D -- everthing is unified around a central mechanic using d20 (20-sided dice, which is why the underlying rules are called the "d20 System"), which eliminates a bunch of tables and complexity. The game removed restrictions around what races could use what classes and got rid of a lot of the vestiges of old D&D, where "elf" was a character class in the same way that "thief" was. It introduced feats... essentially, D&D 3rd Edition was a new game compared to AD&D 2nd Edition. They bundled up a bunch of errata into what was awkardly called the "3.5th Edition" at some point down the line, and most books published for 3rd Edition were really 3.5th Edition books. At the time, Wizards of the Coast did two things that are notable here: 1) They licensed a third-party company, Paizo, to publish the Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Paizo did a brisk business in these, driven in part by their popular "adventure paths." 2) They released a stripped down version of the core rulebooks, removing some "product identity" and some of the rules around character creation, as the System Reference Document, which was released under the Open Gaming License, basically an open source license for RPG materials. The point of the OGL/SRD was to allow people to publish third-party supplements for D&D. This _mostly_ went very well, but there were some releases that WotC was unhappy with, either because they were controversial (like the Book of Erotic Fantasy) or because they were not supplements for D&D but competing games using the d20 System that Wizards had built for D&D. At the end of 3rd Edition, they announced a Fourth Edition, which was roughly as radical a departure from 3rd Edition as 3rd Edition was from AD&D 2nd Edition. They also revoked Paizo's license to publish material for D&D, and they decided that 4th Edition wouldn't be released under the OGL, and they released a much less useful "System Reference Document" under a much more restrictive license. Paizo's entire business at the time was D&D 3.5th Edition supplements, so this left them out in the cold. So what they did was release a new game, Pathfinder, based on the 3.5th Edition SRD, published under the OGL. The changes from 3.5th Edition to Pathfinder First Edition were pretty small, which led it to be nicknamed "3.75th Edition" by D&D players around the time of its release. And, despite WoTC owning the rights to all of the trademarks -- all of the popular settings, NPCs, what have you -- Pathfinder outsold D&D 4th Edition. Because it was a lot more comfortable with what 3rd Edition players wanted from the game. D&D 5th Edition basically throws out most of the changes from 4th Edition and goes back to a 3rd Edition base. It is streamlined from 3rd Edition, but if you have played 3rd Edition or Pathfinder and you want to play a 5th Edition game someone can teach you enough to start playing in about seven minutes. The tradeoff is that 5th Edition has far fewer options to customize characters than 3rd Edition did, but is more streamlined and easier to adjudicate at the table. Pathfinder has retained much more of the spirit of 3rd Edition in the sense of giving a lot of options to customize characters. But neither of them is, in a rules sense, closer to AD&D than the other.

by Paul_S 6y ago

sillyquiet 6y ago

This was briefly not true during the 4th edition years. A LOT of people moved to Pathfinder as a kind of 3.75th edition, rather than picking up 4th edition. It was only when 5th edition came out and it became popularized in the mainstream that WotC regained its seeming ascendency. And I get it, 5th edition is much more streamlined and accessible than its predecessors (not that they were Fate-level challenging or anything). Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed.

VonGuard 6y ago
I hear you, I grew up playing 2nd edition, and somehow the 5th stuff started off feeling empty for me, though I have to admit the rules are so much better and rolling is so much easier. Pathfinder is like doing math homework, every roll... 5th is finally starting to get some better flavor, however, now taht 3rd parties, and WotC seem to be filling in the gaps. Goodman Games has a line of reissued classic adventures, like Castle Amder and Barrier Peaks, and these books are fabulous. They're updated for 5e, so they offer that old school charm in 5e rules. Additionally, 5e has so little in the way of specializations and customizations for characters, but that's being cleared up in the newest official D&D book, Tasha's Caldron of Everything. It's got a bunch of specialized subclasses, like the Bladesinger, and a lot of more flavorful text and items to go with your campaigns. I feel like 5e started off kinda bland, but has been becoming significantly more fleshed out and living over time. And that makes sense: it takes time to add to these worlds. Oh, also, Kobold Press' Tome of Beasts 1 & 2 are also fantastic 5e books. Great monsters.
- FeloniousHam 6y ago
  I can't put my finger on why I dislike 5e, other just having a "corporate polish". Maybe the rules are too articulated, over-specified, or maybe it's just too clean and modern. In any case, Dungeon Crawl Classics[1] is like a mainlining RPG nostalgia. It's the one product that put me in the back of the bus with my 4th grade buddies working their way through the Caves of Chaos. The art, rules and just general vibe are so Old School metal, you can practically hear Zeppelin playing in the background. Magic is uncertain and rare, and death in DCC is the natural result of real danger. Encounters are not gradually scaled to fit the current Challenge Rating of the party. Can't say enough about how much fun this game is. Great community too. [1] https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/ https://goodman-games.com/dungeon-crawl-classics-rpg/
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). It's a different style of play for people who came out of AD&D or who took to the OSR style games. DCC, which I've been playing and running for a while, is lethal in comparison. Which is a mark against it for many people, but my group loves it. We don't have a death a week, but we had several deaths over the past year. The threat changes the play style versus what we saw with 5e where it just felt like PCs couldn't die unless the DM went out of their way to create an excessive challenge that bordered on a forced TPK scenario.
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > My group gave up on 5e because it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on (especially the healing rules). I felt the same way about 4e: overpowered early on, but underpowered (compared to earlier editions) at higher levels. It basically felt like playing a party of 30th-level characters wasn't all that different from playing a party of 1st-level characters.
    - FeloniousHam 6y ago
      > it (subjective) felt like the PCs were overpowered early on I think that's it: the stakes are too low. You don't have to ration your spells, there are few constraints, and your investment in your character is so great it's customer abuse to write them out of the story. Which is not say I don't get attached to my DCC guys.
smogcutter 6y ago
Personally I like 5e, but I know what you mean. I think part of it is just us getting older. DnD is one thing when you’re a bunch of 12 year olds eating cheetos in a basement, and it’s something else when you’re a bunch of 30-somethings with families and jobs carving 4 hours out of a Sunday afternoon. It helps to have a more well-defined and approachable game. That said, the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > the 5e material does feel much more narrowly focused on creating “adventures” rather than creating a world. I have the same feeling; I had it with 4e as well. I can see why, given that the target audience is much wider and, as you point out, often has much tighter time constraints. I can't even begin to estimate how many hours I spent as a teenager doing world building for our D&D campaign (which started with 1st Edition Advanced D&D), hours I couldn't possibly spend today.
- sillyquiet 6y ago
  Yeah, I feel like the creators have already created the world for you and are just giving you a rule set to have adventures in that world. Which, like you mention, is fine.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Like the 3e books had rules for buying a castle and hiring guards for it. Even if no one really did that, just its presence in the book indicated possibilities outside of “run this printed campaign set in the forgotten realms”. 3e was the first open core version (and the first version designed from the ground up at WotC, rather than pre-WotC TSR), and WotC learned a lot about the first/third-part split and what worked well in core/supplement split between 3e and 5e. What they had for this in the core in 3e wasn’t really adequate for people who wanted rules for it (and there was a first-party supplement for it). By 5e, this kind of subsystem isn’t the kind of thing that they really do much in first-party supplements, but there is prominent third-party support leveraging the open-core nature of 5e (a feature it shares with 3e): https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-followers-pdf https://shop.mcdmproductions.com/products/strongholds-follow...
lakkal 6y ago
WotC has been dead to me since 4.0. I stayed on 3.5 and switched to Pathfinder for some new games. I don't particularly want to learn 5.0, but I'm feeling I might be forced to if I want to join/start any current games...
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  One of the awesome things about published content is that you are never forced to do anything if you can form your own group. And even then, there are lots of people in many cities and online willing to play just about any system out there. My friends and I still play AD&D (run by a couple of the guys), or OSR systems if run by myself and the other guys. I've played 5e and 4e, but never felt like it was forced on me, because, you know, I own books for other systems and so do my friends. And since I didn't enjoy 4e, I just dropped that game. I haven't played 5e since the playtest days, but with OSR systems out there that already covered the same terrain, it held no appeal to me or my group.
  - lakkal 6y ago
    Yeah - and I get the impression that 5.0 isn't anything like 4.0, so maybe it wouldn't be as unpleasant as I've been fearing. I had been with two very long-lasting gaming groups (~35 years each) which both dissolved in the last couple of years, so maybe it's time to modernize.
    - cwyers 6y ago
      D&D 5e basically acts like 4th Edition never existed, and you will find it very familiar as someone who ahs played 3rd Edition.
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        Mechanically at its core, 5e is has a very close similarity to 4e with encounter powers becoming recharge on short or long rest and daily powers becoming recharge on long rest, and a few similar translations; it's much closer to 4e in that regard than to any earlier edition. And the catalog of classes, and other options, and their design doesn't throw out 4e heritage entirely, either. But it manages to avoid, IMO, the super-metagamey feel of 4e.
smrq 6y ago
Strange; I grew up with 3rd and I have the impression that 5th is much less prescriptive than its predecessor (I'm ignoring 4th entirely as an anomaly; I never played more than two sessions of it so I don't have any insight about it). 3rd had oodles of rules, prestige classes, feats, etc. whereas 5th to me has more of a "make stuff up for flavor" intent behind it. I think this is a direct result of 5th edition's focus on streamlining. This could be because I was involved with Living Greyhawk in 3rd edition, which was by its nature bound pretty strictly to RAW; or because I came into 5th edition when it was brand new and rules-barren. But I feel like they lifted a lot of restrictions in 5th edition. Example: alignment restrictions on classes. These days I don't even play with alignments at all, but the chaotic good paladin of freedom that I rolled in 5th edition would explicitly contradict the 3rd edition rules. And spells that used to interact with alignments have now been rewritten to target more objective things like creature type instead.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Tangentially, I think 4th edition and now 5th edition lost a lot of the creative soul of earlier editions - the lore is much more heavily integrated with the rule set and feels a lot more prescriptive. but that could just be nostalgic bias as I grew up with 2ed. I think that’s true in a superficial way that helps people new to it get into it, but I also think the core is more streamlined and easily adaptable than the earlier versions (particularly the pre-3e versions), and there’s quite a diversity of different-setting-and-flavor options in the core (primarily, in the DMG), and a good diversity of both generic tools and specific built settings and reusable setting elements, both first- and third-party, so even if the core doesn’t push as hard for “build it yourself”, the support for that is as good as earlier editions.

mcv 6y ago

Pathfinder 1st edition was a direct successor (near-clone, even) of D&D 3, which was created by WotC. That's where the big break from AD&D happened. D&D 5 has about as much in common with AD&D as D&D 3 and Pathfinder have. Perhaps more, because D&D 5 was in some ways (though not all) an explicit attempt to go back to earlier, less complex editions of D&D.

131012 6y ago
To me, d&d 5 is like python3: never gonna look back! Just better in almost all, but don't expect it to support all your niche needs, but you can still try anyway.
pdonis 6y ago
> earlier, less complex editions of D&D I'm not sure I would characterize 1st Edition AD&D as "less complex". In many ways the evolution of the D&D ruleset has consisted of removing unnecessary complexity to make the game easier to manage. For example: a standardized simple formula for computing attack rolls instead of pages and pages of "to hit" tables (I remember when bootleg copies of the tables in the 1st Edition DMG were passed around in my school because the book had just come out and not everyone had it yet); standardized experience points to gain each level instead of class-specific; a more standardized pattern to class progressions instead of a hodgepodge of ad hoc rules; standardized mechanics like skills and feats instead of class-specific ones.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> Pathfinder 1st edition was a direct successor (near-clone, even) of D&D 3 Without going back and checking, wasn't PF a fork of the open core of D&D/3.5e? > Perhaps more, because D&D 5 was in some ways (though not all) an explicit attempt to go back to earlier, less complex editions of D&D. D&D/4e and 5e are pretty clearly the most simple versions outside of the simplified versions after OD&D and in parallel with AD&D (B/X, BECMI, Black Box, Rules Cyclopedia), and in many ways both newer versions are simpler so long as you only consider similar similar scope, though they have broader (but not a superset, because neither has domain management or divine ascension as a first-party subsystem, while BECMI has both and the Cyclopedia retains BECMI’s coverage of the former) scope. 5e seemed to be more an effort to restore flavor elements many perceived as lost from the very complex AD&D/1e through D&D/3e than to revert to simplicity lost (since the opposite was true) in 4e.

mistrial9 6y ago

on the US West Coast, at the early D&D time, there were a dozen other systems in varying states of completion, required learning skills and lots of other differences. Without trying to enumerate all the pithy distinctions, I preferred the Arduin Grimoires.. all hand-typed photocopies as they were.. D&D proper was always viewed with some scepticism by most of the intellectuals involved, whatever the age. Thanks Internet Archive once again!

ajross 6y ago

Hah, I love when HN strays into obscure RPG industry flame war. See, I think this is wrong. People didn't, in fact, stick with D&D at the point where Pathfinder launched. Pathfinder was (relative to the third party RPG market) a huge success. And 4e D&D was objectively a failure in the market (though sure, it sold more than Pathfinder). Where Wizards won was with the 5e rules. And the 5e rules are better than Pathfinder in fundamental ways that lead to higher sales and more player satisfaction. And the reason is that 5e is, really for the first time since the Holmes Basic Set of 1978, accessible to the mass market. Kids like D&D again! Prior to covid, I ran a 2-year campaign for my 10-12 year old son and a bunch of his friends and they loved it. Some of them are hooked hard now. Likewise, couples play 5e; random groups in offices. You can watch people play it on the internet, and apparently that's a big thing too. There are communities of women and queer folks plugging a game that used to be associated mostly with unwashed cloistered incels. It's a straightforward, easy game that gets out of the way and exposes the actual fun part of in-person RPGs to people who would never have had the patience to read through the tomes full of prestige classes and feats that 3.x/Pathfinder require. Basically: with 5e WotC finally got back to the promise we all saw in the early 80's. Pathfinder is a fine game, but it's really just trying to hang on to a player culture from 2004 that doesn't have a lot of growth in it.

crooked-v 6y ago
I'd personally attribute far more of that to the cultural zeitgeist of (a) name brand power and (b) a variety of streamers using 5e for streams of real games, than to any inherent property of the actual rules.
- ajkjk 6y ago
  Well... 4e's failure was due to its actual rules. I might have been too young to see all the details, but my impression is that they tried to turn D&D into tabletop World of Warcraft, and it just didn't feel like the same game, or any sort of good one, anymore.
whatshisface 6y ago
>a game that used to be associated mostly with unwashed cloistered incels. In the same way that "pro-life" does not literally mean anyone who is in favor of life generally, I think you're misusing that term, which refers to a particular culture that did not exist in 1978 or even 2004. Come on, somebody has to defend 80s nerds. ;)

cwyers 6y ago

This isn't really accurate. So, a brief history: Once Upon A Time there was TSR, which published two lines of D&D books, based on the original D&D: Dungeons and Dragons (which started with the Basic Set and added other sets over time) and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, which got two editions. TSR went bankrupt and was bought by Wizards Of The Coast, which was flush with cash from the success of Magic: The Gathering. They put out a Third Edition for D&D, which unified both lines but kept the AD&D numbering, hence Third Edition. It was a rather thorough reworking of the rules to D&D -- everthing is unified around a central mechanic using d20 (20-sided dice, which is why the underlying rules are called the "d20 System"), which eliminates a bunch of tables and complexity. The game removed restrictions around what races could use what classes and got rid of a lot of the vestiges of old D&D, where "elf" was a character class in the same way that "thief" was. It introduced feats... essentially, D&D 3rd Edition was a new game compared to AD&D 2nd Edition. They bundled up a bunch of errata into what was awkardly called the "3.5th Edition" at some point down the line, and most books published for 3rd Edition were really 3.5th Edition books. At the time, Wizards of the Coast did two things that are notable here: 1) They licensed a third-party company, Paizo, to publish the Dungeon and Dragon magazines. Paizo did a brisk business in these, driven in part by their popular "adventure paths." 2) They released a stripped down version of the core rulebooks, removing some "product identity" and some of the rules around character creation, as the System Reference Document, which was released under the Open Gaming License, basically an open source license for RPG materials. The point of the OGL/SRD was to allow people to publish third-party supplements for D&D. This _mostly_ went very well, but there were some releases that WotC was unhappy with, either because they were controversial (like the Book of Erotic Fantasy) or because they were not supplements for D&D but competing games using the d20 System that Wizards had built for D&D. At the end of 3rd Edition, they announced a Fourth Edition, which was roughly as radical a departure from 3rd Edition as 3rd Edition was from AD&D 2nd Edition. They also revoked Paizo's license to publish material for D&D, and they decided that 4th Edition wouldn't be released under the OGL, and they released a much less useful "System Reference Document" under a much more restrictive license. Paizo's entire business at the time was D&D 3.5th Edition supplements, so this left them out in the cold. So what they did was release a new game, Pathfinder, based on the 3.5th Edition SRD, published under the OGL. The changes from 3.5th Edition to Pathfinder First Edition were pretty small, which led it to be nicknamed "3.75th Edition" by D&D players around the time of its release. And, despite WoTC owning the rights to all of the trademarks -- all of the popular settings, NPCs, what have you -- Pathfinder outsold D&D 4th Edition. Because it was a lot more comfortable with what 3rd Edition players wanted from the game. D&D 5th Edition basically throws out most of the changes from 4th Edition and goes back to a 3rd Edition base. It is streamlined from 3rd Edition, but if you have played 3rd Edition or Pathfinder and you want to play a 5th Edition game someone can teach you enough to start playing in about seven minutes. The tradeoff is that 5th Edition has far fewer options to customize characters than 3rd Edition did, but is more streamlined and easier to adjudicate at the table. Pathfinder has retained much more of the spirit of 3rd Edition in the sense of giving a lot of options to customize characters. But neither of them is, in a rules sense, closer to AD&D than the other.