I grew up on 1e and 2e AD&D, had to play some 4e with friends when it was new, and have played exclusively 5e since it released.
I have a lot of nostalgia for 2e. There's a lot of jank to it; people like to scapegoat the "bad" math (people way over-exaggerate the difficulty of THAC0), but the actual rules that clash with sensibility, then and now, are race, class, and alignment restrictions. Some grognards like to gripe that complaints in those directions are the result of modern snowflake think that everybody should be able to make whatever character they want without restriction, but even back then plenty of folks chafed at the restrictions, and you had things like "antipaladins" for playable evil paladins in magazines. Where 2e really shines is the amount of truly flavorful content that got made for it, along with some of the most imaginative and weird game settings to that point or since. Not the mainstays of Faerun, Dragonlance, or poor forgotten Greyhawk, but Darksun (a desert world where magic requires sacrificing HP, and psionics are the dominant supernatural force, druids are the dominant religious force, and the rarity of iron is such that things like fragile obsidian are the mainstays of weapon material, oh and also there's some bug guys hopping around), Spelljammer (fly sailing ships through space to battle beholder space-pirates and journey between all the different DnD worlds), and Planescape (I'm not even gonna try summing up Planescape). Every character class gets an expansion book, which gives them reams and reams of customization options, all of which notably have roleplaying guides and several of which have flaws which are expected to be roleplayed. People say what they want about roleplaying and D&D and how systems encourage or discourage roleplay and the benefits and implications thereof. My experience is that out of all of D&D, 2e, despite all its restrictions on how you can create your character, is the edition that most expects and directly prods you to roleplay that character, which is hardly the prevailing view on how people think of old school D&D.
So when I run 2e (and when my old group used to play it and somebody else ran it), I just houserule things to take out the jank. No class restrictions from your chosen race. You can play unusual alignments for a class if you can incorporate it into your backstory and show you'll roleplay by it in the first few sessions (I make any paladins come up with their own sworn code, no matter their deity or alignment, that they have to live by). We don't use those tables that modify your to-hit chances based on the type of damage your weapon deals vs the type of armor that's being attacked. And I reserve direct control to modify splatbook options, cuz back then, the company that made D&D was being run by a woman that... to be charitable, didn't really understand games, and thought play-testing was gaming on company time, so forbid it. So there's some funky and broken options out there. The tradeoff from dealing with jank is a really imaginative, character focused atmosphere. 5e tries to recapture some of that, but its too... modern. Part of the charm of old school D&D is the imaginative weirdness from being a blended mix of all the pulp fantasy from the 1910's to 1970's that its creators loved and threw together. With 3e and the Wizards of the Coast acquisition, DnD largely abandoned the weird and kept to modern high fantasy and Tolkien, which feels a lot more sterile.
I've never played 3e and its variants myself on tabletop. I've played some videogames adapting the ruleset, and I've heard and read stories about it for years and years. I fundamentally dislike systems that start the game with rolls of d20+5 and go up to d20+65. I dislike systems that enables and passively encourages "efficient" builds and tier list of classes. Yeah yeah, 2e had the quadratic wizards and whatever, it was a ***** and a half to ever get a character capable of making reality their plaything, and if a player is able to put up with it enough to get there, fucking let them! 3.5e and Pathfinder just seem to revolve around all sorts of player creation options which certainly allows you to create anything you want, but then doesn't really funnel you into roleplaying anything with that. You can roleplay, and plenty of people do, and quite a few of those people probably value absolute freedom of expression, but I like it when a system provides you with a focus to direct you. Cuts down on characters that come down to "lol so random", cuts down on people who only play to make killing machines.
I'm not gonna talk much about 4e. I never liked it from day 1. "4e is tabletop WoW" became a meme that 4e fans are derisive of these days, but that was my genuine feeling back when I first read and played it: it felt like videogame design in tabletop. And combat was easily the worst it'd ever been for D&D. I know I just got finished talking about making characters be more than efficient killing machines, but the mark of good D&D combat (if not tabletop combat in general) is actually how efficient it is. In terms of character options. Don't give every class a god damn laundry list of situational abilities for each player to sort through and decide among each and every turn. The accumulative wasted minutes easily add hours of padding where most of the players are passive observers for the 90% of the time it isn't their turn. The key to good tabletop RPG is player acting and initiative, and quite conversely to most expectations, combat is actually where players have the least amount of that due to breaking up the action into turns and having to go in order. 4e was so, so horrendous in that regard. It should have been released as a miniatures wargame rather than a roleplaying game.
Finally, 5e. I talked some shit about modern D&D up above, but 5e is all I play these days. Just because it's simple and painless. DM doesn't need to expend effort to rebalance things if they don't want to, unlike 2e where its a requirement. People get enough character customization and options to satisfy most (or at least a lot of) people while still keeping those options simple enough that combat doesn't become too much of a joyless slog. There's a whole section of nothing but setting up backstories and making everybody at the table come up with some character traits and motivations and history. It's not perfect. The fantasy feels somewhat sterile. The character building feels pretty gamey. It kind of has a diluted version of all the strengths and all the weaknesses of all editions of D&D, which averages out somewhere to "pretty fun".
5e is all I recommend people who want to start playing D&D. It was built specifically to reinvigorate the game after a lot of player base burnt out and dwindled in the twilight of the 3.5e and 4e years. It does it's job reasonably well. Its probably the edition of D&D that is the easiest to master, even if that means it doesn't have the most options or isn't the most flexible.
I have a lot of nostalgia for 2e. There's a lot of jank to it; people like to scapegoat the "bad" math (people way over-exaggerate the difficulty of THAC0), but the actual rules that clash with sensibility, then and now, are race, class, and alignment restrictions. Some grognards like to gripe that complaints in those directions are the result of modern snowflake think that everybody should be able to make whatever character they want without restriction, but even back then plenty of folks chafed at the restrictions, and you had things like "antipaladins" for playable evil paladins in magazines. Where 2e really shines is the amount of truly flavorful content that got made for it, along with some of the most imaginative and weird game settings to that point or since. Not the mainstays of Faerun, Dragonlance, or poor forgotten Greyhawk, but Darksun (a desert world where magic requires sacrificing HP, and psionics are the dominant supernatural force, druids are the dominant religious force, and the rarity of iron is such that things like fragile obsidian are the mainstays of weapon material, oh and also there's some bug guys hopping around), Spelljammer (fly sailing ships through space to battle beholder space-pirates and journey between all the different DnD worlds), and Planescape (I'm not even gonna try summing up Planescape). Every character class gets an expansion book, which gives them reams and reams of customization options, all of which notably have roleplaying guides and several of which have flaws which are expected to be roleplayed. People say what they want about roleplaying and D&D and how systems encourage or discourage roleplay and the benefits and implications thereof. My experience is that out of all of D&D, 2e, despite all its restrictions on how you can create your character, is the edition that most expects and directly prods you to roleplay that character, which is hardly the prevailing view on how people think of old school D&D.
So when I run 2e (and when my old group used to play it and somebody else ran it), I just houserule things to take out the jank. No class restrictions from your chosen race. You can play unusual alignments for a class if you can incorporate it into your backstory and show you'll roleplay by it in the first few sessions (I make any paladins come up with their own sworn code, no matter their deity or alignment, that they have to live by). We don't use those tables that modify your to-hit chances based on the type of damage your weapon deals vs the type of armor that's being attacked. And I reserve direct control to modify splatbook options, cuz back then, the company that made D&D was being run by a woman that... to be charitable, didn't really understand games, and thought play-testing was gaming on company time, so forbid it. So there's some funky and broken options out there. The tradeoff from dealing with jank is a really imaginative, character focused atmosphere. 5e tries to recapture some of that, but its too... modern. Part of the charm of old school D&D is the imaginative weirdness from being a blended mix of all the pulp fantasy from the 1910's to 1970's that its creators loved and threw together. With 3e and the Wizards of the Coast acquisition, DnD largely abandoned the weird and kept to modern high fantasy and Tolkien, which feels a lot more sterile.
I've never played 3e and its variants myself on tabletop. I've played some videogames adapting the ruleset, and I've heard and read stories about it for years and years. I fundamentally dislike systems that start the game with rolls of d20+5 and go up to d20+65. I dislike systems that enables and passively encourages "efficient" builds and tier list of classes. Yeah yeah, 2e had the quadratic wizards and whatever, it was a ***** and a half to ever get a character capable of making reality their plaything, and if a player is able to put up with it enough to get there, fucking let them! 3.5e and Pathfinder just seem to revolve around all sorts of player creation options which certainly allows you to create anything you want, but then doesn't really funnel you into roleplaying anything with that. You can roleplay, and plenty of people do, and quite a few of those people probably value absolute freedom of expression, but I like it when a system provides you with a focus to direct you. Cuts down on characters that come down to "lol so random", cuts down on people who only play to make killing machines.
I'm not gonna talk much about 4e. I never liked it from day 1. "4e is tabletop WoW" became a meme that 4e fans are derisive of these days, but that was my genuine feeling back when I first read and played it: it felt like videogame design in tabletop. And combat was easily the worst it'd ever been for D&D. I know I just got finished talking about making characters be more than efficient killing machines, but the mark of good D&D combat (if not tabletop combat in general) is actually how efficient it is. In terms of character options. Don't give every class a god damn laundry list of situational abilities for each player to sort through and decide among each and every turn. The accumulative wasted minutes easily add hours of padding where most of the players are passive observers for the 90% of the time it isn't their turn. The key to good tabletop RPG is player acting and initiative, and quite conversely to most expectations, combat is actually where players have the least amount of that due to breaking up the action into turns and having to go in order. 4e was so, so horrendous in that regard. It should have been released as a miniatures wargame rather than a roleplaying game.
Finally, 5e. I talked some shit about modern D&D up above, but 5e is all I play these days. Just because it's simple and painless. DM doesn't need to expend effort to rebalance things if they don't want to, unlike 2e where its a requirement. People get enough character customization and options to satisfy most (or at least a lot of) people while still keeping those options simple enough that combat doesn't become too much of a joyless slog. There's a whole section of nothing but setting up backstories and making everybody at the table come up with some character traits and motivations and history. It's not perfect. The fantasy feels somewhat sterile. The character building feels pretty gamey. It kind of has a diluted version of all the strengths and all the weaknesses of all editions of D&D, which averages out somewhere to "pretty fun".
5e is all I recommend people who want to start playing D&D. It was built specifically to reinvigorate the game after a lot of player base burnt out and dwindled in the twilight of the 3.5e and 4e years. It does it's job reasonably well. Its probably the edition of D&D that is the easiest to master, even if that means it doesn't have the most options or isn't the most flexible.
When people start talking about a "best" game and it isn't a generic system, but one with a defined genre and setting, really they're usually big fans of that genre and setting, and that game has the best ruleset for that genre and setting. Deadlands, which I've never played but which I know is "popular" (in that it's a big name in the small pond of "tabletop roleplay systems that aren't D&D, GURPS, or Fate"), is a setting that blends Wild West with spooky horror supernatural stuff. "Weird West" is typically what that sub-subgenre is called.Drathnoxis said:
