"...we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" - Dungeons & Dragons, 1974
Normally, I review games based on a detailed read-through. How about we go to the other extreme and review ones I've played or run for ten years or more? In chronological order, that select group includes Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller, 2300AD, Savage Worlds, All Things Zombie, and 5150. Playing any RPG for that length of time inevitably involves more than one edition, and looking at the differences between them - and my changing attitudes to gaming - may be entertaining, or at least interesting.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then I'll begin.
I'll begin with Dungeons & Dragons, as most of us did... If only I could figure out how to do a wavy dissolve to grainy black and white images on a blog post. You'll just have to imagine that, as well as a voiceover from Humphrey Bogart telling you the following...
Core Mechanics
These were many and varied initially, but stabilised as roll 1d20, apply modifiers, meet or beat target number to succeed. If you hit a target, roll damage dice and deduct the result from the target's hit points; depending on the edition, it probably dies at zero hit points.
Spells follow the Vancian model, or if you prefer, aircraft stores loadouts; you have a variety of spell slots (launch rails) which you can load up with specific items, but once they're gone, they're gone until you can reload.
The Editions
All the editions I know of, and my experience with them.
Original Dungeons & Dragons (1974). I started with the White Box, which I bought in 1976, but I understand there was also a Brown Box before that. I game mastered OD&D for about three years, and played it for almost fifty. I got the 50th anniversary edition of the White Box in PDF format, which has better artwork and removed a number of things which these days would cause copyright lawsuits, notably monsters from Edgar Rice Burrows' Barsoom; I've never used those PDFs, nor do I expect to, but it sparks joy to know that I have them.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1977). I owned this, and played it for something like five years, but never really ran it. It seemed to me that the publisher had taken everything ever written for the game and smashed it together, without much thought for how the various pieces interacted or what sequence would make sense to the reader. Too complex for me; a lot of people consider it the best version of the game, but then you can find stalwart defenders of any edition.
Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1977). I bought this and found it considerably easier to understand and explain than OD&D, but my regular groups had moved on to other games by then - one group to homebrew rules, then The Fantasy Trip, and eventually GURPS, while the other converted to RuneQuest - and I spent the period 1977-1982 moving around a lot, never really settling anywhere long enough to join or form another stable group. When I did run games in that period, it was mostly Traveller or Empire of the Petal Throne.
Dungeons & Dragons BX (1981). I bought this, liked it, and managed to persuade my regular group to let me run one session of it. That's all she wrote, but I think this was the most successful edition; many of the current generation of RPG gurus cut their teeth on it, and it's the game engine underlying much of the OSR - for example, everything Sine Nomine Publications produces is some variant of this game. This is the poster child for race-as-class, which I have mixed feelings about; it's fast and simple, but players inevitably want to play (say) a hobbit thief - the hobbit as written in BX is basically a short, chubby ranger.
Dungeons & Dragons BECMI (1983). I didn't buy this one, because I didn't understand the difference between BECMI and BX. I'm still not sure I do. Never ran it, never played it, but only because I thought I already had. Or was. Or something.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition (1989). This one had my favourite artwork of all the editions, although the three-ring binder version of the Monster Manual was a lot less practical at the table than I hoped. I ran it for less than a year; the party was entirely composed of thieves, as the Usual Suspects were quite taken with the idea of customising their PCs by allocating skill percentages. By this time, though, they had settled in to a thorough dislike of class and level based systems, and I never persuaded them to play D&D again. Decades later, I played in a short-lived campaign of this edition with a completely different group of people, which broke up after a few sessions when the DM moved away. That latter campaign was where I developed trust issues with online shops; I had just bought 2nd edition in PDF when WotC pulled the licence and I lost the books for some years - when they reinstated it they had changed the item codes, so while they did reinstate some files, they were not the files I'd actually bought. Since then, I've always kept offline backups for anything I actually care about.
Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia (1991). This collapsed all the BECMI rulebooks and some Mystara setting material into one hardback book. After not playing it for over a decade, I sold my copy, and I have regretted doing so ever since.
Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition Revised (1995). I didn't even know this one existed until I started researching this post.
Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (2000). This is the edition I used to introduce my children to D&D; it is the single most internally consistent version of the game, and also the easiest to compare with the real world. Unfortunately, it was so complex that I couldn't run it effectively without software support, which meant we could only play where my home PC was. Nonetheless, those sessions in the study with my children, using Lego mini-figures on homemade dungeon tiles, are a highlight of my gaming career, and I look back on them with fond nostalgia. This was also the edition that brought in the Open Gaming Licence, and the consequent explosion of third-party products and, later, retroclones; I have mixed feelings about the former, but the latter are on the whole a good thing, I think.
Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 (2003). I upgraded my children's game to 3.5 when it came out because I thought it was an improvement, although after two decades I can no longer remember why I thought that. Something to do with the Player's Handbook, I think. That was around the time both my daughters left home for University, and while my son and I carried on playing and enjoying 3.5, it wasn't the same with the girls gone. It was my son's favourite edition, and languishes on my bookshelves to this day.
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition (2008). This is a good game, and one I played with my children and their friends over the school holidays for a year or two; we had a great time with it. It's an attempt to merge tabletop RPGs with collectible card games and MMORPGs, and it's a good game when viewed in isolation, on its own merits; but I'd argue it isn't really D&D. We found ourselves drifting gradually into Pokemon-speak... "I play this card in Defence Mode, and end my turn!"
Dungeons & Dragons Essentials (2010). This is the first one I consciously decided not to buy, as "edition fatigue" started to set in. I understand it's an improved 4th Edition, but I couldn't tell you what the differences are.
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2014). I played a few sessions of this, and ran a couple from the free quickstart downloads, but found it verbose and detailed to the point of being unusable, as well as having theme, tone and underlying philosophy that had drifted too far from what I loved about the game to be fun. Seriously, I have entire RPG systems that are smaller than the quickstart for 5th Edition. My children, my friends' children, and their friends play this edition; sadly, it's a language I don't speak, and they have their own lives and session slots which no longer include me. Such is the inevitable nature of growing old. My continuing involvement with 5E consists of playing the PC game Solasta: Crown of the Magister, which is an extremely faithful implementation of the rules, and offers me all the fun of solo D&D while keeping track of all the fiddly details for me.
Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (2024). This is where I officially checked out of D&D. I didn't buy the 2024 editions of the rulebooks, as not even my immense love for the game and nostalgia for players and campaigns long gone could draw me back in. However, I'm unlikely to live long enough for any other game to surpass the 48 years I played D&D. Ave, atque vale.
Pros and Cons
This is the 800 lb gorilla, dominating the marketplace and with a brand you're probably aware of even if you've never played it or even met anyone who has. If you want to find a new RPG group or drop into a pickup session at a convention, chances are this is what they're playing.
The core concepts of D&D are easy to explain to newcomers, even now, when they are buried under hundreds of pages of edge cases and infrequently-used details; roll high on a d20 to succeed, chip away at the enemy's hit points until you take them out. They form a lingua franca for gamers everywhere; you might not like them, but if I tell you I played a 12th level ranger in a campaign loosely based on Mediaeval India you have some idea what I did for fun for twenty years.
Changes Over the Years
The game is very different now from when it first began, both in detail and in philosophy. The changes that stand out to me are:
Rules vs Guidelines. This changed dramatically in 1977 with the arrival of AD&D and tournament play; before then, every campaign was different, there were gaps in the rules which the GM was expected and encouraged to fill in himself, and the guidance from the publishers - as you see above - was "Why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" After that, the view was that there was One True D&D, it was AD&D, and if you weren't playing that you were having Bad Wrong Fun.
PC Creation and Character Death. Death was frequent in OD&D, to the extent that explaining how new PCs joined the group partway through a session was an essential skill; that paired well with creating a new PC in five minutes or less. Now, it takes hours to create a PC, and it's almost impossible for a PC to die. I've seen it argued that this is a shift from wargaming ("we have a mission, and some casualties are inevitable") to storytelling ("I have plot armour until at least the next milestone"); personally, I think it's more about character investment - if you've already spent a couple of hours working out the perfect PC build before you start playing, you can't help be more invested in that character than one you rolled up a couple of minutes ago.
Player Challenge vs Character Challenge. Initially, characters were more or less the same, and everything except combat was handled by conversation with the DM. How exactly were you looking for a trap? What were you saying to convince an NPC to help? Over the years, that gradually drifted into making skill rolls because your character knows this stuff even if you don't.
Themes and Tone. OD&D was sword and sorcery, written by and for readers of Conan, Elric and The Lord of the Rings. Over the years, the hero's journey shifted away from starting as Kick-Ass and ending up as The Batman; now, you start as members of the Justice League and finish as gods, everyone has pointy ears and darkvision, and the game is written by and for people who enjoy Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Are any of those changes bad? No, not as such, they're just a different style of play.
Do they result in a game I'd want to play? Also no, but that's a matter of personal taste.
My Future with D&D
D&D has become a place where I don't feel welcome any more, so I can't see myself playing actual D&D again, much less running it. Mind you, if my old gaming buddies called me up and asked me to play 1974 D&D one more time, I'd be all over it.
If you see me running "D&D" in future, look more closely, and you'll see it's either Old School Essentials or Tales of Argosa. Are those D&D? Well, they're d20-based, roll high, class and level fantasy games with wizards and dwarves; to non-gamers, they look a lot like it, and our debates about what is and is not D&D seem as relevant to them as arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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