4ed must be better than 0ed, right?

[gloriousbattle]

Obviously, many of us think otherwise, or we wouldn't be playing the original game or its many clones.

So why do you prefer 0ed?

For me, it is mostly because I am about the campaign, and the simpler mechanics make it much easier for me to modify the game. I can easily create new character classes, gods, monsters, etc. This is much more complex in 3.5, and infinitely more so in 4e.

I also like being able to tack other game systems onto my rpgs, such as minis battle games for resolving wars, chariot race games, etc. Again, it is much easier to convert back and forth between different systems if the rpg system is a simple one.

How about you?

[Morandir]

Definitely the simplicity. I'm just tired of the hour-long character creation process, and the min-max (excuse me, "optimization") attitude that predominates in 3e/4e games these days. I love how OD&D really forces you to be creative and actually interact with the game world, since there are no mechanical crutches to lean on and no tactical miniatures wargame combat rules. In addition, I've always loved tinkering with the rules; OD&D practically forces you to houserule, so I get to tinker to my heart's content. It's just a nice, light framework on which I can hang my ideas, that doesn't get in the way, and I love that.

Mor

[coffee]

Exactly. I agree with both of you.

[snorri]

After years of 3.5, I was tired of some aspects of the game (hours to create a high level NPC, all that feats, short duration spells, all that additions,...) and went back to Rules Cyclopedia, then discovered Labyrinth Lord. On the oldscholler forums, I discovered Od&d and its fascinated my archeologist imagination, love for history of rpgs and taste for tinkering games.

[kenmeister]

May 6, 2009 3:50:31 GMT -6 snorri said:

After years of 3.5, I was tired of some aspects of the game (hours to create a high level NPC, all that feats, short duration spells, all that additions,...) and went back to Rules Cyclopedia, then discovered Labyrinth Lord. On the oldscholler forums, I discovered Od&d and its fascinated my archeologist imagination, love for history of rpgs and taste for tinkering games.

Same here. I'm actively playing Rules Cyclopedia right now, and still in the "checking out" phase of OD&D.

[chgowiz]

It's the D&D I "grew up" with, although I'm probably more of a Holmes/AD&D than truly OD&D - it's only in the past year that I realized that Holmes *was* OD&D in a real way.

I also prefer the ability to more easily change/do things in 0E and I like the simplicity of it's approach. Say "Yes" or roll. I don't need skills upon skills, feats and powers, to be an adventurer.

It's just the D&D for me.

[Finarvyn]

1. It's the one I know best, since it's the one I started with.

2. It has simple mechanics. No skills, feats, etc.

3. It has the most intelligent fans. (Hey! That's us!)

4. It encourages us to improvise and be creative, rather than be regimented and following the rules set by others.

[Zulgyan]

It has the best, most creative community! At least for my tastes.

[shadowheart469]

It is ironic that OD&D was based on tactical miniatures rules and works in a simple manner, wheras 4E crams tactical miniatures rules into the game and fails miserably.

OE is a toolkit, flexible enough to allow one to notch it up to basically being AD&D, or to create a radical different type of world such as Carcosa.

I've looked thru 4E and wondered how anyone could play anything other than their generic, watered-down fantasy super-hero game with the rules.

[thegreyelf]

Here's the funny thing about fourth edition, and it's just proof that WotC's designers don't get it.

4e claims to be trying to get back to the old school mentality of D&D--one of the designers, though I forget who, ran an OD&D game in the lunch room at WotC during design, supposedly for inspiration.

But what happened was that 4e tries desperately to replicate old school D&D through the extensive use of game mechanics to enforce what they believe to be an old school mentality. The problem is, that the old school mentality is to NOT USE GAME MECHANICS.

Not to mention, OD&D wasn't really intended to be used with miniatures--at least according to Old Geezer, who said over on RPGNet that Gygax never used them. Fourth edition pretty much requires their use.

[chgowiz]

May 7, 2009 9:57:07 GMT -6 thegreyelf said:

Here's the funny thing about fourth edition, and it's just proof that WotC's designers don't get it.

4e claims to be trying to get back to the old school mentality of D&D--one of the designers, though I forget who, ran an OD&D game in the lunch room at WotC during design, supposedly for inspiration.

I believe that's Mike Mearls. There's a quote on Jeff Rient's blog:

"Yup, that's right. At WotC we're playing OD&D. I read Jeff Rients' report of his Winter War OD&D game, and I had to run the game."
--Mike Mearls

[bluskreem]

I play OD&D and I paly 4th Ed. I think they both have their meirts. I use 4th ed for my Sword and Sandals / superheroic style games. When I play fourth Ed the players are special, chosen to be leaders and heroes. OD&D is my go to system for grittier pulp style games, where the characters start at the bottom and face seemingly insurmountable challenges. I wouldn't say I prefer one over the other.

I pretty much started getting into D&D with 3rd ed. 4th ed may be more complicated than OD&D, but it is simpler than 3rd by magnitudes.

[Zulgyan]

I never played 4E, I don't own the books and only read the books once, very superficially. I just doesn't appeal to me. The art, the races, the classes and they way they are done, the style and attitude in which many campaigns are played in practice, the high page count crammed with many rules, not like EGG's DMG that while big, is mainly suggestions, inspiration, useful optional tables, etc.

But it's totally OK for someone to like 4E, I have no problem at all with that. In the same manner some people like to collect stamps and I really don't care at all about that. If that makes them happy, then good.

In the past I complained a lot about the "current edition", but now I think we have enough "support" coming out, and a big enough community to not care with what's "going on with the rest of the hobby".

[tavis]

May 7, 2009 9:57:07 GMT -6 thegreyelf said:

one of the designers, though I forget who, ran an OD&D game in the lunch room at WotC during design

Jeez, guys, it was at this very board that Mike Mearls posted about his OD&D lunchtime game!

I think that his analogy there about OD&D being a jam session and 4E being a symphony shows that he does "get" the open-ended flexibility and radical three-chord simplicity that we all enjoy. The things I think about here are::

- a symphony does something different than a punk band or an improvizational jazz band (i.e. different strokes for different folks)

- the things that a symphony does well are in line with the direction that the D&D fanbase has been going almost since its inception (i.e., some of the strokes I like best have been far from mainstream for a long time, and 4E succeeds in actually doing the standardization & suitability for organized play that Gygax claimed AD&D was for).

- you can't sell sheet music to a bunch of improv punks (i.e. OD&D is for hobbyists, 4E was designed to drill a new wellspring for a game industry)

To stay on topic, what I like about OD&D is the impetus it puts on me to figure out my own rulings and interpretations, and how easily it handles different scales. For me, one of the great OD&D universal mechanics is the way that a turn can be a day of wilderness travel, ten minutes of dungeon exploration, or a comic book panel's worth of combat, and that tossing a handful of dice can let you quickly generate adventure & resolve conflicts for an individual or an army at any of those scales.

When I read mearls' posts like this one about sneaking through the Hill Giant steading, I feel as if skill challenges are that universal scaling mechanism for him, but they seem to suffer from a designer-in-the-box problem. I have a hard time making skill challenges work, even if I believe they do in his hands, and certainly they're a lot less straightforward and robust than similar OD&D mechanics. And for me, 4E is too wedded to the six-second-round microscale, with the result that resolving a combat takes much longer than approaching it or exploring its outcome.

OD&D hits a sweet spot where because it takes about the same amount of play time for you to travel through a hundred miles of wilderness, explore a level of a dungeon, or fight an intense pitched battle, all of these seem like equally valid ways to engage the rules of the game. I think the perception that 4E is purely focused on combat come in part from how much more play time it takes to fight an orc than to negotiate with it, and in part from the fact that skill challenges are so much more freeform than combat. In OD&D, a morale check is as mechanically defined as anything else in the system, and it meshes straightforwardly with other parts of the combat rules (e.g. roll morale when half of the enemy are killed), neither of which are true of any of the canonical examples of skill challenges.

[Deleted]

Personally i like 0ed better. Although i'm still new to DnD (i've played 4e 3 times and 0ed once) but i think i have a feel for what each edition brings to the table. While the 4e is the newest i feel it doesn't stay true to how 0ed feels. They both give me good feelings but each are completely different. 0ed makes me feel that i am the character, i control every little thing i do and every breath i take. While 4ed feels very stiff, i feel constricted everytime i want to do something that isn't a set skill. 4ed is more of a feeling that you have a baby and you tell him how to grow up and in the end if he does everything right you become proud of him while 0ed i feel like i am the one ambushing the toad cultists and i get the feeling of accomplishment when i succeed

[Deleted]

I started playing red box Dungeons & Dragons (Mentzer), but switched to 2E Advanced Dungeons & Dragons when I graduated up to high school because all of my friends felt that it was "more sophisticated." After playing on-and-off for ten years, we switched to 3E, because... well, it was new. Like a frog being slowly simmered to death in a kettle of heated water, I kept playing as the editions gradually added more and more complexity until I finally got sick of cross referencing half-a-dozen books to figure out what an obscure feat did or how attacks of opportunity worked.

At that point, after 20 years of playing Dungeons & Dragons, I quit. I only recently discovered that people were still playing 0E and BD&D, which brought me back into the game with a vengeance.

Everyone else has mentioned it, but the simplicity is what makes the early editions great. The rules are so straightforward and easy that you can play the game without ever having to look things up. It's just raw, uninterrupted fun.

The symphony v. rock band analogy is pretty apt. I can't read sheet music, don't care enough to learn how to tune a timpani, and certainly don't want to argue about the superiority of Bach over Mozart. I just want to grab three friends, hand out instruments, and wail.

[thegreyelf]

The only problem I have with the "Symphony vs. Garage Jam Band" analogy is that it implies that somehow 4e is more legitimate, cultured, or respectable, just as a symphony orchestra is generally viewed as more cultured and respectable musically than a jam band.

[kesher]

Well, I'd say that 4e is viewed as all those things. However, just as with music, a cultural perception or assumption certainly doesn't make it true...

I actually view playing ODD more like group folksinging...

[snorri]

Now I know why I like Od&d: It's just as punk as when I was a teenager playing bass in a punk band in my neighbour garage!

[jacar]

So why do you prefer 0ed?

I'll start with a mini-review of DnD 4e from a Wizard perspective.

My group is about to test out the new DnD rules. we are using the 3 books form the core set. The PHB, the one I have had exposure to, is quite nice physically. IMHO, it has some of the best artwork. Most of it is not overly dramatic and the characters are dressed in sensible armor.

The book is 8 chapters long, to which 6 are devoted to character creation. The other two are devoted to equipment and combat.

Characters are generated with the same 6 attributes that have always been there. You get an array of numbers to set out 16 14 13 12 11 10. You may arrange these any way you want. These can then be modified by the racial pick.

You then get to pick a class. Within the class, you get to pick powers. Powers are spells or combat maneuvers your character can do. Each character gets 2 at will powers, 1 encounter power and 1 daily power. Casters get 2 or 3 daily powers but may only use 1 per day of their choice.

There are also feats which allow you to further customize your character. They can be combat, magic, thievery, holy or racial. These help make a character a little better at certain things. My wizard took ritual magic feat so he can cast ritual spells.

There are also skills which are usually non-combat in nature. The skill checks work similarly to 3e skill checks. roll a D20 and add mods. If you get above a certain target number you succeed.

So it sounds pretty good right?
There is a nice combination to make characters different. you can pretty much play as you want within the class.
Powers are a nice touch for fighters and other characters that were otherwise somewhat uninteresting before.
The whole system has been streamlined for ease of use.

But that sounds pretty bad...no?
The power system almost makes the game feel more like a super heroes game.
Powers, while good for non-casters, are a little bit watered down for casters. You usually get 4 choices of spells per level of spells added. You get your "at will" and "encounter" powers that grow in power with the character. The daily powers are limited to about 4 per level when you add them. You do get a few utility spells at the same rate.
The lingo seems a little terse or forced as if to say, "You must play this way or you will fail!" I don't like the MMORPG lingo they have incorporated and I'm not sure I am going to like the concepts relating to the same.

The miniatures rules in the game are more structured but there is a lot to take in. The book it self is over 300 pages. The core set is about 900 pages long! Holy COW!

Compared to OD&D clones, there is maybe 100 pages in any given set. That covers the whole shooting match! There are enough rules to keep it interesting and these sets are lite enough to not get things bogged down.

We all know about OD&D here so i won't go into the gory details. I like the old sets because it hearkens back to the days when you simply took a medieval setting with all of the legends and and lore. They feel realistic. Of course, in that world, those legends are real!

John

EDIT
These are my initial comments before playing. Our first session is tonight. I'll post back and let you know how it went.

[chronoplasm]

Aw, come on guys.
I haven't played 0E yet, but I want to because I am interested in having a jam session game to warm me up for the symphonic 4E games.
I love 4E to death, and I want to love 0E to death too, but all this tension between the communities is really turning me off.

[kesher]

May 11, 2009 19:41:15 GMT -6 chronoplasm said:

Aw, come on guys.
I haven't played 0E yet, but I want to because I am interested in having a jam session game to warm me up for the symphonic 4E games.
I love 4E to death, and I want to love 0E to death too, but all this tension between the communities is really turning me off.

I have to agree with you. I think the problem comes even from the title of this thread---I mean, given the metaphor that's bloomed, it's as if it were titled: "The symphony must be better than punk rock, right?" Or, I guess I might be more inclined to say: "Prog Rock is better than Punk Rock, right?"

My point is, what's the point? These games are different entities sharing a few core characteristics; I don't think the premise question here actually has any meaning, not objectively anyway. We can certainly discuss their respective merits in the context of what we enjoy about playing one or the other, and we could absolutely discuss the interesting cross-connections between them. But discuss whether one is better than the other? It just comes down to a list of opinions, which isn't actually a discussion at all. Especially online.

[thegreyelf]

I don't even think they really share any important core characteristics anymore. I mean, D&D4 has as much in common with any other edition of D&D as Palladium Fantasy does, and few people would claim Palladium Fantasy was D&D (despite its origins as a house-ruled version of D&D).

But I agree about the tension between communities. Because of the violent, rabid, defensive reactions I've gotten from 4e fans for not liking the game (including being told I was playing it wrong, my DM sucked, and actually being tracked down in person at a con just to be shown the light of 4e) I can pretty much guarantee I'll never buy into that game.

[kenmeister]

May 14, 2009 13:28:42 GMT -6 thegreyelf said:

I don't even think they really share any important core characteristics anymore. I mean, D&D4 has as much in common with any other edition of D&D as Palladium Fantasy does, and few people would claim Palladium Fantasy was D&D (despite its origins as a house-ruled version of D&D).

But I agree about the tension between communities. Because of the violent, rabid, defensive reactions I've gotten from 4e fans for not liking the game (including being told I was playing it wrong, my DM sucked, and actually being tracked down in person at a con just to be shown the light of 4e) I can pretty much guarantee I'll never buy into that game.

Huh. I thought all the animosity was between 3.5 and older editions. Since 4E is so blatantly a different game, I don't even see the need to compare it to what came before. I don't compare Axis & Allies to Samurai Swords just because they were both Milton Bradley GameMaster series boardgames. Or perhaps more apt, comparing Dungeon to Descent. I guess it's the use of the name D&D.

[James Maliszewski]

May 14, 2009 13:28:42 GMT -6 thegreyelf said:

But I agree about the tension between communities. Because of the violent, rabid, defensive reactions I've gotten from 4e fans for not liking the game (including being told I was playing it wrong, my DM sucked, and actually being tracked down in person at a con just to be shown the light of 4e) I can pretty much guarantee I'll never buy into that game.

I get something similar, because my blog is a fairly well-known old school one. Even though my actual comments about 4e are vanishingly small -- I've probably directly referenced it a dozen or so times in 700+ posts over the last year and a half, I regularly get emails from 4e fans who seem to take umbrage at the fact I prefer OD&D and its retro-clones. My mind boggles at this, because, while it's true that I have read and intensely dislike much of 4e, I haven't ever launched into a concerted critique of it on Grognardia, nor do I hang out on blogs or forums where the game is discussed.

My opinions on the matter aren't secret, but I also don't trumpet them at every opportunity. I know what I like to play and that's largely what I talk about. Why that should invite people trying to denounce me or show me the error of my ways I have no idea.

[blissinfinite]

My game was Holmes (as close to OD&D as you can get, really). Simple rules, one rule book to 'rule' them all (48 pages if I remember correctly). You roll up some characters and just play. Being a kid in 7th grade I didn't have much cash for any supplements or modules so we'd have to make all this stuff up. In fact, back then, many games were like that. One set of minimal rules and you were encouraged to go to town.

I don't want my character to be born a 'superhero", I want my character to 'earn' being a 'hero' or die (a gruesome death) trying, but to each his own, I guess.

The artwork left a lot to the imagination and that's what the game is all about.

I don't like to feel that I'm being manipulated to 'buy product'.

I haven't played 4e but (as with 3.5) it just seems more like a marketing ploy than a game. 900 pages of rules? Ugh! (As a side note, I was turned off of 1E for the amount of rules though we did borrow from it quite a bit) It's the new game on the block and some just like whats new for no other reason than that.

The gaming guild in my town is all about 4e. They're ga-ga for it. Pre-release, they debated on 'upgrading' from 3.5 after spending tons of money on version books and supplements, etc. Nevertheless, they they are. I'm thinking of squeezing in a S&W game later this summer if I can dust off my GMing skills.

I'm rambling, it's too early and I haven't had any coffee yet.

--edit: removed town name so as not to cause any grumblings

[thegreyelf]

May 18, 2009 8:35:56 GMT -6 kenmeister said:

Huh. I thought all the animosity was between 3.5 and older editions. Since 4E is so blatantly a different game, I don't even see the need to compare it to what came before. I don't compare Axis & Allies to Samurai Swords just because they were both Milton Bradley GameMaster series boardgames. Or perhaps more apt, comparing Dungeon to Descent. I guess it's the use of the name D&D.

It's exactly the use of the name D&D. Use of that name with an edition indicator clearly states, "this is the same game you've always played, just cleaned up and evolved a bit."

Then, to use your own analogy, you open it up expecting--and looking forward to--Dungeon, with maybe fancier figures, a more detailed board, and glossy cards...and instead they give you Descent.

[kenmeister]

I'm remembering now that awful commercial on youtube when 4E came out, lambasting the earlier editions, 3.5 included. "Ze game shall remain ze same!" I guess the marketing strategy is one of a superiority complex, and some of the gamers playing it have picked that up.

[apeloverage]

May 14, 2009 13:28:42 GMT -6 thegreyelf said:

I don't even think they really share any important core characteristics anymore. I mean, D&D4 has as much in common with any other edition of D&D as Palladium Fantasy does, and few people would claim Palladium Fantasy was D&D (despite its origins as a house-ruled version of D&D).

3.5 especially seems to me to be very influenced by games like GURPS and RuneQuest.

Attribute + skill rolls, universal task resolution, point buy, official setting...all things that D&D started off not having, then other games got them, then D&D did.

[Finarvyn]

[deep booming moderator voice]
Play nice or we'll ban 4E discussion forever! (echo of "ever" "ever")
[/deep booming moderator voice]

Here's the thing. Lots of boards like DF have a total ban on any 3E or 4E discussion. I'd rather not go to that extreme. Hovever, it's true that these topics seem to degenerate quickly into fisticuffs instead of sunshine and flowers.

I was a little troubled by the thread title when it started, but it seemed to be mostly harmless until those last few posts. Keep in mind that this is still an OD&D board. Discussion of 4E will be tolerated as long as it remains polite and somewhat academic, but will be locked tight if it becomes finger pointing and name calling.

We've already got chronoplasm nervous about the tension, stories of people throwing barbs at jamesm for his blog, and poor greyelf has stories of 4E stalkers at game cons.

Let's not allow that to happen here.

Fin has spoken.