I’ve spent some time in recent weeks reading over the various Player’s Handbooks for four editions of AD&D and D&D. There hasn’t been any grand purpose for doing so. I’ve just come to realize that I like certain things about certain editions of the game, and often I can't quite put my finger on the reasons why. I’m also someone who likes knowing the history of things, and how things evolve. I think you get a much better understanding for how and why the way things are by knowing how they used to be.

So I present to you my random musings on the various editions. Have I really reached any conclusions? Not really. Or – at least – not yet. Suffice it to say there’s things I like and dislike about each version of the game, and I’m actually happy to run or play any of the four editions. If I ran another AD&D/D&D campaign on a regular basis, the version I would run would be …

… well, let’s take a look through them all first.

First Edition:

The 1E Players’ Handbook represents all the original ideas for a game called Dungeons & Dragons, as laid out by Gygax, Arneson, and a host of others. These ideas started with Chainmail, made their way into the White Box set of D&D … and then finally crept into the Player’s Handbook.

The main thing that’s evident with 1E is its reliance on subsystems. It’s clear that the game as a whole was not designed all at once. Rather, it started with core elements from the aforementioned Chainmail and White Box D&D, and whenever someone got a new idea, it was tacked onto the game. And that new idea often had nothing to do with the ideas that came before it.

During this early stage of the game’s existence, I’m pretty sure that there was no thought of a unifying mechanic for the rules. Just because something worked a certain way didn’t mean that something else similar should work the same way. So, the game wound up with rules where things were resolved at times by rolling percentile dice, or by rolling a six-sided dice, or by rolling a twenty-sided die and wanting a low result, or a high result … you get the idea. Also, many times, the needed result by rolling any die needed to be compared to a chart or result matrix, and the game had dozens of those. (And sometimes, the “mechanic” was easy – “Touch this and die”.)

There were some arbitrary decisions made for the game as well. For example, clerics wound up with the curious trait of not being able to use edged weapons because Gary Gygax had read stories of the Archbishop Turpin. The good Archbishop wielded a mace in combat because he didn't want to shed blood, as he believed firmly in the motto "who lives by the sword dies by the sword". The same went for the magic system, which was based mostly on the works of Jack Vance, which Gary Gygax happened to like. The rules were chosen more because the designers found such things interesting or fun, not due to balance.

It all led to a slew of fractured systems and subsystems. On their own, most of them worked; it just left a lot to be desired in terms of consistency.

(And for those who complain about the “lack of balance” in 1E … sometimes it helps to remember that the designers were going where no one had gone before. Yes, parts of it are certainly unbalanced … but it helps to keep perspective sometimes. We get to talk about stuff like balance because of their early forays into design.)

Second Edition:

This is the last version of the game that I consider a true revision. When 2E came out, AD&D was enjoying great popularity, and most gamers really liked the game. So 2E didn’t change things a hell of a lot. The game got streamlined quite a bit – we got THAC0, for example, rather than half a dozen “to-hit” charts for the various character classes – but not much got hideously altered from 1E. Gamers were still left with a lot of systems and subsystems. The biggest change I can think of for 2E didn’t really come in the Player’s Handbook, but in the various “Complete” books, which introduced the idea of non-weapon proficiencies – which were the early versions of skill systems, for all practical purposes. TSR’s goal with 2E seemed to be “let’s clean up the game”, not “let’s change the game”. A lot of people liked 1E, so I’m guessing they had no desire to mess around too much with the core mechanics.

The up side? The clean-up. The bad side? Stuff like the "Complete" books added in a ridiculous amount of unbalanced bloat. If you stuck to just the rules in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, your game was probably fine. If you went beyond that, though, the game moved badly out of whack.

(And let's not talk of the Monstrous Compendium and its crappy binder system.)

Third Edition:

3.0 and 3.5 blew up a lot of what First Edition and Second Edition had done, and started over from scratch. Classes and most of the core concepts of the game remained the same, but the big goal was the introduction of a unifying mechanic to the rules – the d20. Roll a d20, beat a target number. That’s essentially how every rule in the game works, whether trying to smack a dragon with a sword, or looking for a secret door. Everything else is a modifier to those rolls. Skills and feats let you either do something, or improve your odds of doing something.

The other goal presented by 3.0 and 3.5 was explaining how everything worked … and I mean everything. A lot of 1E and 2E was dictated by the handwave, or DM fiat. How do you create a sword like Excalibur? In 1E or 2E, the answer is either “you don’t”, or “you need to forge a blade like this in the fires of lava beneath Mount Wyvern, during a full moon when the stars are aligned right” … in other words, whatever the DM decreed. Houseruling was pretty much expected in 1E and 2E.

In 3.0 or 3.5, the answer is “if you have a wizard of this level, with these spells, this amount of gold, and these feats, roll a d20. If you beat the target number, you succeed.” The design philosophy went more along the lines of the DM shouldn’t have to houserule anything. The rules should be your reference for anything and everything imaginable.

Explaining everything, I found, was always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s good to know everything. Want to create a monster? Easy. Follow the rules. Want to leap off a balcony, swing from a chandelier, and do a backflip onto a raving lizard creature? Follow the rules. The rules cover anything you want to do, or can be adapted to do so.

On the other hand, too many rules bog things down. In 1E and 2E, it was always easy to create an orc chieftain. Bump his hit points, give him a slightly better “to-hit” roll, hand him a +1 longsword, and away you go. In 3.5? Making a properly-statted 5th-level orc fighter was a nuisance, especially figuring out his skills and feats (and half of which wouldn't even come into play before the characters killed him!). I also found that things would get bogged down in 3.5 because you knew there was a rule for what you wanted to do somewhere in the Player's Handbook … so you spent a half-hour poring through books looking for that obscure rule, rather than just houseruling and moving on.

The complexity of the rules could also detract from trying to do cool stuff at times. If you wanted to do the aforementioned leap from a balcony, you knew you needed a lot of ranks in skills like Jump, Tumble, and the like to try such a thing. So while it was nice to know exactly how such things could be accomplished, the rules also defined limitations much more clearly.

But despite its differences from its predecessors, I think 3.0 and 3.5 had its strong points. I don’t consider it a better version of the game, though … just different. I personally like the more unified rules (even though it got rid of little grognard things like “negative AC = awesome”, which I always loved), but the fiddly explanations for how everything worked had its bad points as well.

Fourth Edition:

I don’t look at 4E as an evolution of 3.5. Rather, I think the designers went back to 1E and 2E … and then designed a new version of the game, as if 3.0 and 3.5 never existed.

A lot of the 4E game is great. I think the 4E design team found a happy medium between the need for houseruling in 1E/2E and the massive complexity of 3.0/3.5. The rules are unified. They explain pretty much everything that you need to run a game smoothly, and they do so quite easily. It’s something that's *very* noticeable from the DM side of the screen. In terms of running a game as a DM, 4E is by far my favorite version of D&D.

I also like the synergies between the character classes. The player character roles, which I thought would suck, are great. In earlier versions of D&D, there wasn’t an intentional effort to have characters work as a team in combat. There certainly were things characters could do together that would improve their chances of success (such as spell buffs), but I don’t think this was part of the initial design process prior to 4E. The ability to mark enemies in combat, manipulate terrain for tactical advantage, and the like shine much more in 4E than any other version of the game.

On the down side …

The game is very combat-intensive, even in comparison to other earlier editions of the game. Enough so that I consider 4E to be a miniatures game that features some roleplaying elements, rather than a roleplaying game that strongly uses miniatures (3.0/3.5), or just uses miniatures if that’s what you want (1E/2E). Utility skills and spells are present in 4E, but they’ve been very much pushed to the backburner.

I happen to like games that are roleplaying-intensive and feature lots of investigation, in addition to the combat. Without those utility skills and spells … well, I can run a 4E game that’s an investigative game, but the rules aren’t suited well – in my opinion – to run a game like that. It’s kind of like running a dungeon crawl for a White Wolf game like Vampire; you can do it, but there’s probably a whole bunch of other game systems better suited to do what you want.

Also, in many ways, the game is the least flexible of all the versions of AD&D/D&D. Everything has a clearly defined role, or a niche, or a slot. If you want to have the player characters fight sahuagin, you can’t just chuck sahuagin at them. To optimize the combat, you ideally need some of sort sahuagin controller, some skirmishers, perhaps a brute or a lurker as well … granted, it’s not too hard to do, but there’s something a bit off to me about making sure everything fits a formula. 3.0/3.5 did this to a certain extent, but I thought those versions of the game had a little more leeway. 4E, while streamlined, often limits options a bit much for my tastes. It makes me miss the days of 1E/2E where as a DM, I could send a group of sahuagin at the players characters, and I could determine the sahuagin's tactics and roles … rather than having the game dictate those tactics and roles to be in the rules by how the monsters were constructed.

The bottom line?

I like all four versions of the game.

I think they’re all flawed, but in all versions, the good they offer far outweighs the bad.

I probably like 1E and 2E best of all, but that’s probably just my inner nostalgic grognard speaking.

And if I were to run another AD&D/D&D campaign on a regular basis, the version I would run would be whatever the hell best suited the tastes of the gamers at my table.