Community

Looking at the posts that fly about this forum full of anger and rage (sometimes well hidden, but there) I was just wondering if there were many people in the same boat as me.

So does anyone else, like me enjoy ALL editions of D&D? None are flawless in my eyes, and some have glaring errors or omissions but I find them fun to play and can get a few good campaigns out of them at any time. My players will enjoy it and thats what counts.

Earlier editions have the benefits of being able to truly build up your character (beyond the realms of fairness) and later editions start slowly edging towards equality (which was a great draw for newer players). But the stories that we create around the framework can become eternally memorable no matter the edition.

The main reason I'm asking this... to be honest I'm starting to feel out of place without an axe to grind. Most of the posts about D&DN are seemingly factional edition wars set up in little skirmishes about key smaller points. 

I've enjoyed games that were ran in basically 2nd edition, 2nd edition w/ skills and powers options, 3rd edition, 3.5, and 4th. Ultimately they're all systems and I didn't find any of the systems wholey incapable of having fun while utilizing.

That said, 4th edition was the first one of that evolving line where I actually disliked the system comparitive to the system I used the times before. I liked 2nd edition. I disliked a fair bit of things in sklls & powers but I felt it added some very useful things as well and was easy enough to pick and choose from. I loved 3e and thought it was a wonderful evolution to the game. 3.5 was all the things I liked about 3e with a few things tweaked a bit for balance or made a bit more interesting. 4e however felt like a largely different system to me...not good, not bad, just massively different than what I came to expect when playing D&D. That didn't significantly keep me from having fun...but it did detract from my desire to play it as more than an occasional diversion, similar to how Cyber Punk, Werewolf, Exalted, and other systems over the years provided me with that occasionally distraction from the game I primarily played.

I've only played 4e, and only a few times due to lack of group. However, I'm more fluff fan than anything and I've loved most of what I've read about older editions.

I really liked the flavor and feel of 1e and 2e.  The problem with 1e and 2e was there was a lack of flexibility in character creation and the math behind the game was not pleasant.

I have a soft spot for BECMI since that is what I started with.

I really liked the flexibility of 3e.  The math broke down outside of the sweet spot (5th to 12th level or so) and some of the feel from the earlier editions seemed to be lost but it was a great game.  It also allowed me to experiment with a lot of different styles of games and characters.

I think the math of 4e was much better and the fluff for 4e was really interesting. In play the heavy tactical nature of the combat felt more like a table top mini game than D&D to me and the match was heavily weighted towards combat balance and that did not give me the feel I was looking for in D&D.

So far 5e is giving me some of the feel of 1e and 2e and maybe some BECMI, the flexibility of 3e or at least what looks like that flexility but without the need to spend hours creating characters or leveling up those characters, and some of the math improvement of 4e.  It also seems to be geared to let me run low magic or high magic games with the same system - earlier editions did not really allow that without a lot of tweaks since the math was built with the magic items and magic required.

I don't really understand the hate I have been seeing in these and other forums, unless it is just resistance to change and general edition warring.