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Comment by nappy-doo | Hacker News Reader

I'd wait a little while. D&D is currently at 4th Edition (abbreviated as 4E). A lot of people _do not_ care for 4E, and I'm among them. They find that 4E lost everything that the happened during the polishing to 3.5. As a result, Wizards of the Coast is working on creating a 5th Edition, as I type this.

I would recommend you wait a while for 5E, or try PathFinder, which is a continuation where 3.5 left off, and seems to be gaining lost of ground against WotC D&D.

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On the other hand, many people found that 4E removed a lot of the things that made d&d annoying or worse, including a lot of the 'system mastery' abuses.

The great thing about D&D is since the system is ultimately controlled using the GM's brain any abuse can be patched on the fly. Assuming you have a good GM of course.

That was the best part... and I created lots of modifications to the rules when I was very active in the 1980s... a detailed initiative system, an alternate magic system... etc.

Unfortunately, TSR got into this fascist "if it's not official, it's not allowed" kick for a while, but eventually that nonsense was left behind and WotC has done a fine job with the property (4e notwithstanding).

I hear you, it's always good to stir things up a bit. Personally on my campaigns I like to bring in the Iron Heroes reserve hp system. Basically heroes get a pool of double their max hp as "reserve" when they rest they can transfer hp from this pool to their hp. It eliminates the whole 5 minutes of battle 8 hours of resting problem for adventurers.

As for WOTC I'm really unsure how I feel about what they've done. I read that with 4th edition they also fast forwarded Forgotten Realms 100 years and switched it to the new magic system. I don't really read that much fantasy anymore but it still bothers me a little that the Realms I knew and loved are now gone. Kind of reminds me of that old Dragonlance 5th age thing. Oh well I guess I'm just getting old, I'm sure there's lots of people who enjoy having a fresh start. In other news I'm really excited that Shadowrun seems to be making a huge comeback! There's also seems to be some action on the Darksun front, it's really nice to see some of those old favorites that I felt never got a fair shake rise from the dead.

I highly recommend Pathfinder(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathfinder_Roleplaying_Game), it's basically 3.5 with further polishing, 3.5 was released under the open game license and pathfinder has continued it's tradition. It's also got a great support website: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/ and it's really fun. I'm running a Pathfinder game on a weekly basis after about a 5 year break and I'm really enjoying it.

Pathfinder is great. The 3.5e rules really did a great job of maintaining the spirit of the 1e rules, while addressing their many inadequacies. 4e was a real shark-jumping move, but Pathfinder carries the 3.5e goodness on.

It will be interesting to see what 5e is like. Will it be a New Coke/Classic Coke type move? Or Vista/Windows 7... where an obviously flawed product is replaced by something much better that it should have been in the first place?

It's probably best to find a group and play whatever edition they're using, really.

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