[D&D 40th Anniversary Bloghop] Day Sixteen

Day Sixteen: Do you remember your first Edition War? Did you win?

After several years of playing Second Edition at the turn of the century, and several years of putting off changing over to Third Edition, we eventually made the switch. The book-buying and materials-buying went crazy. Then came Fourth Edition.

Apparently our DM at the time decided that he'd had enough of 3.x oddities--concerns and oddities he'd never bothered to share with any of us. It truly was sudden: almost overnight he became enamored of 4E and convinced of its ultimate superiority over all prior things D&D. Even now, I'm not sure what happened or how it happened. I almost wonder if he wasn't somehow in on the playtest. He knew about it almost before it was publicly released.

He also seemed to take it personally when we didn't jump at the chance to change over. You see, we're all middle-aged. We're all really busy, with family, jobs, and church responsibilities. We're also none of us rich. We all determined that it was too expensive in terms of time and money to change over to 4E with nothing earned (at least that we could see) except the DM's worries about 3.xE. So we said no to the change.

And our DM walked away.

Yup. He'd been friends with most of the group since high school, or before. And he walked away. He'd told us he wanted to play football instead of baseball, and when we didn't jump at the chance, he took it personally, he took offense, and he took his football and went home.

As I said, I tried 4E. I really did. I even sat in on a couple of sessions he ran. And I just couldn't do it. I don't know if the other guys ever went further than just reading the 4E Player's Handbook. But none of us ever saw anything in 4E that we wanted to incorporate into 3.xE; neither did we see anything that won us over to 4E to any degree, let alone the highly-personal commitment the DM had apparently found.

That was the first Edition War I experienced; to this day, I'm not sure who won the war.