The History of D&D Editions

I've never heard that tasha is refered to as 5.5..

3rd edition is definitely my favourite

Mate, this was awesome. Would love a breakdown by you module by module/adventure by adventure.

Fantastic job! Thank you!

Brilliant and concise

The 1983 basic set edition all the way. Good times.

GREAT VIDEO!
Small addition but in 1992 there was an revised edition of the Immortals Box to be used with the Rules Cyclopedia (iirc) called "Wrath of the Immortals" 😃

Someone should make an infographic on all these versions 😅

Excellent presentation of the various changes over the years and it was enjoyable to see the art of the various editions. Thanks for the video.

Never heard of TCoE book being referred as D&D 5.5 tough.

Thank you!

Hi,
Thanks for this. Using the DnD ruleset to prototype a video game I'm working on. Figured a good place to start was checking edition differences. This video has been very informative. Thanks again for taking the time to put it together.

Take care & have a good one

I am quite a bit newer to the hobby... I, like most people, was aware of the vague concept of Dungeona & Dragons but only enough to know "That is that game with the funny dice, the dungeon master, and the monsters." I loved that old cartoon when I was little but never really learning how to navigate DVDs watched the same 3-4 episodes 10 times. And up until then and some other references from media I consumed that was it.

That was until about I want to say 8 or 9 years ago when my dad gave me the Pathfinder 1st Edition Beginner Box as a Birthday present. I immediatly fell in love with the game... Although in a surprisingly common turn of events, I didn't really read the rules and I just took my very basic understanding of it that I derived from the starter dungeon and fumbled along.

What started my interest in D&D proper was a combination of things: I knew of D&D and Pathfinder was described to me as "Like D&D", my friend was in to 5e which was out by the time I got into Pathfinder, and I liked to look into the history of the monsters... Specifically the weird ones like the Mimic, Adherers, and my personal favorite the Gibbering Mouther.

In the grand scheme of things I have played very little of any TTRPG (which I hope to remedy some day soon)... But yeah, that's just a cursory overview of my history with TTRPGs.d to me as "Like D&D", my friend was in to 5e which was out by the time I got into Pathfinder, and I liked to look into the history of the monsters... Specifically the weird ones like the

I'd love to see a longer version with more about how the rules changed between each

For the algorithm

I still have my very tattered copy of the 1977 rulebook, worthless now due to wear and tear but I'm never throwing it out. Too much history

I first saw some guys playing D&D, probably in 1977 or 78, using the white box set. They had a huge map on a dining room table and it seemed like they were fighting a huge battle. I just had to play this game!
Later some friends of mine got me playing with the Basic set and the Keep on the Borderlands module. I later was playing with those same guys I had first watched playing D&D and they were still using the White Box set but it wasn't long before they were using the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons books.
Few of us could afford these books and we shared them. Letting players read them here and there meant that hardly any of us really knew the rules. You mostly knew the rules for the character classes that you played. For me it was the Thief and I studied those rules. Others like playing mages and knew those rules backwards and forwards. It was those few that had started with the original box set that knew most of the rules and those ended up being our Dungeon Masters.
When 2nd edition came around, most of us weren't too thrilled with it. Some stuff we liked but most we didn't. So we kept the best and threw out the rest.
We never did really stop using AD&D. We just added stuff we liked into our games, just like we did in the past with all the cool stuff that came out in magazines. We kept what we liked and dumped the rest.

I like to use race as class in AD&D if someone wants to play something off the wall or weird. One time I made up a baboon class as a joke. Someone said that a baboon would be smarter than someone with a 3 Int so I went for it lol. I used it as a NPC. This way you don't have to come up with everything for a creature can it be a thief? Can it be a wizard? just give it set skills and an XP chart and you are good to go

My two favorite editions are the two extremely different ones. I live BECMI for its simplicity and exploration and I love 4e for its tactical combat and build crafting. Both are excellent and appeal to different gaming desires/interests that I have.

I started with Black Box and Zanzer Tem. Love this channel!

Love this video! I really appreciate the nuanced breakdown of the first 20 years of D&D in particular, there was a LOT more going on in that era than I would have thought (I was born in the late 1980s so I wasn't playing back then). Knowing the roots of the hobby is so important, especially for people like me who didn't live through all of it.

I started playing and DMing basically right when 3.5 first came out, so we were sorta playing some weird "bastardized 3.25 hybrid" during that period, like if we wanted to take a martial prestige class, the only option other than the DMG was from 3.0's Sword and Fist or similar supplement as Complete Warrior wasn't out yet, for instance.

I played and DM'd in that edition basically until the late 2010s, often modifying the crap out of it, running stuff like Iron Heroes, etc. Never bothered with PF, for some reason, and skipped 4th Ed entirely. At one point we had 3 (or maybe 4?) DMs all running games in one persistent world using 3.5, with a total of probably 20 players, which was a cool experience! That world is still being used by one of the DM's, though under 5th ed rules.

When 5th came out, I tried forcing myself to like it, but I already had issues with how "high magic and high power" 3.5 was after so many years of running it, so with the release of 5th, the game moved in a direction that I just couldn't follow. It was just "too much" for me, and I found it occupied a weird place on the rules light to rules heavy continuum that I believed to be the worst of both worlds (not saying 5th sucks, play what you like, it's just not for me).

So during COVID I did a deep dive into the OSR scene and have become an OSE DM. Ironically, I found OSE Classic (B/X) to be a bit TOO vanilla for my tastes, but OSE Advanced is basically the version of D&D that I think I've always wanted, and I think that I like it more than 3.5 at this point, especially if you use some of the Carcass Crawler supplements and whatnot. It's just the perfect goldilocks zone of simplicity, approachability for newcomers, and offering JUST enough depth and character options to make people feel immersed and connected with their characters (especially if you choose secondary skills and whatnot as optional rules).

I've brought a bunch of people who have never before played TTRPG's into my game and they've all fallen in love with it, and even managed to get a 5th edition newcomer to join, and she's having a blast too. I now have the bizarre problem of having too many people wanting to join my bizarre retro game of D&D that I'll probably have to run 3 separate parties to get everyone in on the action, so I'm FINALLY getting to do the open world / persistent universe sandbox type DMing I've always wanted.

This video will def be getting linked on our OSE Campaign Sharedrive for educational purposes for my players!

Enjoy the video. Thanx for getting so this together. Should you consider releasing an update to the history...
😊

The history of D&D should include reference both magazines which provided "official" material.
Today, rules from "The Strategic Review" and "Dragon Magazine" might better be referred to as Beta Rules.

The other item missing is the drop in quality in late 1st and 2nd Edition books. This resulted in issues with the books bindings and pages gaming of out.

Pathfinder (P1) was created by the individuals (aka Paizo) who took over Dragon and Dungeon magazines during 3.5. The first edition allowed fans of 3.5 to continue using all those 📚 books with P1.

I see P1 and P2 as the spiritual successors to AD&D. While 4e & 5e inherit the simplicity of the Dungeons & Dragons box sets.

Even today we have an over haul of 5e to D&D-One along with P1 to PFc¹.
￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣
¹PFc ~ PathFinder Core
(aka Remastery editions)

In the early 80's , my favorite thing was going to the mall and seeing which new D&D supplements and books were out. that and the Hildebrandt Tolkien Calendars were my childhood.

This is all so interesting! As someone who had only experience with ADnD through computer games, what with living in non-Western country and all, I saw some games that claimed to be DnD and having "race as class", yes, and some games being "ADnD" and being other way around... So, I believed that basically "race-as-class" DnD was simply the Old DnD, before "Advanced", and THEN it was improved upon.

I could not even guessed then that there is such a convoluted and tragic story, with Gary going all chaotic evil (or is it neutral evil?) on royalties and pushing Dave out of profits on what they created together, and creating parallel branches of the same game for this reason.

(I think it's rather chaotic evil, because blatant lies about ADnD having no relation to DnD is an act of lying, which is chaotic, and being so selfish is inherently evil, with evil being defined "caring for your own self-interest to the detriment of others". But in any case, it's chaotic evil "act", not the claim that of such a disposition was "the person" himself, on a permanent basis.)

What "bothers" me most about modern D&D is how many supplements("fluff" additions) there are... It's better than the confusion and mish-mash of old-school, with all the versions released at once, the fact that wotc released essentially a single ruleset per edition, but then they added feats and races and more feats and classes and races and never stopped adding them... It feels like the game leaves you behind in terms of content, even though realistically most players probably never manage to cover half of the original content they already have. All of this on top of the fact that 5e is more like a fantasy superhero game, while I personally prefer the down-to-earth, low-levels of the original Baldur's Gate which is AD&D2e (that's how I got introduced to the hobby, and mostly my only interaction with it as I lack a party with which to play).

Personally I am more attracted to books like OSRIC and For Gold & Glory as they are more or less reprints of advanced 1e and 2e rules and, with the benefit of time and the internet, I could look up modules specific to those versions of the game.

I am amazed you have the old Eldritch Wizardry volume.

Zeb Cook is easily the best of the writers of D&D. His Expert set and 2e are clean and easy to follow. Everything else, including 5e, is a bit of a mess. I'd like to meet whoever wrote 3e and 3.5e, because I have a knuckle sandwich waiting for them.

Thanks for laying that out for me. I was in my early teens, back in the early 90s when I was introduced to D&D, and I never really understood what the different versions where. It also wasn't that important really. The dad of my best friend at the time ran the game for us, and he had a shelf full of these D&D books! Now, seeing this, I'm pretty sure that we used B/X. Seeing that cover gave me some serious flashbacks to making my first few characters! I clearly remember the red box cover and that AD&D player handbook cover from that time as well. I can't remember if we used those at some point, if they where on the shelves or if we used them later.

We eventually would transition to running games for our own friends and I think we did a lot with that AD&D 2e edition book at that time, but like I said, we used everything we found on those shelves without really understanding about editions. It turned into a real hodgepodge. We must have used it a lot though (it's been a while) because I remember being quite familiar with the system when BG1 was released for the PC. The first edition I bought for myself and ran for my friends was 3rd edition. That friend who had all those games at his house had moved away at that time, and basically ended the gaming until I encountered the, then new release, of D&D in a shop while visiting my grandparents.

I'd love to know how many copies of M & I were sold and how many groups actually played them. I've never seen either in the wild and never met anyone who played them. Seems like B, E, and C to a lesser extent, covered pretty much 99.9% of groups' needs as far as playing "Basic" went. We used B & E quite a lot and C a little bit now and then.

I was, and am still very much in love with the 2nd edition (AD&D). Tho the system is obtuse and hard to understand with too many small rules that don't add much and complicate the flow of the game sessions, it had the best spells (especially with the Forgotten Reams ones) and the Triple classes were to me an absolute joy to play. The different experience curved and max HP limits really help balance the game. It was FAR more balanced than the 3rd or 3.5ed, not to mention those 5 saving throws so that every class had an edge against something. Sadly, I am the ONLY one at my table that loves it and thus unless I DM it, no one wants to, so I can never play as a player anymore. I modernized it to 3,5ed with skills and replaced Thac0 tables with "To Hit" tables, and converted the 5 saving throws into the same system 3,5 uses. Worked like an absolute charm and my players LOVED it too... again not enough to DM it (arrrrgh !)

3,0 was rough, too much buffing (everyone and their mom used spells to buff themselves and you had so much metagaming with that, made me sick as a DM and bored as a player). Also a level 20 dwarf fighter with 24con (20 +1 each 4 levels) now had 340hps, whereto the same dwarf with 19con in 2nd had like 190hps if not less (comparing maximums). yet the wizard's fireball still only did the same 10d6. It was pure idiocy and messed-up balance. Only 3 saving throws made it easy to get near immunity even with a "weak save number" on your class.

3.5 improved it some and it became my second best edition, I still DM in that system to this day, and enjoy playing it too. We had to smooth the rough edge with house rules that everyone agreed on (6-8ppl all agreeing on house rules? now that's perfect!), such as boosting 1min/level buff spells to 10min/level, and 1round/level summons to 1min/level (except demons/elemental lords and other B/S). No items could boost your saves (except bonus from stats) and caster level is the sum of all your magic classes (allowing for that Cleric/Mage again !). We usually work with a point buy system so nobody gets unlucky and have a crap character, or get lucky and gets a bunch of super high stats. Still the HP issues, it really gets bad after level 10, and I think I will revert to HPs from 2nd edition in my next major campaign to reign that in.

4th edition I hated, with a passion, and every one at my table gave it a try but ultimately ditched it. Had a couple nice ideas, which we poached for some of our house runes ( casting in rituals, minions, some feats, the Eladrin fey-elf... it wasn't all bad, but it felt like a computer game instead of a table-top game).

5th edition is... well... meh. It fixed my power-gaming issues from 3.0/3.5 which is a huge plus. Most spells are very poor and not worth their slot cost (let alone empowering them by using higher slots) and metamagic feats really blows. The melee classes are pretty good for the most part, so is the "Healing Cleric", and the Thief is almost overpowered. Still I can play this all night and still have fun. Not DMing it tho. Not a fan of the weak stats for character generation tho, monsters still have 24str or more for the classic ones like Ogre and Demons, but now getting over 15 is difficult and expensive as eff. But that is more to do with my DMs who are alergic to 18's and above, lol. We started houseruling this (much to my insistance), and with very very slight alterations we got a system with is far more fun (such as reverting to MP instead of slots for casters) and adding feats for extra concentration spells and not having the limit of 2-3 magic items.

To each their own, I'd still rather play 3,5ed, or of course 2nd ed. That said, I can't wait to see the 6th edition. I really hope it improves the game and bring back the triple/dual classes in some form... 5th ed is very lacking in that regards, and 3.5 (non-houseruled) kinda blew as well without those endless supplement of prestige class (but we usually play with basic books only).

Thanks for the video !

First d&d my friends and i played, roughly 25 years ago, was based off a 1st edition ad&d players handbook (late 80s i think?) And a 2nd edition dungeon master guide . We found both at a yardsale and nome of us had played before. So we used a weird hodgepodge of rules into 3.0 came out haha

2.5 Edition was awsome!

Edit: I have a ton of experience with it. The biggest things 2.5 did was let you build your own race and class. You picked a regular race and class and had points to select race abilities and points to pick your class abilities. You could take abilities (drawbacks) that were worth negative points to gain more points. Any unspent points could be used to buy or increase proficiencies (which also cost points to buy). By default, if you took the regular version of races and classes, you wouldn't have an extra points. This makes it completely compatible with non-Skills and Powers characters.

The big thing is customizing your character. You could buy the ability for the wizard to cast in armor. A Cleric could buy improve weapon proficiencies like swords. You could pay for this by giving up access to certain spell schools / circles or limiting your armor or taking behavioral restrictions like a Paladin. It let you swap out features you didn't want or weren't going to use for features you wanted and were going to use.

The other big thing in S&P is sub- ability scores. Each stat had two sub abilities that by default were the same as you primarily ability score. Each sub ability was tied to a part of the ability. Dex had one part tied to Range Attack bonus and another tied to AC bonus. You could raise one by lowering the other up to 2 point. So, instead of Dex 14, you could have Dex 12 for Ranged Attacks and a Dex 16 for AC. This was by far the most broken part of S&P since in practice every character just got +2 to basically every stat by eschewing the other half of the stat's use.

Coupled with the custom races and classes, S&P characters were much more optimized and powerful. In my opinion, these easily added a level or more raw power to characters built with the default points expenditures. Needless to say, old skool players often found S&P to be too gamey and too powerful meant for munchkins and power gamers. Like all additional options, you didn't have to power game it. You could simply use it to buy what your concept was going to actually use and be instead of whatever narrow tired trope an author wrote. It was great.

The 3.0 Edition PHB was written by Johnathan Tweet who co-authored the Ars Magica game with Mark Rein*Hagen (the later creator of Vampire the Masquerade). The core Mechanic of 3.0 and all future editions is the Ars Magica mechanic, except using a Characteristic + Ability + 1d10 roll against an Ease Factor set by the Storyguide. Characteristics are the Ability Scores of Ars Magica and ranged from -5 to +5 (instead of 3 to 18). The abilities (Skills) for 3.0 were a mixture of 2nd Edition and Ars Magica lists, some of which were lifted word for word from AM 3rd Edition. And the "iconic" Rage ability of Barbarian (which did not exist in Unearthed Arcana/Oriental Adventures) was a +1 Physical Virtue called "Berserk" in which you gained a "+2 on Damage, Soak, and Fatigue scores, but suffer a -2 penalty on Defense." And the Reputation system inspired the same system in Star Wars d20/Modern d20. I have argued with OSR people before because tI've heard a few people say that the ability bonus feature came from D&D, which I will admit would have been an inspiration to make 1st/2nd AD&D bonus more accessible, but that ultimately Tweet chose his AM system instead.

I bought my first set (the White box) in 1976 (19 years old) when I found a copy in a small shop called Games Centre just off Oxford Street in London. I spent several weeks slowly working out how to play this weird game. I bought the four supplements (Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry and GD&H) over the next year and that made things clear. I played games on an irregular basis for a number of years and gradually collected the books for 1st edition AD&D. I didn't start running a campaign until 1984 with a group of friends and relatives. This started with 1st edition but I converted to 2nd edition as soon as I could. I never used the 2.5 edition but I did play the BECMI version from time to time. My campaign came to an end in 2001, mostly due to various life events that happened to the players. I've never played since and never had the opportunity to start anew. But it's good to see the game still going.

Been starting to collect all th Ad&d books and modules. How much would you say the value of the white box be? Would love to get my hands on it

Navigating the utter chaos of early D&D editions without the internet, or with very early internet, must have been a hell of a time. :p

I started with AD&D in '81. The boxed BECMI sets came out as I was growing up. We used to mix and match editions. We figured it was all the same game because it was Dungeons & Dragons. Going through an AD&D module with BX rules? Check. Mechanical similarities aside, Mentzer Expert was eye-opening. There was so much about the wider world that was implied through the text and art. It influences my campaigns to this day. Cook's Expert set didn't inspire me the same way. To my mind, it was the best boxed set released for BECMI.

Played 3.5 with the neighbourhood kids in the late 2000's/early 2010's. My mom ended up getting me 4th edition and it seemed so strange to us that we just kept playing 3.5! This help put my timeline in perspective. Love the content

I remember starting out and trying in 78 with the player book and getting the dog in 79 but never had the MM which was fine as we had the critters in the DMG

Trying to keep up back in the day was crazy, till We realized how the edition were different, but of course we were playing and running everything Traveller, C&S, Gamma world, Aftermath, Morrow Project, Rq
By the time the dust cleared well we all found our niche

Thanks for the momoriws

I grew up with BECMI, though a friend had the Expert rules from the previous version. The thing I didn't like about higher level play with this version was that it was all about establishing strongholds, which didn't interest me at all.

I am trying to teach my kids the game now and am just wondering where to start. I stopped playing D&D around ‘86 and honestly didn’t realize until now that I played a mixed rules game. If you were going to try to teach a new generation of players, where would you start…? 5.5?

For some reason the Mentzer editions never appealed to me. I can't explain why, it's basically the same rules, but something about the Moldvay/Cook editions seemed much better to me.

Great overview of the editions! Thanks for doing this.

BECMI is my favorite, so clean, so good. Although first edition was my childhood and steeped with such nostalgia, I own every single book and love them all. Even Unearthed Arcana. LOL

Holmes Basic is my favorite in terms of scope and presentation (I think a level cap of 3 is pretty reasonable), 2nd Edition's conscious dropping of Barbarians, Monks, and Assassins from the main book was all positive in my book and wish they'd dropped Druids while they were at it and prefer not having Demons and Devils explicitly called such if they're going to differ from real world Christian theology. 5e is probably my favorite in terms of overall mechanics, so finding a way to crunch that into Holmes Basic's scope would be my ideal.

I first played AD&D in the fall of 1980 with group of military members in Germany (I was in the Air Force). I continued to play (even DMing) through 3rd edition. I started to feel fatigue when endless supplements were released. I didn't do 4th edition. I recently briefly joined a 5th edition campaign and bought a player's handbook. I prefer 3rd edition.

As someone who started with 2nd edition but quickly moved to 3rd edition, I really appreciate insight into the somewhat chaotic origins of D&D. However, I feel the latter half of this video was a bit rushed as there wasn’t as much detail about how editions 3, 4, and 5 were developed nor how they differed from previous editions. Some follow up videos that go into more detail about each specific edition would be great!

I started in 1992 with my dad and his friends. They played a hybrid of 1st and 2nd edition, but it was all the same to me. I played in that game for years and then jumped into 3rd edition in my teenage years, playing with just my friends. 3.5 dropped around the time I graduated high school and started college, so that seems to be my sweet spot for nostalgia because I feel like I had the best times playing that edition and being really into the tabletop gaming scene. 4th edition came out the year my daughter was born. My wife and I, along with our friends, embraced the new changes that were made to the game, and to this day it’s my favorite edition of D&D. We really love tactical combat on a grid with miniatures so this edition was perfect for my group. Then 5th edition came along and we played that for awhile but quickly went back to playing older editions because we didn’t really enjoy it all that much. Since then I’ve retroactively played B/X and the retro clones that were inspired by it. I really love Old School Essentials for when I need that B/X fix, but my group and I are currently playing a 4th edition campaign that we started in the spring of 2022.

Bought that box set for my friend back in high school for his birthday