@gdave thanks. =)
Cool, thanks.
Now just waiting for the pandemic to pass so it gets better use.
My kids’ groups are all online. We have 1 game most weeks with only one outside player.
5e is much the opposite of 3e when it comes to magic items. 5e uses a “bounded accuracy” philosophy that attempts to make characters relevant without needing a ton of bonuses piled on. That’s somewhat reflected in its magic item rules where (a) officially, weapons and armor only go up to +3 now and (b) most more powerful magic items require attunement to the character and you can only attune to three items at a time. So it’s hard to become a walking pile of magical item effects.
On the flip side, characters themselves are fairly front-loaded with tricks and abilities now and some players complain about “superhero” characters at 5th level because you have a number of things you can do besides swing an axe or cast a tightly limited number of spells. While I don’t mind it, some people looking for a grim & dim “real world” low-magic experience might be put off.
I always liked the idea of a party of Heroes. So that aspect of 5e is well to my liking.
For lower power, don’t allow feats, they’re technically optional. Come up with some form of stat creation where they’ll be mostly on the average side. Only allow official rules and no UA or homebrews. The game is very flexible without a lot of work
Me, I love the feats. Though it does make it tougher on me as a ref.
Oh, 5e is the first version to surpass 1e for sales. It also has had the highest annuals sales for several of the last 6 years if I recall right.
It’s been awesome to see how much 5E has taken off, and how much D&D has become part of popular culture over the past few years.
As alluded to upthread, the introduction of 4E caused a schism in the D&D playing community, with a lot of players who were perfectly happy with 3E/3.5 sticking with that, or moving to Pathfinder (which was, in essence, a revision of 3.5). A year or so into the 4E era, Pathfinder sales started to surpass sales of 4E D&D, and for a couple of years, Paizo was the biggest RPG publisher in the U.S.
It’s hard to play in a “low magic” world with 5e, I ran a short campaign in a homegrown setting were there are almost no (living) mages and clerics have no spells (god is dead, you know).
When the players started to level up all kinds of magical abilities for them appeared that were completely uncompatible with the setting and I had to invent new ones, that wouldn’t happen on AD&D 2 (my previous go-to system).
We made it work but it definitively would’ve been easier in 2e
Our house rule is that you confirm crits and confirm fumbles. If you roll a 1 or 20, roll again, if you get another 1 or 20 we go to the arms law and claw law crit/fumble tables and you roll percentile dice to see what happens. The tables don’t translate great to 5e, so the DM uses them as guidelines. I don’t know why we do this, we just have for as long as I can remember.
(I didn’t play early D&D, I wanted to, but cute 17 year old girls were scary for all of the groups I ever encountered - or the groups were scary to me. It did not start as a female friendly hobby).
IMHO time! I have played 1st/2nd/3rd/3.5, I didn’t care for what I saw of 4th, and I do own 5th but haven’t been able to get a group together in years, so, sadness. 1st edition was where I started, and probably had the most ‘fun’. Largely because 1st edition gave you how to do combat, spells and loot, but really didn’t do a good job of saying how to do anything else - which meant it was up to players and GMs! So wild west style fun as it was.
2nd edition started going in the direction of how to handle interactions above and beyond combat and spells, as well as trying to even out some of the balance and role issues of 1st edition. But over it’s span, they released so many damn optional systems that it seemed no one could decide on how to play the game. Dear Gods of Greyhawk, but I saw campaigns that died before they started because of arguments over Player’s Option: Skills and Powers which I believe was a big part of all the groups I was in ditching D&D for years.
So yeah, other, different games came and went, and then we had 3rd Edition. Which I loved, in that it finally integrated a good, if still flawed set of skills which gave voice to generations of house rules about things like situational awareness, NPC interactions, crafting, etc. Multi-classing pros and cons was much more smoothly implemented, and character balance across classes was pretty solid and well thought out. But it still very much felt like D&D. Same basic classes, same basic spells - it kinda felt like a ‘classic car’ where someone bolted a reconditioned body of a classic over a modern frame. All the appearance of the old, but with the underpinnings of something new. 3.5 is largely just 3.0 with some (much needed) fixes.
Again, avoided 4th, and 5th seems like a thoroughly modern game, and freed of a lot of 3rd/3.5 editions own flaws that descended into the same chart/calculation morass of previous editions (god I hated arguing over attacks of opportunity, sunder and grapple calculations and interactions with various feats and abilities). It as of right now doesn’t -feel- quite like D&D to me, but I strongly suspect that would change if I was actively playing.
But again, I think we look so fondly back on 1st edition because it was so new, we were so young, and since it left just about everything beyond the setting and combat to the imagination, we were free to imagine and play big. 
I will speak very well of 1st Ed, then my kids remind me that I have a 100 page Word Doc in a size 10 font of my own rules to improve it. So, yes, it is easy to be nostalgic for 1st Ed and still know it was very flawed.
That happened to me with the first ten or so adventures I GMed, I didn’t have the PH , let alone the DM guide, so I more or less made a system up, using what I (mis)remembered from the 2 or 3 adventures I had played in. (heck we didn’t even had dice other than D6, we used 3d6 to simulate a d20(!))
It didn’t matter, we were so enthusiastic to play that these were probably the most enjoyable games I ever played.
Then we got the PH and everything slowed to a crawl while we learned about GAC0 and stuff, we soon got the hand of it and played for years, but I think it was never the same.
My AD&D(ish) story:
In the early 80s, my older sister and her friends played AD&D*. I was the Annoying Kid Brother who wanted to join in, but she and her friends weren’t having it (I don’t actually blame them in retrospect). I loved fantasy (I read and re-read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings from when I was nine or ten and then once a year for years after), and it all seemed sooo cool. But, I didn’t have anyone to game with.
I forget now how I got a hold of it, but I eventually wound up with her copy of the Official Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album. It wasn’t just a coloring book - it told the story of a dungeon delve, using Gygax-era tropes (a huge party of adventurers and henchmen and hirelings), and in the middle was a two-page mini-dungeon game. I got a friend to play it with me, and I was hooked.
Now, that mini-dungeon game was barely even D&D, and had very simple “rules”, but it was perfect for me. Among other things, a hit did one point of damage, and so “hit points” were literally how many hits you, or a monster, took to kill, which seemed deeply intuitive. This will be important in a moment.
My sister (I think at my mom’s insistence) gave me her copy of the 1981 Moldvay Basic Set (the famous B/X Red Box), and away I went. I dragooned my friend into playing, and he really got into it, as well. Now, there were only two of us, and we knew we were supposed to have a party of adventurers, so we took turns being DM, with each of us playing multiple characters. It was years before I really realized the normal procedure was for one player to play one character.
We were kids, and even though I was a voracious reader, I still managed to skip over a lot of the text in the rules. We played by what made sense to us, and also what we remembered from that mini-dungeon game in the coloring book. So, a hit did one hit point of damage (specific weapons were just window dressing). We couldn’t figure out what “hit dice” were, so we figured they were the same as hit points - how many hits it took to kill a monster. The notations like “HD: 4+1” didn’t make much sense, but we just shrugged and gave the monster 5 “hit points”. We did read the spell texts more carefully, so while our fighter was only doing 1 point of damage with his two-handed sword, the magic-user could do 1d6+1 “hits” with his magic missile! Which actually made sense to us, because the magic-user could only cast one spell per day, and it seemed like it should be really powerful…
We made a lot of “mistakes” like that, but we didn’t care. It was fun. As we learned the rules better, we figured out “hit points” and “hit dice” and why a longsword was better than a shortsword, and so forth. But I still kind of think that one hit = one hit point of damage makes more intuitive sense…
Going from the coloring album to the Basic Set and just the Basic set also set up a dynamic I wasn’t really conscious of until many years later. The story in the coloring album, and the bits of rules and monsters in the mini-dungeon game, were (I think largely unintentionally) allusive and evocative. It made it clear there was a whole big, wide, weird world that it was a part of, but I could only see bits and pieces of it. The Basic Set made any number of references to the Expert Set, which I wouldn’t get for another year or two. And I knew there was also something called “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons”. It was all so fascinatingly fragmentary. I was trying to patch together an idea of the game from disparate bits and pieces, not all of which matched.
When I finally got the Expert Set**, it had an actual game world - but only a part of it. The Grand Duchy of Karameikos was clearly part of a much larger, older world, but there were only tantalizing hints of what lay beyond. Names on the map, scattered references, and so forth. Even within the Duchy, there were brief bits mentioned but not elaborated on, like the forest outside the Duchy’s capital that was actually a massmorphed army waiting for…something to bring it to life.
When I finally “graduated” to AD&D, I read the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide pretty much completely, cover to cover. Not all at once, of course, but over the course of several weeks. While other kids I knew were watching cartoons while they ate breakfast, I was poring over the PHB and DMG. I still have a real fondness for the quirky and random hyper-completeness of the DMG.
But…
There was something about those early games with the Basic Set that I couldn’t put a finger on, and couldn’t ever quite recover. I now have a better idea of what it was. Like others have mentioned in this thread, it was that sense of wonder, of only having a partial and incomplete view of what was going on, of that sense that there was a huge, dimly seen world just beyond my grasp. That There Be Dragons.
And, really, nothing can compare to your first +1 flaming sword.
*It wasn’t until many years later that I began to realize just how unusual that was. Not only was she a girl that played D&D in the early 80s, when the hobby was unfortunately pretty hostile to girls, she played in a group entirely made up of girls. When I eventually inherited her D&D stuff including her campaign notes, I realized she and her friends were also years if not decades ahead of the mainstream of the hobby - they were playing a massive, multi-generational campaign, playing characters, then their kids, then their kids, and so on - I think I found a family tree of PCs that stretched back at least four generations. That’s something that would eventually turn up in games like Pendragon, but she and her friends were doing it with AD&D c. 1982.
**I had the 1981 Moldvay Basic Set, but wound up with the 1983 Expert Set, with the Larry Elmore art. I wouldn’t realize until decades later that those were actually two different editions. That early exposure also made Larry Elmore the definitive D&D artist, for me.
I just want to say that getting to read this thread, and everyone’s stories, is awesome!
Aye, a very happy trip down memory lane. 
Here are some things from my collection, I’ll bet a lot of y’all will remember these dungeons:
https://i.ibb.co/WshNMRB/Dragon-Lance-1.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/2g2DR1R/In-Search-of-the-Unknown.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/3YMfCx4/The-Sinister-Secret-of-Saltmarsh.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/bJM73kr/Blade-of-Vengeance.jpg
Check this one out; it isn’t from TSR:
https://i.ibb.co/30f4Jn2/Cloudland.jpg
Greyhawk:
https://i.ibb.co/tqZDPHB/Greyhawk-1.jpg
Stuff a DM needs:
https://i.ibb.co/0njMx37/Dungeon-Masters-Adventure-Log.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/Gx088cJ/Dungeon-Master-Screen-2.jpg
Here’s a non-TSR personal favorite (I still have both maps!):
https://i.ibb.co/hDyn1HV/City-State-of-the-Invincible-Overlord-1.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/n7g6vK2/City-State-of-the-Invincible-Overlord-2.jpg
About 15 years ago, I bought a used copy of the old World of Greyhawk boxed set from Noble Knight Games (an online seller of used games). When I got it in the mail, I discovered that the front page of the main book had been signed by Gary Gygax!
With Ravenloft, Dark Sun, Planescape, Al-Qadim, Birthright, and others, AD&D 2nd edition was the golden age of settings. I also preferred the art in 2nd edition especially illustrations in the Monster Manual.
Was there much new about the 2e artwork? Serious question: I thought it was mainly a continuation of the Elmore/Easley/Caldwell/Parkinson/etc style you saw in “established” 1e (once they got out of “I know a guy who’ll draw a picture for $15” stage combined with artists like Otus and Trampier)
Speaking of, I sort of hate the art in 5e. It’s all competent but so boring and every picture looks like it came from the same digital paint software. I’d almost rather look at 1e’s janky-ass Monster Manual dragon drawings.
I started disliking a lot of the D&D art in 3rd edition and I’d rather look at some of the janky-ass illustrations for 1st edition as well because at least those have a nostalgic appeal to me. The art in 3rd edition looked like some sort of dungeon punk aesthetic which I just didn’t care for. But I find the art in 5th edition to be entirely serviceable, though not particularly inspirational, but the halfling on page 25 of the PHB looks terrible.
Yeah, that dude sucks. The rest of it looks like five people took the same SkillShare course in how to make digital fantasy art. I don’t even know if that’s the fault of the artists – could be WotC’s editorial decisions on what the art has to look like.
It was, though that also turned out to be part of TSR’s downfall. They plowed a ton of money into publishing settings (and supporting material), many of which were only used by a small fraction of the player base. As a result, when they finally went out of business in '97, from what I’ve read, their warehouse still had a large stock of a lot of those setting-specific materials.