30 Days of D&D Day 7: Favorite Edition

Favorite edition is another hard one for me. I started playing in 3rd edition, and there are things I remember fondly from it. I play with people who started in 2nd, and I've heard their stories throughout my gaming career.

3.5 fixed some stuff that 3rd hadn't gotten quite right, but it also bungled some of them. We actually had a couple campaigns running when the change happened; one DM had us change, midstream. The other did not.

Overall, the edition I'm most familiar with is Pathfinder. It's 3.5 compatible, technically, though we've never mixed any of the 3.5 books with it. I have a good handle on the rules for a variety of classes and situations, and in a way I think it's what we played the most games in, anyway. The online Pathfinder SRD has also been a game-changer (figuratively and literally) because it is free, many people have smartphones and tablets, and though we do purchase most of the books it's nice to have them accessible, searchable, and alphabetical. You don't have to look at 4 books to see all the spells your Witch has access to, say, it's just there on that page of the SRD. You don't need to look at every single book to look at the feats, the feat requirements, etc. etc. because it's there alphabetically. I only hope 5th edition does such a thing as well.

5th edition has a lot of neat things going for it, and a few odd changes, gaps, and discrepancies. It's too early to say if it's "the new favorite", or even what the table is necessarily sticking with. We've started the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure, a 5th edition in the Forgotten Realms corollary to the 3rd edition Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil which was such a formative gaming experience for me.