Shadzar

If you find I changed something and I grossly misinterpretted WP policy or ideals, or the article itself. by all means change it back, but at least tell me why so I don't make the same mistake twice.

While trying to explain on many places my views on D&D I figured it would be easier to just explain them here.

There are four distinct evolutions of the game:

1. D&D
2. AD&D
3. d20 D&D
4. star wars D&D (aka 4th edition)

These four distinctions are made by me in terms of major changes to the systems. Each of the systems have also had minor or even major changes within them, but within the four the first two are most closely related to each other than the other two. None of the games editions can be directly used with each other without converting rules, but this allows for the least amount of conversion required between the games evolutions.

On this site many articles appear to represent the d20 (3.0 and 3.5) version of the game as the whole game in the articles content providing nothing about the older versions or relationships to them or their evolution. This is not true and is a result of WP:BIAS as was shown to me. The way to fix it is to either remove the content about specific edition rules to basic concepts of the game that hold true to all editions, or to specify (preferrably in the title) when something pertains solely to a single edition of the game.

I would love to see whole entire articles explaining everything legally allowed about all editions, but this would probably take up as much content as the books containing the rules themselves. The easiest way I think for "D&D" and other games is to just generalize and not go into specifics and allow decent size articles about why D&D differs from other RPGs or other games. This would hold true for other games as it appears that "D&D" spans much greater area on this site than other popular games. The rules themselves, even though some reproduction is allowed by various licenses; shouldn't be on this site.

My personal bias against d20 system D&D aside, it should have its due as part of the games history and evolution; but shouldn't present itself as all there is. Whatever steps it takes with the massive amount of articles on "D&D" rules is not going to be easy, but it seems like it has gone so far and is now unmanagable and needs to be thoroughly worked over to remove this systemic bias.

added on 2008 Jan 15: 4th category with the announcement of 4th edition and its relationship with Star Wars Saga Edition.

Yes this is the bottom of the page. I just needed 3 sections or the TOC didn't feel right to include.

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