It depends on the edition, and whether or not you want to pirate or have access to new content or digital companion tools, either 1st or 3rd party.
4e is basically unplayable digitally now because of licensing issues for the companion technology. If you still have the books you could try, but it’s an edition that leaned heavily on the assumption that digital tools would be used.
5e scared off a ton of 3rd party creators with the proposed licensing changes last year, and their new 5.5 edition looks to not be very open at all in terms of creator content. You might as well play a spinoff system like the Kobold press 5e or the LOTR 5e.
3.5 and earlier is still possible but the content was mostly never digitized into a good online resource. You could still play pen and paper, but if you’re going back that far you might as well just play a more modern system that draws inspiration from the older D&D system like OSR or PF.
All that being said, it’s all still playable, it just doesn’t have much of a future if you don’t want to get sucked into enshittification, ads, and microtransactions that Hasbro has committed to transforming the game into.
Fair enough. I personally can’t go back to physical. Digital is just so helpful for me as a DM. I think pretty much anything can still be run as long as you have the books, but again it’s a question of whether or not you want new published content. If you are happy with the snapshot of the game that exists in the materials you have, then by all means.
PF2e works pretty well on Foundry. I’ve been playing it for a while now and while there are some glitches, there has been steady progress and only a few niche activities aren’t decently accounted for. I heard PF described as D&D5e with some homebrew rules added on to fix the balance issues, and 2e takes it a bit further. There are things I don’t like, but it’s pretty fun and having a computer take care of most of the tedious math is nice.
It depends on the edition, and whether or not you want to pirate or have access to new content or digital companion tools, either 1st or 3rd party.
4e is basically unplayable digitally now because of licensing issues for the companion technology. If you still have the books you could try, but it’s an edition that leaned heavily on the assumption that digital tools would be used.
5e scared off a ton of 3rd party creators with the proposed licensing changes last year, and their new 5.5 edition looks to not be very open at all in terms of creator content. You might as well play a spinoff system like the Kobold press 5e or the LOTR 5e.
3.5 and earlier is still possible but the content was mostly never digitized into a good online resource. You could still play pen and paper, but if you’re going back that far you might as well just play a more modern system that draws inspiration from the older D&D system like OSR or PF.
All that being said, it’s all still playable, it just doesn’t have much of a future if you don’t want to get sucked into enshittification, ads, and microtransactions that Hasbro has committed to transforming the game into.
I never went past pen and paper, interesting insights.
Fair enough. I personally can’t go back to physical. Digital is just so helpful for me as a DM. I think pretty much anything can still be run as long as you have the books, but again it’s a question of whether or not you want new published content. If you are happy with the snapshot of the game that exists in the materials you have, then by all means.
PF2e works pretty well on Foundry. I’ve been playing it for a while now and while there are some glitches, there has been steady progress and only a few niche activities aren’t decently accounted for. I heard PF described as D&D5e with some homebrew rules added on to fix the balance issues, and 2e takes it a bit further. There are things I don’t like, but it’s pretty fun and having a computer take care of most of the tedious math is nice.
Yeah I play PF2e on Foundry as well. It’s fantastic.