T. Foster wrote:But by that logic they should lump 2E AD&D in as well and label the bucket "pre-3rd edition."
You know, I thought about that quite a bit actually and decided against going there. But since you bring it up
As much as I agree that 2nd edition play is really close to 1st as long as you stick to just PHB+DMG, I think there might be some value to WotC in keeping those buckets separate. My overall 2nd edition customer experience was *very* different than that of prior editions. When I think about what 2nd edition was, I think about the Complete handbook series, a bunch of boxed sets, many colorfully branded campaign worlds, and that sort of thing. To a lot of people, 2nd edition means Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Al-Qadim, Dark Sun, Planescape, etc. Some were also 1st edition settings, of course, but boy did they get a big push for 2nd edition.
From today's perspective, I imagine that very different sorts of players purchased from the 2nd edition pdf back catalog compared to those who purchased from the 1st edition pdf back catalog. At the very least, one might imagine a difference in a 2nd edition customer's willingness to gobble up lots of new settings & stories (willingness to drink from the fire hose!) compared to a customer in their 1st edition bucket.
The dividing line between OD&D+supplements and AD&D is pretty blurry (despite TSR's insistence to the contrary at the time, because they were trying to deny royalties to Dave Arneson) and yeah, to a 9 year old kid the fact that the Moldvay Basic rulebook and the AD&D MM belong to two different editions isn't entirely clear, but certainly the D&D Rules Cyclopedia is pretty obviously different from 1E AD&D -- moreso than 2E AD&D is -- and also anybody who's still playing one of those versions now and is going to take that WotC survey and vote for one of them almost certainly registers the difference between them.
Yeah, I don't have a great response for that, but I would guess that most current RC players don't grok anything but the superficial differences. Maybe 1 person per gaming group, as with my own AD&D experience.
In any case, the survey seems to completely punt on the various later incarnations of Basic. If I were a Basic player of anything RC or later (like the early-to-mid-90's boxed sets), I don't know what I would have picked in that survey.
Touching on my previous point about the difference between 1st and 2nd edition, I'm not familiar enough with the offerings for RC to know whether the BITD customer experience for RC was more 1e-like or 2e-like. For those who know, what was it like?
I'm not saying they need to go into the level of detail of separating out the various Basic Set iterations and whatnot, but would it really have been so onerous of them to offer 6 choices instead of 5:
[]Original edition (first released in 1974, includes the various Basic, Expert, etc. sets & Rules Cyclopedia)
[]First edition (first released in 1977)
[]Second edition (first released in 1989)
Personally, I don't think it's quite right to lump LBB in with Basic, but admittedly I don't have any first-hand BITD experience with LBB, so I reserve the right to be totally wrong. All I know is that when I read about LBB play, it sure sounded like there was lots of supplement use, thus making LBB pretty much equal with 1st edition.
And picking a 1st edition date (for that definition of 1st) is tough, isn't it? Technically 1977, sure. A little bit later is probably more pragmatically correct, though. And then you have to hope the typical survey taker can remember whether they fell into a bucket that was a really long time ago, or a really long time ago minus just a few more years.
Not to mention that pre-release 4e ads, the ones that bothered to mention earlier editions at all, were decidedly derogatory toward those earlier editions.
