Quote Originally Posted by Digitalelf View Post
I did not change the way I DMed when I played 3rd edition, Pathfinder, or d20 as a whole, as there were elements of those games that I and those I have gamed with over the years, thought inferior to the older editions or felt that were just plain lacking in the systems entirely. It wasn't until 2012 that I just got fed up with the direction that Pathfinder had gone, and it made me realize that I should have just stuck with running 2nd edition; so I went back to playing that edition and have not looked back since.
Why ever not? They are different games with different strengths. If you run every game like it's AD&D, you miss their purposes.

Quote Originally Posted by Digitalelf View Post
That's too bad, honestly.

I think that in all of their "perfection", and strive for this almost mythical thing called "balance", that the newer games, especially the newer editions of D&D, up to, and including 5th edition, have lost so much.

This is nothing against you Yora, but I think it is a sad thing indeed that a lot people seem to be unwilling to just simply accept a game for what it is, and feel that they must change things to suit their more modern tastes and/or preconceived ideas of what a game should and should not be like in order to enjoy it.

Certainly these older games are less than perfect, and in some areas leave a little something to be desired, but THAT is their charm...

I don't know, I suppose that I am biased as I just hate the modern concepts of what constitutes fantasy, that wizards need to be able to lob spells whenever with no or very little restrictions across all levels, or that fighters need to be able to just wade through the enemy like a knife through hot butter from the very start of their careers. It's just a difference in play-styles I guess.

Still, it’s an interesting review of the Basic and Expert rulebooks.
This is contradicting what you said above. If you believe that oldschool D&D should be taken for its own merits - and I agree, it's awesome and worth playing for what it is! - then it's unfair to apply a different standard to other RPGs, be they PF, 4e, FATE, Dungeon World, Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia, WFRP, etc. You're veering off into one-true-wayism where it's fair to criticize other games for not being AD&D, but it's not fair to criticize AD&D because it's not like other games.

(Quick aside on the balance bit... Oldschool D&D, especially IMO the RC variety, is a pretty elegantly-balanced game, especially when compared to 3.x/PF. When played close to by-the-book, class balance is tighter than it would get again until 4e. AD&D, too, has good balance mechanisms, but sadly they tend to adhere to the 'make the magic-user track annoying bits and bobs' variety. Whether by accident or design, and I like to give credit where it's due and say it was design, BECMI/RC is a quite well-balanced edition; it's just balanced in different ways. Weapon Mastery, for example, is amazing for class balance.)

Anyway. There are different games so that people can have different experiences when roleplaying. A game's rules and its focus are incredibly important in the experience it produces. Even tweaking rules - something like XP-for-GP - can radically change playstyles by altering a game's reward mechanisms. I'd go so far as to say that, the more RPGs you learn to play, the more you branch out, the better you'll get at playing or running all RPGs. It's eye-opening to see what's out there and break out of the D&D paradigm.