Is there a version of D&D that has fully supported campaign settings, character options, adventures, and detailed world books, and no conversion is needed?
Yes, and it is called D&D 3.5E.
And I sit here, wondering what Wizards has been doing for the last twenty years? Oh, that's right: rebooting the rules (three times), abandoning 3.5E, getting suckered in by Hollywood, angering the community with the GSL and OGL, and sitting on a treasure trove of IP. They have done three things right: D&D Beyond, Baldur's Gate 3, and supporting the legacy books via PDF and POD.
The company keeps thinking, "A new set of rules will solve all our problems," and it keeps getting stuck in the same reboot trap. Wizards has some of the best IP in fantasy and cannot do anything with it. Hollywood won't let them. Trust me, when a Dragonlance movie gets greenlit, it will come out the other side of the production as a science fiction superhero comedy movie.
Nobody in Hollywood lets you spend "their money" how "you want."
Books will be the best we will ever get.
Currently, the only supported campaign settings are "The Planes" and "Magic: The Gathering crossover content." Yes, a sample Greyhawk is setting in the new DMG, but look back at the 3.5E releases and tell me this is "full campaign support." If you want any of the older settings, you are porting them into 5E, not getting any of the incredible custom content in the old books, and you might as well be playing the Forgotten Realms with Savage Worlds or some other rules-light game.
And this isn't "using Pathfinder 1e," either. The original D&D 3.5E game has an excellent supported character creation suite in Hero Lab. You get all of what's in these books, which are community-supported and ready to use.
Seriously, the 3.5E books are far better than 5E's offerings. Custom feats, prestige classes, and many character options are specific to the world. In 5E? Forget all that; it doesn't work anymore - toss out half the book and use the town names, I guess. Everything is the monolithic, generic fantasy, rules-light 5E. There is no content specific to one setting anymore. Everything feels too gentrified and homogenized. Sure, 5E was popular, but 5E is still emulation and not the authentic experience.
What happened to the early 2000s Wizards? They were on top of this game.
And if you want, Eberron and Dragonlance are very well supported in 3.5E. So you have three fully-supported campaign settings, four if you count the excellent amount of Greyhawk content available. Ravenloft is there, too.
D&D 4E killed this company. Gaming had moved on, and the fully supported campaign settings became Golarion and Pathfinder, where you can find many of these setting-specific ideas and excellent support.
Then again, why would I want the current Wizards team to remake these settings? Today's writers are flat-out not up to the job, and given the track record, I wonder if there are writers out there willing to take this on. They have proven this with 5E Spelljammer and Dragonlance, where they ended up angering more than starting a new product line.
If writers come in and complain about "having to learn volumes of lore and backstory," - you fire them. The company is not hiring you to go into the office and write fan fiction with your self-insert characters all day. The company is hiring you to learn the IP and ensure it keeps its value by curating and carefully growing the product, which means understanding and respecting all prior contributions. This is not a creative job; it is a brand management job. These are anti-creative endeavors, but you enable the dreamers - your customers - to dream in this world. You support the customer's creativity. Not yours.
So we are at an impasse. I don't believe the new creative team could write the next "Tomb of Horrors" or create a decent gazetteer for these worlds. The best talent has left the room. We are asked to buy legacy products and convert them to 5E.
Why convert? Why emulate this with 5E? I can emulate this with Savage Worlds, GURPS, Castles & Crusades, OSE, Pathfinder 1e, DCC, FATE, or any other game. It is just as much work.
I have D&D 3.5E. The rules are in the setting books to make this all work together. Why not play that?
D&D 5E is easier and more streamlined!
There are still 30-minute turns in high-level play in 5E, and the complexity of min-maxing a turn remains. At the low levels? Yes. At the high? Is there much difference?
I will play and find out.
Oh, and I know that Wizards can't make a game that works past the 10th level; from 3.0 to 5.5, they have always blown it at the high levels. This argument favors AD&D 1e and 2e massively, along with Pathfinder 2.
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