3 is a broken concept while 3.5 is a finely tuned machine. Buy 3.5, not only does it fix some initiative issues the sourcebooks are badass. I got like 5 sourcebooks(from my bro in law who went to 4.0) and I love all the content. 3.5 ftw!
A D&D question
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3.0 = Busted beyond reasonMikeTheElf said:
3.5 = Annoying number crunchin, top heavy rules and too many feats get in the way of the fun.
4 = Far too Class/Role locked with very rigid abilities, great for newbies, bad for veterans.
axia777 said:
My, my!vdgmprgrmr said:
So much wailing and gnashing of teeth about a company buying up the jetsam of a dead company and turning it into a cash cow, and yet you guys look upon the long spiral of greedy market-glutting rush-jobs that preceded all that as some kind of proud and noble Golden Age!
-- Alex
No, no, what TSR did before that was still powered by greed for dollars, and I realize this. But WotC ruined D&D while doing it, and TSR didn't ruin D&D while doing it. Huge difference.Alex_P said:
Also, WotC are good businesspeople, while it's obvious that TSR aren't (seeing how TSR's D&D was not mainstream and wasn't playable by the population's majority). This shows that it started with D&D. With WotC, it started as a business, then became (a ruined, torn apart) D&D.
Shows where the emphasis lies.
I've been around since the days of AD&D (Though I honestly can't remember much about it due to how young I was at the time), and I've got to say that 3.5 was more organized and well-executed than 3.0, though not substantially so. It helped to counter some older issues, and as a whole made it much more enjoyable.
Still, for someone like me who enjoys more role playing and dialogue than combat in their campaigns, I actually find 4E to be much more enjoyable. The rules may be much more rigid and basic, but that makes it easier to play and removes a lot of the time it takes to make an action. That, and the action system that 4E uses works wonders, as you no longer have to worry about keeping track of spells a day and all your combat abilities. I don't know why it gets so much hate, probably because of how much it changes the mechanics, but I propose that you should go with 4E.
It would be nice if they brought back druids and monks, though. (Hint hint, WotC.)
Still, for someone like me who enjoys more role playing and dialogue than combat in their campaigns, I actually find 4E to be much more enjoyable. The rules may be much more rigid and basic, but that makes it easier to play and removes a lot of the time it takes to make an action. That, and the action system that 4E uses works wonders, as you no longer have to worry about keeping track of spells a day and all your combat abilities. I don't know why it gets so much hate, probably because of how much it changes the mechanics, but I propose that you should go with 4E.
It would be nice if they brought back druids and monks, though. (Hint hint, WotC.)
Playability by the masses is not the indicator of quality or of greed. Hell if overly complex rule sets were the order of the day for a well done or artistic game then we would all be exonerating RIFTS. Now WotC pre hasbro was very much in the buisness of making good quality games. The power creep for magic cards was not as well measured making the game more interesting and the initial idea behind 3.0 was still a really good one. A game that allows for inserting various rule sets from a wide array of games into one. It was the 'Linux' of Tabletopping and still along side the Unisystem. Really though 3.5 may have been greed in part, but it did fix enough problems to make it worth it. Fixes not only of purely mechanical nature but of intent. granted part of it may have been greed but people do have to make money and its hard to argue with results.vdgmprgrmr said:
4E though, that one I will argue was not given enough time to play test by the higher ups and frankly seems to take a step backwards in all the wrong places all for the sake of making the game 'more accessable'. It takes literally two sessions to teach the D20 system at most so these new changes are simply a way to take responsibility off lazy DMs who don't want to think on their feet or make the game fit the characters more.
Again if everyone is a twink, then nobody can be.
D&D in general is not mainstream. Only its cultural descendants are.vdgmprgrmr said:
2nd Edition didn't require any particular brilliance or talent to play. Just time and a bit of a geeky streak, like all RPGs. Unless you count occasionally stopping to go "Fuck, this particular section makes no sense. I guess I'll just bullshit this rule and hope the group doesn't notice!" as the sole province of the gifted. If anything, successfully navigating all of the rules-interactions minutae of 3-point-whatever is more of a (pointless) mental exercise.
-- Alex
Whoa, I never said that. I said that it's obvious TSR weren't good businesspeople, which is obvious from them not making their product as widely available as WotC has. (And from the whole flopping thing... but I neglected to mention that.)TerraMGP said:
I know it didn't require any particular intelligence, but it required a lot more imagination than is necessary in later versions. Later versions tend to explain everything, give descriptions, and give certain rules for many situations, whereas 2e required players and the DM to be able to come up with what's going on on their own, on the fly.Alex_P said:
I think you lost what I was trying to say. The part about 3.5 being just as easy to twink was a response to what you said about 3.0 being easy to tweak. That was separate to my comment on thinking that PRCs are unnecessary. I just am of the opinion that PRCs aren't necessary and that its for people who require special game rules to feel that their character isn't being pigeon-holed, which could be just as easily accomplished by creating a creative and interesting character (by shifting stats around, putting skills in specific slots, taking certain liberties with your character's background and physicalities).TerraMGP said:
Ah sorry for that.vdgmprgrmr said:
Ah, well still I would have to disagree. I like to build my characters abilities to match their personality. I like options. In fact I think Prestige classes were the best thing to ever happen to a system that has classes. An interesting character is always good, but an interesting character whos special tricks and abilities match with her personality quirks is that much better. Then again its all in what you enjoy, but frankly the more options you have the better.Fightgarr said:
The problem with that style of design is that it's all just throwing a new "skin" on top of the exact same game. The D20 System pretty much resulted in three types of products:TerraMGP said:
- D&D supplements. The 3.x/D20 era's third-party supplements really broke new ground in uselessness: for $5 you could get a short PDF book about a crossbow that shoots stone cannonballs, including its stats, its history, and, of course, some prestige classes.
- "D&D but with ____" products. D&D in Space! D&D with Magic Items Replaced by Innate Abilities! D&D but with Slightly Different Classes! D&D in Space with Lightsabers and Droids! This is the "setting and genre are totally the same thing!" school of game design.
- A few products that say "D20" on the cover to attract customers but are really just an entirely different (and incompatible) system with "Hey, you still roll d20s so it's D20, right?"
The D20 System and its Open Gaming License certainly produced a healthy industry (well, a healthy bubble and a somewhat-healthy industry) but very little actual game design. It's like Linux if most developers just changed the default wallpaper and called it a new distro.
I think it's more about trimming the handwaving in such a way that made the designers' design goals too clear, which broke the happy haze of "Oh, you can do anything you want with this game!" that D&D had been floating in for a long time.TerraMGP said:
3rd Edition was originally pretty similar to 4th in style and intent. The designers obviously made tactical combat their top priority and built the game around that.
They just didn't want to admit that right out, which is why your 3rd Edition DMG has got that brilliant section about "Deep-Immersion Storytelling" where you learn that the way to indulge in "character development" and "roleplaying" is to ignore the stuff in the book (not that OD&D or AD&D or BD&D were any different in this respect). (You also learn that talking to shopkeepers is good story-centric roleplaying. What the fuck?)
Then the supplements started up and the focus, both of the designers and the community, shifted to character-building via endless combinations of classes and feats. This is inevitable: the RPG supplement treadmill naturally steers its way towards the "lonely fun" aspects of the game -- the parts you can enjoy without actually having to sit down for a session -- since RPG players generally have a lot of free time when they can't actually play the game but can take out the books and look at them and scrawl things down in a notebook. So this act of glorified doll-making became the other mainstay activity supported by the rules. (AD&D 2nd Edition, in contrast, ended up focusing more on giving you setting "fluff" that you could read for fun but which would never really be mentioned or explored in play.)
The 4th Edition designers saw that the tactical combat often wasn't nearly as tactical as it was cracked up to be, and decided to fix that by refactoring the character-building so that it didn't get in the way of the combat as much (since in 3e your "build" would usually serve as a script for exactly what you should do in battle). They also noticed that encounter setup was rather handwavy and decided to change that, focusing on fairly explicit guidelines of how to put together what they considered a fair and engaging fight. And, sure, just like previous editions, they threw in the same nod to "Oh, but I'm sure you could do other things instead of fighting monsters, too" in the form of rules for skill checks and "skill challenges", but this time the design goal was so explicitly evident in the structure of the combat rules that many of the players who were content to try to scrape through 2nd or 3rd Edition doing something that the rules in the book didn't particularly support or improve looked at 4th and decided "Meh, this is clearly not really what I want out of the game".
-- Alex
If you're going to play in the 3e era, go with 3.5.
There's really no reason to use 3.0 over 3.5.
The BIGGEST change I found in 3.5, was that it was designed to play more similarly to the D&D miniature game (4th edition took this to the umpteenth degree). Units of measurement are measured in Squares (5'x5'), rather then feet. Gnomes favored class has changed to bard, rangers are overhauled, there are more rules for different timing of effects (swift actions for instance).
All in All, D&D has been changing over the years to be played as a Board Game, rather then a true Roleplaying Game. It's difficult to play 3.5 without a board, whereas I could get away with a "sitting around the room playing D&D" with earlier versions of the game.
If you see that as a bastardization of the game, go back to D&D, AD&D, or AD&D 2e, everything that WoTC have done to the game will seem stupid to you. I personally prefer 3.5 the best, although I don't get a chance to play very often. The books are just better to read I find, which is what I mainly do with my D&D.
There's really no reason to use 3.0 over 3.5.
The BIGGEST change I found in 3.5, was that it was designed to play more similarly to the D&D miniature game (4th edition took this to the umpteenth degree). Units of measurement are measured in Squares (5'x5'), rather then feet. Gnomes favored class has changed to bard, rangers are overhauled, there are more rules for different timing of effects (swift actions for instance).
All in All, D&D has been changing over the years to be played as a Board Game, rather then a true Roleplaying Game. It's difficult to play 3.5 without a board, whereas I could get away with a "sitting around the room playing D&D" with earlier versions of the game.
If you see that as a bastardization of the game, go back to D&D, AD&D, or AD&D 2e, everything that WoTC have done to the game will seem stupid to you. I personally prefer 3.5 the best, although I don't get a chance to play very often. The books are just better to read I find, which is what I mainly do with my D&D.
Uh... only a particularly brilliant and talented person would think that. To put it another way: Try playing an RPG like D&D 2nd Ed with people who are genuinely of average intelligence. It doesn't work very well. Realize then that 50% of the population is less intelligent than that. Tabletop RPGs will always be niche for that reason.Alex_P said:
Perhaps an average player can skate by if the rules are simple enough, but any good GM/DM is almost certainly coming from the "gifted" program of his high school. If he's not, it's because the system screwed up. Improvisational acting + real-time storytelling + complex rules management? It's harder than law school.
And Gary Gygax singlehandedly drove my 5th-grade vocabulary into the 12th grade level, though to be fair that's 1E.
Real men use Home-brewed 2Ed. I personally feel the base of 2nd with some of the bits of 3rd like feats and prestige classes is best. Hell, if you're the DM, just make it up as you go along.
I was speaking more in terms of 2nd Edition compared to other games rather than all RPGs in general, but, in the interest of saying something interesting, I'll press the more general claim as well.Archon said:
So, first, here's why AD&D 2nd Edition isn't special as far as RPGs go.
The game has lots of bits but offers fairly few built-in choices. Sure, the game had a chart of how big of a tunnel a kobold could make in an hour, but the game mechanics seldom created useful, interesting choices. Consider how bland by-the-book combat was in AD&D, for example -- spellcasters are perhaps the exception here, but that's only if your wizard has found a lot of spells or if your cleric isn't wasting most of his slots on healing. No, most of the real complexity came from going above and beyond what the rules actually covered. Some players speak very highly of the rules improvisation in their AD&D games, but deciding how to handle a chase scene or checks for falling off a bridge or your own sex mini-game (hey, some people go far enough to try to publish theirs) pales in comparison to the basic fiction-building legwork you have to do in any RPG.
...
I also think that RPGs in general aren't all that special, either. (Correction: they are very interesting and special as games go, but I don't think they require amazing talent to play.)
My contention is that most RPG players are already pretty average where it counts. They may be identified as the "smart kids" or educated adults, but their particular talents and areas of expertise likely have very little in common with what participants actually do during a session of play. That's why you don't see them doing much improv or acting or writing.
When you say "Try playing an RPG like D&D 2nd Ed with people who are genuinely of average intelligence. It doesn't work very well," you're describing a situation that already happens all the time. Most pen-and-paper roleplaying doesn't work very well. Both the formal rules (from the rulebook or explicit "house rules") and more informal play procedures (which the players synthesize from the game books, their individual experiences, and wider gaming culture) tend to be burdened with a bunch of bad ideas.
Do you like listening to other people describe their RPG sessions? Usually, I don't. With very few exceptions, the stories people describe are pretty mundane, even boring. They're fun for the participants in the moment but come off as stilted and exceedingly predictable in the retelling. In a game like D&D, you've also got game-mechanical structures that encourage formulaic style.
Hell, let me go further than that: part of the joy of pen-and-paper roleplaying is that your stuff only has to be good enough for right now. You don't have to be a good writer or a good game designer or a halfway decent actor. You whole group can be quite average when it comes to all that stuff and you can still skate by and have fun -- and, yes, I sincerely think that's what most people are doing right now.
-- Alex
