Ridley's Cohort said:
I have great respect for your opinion, Woodelf. I really do. So with hesitation I pronouce that this argument has always struck me as the Dumbest Thing Ever Said About D&D. This idea has always been the most bizarre defense of the rabid D&D faction when arguing (pointlessly) about the relative merits of game system on Usenet.
In my mind it boils down to arguing: "AD&D 1e/2e has such hopelessly bad mechanics that nothing I do will noticeably improve or damage the system. Therefore D&D is an easer system to customize."
By the standards of 3e, every single customizable of 1e/2e is an utter failure, because the end result is a hopelessly unbalanced system. (No big surprise if that is what you started out with.)
For those of you who care not about play balance, it is theorectically possible that 3e is not an improvement for your style of play over 1e/2e. But then it becomes impossible to logically argue "one simple change echoes all over the place" in 3e. The echoes are all irrelevant -- they are mere play balance issues.
hmmm... that's a good point.
I don't *think* i've ever argued quite that, but maybe i have. I'd have stated it like this:
"AD&D has a mess of only-loosely-interconnected systems which can be easily used to produce a balanced game. Therefore, changing one element won't generally propagate to others (loosely-connected), and any subsequent changes that are necessitated in the interrelationships are easy to implement, leading to a possibly-new balance that is no less stable than the original point."
vice
"D&D3E has a tightly-interconnected set of subsystems, all built around a couple core elements. Therefore, changing one element almost always has propagations which must be addressed, and the fixes for those are likely to have propagations of their own. Thus, re-establishing balance in the face of a change often takes a fair bit of effort, and may not be as stable as the original balance point."
I certainly never intended to argue that "AD&D had no balance, so you couldn't make it any worse" (or words to that effect)--rather, i think the balance was embodied in the interaction of rules and group, rather than in the rules alone. I'm still undecided as to whether or not this is a good thing. On the one hand, you don't want to be fighting the rules to have a good game. But i, personally, find myself fighting games like D&D3E (and Storyteller, and GURPS, and...) more than games like Over the Edge (and Dread, and Four Colors al Fresco, and ...). Perhaps i have an atypical balance point in mind, so shifting a game with its own balance point is a chore, while simply setting the poin there with a more open game is easy. But, on the other hand, you also don't want a set of rules that requires your efforts just to achieve *any* sort of balance. Personally, I think it's this latter that frustrates so many who love D&d3E about AD&D: for them, it simply couldn't be played "out of the box". Me, i don't see the advantage. That is, IME, the much-vaunted balance of more-complex systems doesn't actually translate to better play, so i'm left with a lot more effort (D&D3E vs. OtE, frex) for no perceptible [to me] gain. In short, while i can see that D&D3E is better balanced on paper, there must be some other element (i suspect the campaign style, but it might be a player-dynamics issue) that contributes to balance, because my empirical experiences with it are that it's no better.
Oh, and I'd say that very few of the changes i made to AD&D were for reasons of balance--almost all were to improve verissimilitude, simulation, or flexibility. The only thing i felt needed to be changed to improve balance was racial level limits--i went to XP penalties instead. [And, i still prefer that solution, even if it takes some fasttalking to justify it completely, to the all-races-are-equal solution of core D&D3E. Though ECLs are a pretty good fix, too, and much less math. I guess i'd have preferred elves to be an ECL +1 or +2 race, and closer to how they were depicted in earlier editions (and thus, to Tolkien).]
