Lucias
First Post
Those of you who have gamed with me probably know I'm not the biggest fan of 3.5. I'll play it without hesitation, but it's not something I've been eager to run since my two-yearish 3E campaign ended in '02.
One of the big reasons for this is the sheer amount of work it requires to DM. The prep time is just ridiculously high for anything except a published module and even then it can be tough. Another reason is that the sheer amount of rules make it difficult for anyone without a lot of experience with the rules to run anything on the fly or roll with a PC decision that takes the adventure off track (which we all know frequently happens).
This is in stark contrast to Savage Worlds, which is everything I want in a game. It plays fast, easy to roll with on the fly, and you can tinker with it endlessly without worrying about dramatically breaking the game. I could talk for hours about how Savage Worlds is the perfect game for my GM style, but that's not the point of this.
Aside from the above problems with 3.5, which I could deal with if need be, there's one other thing that's been the biggest obstacle to my embracing of 3.5...the implied setting.
D&D has always made a lot of assumptions about the world the game is played in. People get more power by adventuring, there is divine and arcane magic, magic is commonplace, the gods are real and grant spells (though there's wiggle room in that), people can and will be raised from the dead, people walk around in heavy armor, magic items are aboud, etc.. If the setting you're playing in doesn't account for these assumptions then there's bound to be a conflict between the rules and story. How many of us have tried to run our favorite works of fantasy literature through D&D and failed because the assumptions D&D uses are completely at odds with the setting?
3E/3.5 made this worse as it further embraced these assumptions and integrated it further into the rules set. PCs were expected to have X amount of magic items by Y level or else the balancing systems were off and had to be accounted for, and the like. To make things even more difficult, the core mechanic was unified and the system tightly tied together and integrated. This makes for much easier play and supports an easier way of thinking that older editions just didn't have, but it made the system a pain to tinker with without introducing heavy bias toward or away from some parts of the system.This, in turn, made it much harder to house rule the system to get away from the assumptions that come along with the implied setting.
This is a problem if you never came to accept the implied setting, like me.
I just could never reconcile the pervasiveness of magic in society with my vision of fantasy. The picture in the DMG of the barkeep by the "No Scrying" sign always used to drive me nuts. That was just more common than I liked magic to be in my setting. My problem was that I was still approaching D&D like it was generic fantasy that can be adapted to most styles, but it's not. Not at all. That's why there are all the liscenced OGL games (Conan, Slaine, Babylon 5, Lone Wolf), because the implied setting that comes with all the D&D tropes doesn't mesh with settings not based on the implied setting.
The problem wasn't really with D&D but with the fact that my version of fantasy never meshed with the implied setting.
Over the years I've really let myself get twisted up in the fact that D&D doesn't do my assumed fantasy setting well and have complely ignored taking a look at the facets of the implied setting itself. I've seen raising the dead, everyday magic items, and easy healing as problems to overcome for so long that I haven't seen how interesting a world where they exist can be if fully embraced as strengths instead of weaknesses.
The thing that really opened my eyes to this possibility was a recent re-read Stephen Brust's Taltos series of novels. The setting there shares many of the assumptions that D&D carries along with it and presents them in ways that make you go "Wow!"
I actually think I could have a much better time both playing and running the system now that I've come around to embracing D&D for what it is instead of lamenting what it isn't.
Just some thoughts I'd had.
One of the big reasons for this is the sheer amount of work it requires to DM. The prep time is just ridiculously high for anything except a published module and even then it can be tough. Another reason is that the sheer amount of rules make it difficult for anyone without a lot of experience with the rules to run anything on the fly or roll with a PC decision that takes the adventure off track (which we all know frequently happens).
This is in stark contrast to Savage Worlds, which is everything I want in a game. It plays fast, easy to roll with on the fly, and you can tinker with it endlessly without worrying about dramatically breaking the game. I could talk for hours about how Savage Worlds is the perfect game for my GM style, but that's not the point of this.
Aside from the above problems with 3.5, which I could deal with if need be, there's one other thing that's been the biggest obstacle to my embracing of 3.5...the implied setting.
D&D has always made a lot of assumptions about the world the game is played in. People get more power by adventuring, there is divine and arcane magic, magic is commonplace, the gods are real and grant spells (though there's wiggle room in that), people can and will be raised from the dead, people walk around in heavy armor, magic items are aboud, etc.. If the setting you're playing in doesn't account for these assumptions then there's bound to be a conflict between the rules and story. How many of us have tried to run our favorite works of fantasy literature through D&D and failed because the assumptions D&D uses are completely at odds with the setting?
3E/3.5 made this worse as it further embraced these assumptions and integrated it further into the rules set. PCs were expected to have X amount of magic items by Y level or else the balancing systems were off and had to be accounted for, and the like. To make things even more difficult, the core mechanic was unified and the system tightly tied together and integrated. This makes for much easier play and supports an easier way of thinking that older editions just didn't have, but it made the system a pain to tinker with without introducing heavy bias toward or away from some parts of the system.This, in turn, made it much harder to house rule the system to get away from the assumptions that come along with the implied setting.
This is a problem if you never came to accept the implied setting, like me.
I just could never reconcile the pervasiveness of magic in society with my vision of fantasy. The picture in the DMG of the barkeep by the "No Scrying" sign always used to drive me nuts. That was just more common than I liked magic to be in my setting. My problem was that I was still approaching D&D like it was generic fantasy that can be adapted to most styles, but it's not. Not at all. That's why there are all the liscenced OGL games (Conan, Slaine, Babylon 5, Lone Wolf), because the implied setting that comes with all the D&D tropes doesn't mesh with settings not based on the implied setting.
The problem wasn't really with D&D but with the fact that my version of fantasy never meshed with the implied setting.
Over the years I've really let myself get twisted up in the fact that D&D doesn't do my assumed fantasy setting well and have complely ignored taking a look at the facets of the implied setting itself. I've seen raising the dead, everyday magic items, and easy healing as problems to overcome for so long that I haven't seen how interesting a world where they exist can be if fully embraced as strengths instead of weaknesses.
The thing that really opened my eyes to this possibility was a recent re-read Stephen Brust's Taltos series of novels. The setting there shares many of the assumptions that D&D carries along with it and presents them in ways that make you go "Wow!"
I actually think I could have a much better time both playing and running the system now that I've come around to embracing D&D for what it is instead of lamenting what it isn't.
Just some thoughts I'd had.
