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Edition Experience - Did/Do you Play 3rd Edtion D&D? How Was/Is it?
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<blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9252761" data-attributes="member: 11760"><p>Boy, I really loved 3E. It was great to be able to see the math and have it explained by the designers for the first time, and have it mostly be logical in the way it fit together, rather than a collection of ad hoc rules in 1E and only slightly cleaned up ad hoc rules in 2E.</p><p></p><p>That said, the expectations that everything worked the same for PCs and NPCs eventually became a headache for me as a DM (if an NPC has a new ability, the game expects that the DM will sit down, work it all out according to the math, and have it theoretically available to the PCs in some fashion, and by the end, that extra homework really irritated me). </p><p></p><p>The notion that access to prestige classes largely comes down to in-game decisions by the DM effectively meant that any prestige class was assumed to be available to all player characters, or the DM was being a Scrooge, was also a pretty crappy thing to do to DMs. The fact that, in theory, nearly any character could get access to nearly any prestige class eventually, even if they had to do some crazy gyrations to qualify for the mechanical bits, really encouraged a lot of silliness.</p><p></p><p>I do love that the underlying math and chassis were cleaned up, and we continue to benefit from that, across the ttrpg space, as there's now an expectation, IMO, that games' math has been interrogated well before the public sees it. And, of course, corporate shenanigans notwithstanding, the open gaming concept has meant 10,000 flowers have bloomed (OK, some of them are ragweed) since then, which is also wonderful.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Whizbang Dustyboots, post: 9252761, member: 11760"] Boy, I really loved 3E. It was great to be able to see the math and have it explained by the designers for the first time, and have it mostly be logical in the way it fit together, rather than a collection of ad hoc rules in 1E and only slightly cleaned up ad hoc rules in 2E. That said, the expectations that everything worked the same for PCs and NPCs eventually became a headache for me as a DM (if an NPC has a new ability, the game expects that the DM will sit down, work it all out according to the math, and have it theoretically available to the PCs in some fashion, and by the end, that extra homework really irritated me). The notion that access to prestige classes largely comes down to in-game decisions by the DM effectively meant that any prestige class was assumed to be available to all player characters, or the DM was being a Scrooge, was also a pretty crappy thing to do to DMs. The fact that, in theory, nearly any character could get access to nearly any prestige class eventually, even if they had to do some crazy gyrations to qualify for the mechanical bits, really encouraged a lot of silliness. I do love that the underlying math and chassis were cleaned up, and we continue to benefit from that, across the ttrpg space, as there's now an expectation, IMO, that games' math has been interrogated well before the public sees it. And, of course, corporate shenanigans notwithstanding, the open gaming concept has meant 10,000 flowers have bloomed (OK, some of them are ragweed) since then, which is also wonderful. [/QUOTE]
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