airwalkrr
Adventurer
It's completely beyond the pale. I just mentioned the "name level" issue to point out ONE of the many discrepancies between the tying of rules systems to game settings. Sure, 3e has the Stronghold Builder's Guide and PF has Ultimate Campaign. But those are technically optional rules. In AD&D it was more of an assumption. Running Greyhawk in 3e or PF requires a lot of changes and/or compromises. The setting and the system in the case of Greyhawk were intrinsically intertwined. And I'm not just talking about NPC names being attached to spells. Take skills, for example. AD&D is a very skills-light system. It had the assumption that thieves were the ones with the real talents for those sorts of things. In 3e/PF pretty much any character can take 1 level of rogue and be just about as good of a trapper as anyone else. Or consider feats. The presence of these abilities in Greyhawk makes for some rather troublesome issues, especially when it comes to spellcasters. And while we're on the subject of spellcasters, 3e and PF spellcasters (especially PF spellcasters) are significantly more powerful throughout all levels. In AD&D, spellcasters had a rough go of things in the early levels but came to be quite powerful at the higher levels. In 3e and PF they have incredible power throughout all levels, especially since they have many more spells per day at their disposal. And magic item creation, well in AD&D it used to be difficult, and as such you didn't see a whole lot of low-level magic items floating around. How many players wanted to risk permanent Con loss to make a scroll of a 1st level spell? And it wasn't even possible until around 9th-level! 3e and PF meanwhile assume that even low-level PCs have access to a vast quantity of low-level magic items. In AD&D you were supposed to EARN magic items through adventuring. In 3e and PF, earning your loot is largely unnecessary. So long as you are earning the gold, you are getting the means to make whatever you like. I'll cite an example, if I may. A certain wizard... I mean magic-user, in Iuz the Evil, is said to make one +1 magical sword for the armies of Iuz PER MONTH. If given the gold by Iuz and his minions using PF, he could easily be churning out 15 of those suckers a month. A lot of issues here.
Now this is not an argument for one system or another. I am simply positing that the AD&D system is tailored to fit the Greyhawk setting because that was the default setting from the start. If I am going to run a GH campaign, I much prefer to use AD&D, with all the assumptions that system has to offer, and save myself the headache of conversions, changes, and compromises to the base setting. It's the same reason I only run Eberron when using 3e (and PF since they are close enough to work together). I can't imagine the headache of trying to back-convert all the sub-systems within Eberron back to AD&D. Eberron was explicitly designed for 3.5.
Now this is not an argument for one system or another. I am simply positing that the AD&D system is tailored to fit the Greyhawk setting because that was the default setting from the start. If I am going to run a GH campaign, I much prefer to use AD&D, with all the assumptions that system has to offer, and save myself the headache of conversions, changes, and compromises to the base setting. It's the same reason I only run Eberron when using 3e (and PF since they are close enough to work together). I can't imagine the headache of trying to back-convert all the sub-systems within Eberron back to AD&D. Eberron was explicitly designed for 3.5.
