Weakness by Edition

[Betote]

I'll only post flaws from D&D games I've DMed:

Basic: Races as classes. That sole point kept me from DMing BD&D for years.
2e: Too bland. Too much subsystems.
3.5: Huge stat blocks, too much modifiers to keep track of.
4e: Sameness. Everything seems to be just "damage+effect".

And from not-really-but-kinda D&D:

HackMaster: Unplayable if you follow all the rules.
Pathfinder: Low levels not as low as they were in 3.x

 

[yesnomu]

Diplomacy and Sense Motive are two of the most misunderstood rules in 3e. Diplomacy does not force anyone to do anything, and Sense Motive has some pretty clear limitations on what information it will give you.

If you trick it out enough, you can absolutely make a diplomacy check high enough to turn a hostile enemy into friendly, guaranteed. Now, the DM doesn't have to accept it, or they can just have the enemy kill your friends anyway, but it's pretty clearly abusable.

EDIT: Diplomacy rules. DC 60 will turn a hostile friendly as a full-round action. CharOp has six dozen ways to make that, I'm sure.

 

[M.L. Martin]

The problem is that every edition (except possibly 4e) was written with a "correct" amount of magic in mind. It is just that until 3e, they didn't bother to tell you what that amount was in anything but the vaguest of terms. In the 1e era, large amounts of the letters column and forum in Dragon was taken up by people trying to parse out what the "correct" amount of magic for characters to have actually was - and it turns out from examining the modules published at the time, that the "correct" amount for 1e was roughly what the 3e designers explicitly said it was for 3e.

Was 3E that much of an improvement in this regard, though? Giving a lump sum of money isn't that much help if you don't know what it's expected to be spent on or distributed, just as in the HERO System, a lump sum of character points can be problematic if you don't establish ranges for character abilities as well.
Did 3E ever fix this problem?

 

[Lanefan]

EDIT: Diplomacy rules. DC 60 will turn a hostile friendly as a full-round action. CharOp has six dozen ways to make that, I'm sure.

Perhaps the biggest single flaw (or a symptom of the biggest flaw?) with 3e is that something like CharOp can even exist at all.

Lanefan

 

[Betote]

Perhaps the biggest single flaw (or a symptom of the biggest flaw?) with every RPG in the market is that something like CharOp can even exist at all.

Fixed that for you

 

[firesnakearies]

That's somewhat true, but I've been gaming for 22+ years, and I never saw anything even approaching the level of CharOp-type madness until 3.x D&D came along.

Now, I'm not specifically blaming that on the design of that particular game system. Not at all, really. That was more of an accident of timing, combined with opportunity.

I think it has everything to do with the rise of computer video games, especially MMORPGs, and to a smaller extent, the rise of Magic: The Gathering and its many clones.

Character optimization makes nothing but pure sense when you're facing an entirely inflexible computer "DM" which simply presents the highest-end challenges at a level which makes them (practically) impossible to overcome without squeezing every last advantage from the game's mechanics. When you add into this the element of competition between players, it is only natural that the "extreme ultimate totally ludicrous character optimization" mindset would arise and become more or less the standard.

It is rare to see old-school gamers, who have not gotten into computer games or collectible card games, or been significantly influenced by the players of those kinds of games, engaging in the kind of ultra-hardcore character optimization fanaticism that is so widespread now.

This is simply because, in classical pen-and-paper gaming, such a degree of mechanical efficiency was never really needed. You weren't, usually, ever really competing directly with other players, at least not for long, and not as a general rule. And you were always facing dynamic challenges which were, ideally, more or less custom-suited to the capabilities of your characters, with a living, intelligent human DM who could adjust anything on the fly to fit the game. So if you made "concept" characters who weren't necessarily the baddest thing on the block, it was okay, because the expected game content was never all that hard.

High-end raid content (or high-end PvP) in an MMORPG isn't dynamic or forgiving. Either you optimize to the highest degree, or you fail. Furthermore, you're in a social environment where you're competing for raid slots, or competing directly against the strengths of other characters in PvP, so once again, it completely behooves you to make your character as mechanically effective as possible, and massively disserves you not to.

These ideas, I think, have just sort of filtered into the mindset of pen-and-paper gamers, as well, over time. Many modern gamers now consider it just a given that you'd make the most combat-effective characters possible, because in the overall community of RPG-type gamers, that's the prevailing idea of the most "logical" and "beneficial" thing to do.

Sure, 3.x did make it easy, by offering so many options and so much flexibility in character building that it really lent itself well to CharOp-type tactics. But I don't think the game itself caused the colossal surge of CharOp thinking. I think it came, mostly, from outside of the tabletop gaming experience.


I, personally, can enjoy both kinds of games. I really love playing more role-playing and story-oriented campaigns, where I'm free to craft a meaningful character without worrying about whether or not I'll be powerful enough to handle the game challenges. I can also really get into and enjoy playing high-powered tactical combat-type games, where you can get the satisfaction that comes from system mastery and its rewards. So I get both sides.

The problem only really arises when you have a mix of these types of players in one game, and neither are especially flexible in their playstyle. That quickly turns into something like this:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFuMpYTyRjw"]Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit[/ame]


(Or, as I call it, a Needlefang Drake Swarm Summoner and Halfling Mace Fighter situation, in 4E terms.)

That's no fun to DM, and rarely fun for the players.



I do like the fact that 4E appears to have at least partially mitigated the rampant CharOp-ability of the game. It looks more balanced (largely due to greater restrictiveness), but only time will tell.



$

 

[Betote]

I just warn my players: "If you min/max, I will min/max. And I can make up the rules". They usually get the messaage

 

[pawsplay]

If you trick it out enough, you can absolutely make a diplomacy check high enough to turn a hostile enemy into friendly, guaranteed. Now, the DM doesn't have to accept it, or they can just have the enemy kill your friends anyway, but it's pretty clearly abusable.

Let me put it this way. Vader and Palpatine are pretty friendly with each other. Do you want to be Vader's friend?

You can make that DC 60 check, and the bad guy might still kill YOU, if you decline his polite, friendly offer to become his minion. Business is business, after all.

 

[Storm Raven]

That's somewhat true, but I've been gaming for 22+ years, and I never saw anything even approaching the level of CharOp-type madness until 3.x D&D came along.

I take it you've never played HERO or GURPS.

This is simply because, in classical pen-and-paper gaming, such a degree of mechanical efficiency was never really needed. You weren't, usually, ever really competing directly with other players, at least not for long, and not as a general rule. And you were always facing dynamic challenges which were, ideally, more or less custom-suited to the capabilities of your characters, with a living, intelligent human DM who could adjust anything on the fly to fit the game.

I take it you have never seen the articles recounted the early days of D&D when PvP was a large chunk of how the game was played, and the challeneges included things like the uncatchable "gold and jewels man". Competing with the other players was part and parcel of the early days of D&D. Of course, maybe by the time you started playing, that had died out. (I started gaming about ten years before you apparently did, given your 22+ year note). It was a huge effort to convince some players to work with a group without stabbing them in the back.

 

[Storm Raven]

To be fair, I think the larger point about dice-rolling being a get-out-of-thinking free card stands, more or less*, though I don't run Sense Motive like that either.

Not really. The skills checks are fairly limited in their results if you actually use them as intended by the rules. They give far less benefit than many people seem to think, and the benefits are usually fairly broadly defined. There is plenty of room to determine exactly what the specific effects of the use of the skills will be, and that leaves plenty of space for players to have to think in order to be successful.

Also I never parsed correct treasure amounts from modules in the 1e days, because I didn't buy a ton of the things. Nope, Treasure Type C is the kind of thing I went by. People who subscribed to Dragon were probably a self-selecting sample here.

That doesn't change the fact that an assumed level was used when Gygax and Arneson wrote the rules. They made assumptions but didn't tell you what they were. You can parse out those assumptions with some work - the fact that you didn't do that doesn't mean the assumptions weren't there.

To a certain extent, some 1e/2e treasure assumptions were more of a straitjacket, since there were monsters you simply could not defeat without having a magic weapon of a particular strength - as Monte Cook (I think) put it "you must be this tall to ride this monster".