D&D 5E You can't necessarily go back

[Neonchameleon]

I think that the designers seem to be doing well with that in 5E so far: the really important things are to make a simple system that is easy to use, give everyone something cool to do, and then step back and let everyone have fun.

For the record I'd agree with this - I'm actually running a campaign in 5e with the latest playtest and for the most part, the rules seem pretty good at getting the hell out of the way and letting the game progrees; the first edition of D&D I'm aware of that makes this close to happening RAW (4e took the opposite approach and made the rules fun).

AD&D experience, though, hits OMG at name levels, and it can take a year of play to go up one level after that, you can run games for a long, long time, and, while some classes top out, and others get basically nothing for leveling after a while (ooh, 3 hps), some have spell/day charts that go over 20, and can clearly be extended ad infinitum, if you so desired. So a campaign - particularly a campaign made up of humans that aren't Druids, Assassins, Monks, or Bards with maybe a few non-/demi-human thieves - can quite literally go on forever.

AD&D enters the endgame after 10th level. You get castles and followers and are meant to change the way the game is played. And there's a reason the highest level PC at Gygax's table (Sir Robilar) I'm told was 14th level. Also if you follow the 1e rules (2e relaxed this) all the non-humans went home long ago.

Plus [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] houserules for a long campaign. I assume most of the other really long games do too.

 

[pemerton]

Plus Lanefan houserules for a long campaign. I assume most of the other really long games do too.

The houserule my group uses is to have 3 to 4 hour sessions every 2 to 3 weeks!

 

[B.T.]

You mean that 3.5 is non-gritty when DMs actually play by the rules as written. Wealth by level rules exist, so do crafting rules, so does expected treasure. In my experience there needs to be either a soft or a hard houserule that "We do not take wands of Cure Light Wounds or Wands of Lesser Vigour" before you can approach grit. Because a wand of CLW takes all of one day and 375 GP to craft. The expected wealth by level of a second level PC is 900GP (1000GP in Pathfinder). Which means that a well equipped party of second level or higher should start with at least one for 750GP.

That makes a lot of assumptions about the game that vary from DM to DM in a way that healing surges don't. Wealth-by-level is a guideline, and I've never seen a DM that calculates treasure so that it exactly matches up. The wizard churning out wands of CLW requires 5th level and they have to blow a feat on it (something most players are reluctant to do). On top of this, the whole "freely available magic wands" thing seems uncommon (again, in my experience).

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

That makes a lot of assumptions about the game that vary from DM to DM in a way that healing surges don't. Wealth-by-level is a guideline, and I've never seen a DM that calculates treasure so that it exactly matches up. The wizard churning out wands of CLW requires 5th level and they have to blow a feat on it (something most players are reluctant to do). On top of this, the whole "freely available magic wands" thing seems uncommon (again, in my experience).

It's totally worth the feat, but it could be the Cleric that takes it. Doesn't really matter. And it was "Standard Operating Procedure" in the gaming group I played with.

In the end - D&D 3E played with not many problems, I suppose, if you played it with an AD&D mentality. Because it was trying to fix all the things that people saw with AD&D or had already fixed via house rules in their AD&D games.

But if you played D&D 3E as it its own game and looked out for how things worked out and how to really (or even somewhat) optimize your character... Well, you could be creating a very messy, imbalanced game. (4E lessons that fixing one problem can create new ones was already something you could learn in 3E )

IMXP, the only thing a D&D 3E DM needed to do was: Use the treasure tables, and either allow buying and selling magic items or allow magic item creation. (All 3 the standard assumption of the D&D rules, but not necessarily AD&D standard assumptions - the latter two may have been tightly restricted if you came from AD&D).

The wealth by level guidelines, I believe, were not just made up numbers - they were basically averagized by the treasure tables. Unless you really only used monsters that didn't give treasure, you were likely to give your players enough money worth that they could start optimizing by selling everything they didn't need and buy or craft what they wanted. The few xp lost in the process were more than made up by the fact that the party was not limite by hit points, but only by spells per day. Which unfortuantely in turn broke the "encounter day" balancing - 4 standard encounters didn't require (m)any spells, and with the Fighter being able to recover all his hit points afterwards, didn't even come remotely close to costing the party 25 % of their resources. You could only create a semblance of challenge if you forced the player to invest a lot of spells in an encounter.

It is probably also one of the reason why even something like "wandering monsters" failed to achieve their effect in discouraging the 15 minute adventuring day - unless your wandering monster table consisted primarily of encounters above the party level, you wouldn't create much of a challenge or worry. It would just probably mean 2 or 3 extra spells held in reserve for the night.

 

[Obryn]

That makes a lot of assumptions about the game that vary from DM to DM in a way that healing surges don't. Wealth-by-level is a guideline, and I've never seen a DM that calculates treasure so that it exactly matches up. The wizard churning out wands of CLW requires 5th level and they have to blow a feat on it (something most players are reluctant to do). On top of this, the whole "freely available magic wands" thing seems uncommon (again, in my experience).

Wealth-by-level is a guideline, sure. The hazard (and one that's not clearly stated) is that being short on magic treasure really hurts the non-casters the most. Clerics and Wizards get new toys by just leveling up. A Fighter needs those +X weapons and +Y armor to contribute at even moderately high levels. So if you give out treasure at a rate that keeps the fighter in the game, it follows that the cleric won't have much trouble getting the ... what 375? gold it takes to craft the wand.

You say it didn't happen in your games, and I believe you. It certainly happened in mine - and we were fine with it, because otherwise the healing process got tedious. My point is just that making CLW "healsticks" is both easy and obvious - and doesn't rely on a single book outside the PHB and DMG.

-O

 

[Neonchameleon]

That makes a lot of assumptions about the game that vary from DM to DM in a way that healing surges don't. Wealth-by-level is a guideline, and I've never seen a DM that calculates treasure so that it exactly matches up. The wizard churning out wands of CLW requires 5th level and they have to blow a feat on it (something most players are reluctant to do). On top of this, the whole "freely available magic wands" thing seems uncommon (again, in my experience).

In my experience, when I didn't play an Artificer, spending a feat on Craft Wands was one of those "For the good of the party" things - either the wizard or the cleric would - and then they'd claim an additional share of treasure. I would consider it extremely inept play by the party unless your DM was a miser from hell (I'm not talking about full WBL, I'm talking about no more than a +1 sword and dagger by level 6) to not get Craft Wand and be able to take care of your healing needs permanently. The WBL guidelines are averaged treasure tables accounting for attrition.

3.X works if and only if you approach it either as 2e or as an utterly gonzo game in my experience. You seem to pick the 2e approach.

 

[B.T.]

You seem to pick the 2e approach.

In general, yes.

Also:

>2012
>allowing artificers in your game
ISHYGDDT

 

[slobster]

In general, yes.

Also:

>2012
>allowing artificers in your game
ISHYGDDT

I love artificers, and try to convince all of my Eberron parties to have at least one (it usually isn't difficult).

I also, like most 3.x GMs, have plenty of houserules in my game. One of them is that you need a schema, basically a blueprint, in order to craft a magical item in addition to the feat and the normal prereqs. Most common (read: not broken) magical items' schema can be bought (it helps to have contacts within House Cannith), but particularly powerful and interesting schema tend to be unique or buried in lost ruins and blasted battlefields.

So that reins in the gonzo omni-competent artificer a bit.

 

[Lanefan]

Re 3+ year 4e campaigns:

3+? Dunno, but that's a little bit dirty pool considering the edition was only released 4 years ago.

Dirty pool? Hardly, if one compares apples to apples - how were campaigns in each of the other editions holding up 4 years into that edition's run?

I have a Dark Sun campaign that's been going strong for 2 years right now, and certainly has enough potential to go 2+ more.

Excellent! From what little I hear of Dark Sun I get the impression it might be well suited to longer campaigns due to its lower magic content.

Lan-"but now let's see if you can squeeze 10 years out of it"-efan

 

[Lanefan]

I'm not sure why you say that 4e moves away from open-ended campaigns. It has clear rules for PCs from 1 to 30. It has high level PCs which can be complex to build and play cold, but benefit from being developed and played organically over time. And it has numerous suggestions, in a range of sourcebooks , for possible campaign arcs drawing on the published material(DMG2, Underdark, Plane Above, Plane Below, plus I think others that I've forgotten).

You answered your own point in your second sentence - it goes from 1-30 and that's it. Which in and of itself would be fine provided the advancement through those 30 could be set to slow. Using published WotC adventures (which are a direct reflection of how the game is designed to be played), it can't; a single adventure often expects the whole party to be 2 or even 3 levels higher at the end than they were at the start and the challenges etc. are designed as such. 2-3 levels per adventure is gonna get you to 30 well within 3 years, unless your group doesn't meet often and-or the pace of play at the table is very slow.

OK, although I think that sort of campaign is probably an outlier. Lanefan achieves slow levelling by keeping the AD&D XP charts but dropping XP-for-treasure

Which is also exactly what 2e did. So, one could simply say I'm using 2e advancement in a 1e-like game.

and a similar decelleration (divide XP by half, or five, or ten) would be viable in 3E or 4e, I think.

I've seen it in 3e; the campaign lasted for 10 years (I stuck around for 6) and worked out mostly OK except the wealth-by-level guidelines went completely out the window. I suppose it could be done in 4e if one didn't use published adventures.

Plus Lanefan houserules for a long campaign. I assume most of the other really long games do too.

There's other ways to make 'em go long as well: multiple parties* within the same setting; allowing/encouraging players to cycle characters in and out (as a side effect these both further slow the overall level advancement), etc.

* - easily achieved in an existing party by splitting it somehow; one group goes off on adventure A then gets put on hold while the other group does adventure B, they then meet, rearrange themselves, and go off on adventures C and D, etc. It really helps if the players each have more than one character in the original party, however.

Lanefan