Legends & Lore: What Worked, What Didn't

[Majoru Oakheart]

I guess our tastes are just different, which is completely fine. By the end of the 90s we had already house-ruled AD&D so much that it was another game altogether. And yet we were getting tired of all the inconsistent and disparate mechanics (percentile rolls for system shock and thief skills, d10 initiative, XP tables, etc.). 3E felt like a breeze of fresh air to us, and it took a year or two to discover its flaws. However, I still vastly prefer 3.0 over AD&D any day.

See, that's the thing, I don't think our tastes are completely different. When 3.0 came out, I embraced it like crazy. I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Feats and multiclassing let you create precisely the character you wanted to create. There were more options as a fighter than simply "I attack" every round. It felt like "grown up" D&D. And I kept that feeling for a LONG time. I think if I didn't play as much as I did, I might still feel that way.

The problem is, I don't play D&D casually. I play D&D a LOT. I volunteered for WOTC as a campaign admin in Living Greyhawk. I ran a Living Greyhawk game's day every Saturday then I ran Living Greyhawk adventures a couple of times a week in addition to having a home game once a week. I also traveled a couple of times a year to go to conventions just to get more play experiences in as well as running a couple of our own.

As time went on and the characters in my home game passed about level 10 and so did our main characters in Living Greyhawk, each game I ran became harder and harder to DM. I actually sat down and realized our sessions were not about the plot or the adventures anymore. None of my friends even cared if they played the next part of an adventure series because they didn't care whatsoever about the plot or story of the game. Our in-between game chat was almost always centered on game mechanics and how to abuse them. Our IN GAME chat was centered on game mechanics. Discussions about "What feat should I take next level?" and "What do you think of this build for my next character?" were way more common than any discussion about what was actually happening in the game. Each round was filled with talk like the one I posted earlier in the thread, constantly going through checklists in our mind and out loud to make sure people followed the rules precisely and didn't forget anything. Constantly trying to outsmart the other players and the DM and prove we knew the rules better than everyone else....and trying to prove that our particular character build was better than everyone else's. Lots of "Look at this, because I have feat X, I knock the enemy prone. But because I have feat Y they can't get up without making a Balance check when within 10 feet of me. The Balance check DC is based on my Strength and my character has a 32 Strength because I put all my points into it and I have +2 for my race and then I got a +6 stat enhancer. So most enemies have to make a natural 20 to stand up. Then I have a class feature that says enemies take my strength mod in damage when they start their turns prone within 10 feet of me. Isn't that awesome?!?!"

The longer it went on, the more of a chore it became running D&D games. It's likely the enemies wouldn't do anything at all because the PC's Uber-Combos of rules bending were built in such a way that non-custom monsters designed to defeat their tactics would simply lose. So, I was running through the motions of running combats that were impossible for the PCs to lose to while they spent all their time talking about how great their combos were and about whether their next great idea would work "technically" according to the rules.

I remembered back to my first game of D&D in 2e and about how interested I was in playing a game where it felt like I was really IN the fantasy world. Where I got to experience a world of dungeons and dragons from the point of view of my own character. I remember the wonder associated with it. We had no immersion in 3.5e at all. The focus of the game was entirely on game mechanics.

That wasn't the case when we played 2e. There weren't enough rules for people to constantly discuss. There were a lot of rules issues, don't get me wrong and 3e/3.5e/4e did a lot of work finding a proper balance for the game and came up with a lot of good ideas if applied back to 2e to fix all of its rules issues would make a great game again. That's the feeling I've been getting since I started running and playing D&D Next. There's virtually no game mechanic talk at the table anymore. We discuss the plot and what our characters think instead of what would be tactically optimal according to the rules(although we do have one player who complains relentlessly because that was the part of the game he enjoyed the most and his attempts to do so in D&D Next have been met with failure).

 

[Argyle King]

Of course they do...but that doesn't mean they don't get hit, sometimes really hard. Sleep generally impacts a couple of creatures, who can each be woken with an action from an ally. Web similarly can be escaped with essentially an action.

If mage's could just waive their hand every challenge and end the challenge that way, it wouldn't be much of a game. Your AC and hit points WILL come up in this game, if you have an even moderately combat-intensive game.

I very much agree with the part I bolded. However, previous editions seemed to feel that was part of what playing D&D meant. I've also had people on this very forum tell me I was wrong for not wanting D&D to be that way.

As for whether 5th will be better in that regard, I'm not yet convinced. I do see that some melee classes seem to be very good at levels 1-4 (the levels I've played most during Encounters,) and some are arguably too good right now. However, I specifically mentioned web because I myself used it in a session to essentially shut down an entire encounter. However, that happened during an older packet, so I am not sure what things look like for mages now. I plan to find out during the upcoming season though; I've decided to play a mage specifically so I can see how I feel the game handles magic.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

<snip>

This. This is what I've always referred to as system mastery. I hated it. To compound things for my group, only half of the group enjoyed doing this. So on top of the the whacked out combos I had players who made suboptimal choices based on roleplaying reasons. The gap between the two types of PCs grew so wide that nothing seemed capable of fixing it. The end-run of 3.x was the first time since I started playing D&D that I actually thought about quitting gaming, not just D&D, for good. That's how much I hated the sub-game of character optimization.

 

[Mistwell]

I very much agree with the part I bolded. However, previous editions seemed to feel that was part of what playing D&D meant. I've also had people on this very forum tell me I was wrong for not wanting D&D to be that way.

I can see that issue coming up in 3rd edition. Particularly in 3.0e, where you could scry a location, teleport in, and drop a nuke. Same with the flying, improved invisibility fire-balling helicopter of doom. We had a wizard take out an entire pirate ship using that later method, on her own, without risk of injury (the pirates had nothing that could reach her, and couldn't identify her location precisely even if they could).

I never found that to be an issue in B/X, or 1e, or 4e. And it wasn't an issue in 3.5e through the early levels.

As for whether 5th will be better in that regard, I'm not yet convinced. I do see that some melee classes seem to be very good at levels 1-4 (the levels I've played most during Encounters,) and some are arguably too good right now. However, I specifically mentioned web because I myself used it in a session to essentially shut down an entire encounter. However, that happened during an older packet, so I am not sure what things look like for mages now. I plan to find out during the upcoming season though; I've decided to play a mage specifically so I can see how I feel the game handles magic.

Our mage has web, and has used it to good effect. But mostly, it was to buy the party time to flee without being overrun. The foes had access to torches, so it only took them a round to burn the web away and get out, without a strength check. Others have broken through with a strength check, or made their initial save. It's a good spell, but pretty much what I'd think of for a low level wizard from 1e or 2e - it's only going to stop the show if the foes are really weak.

 

[billd91]

I remembered back to my first game of D&D in 2e and about how interested I was in playing a game where it felt like I was really IN the fantasy world. Where I got to experience a world of dungeons and dragons from the point of view of my own character. I remember the wonder associated with it. We had no immersion in 3.5e at all. The focus of the game was entirely on game mechanics.

That wasn't the case when we played 2e. There weren't enough rules for people to constantly discuss. There were a lot of rules issues, don't get me wrong and 3e/3.5e/4e did a lot of work finding a proper balance for the game and came up with a lot of good ideas if applied back to 2e to fix all of its rules issues would make a great game again. That's the feeling I've been getting since I started running and playing D&D Next. There's virtually no game mechanic talk at the table anymore. We discuss the plot and what our characters think instead of what would be tactically optimal according to the rules(although we do have one player who complains relentlessly because that was the part of the game he enjoyed the most and his attempts to do so in D&D Next have been met with failure).

I guess the questions come up for me: Things clearly changed but why did they change? Was it simply because 3e had so many additional substantial customization options? And have you played other games with lots of customization options and compared the experience?

I have to say that having played a lot of 2e and 3e (and now PF), my experiences have not been like this at all. Sure, we discuss some build options and talk about what feat to take next, and yes, it is often about combat effectiveness in some way shape or form. But we never really lose sight of the story, in fact, once we get to a certain level of effectiveness, we're looking for more interesting stories than just doing some dungeon crawling. That doesn't seem to have changed from 1e through PF. It's like the game has changed, but we fundamentally haven't in how we play other than to pick up new techniques in using the new rules. By comparison, your group sounds more like you changed with the game - and that's why I asked the question about other highly customizable games. Would they behave the same way with GURPS, Hero, or Mutants and Masterminds? Do they get distracted by all of the trees (customizable options) that they lose track of the forest (the game's story) and really need to clear a lot of the trees to appreciate the forest again?

 

[Cybit]

I think because people spent a lot of time making those choices, and because there were so many to make, it became the focus of the game. In any game you play, the thing that is the most time consuming often receives the majority of attention & brainpower, methinks.

 

[Thyrwyn]

...snip...

This matches my experience as well. As I primarily DM, my problem was magnified by the fact that only a minority of the party enjoyed the optimization/system-mastery aspect of the game - the rest of us were there to enjoy the plot and move the story along. But as they rose in level, the math made it harder and harder for me to challenge the optimizers in combat without wiping out the rest of the party. I don't DM because I enjoy the math (which I do), but because I enjoy the world-building and the story creation that emerges from the playing of the game. That is what is so appealing about Next - bounded accuracy alone means that system mastery should have less of an impact on those players who don't want to pursue it, while still rewarding those who do.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I guess the questions come up for me: Things clearly changed but why did they change? Was it simply because 3e had so many additional substantial customization options? And have you played other games with lots of customization options and compared the experience?

My guess is that in core 2e there was very little actual game to play. I mean "I'm a fighter, I have a longsword that does 1d8 damage" was an adequate way to summarize a 1st level human fighter. Every other fighter has pretty much the same options, which is to say very few. There were very few ways to optimize your characters so there was no need to concentrate on that. Why worry about options you don't actually have? Instead concentrate on the things you can actually control like whether or not your character would run into that burning building to save the children or not.

But in 3e and later there became 2 games being played at once: There was the optimization game where you tried to find the most effective way to defeat enemies, tried to make your character the best at what you wanted him/her to do mechanically. Then there was the actual game of D&D where you decided what your character would do during the game. Most of my friends like the optimization game more than the actual game. I had one friend who would show up with a new character nearly every session because he loved optimization so much that he wanted to do the entire process again every week. The actual game session was just a chance to prove how well his optimization worked.

I think in addition to the options being available it was also a matter of how much time was spent in the game where the options were useful. Our battles were taking about an hour a piece in 3e as opposed to the 15-20 minutes they were taking in 2e. There was a lot more time to concentrate on the effect your optimization was providing you. You could sit there for an hour thinking in the back of your head "We're winning because of the AWESOME character I made. Look how much damage he does in comparison to everyone else!" when battles only took 15 minutes and weren't made out to be such a big deal, it didn't matter if you did 30 damage instead of 10 damage. The monster only had 10 hitpoints and your overkill was kind of useless. In 3e, monsters had 100 hitpoints so the person who did 30 damage in a round vs 10 was killing the monster 3 times faster.

As for other systems, yes we've played a couple. My group was just as bad when we played Champions. They attempted to power game and there was a lot of game mechanics talk. However, it didn't get too bad since that system was so complicated that none of them understood it well enough to power game effectively. We decided to switch away from it after people got bored at how long battles took, but I can imagine after a while everyone learning the system well enough to turn into the same thing.

There was almost no mechanics talk at all when we played Numenera since the system is so light. However, I think we all decided after a short while that it was a little too light for our taste, we like mechanics and options but there just can't be too many. D&D Next hits about the sweet zone for me. Though, as I mentioned in the previous post, one of my players would really prefer we go back to 4e where he could power game way more.

But we never really lose sight of the story, in fact, once we get to a certain level of effectiveness, we're looking for more interesting stories than just doing some dungeon crawling.

I don't think my players have ever been REALLY interested in stories. Though the composition of my group has changed quite a bit and each player is different. However, the group that was playing my 17th level 3.5e game was perfectly happy having interesting things to fight. The setting and reason they were killing them didn't matter much. It was just an excuse to test their cool builds.

About the time that one of my players was playing a Half-Shadow(or whatever the template is called) Rogue/Warlock/Arcane Trickster build who had permanent Fire Whip spells cast on both hands so he could materialize 2 4d6 fire damage reach weapons that only had to hit touch AC to hit while having the entire Two-Weapon Fighting tree and could make 6 attacks with sneak attack each round while adding his Warlock Eldrich Blast on all his attacks nearly guaranteeing somewhere around 50d6 points of damage per round to any enemy and could teleport from shadow to shadow at will while hiding in plain sight I wanted to shoot myself.

But they were perfectly happy fighting monster after monster and totally annihilating them over and over again. That's really what they wanted to do.

That doesn't seem to have changed from 1e through PF. It's like the game has changed, but we fundamentally haven't in how we play other than to pick up new techniques in using the new rules. By comparison, your group sounds more like you changed with the game - and that's why I asked the question about other highly customizable games. Would they behave the same way with GURPS, Hero, or Mutants and Masterminds? Do they get distracted by all of the trees (customizable options) that they lose track of the forest (the game's story) and really need to clear a lot of the trees to appreciate the forest again?

I think the thing is that we're hardcore gamers. We play board games and video games pretty much constantly. To us, D&D is simply another game we play...though the only game we play consistently. Like any other game we play, you examine the rules and you play the way the game wants you to play.

My one powergamer friend who is in my group, for instance, played Skyrim and get super annoyed at how easy the game was because he had found a "bug" in the game where it was really cheap to increase your blacksmithing skill to max by making daggers continuously. The game doesn't stop you from doing that and you can make one of the best weapons in the game at close to first level. Enchanting is likewise super easy if you know the right tricks allowing you to enchant that weapon you made with enchantments that require skill above 100(the maximum) by first enchanting items to give you bonuses to enchanting skill.

So he was wondering around the game at level 3 or something with a weapon about twice as powerful as the most powerful item that occurs in the game without crafting. He killed everything in one hit. However, he blamed the game for allowing him to do that in the first place.

I asked why he just didn't play the game without training blacksmithing to see if it was more fun and he looked at me incredulously as if the idea that you would purposefully NOT take your absolute best option was unthinkably stupid.

 

[billd91]

I think the thing is that we're hardcore gamers. We play board games and video games pretty much constantly. To us, D&D is simply another game we play...though the only game we play consistently. Like any other game we play, you examine the rules and you play the way the game wants you to play.

We've got some pretty hardcore gamers too (board games, war games, LARPs, CCGs, console games). But I think with just a different focus. My friends will play games like Mass Effect multiple times just to explore the story changes different choices lead to, not so much to find ways to crush the enemy with more power.

I asked why he just didn't play the game without training blacksmithing to see if it was more fun and he looked at me incredulously as if the idea that you would purposefully NOT take your absolute best option was unthinkably stupid.

Sounds like a gamer-variety of OCD.

 

[Argyle King]

I can see that issue coming up in 3rd edition. Particularly in 3.0e, where you could scry a location, teleport in, and drop a nuke. Same with the flying, improved invisibility fire-balling helicopter of doom. We had a wizard take out an entire pirate ship using that later method, on her own, without risk of injury (the pirates had nothing that could reach her, and couldn't identify her location precisely even if they could).

I never found that to be an issue in B/X, or 1e, or 4e. And it wasn't an issue in 3.5e through the early levels.

I want to say I didn't have the problem in 4th, but I did; on some occasions far worse than it was in 3.5. I've been a player in 4E games where the DM literally just ended the campaign because the PC group was so out of control with what they could do.

I remember the first campaign to 30 ending with one of the PCs essentially solo-ing Orcus. The other members of the party didn't contribute because we really didn't need to, and the encounter was over so quickly that there wasn't much for us to do. Part of that was due to the early 4E monster math not really working, and also due to some of the PC options which allowed that being pretty obviously broken (and later changed in official updates to the game.)

Unfortunately, things did not change after the updates to the game. The second campaign to 30 ended with the group so thoroughly crushing the first part of the campaign's end battle that the DM didn't see the point in playing out the second part, and thus simply declared we had won because he didn't feel like running the game anymore at that point. Part of the problem with why he was so burned out here is because the PCs completely destroying everything in their way had been pretty status quo from about level 12 in the game. I hate to brag, but the best way that I can convey just how thoroughly the collective player group (and their respective characters) dominated things during that campaign is to say that we took time to make a coat of arms for the character group involved in that game. To this day, mention of "The Stormbringers" is a sore spot for the guy who DMed that game.

The most recent game ended before paragon because things were already starting to get a little out of control at level 8. I'll admit to being part of the problem in this game, but it was completely on accident that I broke that game. Since I hadn't really messed with hybrid characters before, I wanted to try one. I also had a concept for a character which seemed (to me) to be pretty cool. Thus, Mer Tzu, the warlord/wizard was born. It frustrated the DM that I (as well as a few other members of the party) had such a high AC which I could boost even further by using the utility power shield in the event that someone did actually miraculously manage to hit me. I had honestly zero intent of playing a broken character and just put together what seemed cool to me. I realized that using hybrids in this discussion isn't helpful because they are a known problem, but the reason I made that character was because my previous character was putting out amounts of damage which bothered the DM. He never said anything about it, but I could tell it was an issue. What really pushed things over the edge was that other characters in the same game were just as bad. The problem with these 4E games was a little different than 3rd; it wasn't that the characters weren't balanced against each other; the issue was that the characters were so far beyond the expectations of the world they existed in that it was disruptive to the game.


None of the above defends 3rd though. I have not at all exaggerated in other threads when I've said that the group used to have to ask the guy who normally played a wizard to not doing anything for a few rounds so that the rest of us would actually get to play. It was already bad enough to have one class which was quite clearly better than the others; putting that class in the hands of a player who was also quite clearly more skilled than some of the other players just made things even worse. In a recent attempt by the group to play Pathfinder, the same player was using a Summoner, and it essentially ruined the group's ability to enjoy Pathfinder.

I can't speak on behalf of 1st. I do own some of the reprints, but have only just barely dabbled in trying to use them. Though, if this makes any sense, I will say that I can look at 1e adventures and pick up what appears to be a different mentality behind the design of the game. While I've had barely any experience playing 1e, I have played some of the adventures using different rules systems. Maybe it's crazy to try to extrapolate what the game is like via an adventure played using a completely different rules system, but I feel as though (in spite of using the material with different rules,) I have some sense of what the game is like. I am inclined to agree with your statement that things are different in 1e, but I cannot honestly say that's how I feel without more hands on experience with it.

Our mage has web, and has used it to good effect. But mostly, it was to buy the party time to flee without being overrun. The foes had access to torches, so it only took them a round to burn the web away and get out, without a strength check. Others have broken through with a strength check, or made their initial save. It's a good spell, but pretty much what I'd think of for a low level wizard from 1e or 2e - it's only going to stop the show if the foes are really weak.

The short version of how the encounter went was like this...

me: I cast web.
dm: (after rolling) the enemy is stuck
other player: I shoot them with my bow
me: I use magic missile
dm: they're still stuck
other player: I shoot them with my bow
me: I use magic missile
dm: they're still stuck
other player: I shoot them with my bow
me: I use magic missile
dm: they're dead

That was from an old packet though. I have no idea how web may have changed from then to now. I plan to find out during the next season. For next season, I plan to either play a wizard or a druid. I've even considered wizard/druid just out of curiosity to see how the 3E character I am currently playing (multiclass wizard/druid) would translate into 5th Edition.