Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?

[diaglo]

i've noticed it since the introduction of Supplement I Greyhawk (1975)

bonus above +1 and other things added. the introduction of the power gaming creep.

i still blame Gary for letting his scions unleash it.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Follow up question. A lot of you have said you immediately noticed 3.x problems or pathfinder problems. Why do you think those problems exist if they are so blatant? Why would the devs stick with them if it was just so completely obvious? What was going through their heads?

When we designed 3rd Edition D&D, people around Wizards of the Coast joked about the "lessons" we could learn from Magic: The Gathering, like making the rulebooks -- or the rules themselves -- collectible. ("Darn, I got another Cleave, I'm still looking for the ultra-rare Great Cleave.")

But, in fact, we did take some cues from Magic. For example, Magic uses templating to great effect, and now D&D does too. (To be clear, in this instance, I don't mean templates like "half-dragon," so much as I mean the templating categories such as "fire spells" and "cold-using creatures," then setting up rules for how they interact, so that ever contradictory rules for those things don't arise again, as they did in previous editions.)

Magic also has a concept of "Timmy cards." These are cards that look cool, but aren't actually that great in the game. The purpose of such cards is to reward people for really mastering the game, and making players feel smart when they've figured out that one card is better than the other. While D&D doesn't exactly do that, it is true that certain game choices are deliberately better than others.

Toughness, for example, has its uses, but in most cases it's not the best choice of feat. If you can use martial weapons, a longsword is better than many other one-handed weapons. And so on -- there are many other, far more intricate examples. (Arguably, this kind of thing has always existed in D&D. Mostly, we just made sure that we didn't design it away -- we wanted to reward mastery of the game.)

There's a third concept that we took from Magic-style rules design, though. Only with six years of hindsight do I call the concept "Ivory Tower Game Design." (Perhaps a bit of misnomer, but it's got a ring to it.) This is the approach we took in 3rd Edition: basically just laying out the rules without a lot of advice or help. This strategy relates tangentially to the second point above. The idea here is that the game just gives the rules, and players figure out the ins and outs for themselves -- players are rewarded for achieving mastery of the rules and making good choices rather than poor ones.

Perhaps as is obvious from the name I've coined for this rules writing style, I no longer think this is entirely a good idea. I was just reading a passage from a recent book, and I found it rather obtuse. But it wasn't the writer's fault. He was just following the lead the core books offered him. Nevertheless, the whole thing would have been much better if the writer had just broken through the barrier this kind of design sets up between designer and player and just told the reader what the heck he was talking about.

To continue to use the simplistic example above, the Toughness feat could have been written to make it clear that it was for 1st-level elf wizards (where it is likely to give them a 100 percent increase in hit points). It's also handy when you know you're playing a one-shot session with 1st-level characters, like at a convention (you sure don't want to take item creation feats in such an instance, for example).
Ivory Tower Game Design requires a two-step process on the part of the reader. You read the rule, and then you think about how it fits in with the rest of the game. There's a moment of understanding, and then a moment of comprehension. That's not a terrible thing, but neither is just providing the reader with both steps, at least some of the time.

While there's something to be said for just giving gamers the rules to do with as they please, there's just as much to be said for simply giving it to the reader straight in a more honest, conversational approach. Perhaps that's what the upcoming D&D for Dummies book will be. I hope so.

.........................................................

 

[diaglo]

i took the D&D course with James Wyatt and i bought a copy of D&D for Dummies for every member of my gaming group.

they didn't help.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

When 4E was released I was still happily running a 3.5E game, so did not change editions. By the end of last year, having run 3 campaigns from 1st level to mid-teens (and 1 campaign to 19th-20th level) I had well and truly started to notice all the broken bits in the 3.5E ruleset.

For me, high level play simply was not fun to run, and by the 3rd campaign, I started to find it not fun to run once the players were above around 10th level.

So for me, it was probably 5+ years of fortnightly play with the ruleset. Some of the broken-ness was due to having additional splatbooks, but some of the broken bits would have been an issue if we were just playing with the core 3 rulebooks.

 

[Wolfskin]

How much do you really scrutinize all these +1's and bonuses and this statistical makeup? Personally me? I STILL don't notice the 3.x brokenness, and probably wouldn't know about any of that if I didn't go on message boards. What about you? Not saying things are balanced or not, I'm just saying it escapes me or maybe our group doesn't really care about that stuff and it's usually completely unnoticeable. I'm sure its a big problem with some people though, just curious.

I didn't notice most of 3.X brokenness either, but then again I never ran a high level campaign from 3E to this day.

I did notice 3.X amply rewarded system mastery because I had a specific player who was always figuring out how to play the system to get the most out of it, and he did play a couple of mid-level optimized builds, though nothing game breaking (I didn't ascribe this exclusively to 3.X, though, as the guy did this for every single game he played, DnD or not)

 

[Ahnehnois]

I didn't notice most of 3.X brokenness either, but then again I never ran a high level campaign from 3E to this day.

I've run several, including well into epic. What happens is not really all that different from what happened in 2e; magic becomes awe-inspiring and useless at the same time. All the powerful spells are there to be had, but there are so many reasons why they don't work that it ends up being not so great.

What sets 3e apart is the utilitarian role of magic items (and, to a lesser extent, mercenary spellcasting). Given large enough wealth, almost all character abilities become irrelevant. What emerges is that any notion of balance is very labile, depending not only on character level and on ability scores, but on money and related practical constraints.

The default conditions in the books (standard array and the wealth charts) are pretty favorable to spellcasters. But most people don't play anywhere near that territory. The lower you go on those parameters, the better spells look. The higher you go, the worse they look.

 

[Hussar]

Why do you say that Ahn? What evidence do you have that "most people don't play anywhere near that territory"?

Why the insistence on trying to project your experience onto a larger group of people?

 

[Savage Wombat]

OK, everybody, we're going to need affidavits now from all your gaming friends and community members so we know exactly what percentage of gamers we're dealing with.

 

[Hussar]

OK, everybody, we're going to need affidavits now from all your gaming friends and community members so we know exactly what percentage of gamers we're dealing with.

Heh. Ok, fair enough. But, when people start claiming that "most gamers" play this way or that, I'm not really sure how useful that is. I mean, Ahn here is claiming that most people ignored the wealth by level guidelines. I'm kinda wondering where that comes from though. Because if it's true, then one of the fundamental baselines for 3e was ignored by most groups, meaning that 3e is not based on what is actually being played at given tables.

I really don't think that's true. But, to be fair, I have no evidence either way. So, I don't think I'm being unfair by asking how Ahn arrives at the conclusion that most groups ignored WBL. Some? Oh sure. No problems there. That's a pretty fair statement to make. But most? That's going to need a little more evidence.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Why do you say that Ahn? What evidence do you have that "most people don't play anywhere near that territory"?

Have you ever read any of the dozens (and probably hundreds) of polls and threads here on topics here about what type of ability score generation or treasure allocation people are using? No? Anything in poll form usually bell curves around something above the "default". Read them and get back to me.

The way this plays out in in-game terms is very important. A character with the standard array is not a "hero" in the sense of being the protagonist of your favorite fantasy novel; that's why it's called "standard". The game, not surprisingly, does not play that way at that power level. That means anyone who wants to do plots of large-scale consequence in their world, or have characters that are on the level of mythic heroes needs to adjust things way upward. And most people indeed figured that out.

All of which has implications as far as relative usefulness of different character types.

Because if it's true, then one of the fundamental baselines for 3e was ignored by most groups, meaning that 3e is not based on what is actually being played at given tables.

All of the fundamental baselines of 3e were almost certainly ignored by more groups than not. To suggest the contrary would be to impose of a group of millions of people of diverse experiences around the world a ludicrous standard of homogeneity. Are you suggesting that people out there are essentially playing exactly by the book, rules and guidelines, and not meaningfully deviating from any of it?

We discuss the published game here because it's a common frame of reference, but no one completely adheres to it (and even the original 3.0 core books presented all manner of paradigm-changing variants). And, I think it's fair to assume that by the time D&D had gotten into WotC's hands, people understood that. They understood that the OGL legitimized the widespread homebrewing community. They understood that variants needed to be built into the game. And the baseline was wrote not as an expectation to adhere to, but as an example to start from.

Feel free to start a thread asking how many people ever ran four-character groups at the same level with standard array or 4d6 ability scores and wealth matching the WBL tables through challenges with an EL appropriate to their level. And no houserules, variants, third party material, etc. etc.