D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

Do not cite the Deep Magic to me. I was there when it was written.

Oh, this line is going to be used against my player's elven Artificer know-it-all. :devilish:
He's going to love it.
 

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As I recall, the Gnome was removed because it's niche was questionable. What is a Gnome? They are short and live underground, but are not Dwarves or Halflings. They are an innately magical race with ties to nature, but are not Elves. Pushing them back to a later book allowed them to create new lore for the race (tying them to the Feywild) so they had a more distinct identity. YMMV if they succeeded.
Gnome was removed because no one played them. They were the least played 3e PHB race. Same for druid in class. Only power gamers dealt with druids Nonesense. SAME in 5e.

So 4e put all the nature and primal stuff in the 2nd PHB.
 

Everyone: A bunch of red text just landed in this thread.

Your collective behavior towards each other hasn't been great. You have, collectively, been warned.

So look at your replies and ask yourself if you want to become an example of what happens to users who cannot bother to be kind
.
 


On Thac0: something about the way my brain works constantly trips me up with descending AC. The PHB didn't do a very good job of teaching me it, and even now that I've learned the trick (subtract to-hit roll from Thac0 to get target AC) it still feels counter-intuitive.

And it's not just me. Some time ago, the idea of running a 2e game came up, since I have a friend who waxes nostalgic for it, and is always going on about how superior it was to modern D&D.

But the other players we roped into it were very confused about the rather arbitrary decisions made with the rules set, and the whole AC system felt strange to them.

Like how a +1 armor lowers your AC, but 17 Dexterity has a -3 defensive adjustment. "Why," one player asked, "aren't these things more consistent? Why do some rules elements expressed as positive integers and others negative?".

Like a +1 sword made sense, even though it effectively lowers your Thac0, it's easy to grasp that it's doing that by adding to your attack roll. But then one guy had a Swashbuckler and he was really hung up on the fact that his Dexterity adjustment was a negative integer and his Kit gave him a +2 to AC at the same time. "This doesn't make any sense!", was the gist of what he was saying.

And I think this is really the point to drive home, I think. If everything worked in the same direction, it wouldn't matter if we used ascending or descending AC. Have low rolls be good on the d20* and have all modifiers subtract- just as easy as it is today.

But rolling high to arrive at a low number seems like this needless step, as does having both positive and negative "bonuses". Now I get, to a lot of gamers who played earlier forms of D&D, this makes perfect sense to them, because they're used to it, but from an outside perspective, it just adds to the arcane, sometimes byzantine nature of AD&D's rules.

*And when we got to NWP's where low rolls are good and high rolls are bad, I watched a player throw a d20 off the table in disgust, lol, as it rolled low when he needed it to roll high and vice versa.

I know that someone is going to instantly take umbrage with my entire post and repeat to me the whole "Thac0 is easy/it's just math/neither me or anyone I ever played D&D with ever had these issues" conga line- it's great that you think this way and it works for you.

But there are people who it doesn't work for. Plus, I mean, has anyone heard a new player complain about ascending AC being hard to grok?**

**(sighs, knowing someone will likely immediately post "yes").
 

One theme I keep seeing:
-New players with a background in computer games have wild unrealistic gamiest and strategist expectations.
-New players with a background in novels, movies, and tv shows have wild unrealistic Narrativist expectations .
Frankly both incorrect viewpoints of tabletop RPGs are a pain, but they as new players can’t know better.
 


One theme I keep seeing:
-New players with a background in computer games have wild unrealistic gamiest and strategist expectations.
-New players with a background in novels, movies, and tv shows have wild unrealistic Narrativist expectations .
Frankly both incorrect viewpoints of tabletop RPGs are a pain, but they as new players can’t know better.
I kinda feel that there is a rather small window of acceptable play that people allow new players to have. For example, smart play is encouraged, but optimization is frowned upon. Tooning (having a character with no background or personality, often billed as a joke) is bad, but so is having a character with a long backstory are viewed as entitled. You should care about your character and not make stupid decisions (IE charge the dragon) but you shouldn't be upset when your character dies. Considering how much of that flies in the face of how most people are exposed to fantasy gaming, I can see where the problem lies.
 

I was reading Usenet boards when alt.tsr.dnd was active. I read Dragon magazine letter sections though the 90s. I've been active on Enworld since 2003 and was lurking since Eric Noah was running a spoiler page. I have lurked on Dragonsfoot, was a member of my local college gaming society and spent an untold amount of my youth in game stores. Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Micah. I was there when it was written.
Nice bone fides. You might be right about popular opinion, I don't really care. I will say, however, that disagreement on this point is perfectly valid, and I won't just roll over because you can cite examples of agreement with your opinion.
 

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