2E vs 3E: 8 Years Later. A new perspective?

[Spell]

i was going to make another post, but it seems that, once again, whenever one touches the holiness of 3e on these boards, and even hints at the fact that, for all the good things it accomplished (which i conceded, if you cared to read my earliest posts...), older editions of the game have their plus sides, too, a holy crusade starts against those foolish enough to raise a finger against the mighty god of any role playing games.

what can i say? happy flame war, if that's what you like doing.
bye bye.

ps: just a though: is 4e going to be inferior to 3e? i honestly hope so for you crusaders.

i wonder what would happen if you sort of liked it, but not really, and then 8 years from now found yourself on these very boards saying: "but i *personally* liked 3e better, despite all the good changes in 4e", and people would (not so subtely) treat you like you were the peasant just arrived at the court of Louis XIV.

 

[Psion]

i see what you mean, but do normal, "mundane", non adventuring people have access to the same modifiers? no.

Again, I return you to the question "what are you trying to accomplish?"

If you are trying to weaken them and make them mundane.

Or you could go the Iron Heroes route and try to keep the same power baseline (which is well above "common rabble").

In either case, pretending that in 2e you could simply strip away weapons and not have an effect on balance is illusory, because there was no such plainly published standard of balance. It's all on the GM feeling out what the right level of power is to face the PCs. Is a +1 sword too good for a 1st level character? Is it good enough for a 10th level?

In 3e, there is a standard. In this case, you would be willfully deciding to undershoot that standard, and the wise DM knows to compensate.

thieves skills weren't really part of non weapon proficiencies, though, were they? they were detailed in another part of the PHB, and they had different mechanics.

That's all quite peripheral to the real point I was getting at: the real reason that there would be a problem removing skills from the games is that it makes up a big portion of the capability of many of the classes, and has been since the thief came into being.

That being said, fundamental baseline consistency has always been a boon in my book, and disparate systems to do essentially the same thing a scourge, inviting inconsistency and confusion. (If I had a nickel for every time one of my 2e players said "do I roll high or low for this?", I've have a few free meals at least.) If you choosing C&C or the like over 3e is the cost of having such consistency, so be it. I feel 3e is a much better game for it.

not really. i don't have an unlimited amount of time, and when i wanted to start DMing 3e, i couldn't run through the books multiple times to see what feat might have been affected if i decided to change this combat rule, or what wuld have happened to that class had i decided to drop the feats and substitute them with feat trees.

I don't have an unlimited amount of time, either. What works for me is:
1) Don't throw the doors wide open. Only as a default allow books which contribute to the game experience I want, and only allow additions beyond that on a case-by-case basis.
2) Take charge of my game. Let players know up front that unforseen imbalances will be smacked down. 3e is in NO way unique here; I've been doing this since 1e.

really? how comes i can do that in C&C? or GURPS? or OD&D? is that silly? if so, bring the silliness on for me!

Are you honestly suggesting to me that if you take armor out of C&C or OD&D, the fighter/fighting man isn't devalued as a class?

You have to do balancing work there, too.

the early articles of dragon, though, can hardly be considered the height of game design philosophy, can they?

I don't remember suggesting that they did.

What I am suggesting is that tweaking a game often didn't go so well even in the good old days, and even back then, the designers knew it full well.

yes, because adding 1, 10, or 100 feats does not change the system of feat distribution, or the fact that feats are in the game. insted of having, say, 50 options of what you're going to choose, you have 51, 60 or 150. same story, though.

I get now after having read your response to jdrakeh that by "touching", you mean "remove entirely". Which I would agree would be a more significant undertaking, but I don't consider it an indictment to a game that choosing to remove a major consistent underpinning of a game requires some work.

 

[Psion]

wait a second, don't put words in my mouth. where did i bashed 3e or 3e lovers?

I was referring to the argument that I thought you were invoking. I guess Voadam got what you were saying and I didn't on that score.

THAT SAID, I somewhat prefer the 3.0 way of doing things with respect to staged "+" modifiers; the 3.5 version makes magic DR too trivial after low levels, and I find DR an useful balancing factor for fighter types.

THAT being said, as I recall 1e had staged modifiers for weapon immunity as well; I thought 2e had the same thing. I seem to remember a chart listing modifiers up to +4, and what HD overcomes that level of weapon immunity.

 

[Greg K]

I miss
1) The Settings
2) PO: Combat and Tactics critical hits
3) Specialty Priests: domains and PrCs are not enough distinction
4) The various Specialist Wizards. I would have loved to have seen the alchemist, artificer, geomancer, elementalist, force mage, song mage and shadow mage done as 3.5 class variants with variant class abilities per the Unearthed Arcana Specialist Wizard variant abilities.
5) The class splat books. Despite the power creep in later kits, a few stupid kits (Greenwood (?) Ranger), and some lame mechanics (e.g., the Savage's use of alarm spell to represent light sleeping, I still prefer the format and information in the 2e Complete Books to WOTCs 3.x class books and PHB2. I suppose that, if WOTC had included class variants (per the phb Thug and UA) for many of the 2e kits, I would have received more enjoyment and usefulness out of the 3.x splats.

 

[jdrakeh]

I was referring to the argument that I thought you were invoking.

Ditto. I guess all of that hyperbole got in the way Removing feats and skills wholesale will take a lot of work, as will removing magic items (removing AoOs and tactical combat, on the other hand, is simply a matter of ignoring references to AoOs and squares, respectively).

That said, the removal of feats and skills from D&D 3x is comparable to removing THAC0 from AD&D in that they are both integral parts of the system. If somebody is mad because a system won't function when they tear out integral parts, it's not really a fault of the system.

It's like complaining that your car won't start if you take out the spark plugs and then blaming it on the manufacturer.

 

[Reynard]

On that, I entirely disagree. 3E quantified what was always implicit in 1e and 2e. PCs were expected to have a certain amount of magical mojo, signified mainly by weapons of increasing plus, to combat a lot of higher-end monsters.
3E's quantification of it is more of a lifting of the veil than anything else.

I would argue that the truth is somehwere between the extremes (as it is in most things). Yes, D&D characters of every edition got magical gear as treasure, and as the characters gained levels and defeated more powerful enemies, that gear tended to be more powerful. Hiowever, that was only an average over a pretty wide swath. Any given hoard could possess wildly varying amounts and degrees of treasure and there was no assumed "level appropriate" value. The DM was expected to adjudicate treasure -- either at the time it was placed or by dealing with it later if there was too much or too little. 3E, although maintaining some lip service to the idea of random treasure, codified it in such a way as to make it standardized, which led, inevitably, to the abomination that is "assumed character wealth in magic items by character level".

 

[Thurbane]

Because it was a very complicated way of deciding something that is generally pretty obvious?

I kinda like morale, but it seems to me that it's much easier to ask what the monster would do. If a kobold's buddies are all dead and he's the only one left, he's going to run away. If the opponent is a dragon, he's not going anywhere. Just use your best judgment and you're fine.

I understand it was to allow the DM to decide whether or not the monsers stick around rather than basing it merely on a die roll.

The problem I have here is that, even as a DM, I have no idea how a nonhuman mind works.

While it is generally accepted that creatures like kobolds and goblins are quite cowardly, and that creatures like zombies and golems are totally fearless, what about the myriad of other nonhuman beings?

Are elves braver than grell? Are gray renders known for their bravery? How about beholders, mindflayers and medusas?

...this is what I liked about the morale system. It gave me a baseline for how brave or cowardly a particular race was prone to be. I never used it slavishly - we always excercised some common sense. But I still think it works better than what I see in many 3E modules: "When monster X gets below Y hit points, it will flee".

 

[Reynard]

Another thing I miss: monster frequency.

 

[Greg K]

ps: just a though: is 4e going to be inferior to 3e? i honestly hope so for you crusaders.

First, I don't think 3e is perfect as written. I use several UA and third party supplements. However, based on what we know right now, I would say yes for my gaming tastes is looking to be inferior to 3e. Actually, other than 4e keeping the unified core mechanic, unified abilitiy scores (if this remains the same) and three saving throws inherited from 3.0 and the introduction of talent trees, I think I would much rather play 2e using the PO:Combat & Tactics critical hits and PO: Spells and Magic Spell Points rather than play 4e- and I have no interest in ever playing 2e (or 1e) again.

 

[Greg K]

Another thing I miss: monster frequency.

How did I forget monster frequency? Now, I have to go back and edit my post!