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

[Spell]

You have now. Well, electronically, anyway.

hello!

Example is have the game set in a human-dominated society where non-humans are distrusted, or shunned, or even stoned or worse, by the locals in every town they ever visit....

ideally, this should be done in ravenloft, but then it was never really implemented that much in the published adventures or books, as far as i can remember. a pity, really.

 

[Spell]

I do not believe I have dissed personal preference stated as personal preference.

I have been a bit aggressive with what I perceive as personal preference dressed up in a double standard and illogical handwaving, stated a broad general truth.

well, the fact that a number of people have raised the same "personal preferences", even when they admit that, yes, 3e is good for this or that mechanical development, should be a clear signal that there "personal preferences" are not just a one time thing, but maybe they hint at different priorities that people have at a game table... or different mindsets... or different reasoning abilities (and i don't mean intelligent vs. stupid, but visual vs. mechanical, or what has you)...

I believe that there are legitimate reasons to prefer other games.

good! we agree on something, then.

But I do not believe the Curse of Integration is real -- that is a bit of an axe to grind for me.

and why is that? i made a number of posts that defend my claims. why, instead of aggressively trying to deny that i might have my point of view, you simply state yours and make a point for it?

And I have trouble respecting the implication that the Integration Police busted down someone's door one dark and stormy game night, put a gun to the DM's head, and forced that DM to make a poor decision.

oh dear, that's why i had to move to another nation, in fact... it was terrible! terrible, i tell you!

if you really think that that's what we have been talking so far, maybe you need to read our posts in a different light.

as someone said, there are a number of reasons why someone might have issues with not contraddicting openly stated rules in the game. none of which, as far as i read (or are aware), involve the evil forces of integration police!

I have come to understand that 3e is indeed on the rules heavy sides in a few areas for a some DMs who were successful with previous editions.

in some areas?!?! i feel like it's as rule heavy as GURPS, if not more! only, in GURPS i am *expected* to throw tons of rules out of my game because they don't suit my gaming style, and the whole system is designed with that in mind. in 3e, that does not happen as easily. at least, not for me.

now, with a design philosophy that was explicitedly aimed at creating a system that was easy to grasp (integration of all rules under one system), but difficult to master, that really is not a big surprise. personally, i just wish i had saved the 200+$ i spent on the core books, psionic manual and (ESPECIALLY) the epic level handbook, and bought something that:

1. was written to sparkle someone's imagination more than my old calculus I book.
2. was designed not just for what the majority does, but for me, too. after all, it was my money.

obviously, i am not that simple minded to think that wizards actually care for the fact that i am going to have a LOOOOOONG wait before i buy the 4e core books (at least to the second printing... so i get some errata in the text). they don't care for me. and, frankly, if i pick up a 4e book and i see that they still don't care for me, i will just move to other systems. or just buy them for the fluff when i can find the book new on ebay for 5 dollars or something (you know, for the fluff).

it will be even more difficult to find players, maybe... but at least, when i find some, i will have fun!

I also give kudos to Lanefan for admitting he is using a double-standard.

well, i, for one, don't.

my standard is: what game system makes me feel willing to run a game? what game system makes me laugh under my breath thinking that "yes, i can use this aspect of the game to challenge the party and have fun at the same time"? what game system allowes me to use the hundreds of books i have collected through my 16 years of gaming without having a headache, or having to wig pretty much everything all the time?

that is not 3e, sorry. at least not for me. and, shame on them, it's not GURPS either, or i would have switched to that the day after i finished reading my 3e PHB.

now, admittedly, it's a very subjective standard. and you know what? it's totally cool. i am not a game designer. i am a consumer. my money is really subjective, because it's mine, not the universe's.

while i can't pretend that the world revolves around me, i do want that if i spend a signinficant amount of my leasure money on a game, it HAS to be at least usable in a way i like, without forcing me to have fights with players who feel that i am being a DM ogre, or without forcing me to buy even more books designed to "fix" the game for me, or without forcing me to spend quite a bit of time to convert stuff/ house ruling my preferences into the game (which, by the way, might not be that easy all the time).

silly me, i know.

but enough talking about my standard. what's yours?

That he believes his double-standard is justified is a secondary issue. Most people recoil from that logical conclusion, as it might be construed as impugning their judgment, and start babbling about how integrating rules is such a horrible thing in some vague hope I will not notice they are babbling.

so, what are you saying? that i am allowed to have my standards until they clash with someone else's, and then i should yield to their superior sensibility?

or that i can't say: "i think integration made the job of the DM 5 times more burdersome" when one of the design goals in 4e is reducing the workload for the DM? or when the whole thread is about what we *personally* miss about AD&D?

you think integration is great. you have no problem with "some ares" being a bit more rule heavy. cool! great for you. next time you feel like DMing for me, don't esitate to drop me a line. and i am not joking, i might have the time of my life at your table, as far as i know.

but me, running even a short campaign with 3e?!?! no, thanks. seriously. not unless i run published adventures, have a computer to track the combat, and we stick to the core only.

 

[Spell]

There are no basic mechanical concepts in 3e that were not available for borrowing from other games in the late 80s. I am skeptical of the implication that a "mere" 14+ years of roleplaying game design in the industry made highly competent game designers unavailable.

you are forgetting, maybe, that one of the design goals was make the old books almost 100% usable with the new edition? that's why the proficiencies are "optional", for example.

you say that this business decision is timid. maybe. i can still take out the temple of elemental evil and run it in the same campaign in which i ran dragon mountain or a module from the last 2e dungeon pretty much without troubles or conversions.

you might not appreciate that. many 1e players certainly didn't. i do.

Furthermore, there were a lot of low hanging fruit for fixing in 1e that could have been fixed in 2e.

like?

Perhaps it would be logical to judge 2e by a far harsher standard than 1e or 3e?

if i understand your point of view, yes, it would be. if one accepts that point of view, that is.

 

[S'mon]

There was so much reliance on DM fiat, especially compared with 3rd edition. Some people may find this aspect appealing, but I dislike playing "mother-may-I" with the DM.

Yes, conversely it was the sense of player entitlement fostered by 3e that, along with the excessive complexity at higher levels, turned me off the game.

 

[Reynard]

I believe that there are legitimate reasons to prefer other games. But I do not believe the Curse of Integration is real -- that is a bit of an axe to grind for me. And I have trouble respecting the implication that the Integration Police busted down someone's door one dark and stormy game night, put a gun to the DM's head, and forced that DM to make a poor decision.

The problem with this is that you are simply wrong. An explicit design goal of 3E was to integrate all the disparate subsystems of 1/2E under a central mechanic, and they succeeded admirably in doing so. But by doing so, they forced the rules-madifying DM, assuming he cared about "balance", to examine more than the single portion of the system he was changing -- the DM also had to look for cascading effects throughout the system.

Let's go back to the thief abilities and skills example. In 1E and 2E, thief abilities (and similar abilities for rangers, etc.) were class abilities totally disconnected from any larger "skill system". Therefore, adding or removing a broader skill system, whether secondary skills or NWPs or porting in the Palladium skills or any of the other things many of us did, had exactly zero impact on the thief and his class specific skill abilities. In 3E, the two were conjoined in such a way that manipulating the skill system even a little -- say, boosting the fighter's skill points and class skill list -- means examining the rogue to make sure that skill-based class isn't getting shafted by the changes. Moreover, it means looking at feats and PrCs to make sure that too many skill point/choice changes don't imabalance the prerequisities in place for those things.

You really don't have a place from which to argue. None of the above is opinion; it is all simply true.

 

[Spell]

in Ridley's defense, i would say that the many many many discussions i've seen on these boards on whether or not this class or feat was unbalanced means that the idea that 3e is actually balanced is a myth.

it is better balanced than 2e, yes. but it's not balanced.*

people with an extensive experience with 3e will recognise that fact and simply change whatever they want knowing that, at worse, they will have to house rule some restriction back to fix a specific case... if they can't live with teh consequences, that is. Voadam's posts convinced me of this).

now, whether or not you come to acquire that experience solely depends on your perceptions of how the rule system will confy to your style of playing. it works for Ridley's, whereas he has no use for 2e, so, obviously, he won't find thinkering with this or that part of 3e. he might have problems doing the same with 2e, maybe, just because he doesn't have the same feel of how the system works.



* but it *has* to be so, if it wants to give players such an ability to multiclass, or such an easy way to decide whether or not monster X is a good match for party Y through the CR system.



ps: on the other hand, since it seems that today i have no desire to finish the orchestration, despite the closing of the deadline, i found this quote...

"For example, in breaking the game, he suggests giving out bonus skill points, extra hit points, or improved ability scores. At what point do these increases cumulate in a ECL boost? If you provide more than 3 bonus hit points, you’ve already beaten a standard core feat (Toughness) and if you provide too many skill points or don’t have a cap on things, you’ll find players may be able to enter PrCs or other restricted things like feats before their time.

It’s a good article for those who aren’t worried about game balance or feel that the ‘little’ things don’t matter. While I can agree with that theory in idea, in a game like Hero or GURPS, you can always provide bonus points that show up on the character sheet. D&D, with it’s inherent limitations of levels and caps on skills, and (default) random rolled hit points and ability points, doesn’t quite have that ease of use. In Champions, +5 to STR is +5 points regardless of who you give it to."

it comes from here.

it's ENWorld's very Joe G Kushner commenting on an article on kobold quarterly.
so, the perception that messing about with 3e is NOT that easy (unless you "aren't worried about game balance") is not just something flying around in my head... or in that of some other people that seem to prefer 2e in that respect.

 

[Rallek]

What I personally miss about 2e is the “toolkit” functionality of it. In the years that I was a DM using the 2e system, I ran (among others) a sci-fi campaign, a stone-age campaign, a players-as-young-deities campaign, players as a kind of spiritual “men in black” during the renaissance (what with all of the alchemists, philosophers, and sorcerers studying all of that forbidden lore and those pesky summoning rituals), some gritty low-fantasy, and even a sci-fi fantasy blend.



Average “homebrewing” DM kind of stuff, really. But here’s the bit that’s different from 3e, at least in my group’s experience,… each campaign had it’s own unique “feel”.


I’m going to invoke the “Curse of Integration” as the reason why 3e hasn’t lived up to 2e in this respect. Because 2e was more of a collection of subsystems, rather than one unified system, changes made could be very easily isolated. This lower measure of interconnectivity also made the consequences of system changes easier to predict. Because the subsystems interacted in fewer places, a relatively small amount of review could provide a fair assessment of the scope of a given change’s effects.


So when we wrote a new system for attack resolution for one of our sci-fi forays, we only had to look at the places where that subsystem interacted with other systems. In 2e that translated (as far as I recall) to a few spells. In 3e I would have those same spells, AND all of the feats that interact with the “attack” mechanic. Since feats are such a large part of the fighter’s class features, I now have to examine the fighter class to see how it fares with the “revised” feats…. now that I’ve changed the feats I might have to review some PrCs that use those feats as requirements for entry, which may or may not lead me to yet more issues at the places in which that PrC interacts with the system…

Can I do that, sure… but it is a bigger job, and it is a bigger job because of the Curse of Integration. I could also “just wing it” which we all did a lot in 2e (in my experience), but because of the much increased interaction between the parts of the system in 3e, the results of “winging it” are harder to predict, as there is more to consider. Here again, we see the Curse of Integration.


Which brings me back to my initial point, my group has played a few games of sci-fi homebrew 3e, a touch of “implied setting”, and we revived some of our favorite and longest running settings from our 2e days as 3e conversions… and it all “feels” like vanilla 3e. Largely because (due in large part to the Curse of Integration, in my opinion) it all seems to play the same when you get it to the table.




There are some more things that I could go on about, but this post is already too long. There are a few things I miss about 2e, but its ability to serve as an easily adaptable toolkit, and deliver on a different “feel” at the table for the worlds built from that toolkit, certainly tops the list.

 

[Hussar]

I agree with this. The purpose of multi-classing, IMO, is to fill in the missing niches and archetypes, so there's no reason to limit it to demi-humans. And given the nature of 2E multiclassing, the act of doing so is quite restriction enough: it takes a lot of XP to get to level 2/2 (depending on the class). i much prefer 2E multiclassing to 3E multiclassing, and have houseruled it back in.

Not really a lot of xp. Generally speaking, until you hit double digit levels, any 2 class character would be 1 level at most behind in each class compared to a single classed character. On a side note, due to the wonkiness with the xp tables, you could actually come out significantly AHEAD if you chose the right classes. For example, the xp for a 9th level fighter makes a 8/9/9 fighter/thief/magic user (I think I've got those levels right). So, basically, you gave up one level of fighter to gain 18 levels of other classes.

I believe this is where issues of balance come into play.

Other issues of balance came into play because some elements were flat out better than others. You used a longsword because it was flat out better than any other weapon in the PHB. Actually, you used a longsword and short sword because, if you burned one weapon proficiency, you effectively doubled your attacks per round and doubled your damage.

Any other choice was just woefully sub par.

People can argue about how 3e isn't balanced because of this or that, but, at the end of the day, no single option emerges from the game as a clearly superior choice. Yes, CoDzilla is an issue. But, it's not a case that not playing a cleric means that you are clearly weaker. In 2e, not using two weapons was a deliberate choice to be weaker.

 

[billd91]

in Ridley's defense, i would say that the many many many discussions i've seen on these boards on whether or not this class or feat was unbalanced means that the idea that 3e is actually balanced is a myth.

it is better balanced than 2e, yes. but it's not balanced.*

It's no myth. But asserting that it is 100% perfectly balanced is erroneous. There's no myth that balance was a goal and was substantially delivered, some debating around the margins acknowledged.

Stating that it's a myth is pretty dismissive of the reality that they did achieve even if the goal was not fully accomplished.

 

[Storm Raven]

people, you have to admit 3E was deisgned with te basic assumption that characters will have a certain amount of magic items at certain levels, and thus spells and monsters and adventures all scale with these in mind.

2E relied far less on this assumption.

No, 2e relied upon certain assumptions, but they just didn't bother to tell you what those assumptions were. Effectively, you were left with no guidance as to what the designers thought PCs would be equipped with when they designed monsters, adventures and other supplements.

All 3e really did with the wealth guidleines and so on was pull that curtain back and say "these are the assumptions we made". So you could know what they were thinking when they put the adventure or supplement together. This actually makes the system much more flexible, since you can have a pretty good idea how far your assumptions might differ from theirs, and make adjustments to the material they provide accordingly.