Spell said:
well, they were not. have you checked how much of the PHB is devoted to the combat section? how many spells are connected to combat vs. those than have other effects? how many NWP have nothing to do with combat?
I'll take these in order:
1. The 3e PHB or the 2e PHB?
The 3e PHB: 27 pages.
The 2e PHB: 23 pages, plus another 4 pages convering "Encounters" that covers material covered in the 3e Combat chapter.
2. About the same for both editions.
3. At most, the same number as the number of noncombat related skills in the 3e PHB, primarily because almost all of the noncombat NWPs can be replicated with Profession, Knowledge, or Craft skills. Listing them seprately doesn't get you a cookie. It just means you have used a couple dozen words to say something you could have said with a quarter as many. Literary surplusage is not a virtue when writing.
now, you might like the way things were implemented, but you can't say that the level of "combat madness" was the same in earlier editions of the games.
Sure I can. Because it was.
i remember we laughed at powergamers and avoided them like the plague. then 3e comes out, et voila! sidebars on "power combos" right in the middle of dragon, as if that was meant to be the way to play the game. at the same time, no ecologies or habitat entries in the MM. and combat references spilling out almost everywhere in the system.
By the most optimistic of a accounts, less than a twentieth of the 3e player base read
Dragon. The number was probably much smaller than that. And if you actually looked at the "power combos" you might have noticed that using one of them would give you a really good "one-note" sort of ability, at the cost of being able to do much else as effectively. In other words, just because you were a halfling monk who blew all his feats on save enhancers and could succeed on a save against most things didn't mean you were really anything special as a result. Most of the "power combos" listed in
Dragon were at best, fun oddities.
As for ecology and habitat entries, I was glad to see them gone. And I think that my sentiment was shared by a lot of players. D&D, at its core, was intented to be a game that allowed each group to design their own game world. The worst thing introduced in D&D was the long-winded "ecology of" articles that tried to tie down various creatures to a particular set of assumptions. I don't want to know the "ecology of" the medusa. I want to make medusas fit
my campaign world. in 1e, this was the way the rule books worked for most monsters. Further, anything in the books that won't be seen by the players is a waste of space. Like an adventure that tells you the irrelevant geneaology of the BBEG's henchman (that has no impact on the events in the module or elsewhere), telling me the mating habits of the gray render is a pointless piece of information.
2e was hemorraging players. The number of people playing the game had drastically declined from the heyday of the early- to mid- eighties. One possible reason was the long-winded, overbearing, unneccessary monster ecology descriptions. 3e ditched them to attract back gamers who had left the fold (so to speak).
sorry, i don't think this is a matter of experience. it's a way of presenting the system to new players and oldies alike. it's a shift in attention for the design team.
Or, you decided up front you didn't like 3e and conformed your viewing of the game to match your expectations.
if role playing mechanics weren't well implemented in previous editions, the solution shouldn't have been: "ok, screw those, we're concentrating on combat", but "wait a second, what can we do to make things better for those that want role play heavy campaigns?!?!"
They did do that. The response of most "role-play" oriented DMs was to say "no way am I gonna allow some character sheet stat tell
me how good somebody is at dimplomacy! The player has to come up with flowery speeches and convince me even though they are actually stutterer who can't string three words together."
like? the alignment is toned down. non adventuring specific skills (farming, woodcutting, and so on) are either confined in knowledges, crafts and professions, or just not in the game.
Toned down? How? By having as many, if not more classes and spells dependent upon it? Exactly how has alignment been "toned down"? (Of course, I'd have ditched alignment entirely, as an archaic and poorly thought out system).
Tell me one NWP that is "not in the game" in 3e. And why is making things easier to use (by combining a variety of related skills into groups) a flaw rather than a benefit?
feats are mostly just an excuse to rake in combat bonuses and "cool" tactical manoeuvres.
Some are. Others are ways to improve your skills (even noncombat skills), give you the ability to do cool stuff with spells (even noncombat spells), or even make magic items (even noncombat ones). Still others provide odd noncombat perks (like spell like abilities) that can't be replicated otherwise.
where is this famed customization?
It is sitting right there, under your nose. You just missed it in your indignation.
