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

[Spell]

All untrue. You can add new skills without unbalancing d20, you can add new feats without unbalancing d20,

can i remove skills and feats in their entirety? can i pick up, i don't know, OD&D skill system and put it in without too much hassle? i don't think so.

you can dump attacks of opportunity without unbalancing d20,

you might be right on this one, i give you this.

you can remove magical items without unabalancing d20. How do I know? because multiple published products have done all of these things -- and more -- without unbalancing d20.

and without offering a substitute mechanic or rule?
multiple published products have said: we're not gonna use feats, but the rest of the rulesets stays right there where it is? multiple products have said: in this game world you ain't getting a +1 magic sword not even if you're a level 20 paladin blessed by the gods, but you can run a D&D game by the book with no pain nor sweat?

if these products do exist, please point me at them.
as far as i know, the only ones that do something fancy with the ruleset (arcana evolved, iron heroes, midnight campaign setting, iron kingdoms, the nitty n gritty bad axe games book that is supposed to works with the d20 system... sorry, can't remember the name!, and so on) have a consistent section of alternative rules to "fix" the system.
i might be wrong, but at least i cite my "multiple products"

Would you care to explain the existence of hundreds of products that completely disprove your assertions that you can't modify d20 without breaking it?

i can certainly care and i will certainly do. you see, i meant taking out of the system something i don't like, and replace it with nothing. or, if i really want something, with anything that pleases my tastes.

i could do that in OD&D. i could ignore the skill system given in the rules cyclopedia and run a very enjoyable game. i could pick up runequest skill system (or any skill system i happened to like and consider balanced) and hammer it on without spending hours on ends to think about how this skill might trigger an attack of opportunity if player X has feat Y.

i also could do that in AD&D.

in fct, i could do whatever i wanted, because it was my game, and the ruleset was open enough to accomodate my style of playing and yours, maybe with some additions or modifications that were not *necessarily* too complicate to make.

not so in your examples. iron heroes doesn't like magical items. so they "fixed" the system assumption that you have to have a + x attack bonus at level Y by simply giving (from what i have read on these boards) a +x class bonus to the character. it's perfectly good game designing. and it is. but it's fixing the system. and it does so, incidentally, in a way that further disrupt my suspention of disbelief. ("so, the captain of the guard, who's been in the military for 20 years has a +1 class attack bonus and 20 hp. you started adventuring last year and have a + 5 class attack bonus and 50 hp. i guess you are *special*).


now, before this escalate in another silly edition war, let me tell you one thing: i do appreciate that these are d20 boards, and i'm the minority. i do appreciate that there's nothing inherently Wrong with the d20 game design philosophy and that there are tons of people out there that know the system in and out so well that they can afford making significant changes in much less time that it would require me.

what i am trying to say is that, whatever you think of the system, AD&D, *in my opinion and experience* managed to accomodate to a more diverse set of assumptions about the game, simply because, again *in my opinion and experience*, when some parts of the system clashed with what was needed at the game table, they could be easily amended or ignored.

now, is there anything you can say, in all faith, that can invalidate my experience, opinions, and preferences? until now, it seems to me that you are just saying: "you're wrong, because i like 3e better". ok, fair enough. i think i got that to begin with. but that argument is not doing much to make me change my mind, if that's your goal.

if i have misread you, or i explained myself in a way that still leads to misunderstandings, feel free to offer? ask for clarifications.

ps: if you are about to say that OD&D and AD&D are simplistic systems, or that they are old dinosaurs, or that they are pretty much freeform rulesets, and that today's games are not built to please different styles of gaming, please don't.

one example: GURPS. it's not simplistic, it's certainly not rule light (unless you want to just run the basic combat and create human characters with GURPS light, that is, and ignore rules like "how long should you dig to create a hole of X cubic feet of volume"), it's not a dinosaur (it had a new edition some years ago, and it's going ok, given that it never sold million of copies), and it's built not only to accomodate different styles of gaming, but different types of games, too.

why do i not stop yapping and switch to GURPS? simple: i have no time nor desire to convert 20/30 year worth of game material that i have spend hundreds of dollars to buy into a completely different system. universal or not.

 

[Spell]

It isn't that you can't change stuff, but rather that there is a lot more to consider when doing so because everything is so interconnected. Spycraft didn't just drop AoO's and be done with it, for example. Dropping AoOs means re-examining a lot of feats and combat maneuvers and other elements that AoOs interact with. You start to blur the line between "house ruling" and "game design".

reynard, are you a woman? if so, i'm about to leave my girlfriend and ask you to marry me.
only kidding.

 

[Psion]

With little consequence your kidding right?

No. I've purchased multiple products introducing scads of new feats, integrated them into my game, and lo and behold, my game didn't go off the tracks.

Even the folks at WotC have admitted that the proliferation of an endless list of feats has been problematic in terms of game balance because feat C from book D does take into account the consequences of feat H from book Z etc, etc.

That's a different kettle of fish. I'm certainly not claiming that any body of work as large as D&D can remain perfectly consistent across all works without tweaks, and I submit to you that if you put any other system in its place, the same or worse would happen.

Nor, mind you am I saying that you can't write unbalanced feats.

Look at the scope of the assertion being made here. He states that "touching" feats--whatever that means, but it sounds like a pretty modest change--causes the system to be unbalanced.

Feats are the primary means by which the game are expanded. Yes, you can do it wrong. But to suggest that the mere act of "touching" feats in a perilous process seems to me to be at odds with reality.

 

[Agamon]

Settings in 2e were GOLD.

Don't get me wrong, I wanted to like them. The ideas for most of them blow Eberron out of the water. But 2E FR and GH weren't as good as 1E's. I liked Ravenloft, but I didn't like when they tried to turn it into an actual setting. Dark Sun didn't grab me. You wither love Planescape or hate it, I'm one of the latter. I was excited by the idea of Birthright, but it didn't quite work the way I would have liked. And they sure tried to mess up Mystara, good thing that stuff is easily ignored.

And most of the setting specific adventures were beyond bad, railroady, look-at-my-shiny-NPC pieces of crap. That doesn't do much to improve the look of the settings themselves.

 

[Sitara]

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.

 

[Agamon]

No. I've purchased multiple products introducing scads of new feats, integrated them into my game, and lo and behold, my game didn't go off the tracks.

Yeah, a pile of feats wasn't a problem in my game either. But the spells and prestige classes were. And once I allowed them, it's tough to try and reign them back in. A lesson learned for 4E.

 

[Spell]

You realize, of course, that this poisons the analysis with your perspective? The only thing that makes these "superpowers" is that you know that in the version of the game you are not playing, the modifiers are assigned to magic item.

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

this is a thing that happened in previous editions of the games, as well. the PCs were above the norm, or they were meant to become above the norm if they survived. they were in another league compared to normal zero-level characters (which i found annoying an unconsequential at the time, and i still do... Hackmaster solves the problem by adding a hp kicker. very simple and very elegant, in my opinion. a real stroke of genious... anyway..). on the other hand, they weren't complete monstrosities.

before, it was like saying: i am joe zero level, and a low level character is a university level athlete. eventually the character can become carl lewis, or god knows what... but for the moment, we're not so terribly far away.

now, at least in my perspective, even at first level PCs are really another story. it's like 1st level characters are carl lewis, whereas i still have a bit of a belly and can't run for 10 minutes without having a stroke.

i can be wrong, but you can't completely deny that this philophy is somewhat inbuilt in the game. it's fair. only, i don't like that type of gaming experience.

Which begs the question: what do you hope to get out of this "low magic" game? Do you want to take away magic because you don't like the concept of players having much magical bling? Or do you think that magic items make it too easy?

personally: i like low magic games, because, to me, magic becomes more meaningful and wonderful if it's rare. philosophically, i like the idea of low power magical items being more or less common against three thousand years of mythology, and that, to me, represents an incommensurable break in my suspension of disbelief.

as for the players, i have to admit that, faced with a nondescript "player", yes, i'd like to have some power on how easy a job they do, without having to beef up monsters (which, again, in my mind would create an inconsisten world). having said that, i rarely, in my years as DM doubted that the players *at my table* were going to do something that would have completely destroyed everyone's enjoyment of the game, at least knowingly. if they had a supersword that happened to be too powerful, they realised that some in game reason might have taken the sword away, and that would have been ok with them and with me.

on the other hand, they also expected that i wouldn't had been mr. evil DM. and that was ok with me, too.

Then you'd do something that hasn't been done since before 1e, because the thief/rogue has required some version of the skill system since 1e.

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.

The simple, unified baseline of d20 makes it fairly straightforward to predict the scope of these consequences. If you want to make changes and not compensate, that's your fault.

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.

maybe nothing would have happened. but there was too much stuff to consider and too little time to actually try and change things.
i might have tried and solve problems as they showed up in the game. but i would like to have house rules that are somewhat solid, before throwing them at my players.
the fact that i also moved to another *nation*, and i had to get a new group certainly affected my perspective.

i still think things don't have to be necessarily this way, though.

I would suggest to you that wanting it to be otherwise is silly.

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!

So, are you honestly suggesting old AD&D house rules had the same level of playability and quality as AE and IH? I rather think that unlikely.

absolutely not! i would be a fool to do so, since AE and IH are professional products by senior designers. i am suggesting that i could house rule AD&D with much less hassle and fear of having unbalanced the entire system than i can with 3e D&D.

(For that matter, am I the only one who recalls how every Dragon back in the 1e days came with warnings about how all this stuff was use at your own risk... and risk there was...)

the early articles of dragon, though, can hardly be considered the height of game design philosophy, can they? or does this matter only when you're putting AU and IH against some house rules some dude came up with in that campaign i heard of?

Notwithstanding that innumerable supplements have added feats with little consequence?

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.

 

[billd91]

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.

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.

 

[Spell]

Huh?
In 3.5 DR magic only requires a +1 weapon as well.

my mistake, then. i stopped buying 3e items when i got the disappointment that was the epic level handbook. did they suppressed the expected health and expected magic item power level from the game?

For low armor I go with a house rule that class reflex save adds to dex bonus to get a level based AC increase for low armor types that favors the agile and encourages feinting.

that looks like a good quick fix.

House rules that were not REDESIGNING the system to provide AD&D nitty n gritty, without armor, or without magic, or whatever?

if you want to see things that way. what i meant is that the changes to one subsystem don't need to touch other parts of the system you like.

Weren't the other D&D like options from Pre 3e/OGL things like Paladium, Rolemaster, MERP, Ars Magica, and GURPS?

what do you mean? i honestly don't follow.

Of course if you don't have time to read such rule variants to fit different campaign styles then most of the options from 2e wouldn't be available either (historical setting books, ravenloft CS for fear and horror mechanics, combat and tactics for some 3e similar tactical combat, etc.)

historical settings: no need for those. i have my history books. and tons of that.
revenloft CS: given that i would game in that setting, among others, yes, i would use those mechanics. which, by the way, take 2 minutes to read, and touch very little else in the game (contrary to, say, switching to the vitality system).
combat and tactics: are you joking? i want to simplify combat!!! i have no use for that book now like i didn when it came out!

 

[Spell]

IWhich is an old 3e-bashing argument

wait a second, don't put words in my mouth. where did i bashed 3e or 3e lovers? haven't i said *more than once*, that these are my preferences and that i quit the game only because i felt that i couldn't change it to play as i want? did i ever say that 3e have to disappear from the face of earth?

i hope i'm overreacting and that i misread your post. you can disagree with me, but if you want start trolling around, you can do it very well by yourself.