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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rallek" data-source="post: 4000000" data-attributes="member: 8463">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.</blockquote>

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