3.5 better for world building?

[Neonchameleon]

4e: Design a world with room for larger than life characters - the system neither helps nor hinders (other than having a slightly FUBAR'd economy for the PCs). The system won't help you much but it won't get in the way much either.

3e: Seemingly a lot of simulationist support. Then you do things like work out how long it takes to make a suit of plate armour under the crafting rules, the number of chickens in Greyhawk, what Wall of Iron does to the economy and give up. But you still have really powerful game warping spells, an economy that's hard coded and FUBAR'd (rather than just warped by the PCs) and other things to work round. That said, there's some nice guidance in there about level distribution (which admittedly forces a type of world)

 

[pawsplay]

But that doesn't mean you can't create the game first and the setting(s) afterwards; were Blackmoor and Greyhawk designed before OD&D came about?

That doesn't seem to bear much relation to what I said. OD&D has never not had a setting. Nor are Blackmoor and Greyhawk possible to conceive without affecting the design of the system.

 

[Umbran]

I disagree. I say there is no setting design that is not bound to mechanics.

That they are "bound together" does not make them the same thing. They can be created separately, and bound together with tape, crazy glue, and bailing wire after the fact

Your original statement makes it a one-to-one relation. If setting design and game design were the same thing, then a given rule set could only ever be played using one setting, which is clearly not the case. I can construct two different settings using only the core rules of a game, simply by using two different geographies and socio-political arrangements, which are not rules-dependent.

Only those elements with which the characters can directly interact are bound to mechanics.

 

[Trevalon Moonleirion]

For purely building a world out of my imagination? I can do that in any system.

For cobbling together stuff from published sources to use an established campaign, albeit with my mark on it? Same answer, but, it's much easier with 3/3.5 simply because there's more material out there, and it's much easier to convert stats from an adventure or supplement into their 3e equivalent, if they're older books.

For instance, in high school, I ran a bit of Return to the Tomb of Horrors 2e mega-adventure as a high level 3.5 side campaign. It was pretty easy to just swap out monster stats and mechanics, or follow the little "conversion guide" that WotC published to convert original monsters into 3e ones.

It was quite easy to do so with 3e. It'd be a bit harder now with 4e, but certainly not impossible. At some point I'm probably running the old Night Below box in 4e. Sure it'll require a bit of prep and conversion, but I never have to worry about DM's block.

 

[pawsplay]

If setting design and game design were the same thing, then a given rule set could only ever be played using one setting, which is clearly not the case.

If you want to be precise about it, that is the case. If you change the setting, you change the game. Just ask any player of the revised Mage: The Awakening. For a very literal case, look at DC Adventures, which is the future M&M 3e in DC drag. For more of a slide, look at Call of Cthulhu versus old Runequest; for all the mechanics shared between them, different games.

Look at GURPS. Every GURPS campaign is a different GURPS.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Further, 3e provides more components that map to identifiable phenomena in a world, in ways that one can understand and so use. One can alter the model, and say what has changed elsewhere and why. With 4e, too much seems at once arbitrary and mysterious -- sometimes utterly lacking any explicit rationale at all, while confounding common sense -- and yet pretty certainly important to the abstract mathematical game. It is blatantly a Potemkin village, whereas 3e structures are potentially self-sustaining.

The problem with 3e, of course, was chaos theory, IME. You alter the model, and since everything uses the same rules, it changes things elsewhere. Some of those are obvious and expected, which is reinforcing and pleasing. Of course, some of the changed things were less obvious.

You flap a butterfly's wings and 2 sessions later discover that random spell #327 can destroy the universe. (Yes, I'm being slightly hyperbolic, but unpredictable effects did occur if you wanted to tinker.)

That they are "bound together" does not make them the same thing. They can be created separately, and bound together with tape, crazy glue, and bailing wire after the fact

Love me some bailing wire. If people are having fun, they don't notice the man behind the curtain, frantically duct taping things together.

 

[El Mahdi]

...I have done setting design in 3.x, but not in 4e. I would imagine that in 4e, setting design would be a tad simpler, or at lest more open and less restricted, as there's an explicit notion that the PCs use different rules than NPCs and monsters. The designer is tied to the fact that the PC classes are available for PCs, but nobody else in the world actually has to use those mechanics.

Except, what do you do when the mechanics for characters allows them to do things or do them in a manner inconsistent with your world?

I think it then boils down to which system is easiest to alter.

Not saying 3.x is easy to alter (I personally find all iterations of D&D hard to alter, too many default conceits built in), but I get the impression from those who've played it, other posters here and my own reading of 4E, that 4E is very difficult, if not impossible, to houserule...

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Except, what do you do when the mechanics for characters allows them to do things or do them in a manner inconsistent with your world?

Since most mechanics are separate from each other, as per exception-based design, you modify or remove the offending power. But most of the time I've found that when someone balks at how a power works, simply coming up with a different flavor explanation for the mechanical effect gets them over that hurdle. If the effect is X damage, push 2, and prone, that's what is relevant. Anything that might push someone back a ways and knock them down or cause them to stumble backwards fits the power, and that's a pretty wide flavor space. You can call it a magical thunderbolt, smacking the crap out of them with your shield, hitting special pressure points, a lucky blow to the forehead, mild concussion via your control of blood flow in their brain, a low grade thermal detonator, overwhelming their mind with complicated math on your portable blackboard, or smashing them really hard in the face with a pie so that they stumble backwards.

All of these explanations fit the effect. Pick the one that works for your world and vision of how the class with the power interacts with that world. Making a power fit a world is pretty trivial for the vast majority of powers.

 

[Ariosto]

Setting design is game design.
Setting design is not the only thing that is game design.

 

[AngryMojo]

If you want to be precise about it, that is the case. If you change the setting, you change the game. Just ask any player of the revised Mage: The Awakening. For a very literal case, look at DC Adventures, which is the future M&M 3e in DC drag. For more of a slide, look at Call of Cthulhu versus old Runequest; for all the mechanics shared between them, different games.

Look at GURPS. Every GURPS campaign is a different GURPS.

By that rationale, every individual DM's game is a completely different game. You and I could use the exact same mechanics and the exact same setting with the exact same characters, and the two games will be different. That doesn't mean we're using different rulesets, just that our particular way of running games is different. No matter what type of GURPS you're running, you're still running GURPS. Same with Savage Worlds, or any other generic system.