3.5 Complexity Revisited: Core Books Only, Low Levels . . .

[Treebore]

Benimoto said:

Little things, like how if you charge or run, it has to be in a straight line and you can't even clip the corner of an ally or difficult terrain square seem unnecessary and kind of petty now.

----It is petty, don't worry about the specifics. Player says he wants to run, if its clear enough, then let him run. If he wants to Charge, if its straight enough, let him charge. I only worry about the last 10 feet being straight, prior to that I don't really care.


To look at on a wider scale, 3.5 seems to have the attitude that you can attempt almost anything, just that there's going to be some sort of disadvantage to make it balanced. The problem is that it's hard to remember the whole list of what you can do and what it will cost you. So then you just spend a lot of time referencing and cross referencing, just to do something fairly simple, like pass a weapon to your friend, push a kobold off a balcony, or even just use a class feature like turn undead. And because there are fairly strictly defined rules for all of these things, it's somehow harder to just make a DM call.

---- No, its easy just making a DM call, its making a DM call that follows the rules precisely as written that is hard. Everyone needs to just quit being so anal and be happy with "good enough".


So, it really depends on your threshold for "painfully complex" is, and how willing you are to either memorize the combat chapter, make quick calls, or spend gaming time looking up rules.


---Nah, it just requires going back to an easy going laid back attitude, rather than an overly anal, attention to every detail, attitude.

 

[Treebore]

I never found that adding in splatbooks had much to do with making the game more or less complex. The splats in 3e are mostly filled with player options. Unless you're building a lot of NPCs, they don't really affect the DM's job. What I found complex about running 3e was 1) Building NPCs past about 8th level (or casters past about 3rd level), 2) Modifying monsters according to the RAW; 3) Adjudicating mid-to-high level combat where lots of buff/debuff spells were involved; and 4) Running monsters that deviated from the "Rawr! I have lots of hit points and can hit you really hard, in the face." paradigm (i.e. intelligent creatures with spell-like or special-case abilities).

After several years of trying, I could never find a way to eliminate or even minimize those problems in 3e without either sticking to very low level games or running a very limited campaign that satisfied neither me nor my players.

Modules. Lots of pre genned NPC's and monsters are in modules. Dungeon Magazine too. Took a lot less time, and was much more enjoyable, browsing through the adventures looking for good NPC's and monster write ups. Not to mention the ideas and good maps I got inspired to use from those read throughs. NPC's and monsters of every level range.

Plus there were lots of NPC and monster write ups available on a lot of websites, including this one.

 

[malraux]

Personally I found level < 4 in 3e to be a touch too simple for my taste. A lot of what you spend doing at those first few levels is just getting the feats/equipment/class features/etc that really, to me any way, feel like you should get to begin with;Weapon finesse as an example. That said, if it works for you, then I certainly wouldn't tell you no.

Anyway, if you are just sticking with core books and low levels, I'd really recommend a software package to help manage things. If you get a good one, it takes a lot of the tedium out of dming. Personally I recommend DMGenie, but there are others. The advantage is that pretty much all the core stuff is already there. So when you BBEG bard starts his song to buff his mooks, it just takes a click to get that factored into their stats, while tracking what stacks and doesn't. If you are going outside of core, then it becomes a problem of is it worth either finding someone who has already added the new thing, or figuring it out yourself. But with core, its indispensable.

 

[Delta]

Now without question, 3.5 is a complex game. But let me ask the following: if a DM were to only use the three core rulebooks and was only interested in running a low-level adventure/campaign (say, levels 1-8 or something), would DMing 3.5 still be a painfully complex affair?

And if you will indulge a second question, give me a quick answer to this one: is 3.0 more, less, or of equal complexity to 3.5?

My solution has been to strip down 3E into my "Dan's Diminutive d20" rules (see link below). Part of the point is that I want to use my 3E books, and write under the OGL, but be cool to DM (via just a few key house rules). It's entirely resurrected my taste for playing D&D again.

My system goes up to 12th level (double the E6 people), because that's the closest match I could find to classic D&D "name levels" and where the traditional spells topped out in OD&D. I use the 3 Generic Classes from UA and let Feats fill in the rest. Skill points are terminated with extreme prejudice (Level-Based Skills from UA). Folks get Feats at the same rate as their BAB so there's no table-lookups, but statistically matches the core rules on average. Clerics got the heave-ho (after much soul-searching). Equipment fits on 1 page. Monsters all fit on 3 pages. Stuff like that.

I do think that 3.0 is easier to run than 3.5. Usually I find that the "revisionist" editions do get more cluttered overall. (Example: Benimoto's fiddly cover/movement complaints above are all 3.5-specific.)

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I always thought the best way to reduce complexity in D&D would be to get rid of resource tracking. Warlocks instead of traditional casters, that sort of thing.

 

[Benimoto]

---- No, its easy just making a DM call, its making a DM call that follows the rules precisely as written that is hard. Everyone needs to just quit being so anal and be happy with "good enough".

Absolutely, and my favorite sessions are where everybody is happy with "good enough" and the game flows smoothly. The problem is, that while it's easy for everybody to agree on this while things are going well for the party, my experience is that once things start going badly for the PCs, you'll always find one player who wants to look up a rule "just to be sure", especially if it's their character being threatened.

 

[Hunter In Darkness]

Well guys for 8 years I have ran games with pretty much core only. Only other books normally ever used are Forgotten realms campaign setting, and the Eberron campaign setting.
Under 14th level I have never found it to be really hard. Over 14th you do need more prep time.

May I also suggest you check out pathfinder beta, to at lest mine for rules. CMB is far better then the old grapple I have found. And they are taeking Ideal to make high level play less a headache for most people.

 

[Ourph]

Modules. Lots of pre genned NPC's and monsters are in modules. Dungeon Magazine too. Took a lot less time, and was much more enjoyable, browsing through the adventures looking for good NPC's and monster write ups. Not to mention the ideas and good maps I got inspired to use from those read throughs. NPC's and monsters of every level range.

Plus there were lots of NPC and monster write ups available on a lot of websites, including this one.

I don't think I ever ran a 3e game where I wasn't using a module of some sort and I stole like a madman to get monsters and NPCs pre-made for my games. Those things helped, but I still found 3e too cumbersome for running a game to be enjoyable. Even running some of Paizo's Dungeon adventures was a pain because they tended to employ a lot of powerful monsters with lots of spell-like abilities, special-case attacks or debuffs in their adventures and generally those combats bogged down in "OK, let's figure out how that attack affected all of the PCs numbers before moving onto the next person in initiative order.".

 

[megamania]

I never had huge issues with running the game. After 12th level there was more to keep track of but with lil' notes to post on your DM screen it was easy enough.

What I still wish was easier (though this will happen in any game) is the creation of a higher level NPC from scratch, especially magic / psionics. And of course adding Prestige classes complecates things also.

It took me roughly 4 hours to do a Psion 10/Metamind 2/Dark lantern 1 (largely to selections of psionic powers and typing up enough short hand details to run her in a game.

 

[Richards]

My current player group includes two people for whom 3.5 was their introduction to D&D. (The other two date back to 1E and 2E, respectively.) I've kept the campaign to core-only for that reason, so as not to overwhelm the new players. We're up to 9th-10th level thus far, and so far everybody's having fun and nobody's missing out on any potential "missing opportunities" from splatbooks.

So I say go for it, as your proposal (3.5 core books only, low levels) sounds like it should be fine.

Johnathan