3.5 high level woes and Paizo's hand in it.

[Brown Jenkin]

@Brown Jerkin, does your Ptolus DM have experience with other 3E high-level games where he DID get burned out with the system? Or is the Ptolus game a first attempt at getting to these levels?

In general he normally burns out after about 6 months no matter the system we are playing (He also runs HERO System). He has run 2 other 3.x games that he stopped the campaign at about 10-11th level. We also had another DM (who left the state) that ran a 3-20 campaign that our current DM played in, and both of the DMs often talked shop. Ptolus however has kept him interested far longer than normal.

 

[S'mon]

I have no experience with Paizo adventures, and I encountered the same problems as everybody else.

The only time I really had fun with high level 3e was GMing some solo stuff with an 18th level Fighter type character, he had fun leading his armies, hacking up CR 8 monsters, slaying the evil high priest, negotiating with the diplomats of rival powers, and the 3e rules rarely intruded too much.

Anything that was supposed to involve a challenging battle for a group of 15th+ PCs was dire. Either it was trivially easy or TPK territory (with a few PCs escaping). That was equally true of published stuff like Necropolis as homebrew stuff.

And I could never send enemies to ambush the PCs. 1st strike advantage was so overwhelming that the PCs would have had no chance of survival.

The game had seemed to work fine through the 1st 10-12 levels, as long as no high-CR (16+) foes appeared, so now I just run the game in a 1-10/12 level range and it works fine.

I do think 3e's claim to 'fix high level play' was the biggest load of codswallop in the history of RPGs.

 

[Agamon]

Paizo only gets picked out because they published well written and very popular adventures. They didn't really invent the AP, but they sure popularized it, and that's why a Paizo AP is often mentioned in conjunction with dislike for high level 3.5e. I won't say AoW was horrible, quite the opposite. Aside form the dud that was Spire of Long Shadows, I really enjoyed running each adventure up to and including (and especially) Prince of Redhand. The fact that the fun level dropped off the side of a cliff after that was more of a problem with the rules than the adventures.

And adventure difficulty was only a fraction of the problem. People say 4e combat can be grindy, but it has nothing on high-level 3e. I'd say all the die rolling due to iterative attacks is probably my biggest beef. Some fights I had to sit on my hands to stop from clawing my eyes out of their sockets.

 

[S'mon]

Iterative attacks - I hardly ever saw an iterative attack in high level 3e. The spellcasters so dominated the battlefield that melee fighters with 20' move rarely even got an attack in, never mind iterative attacks.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Paizo is not responsible for the high-level problems of 3.x- that is a built-in fault of the system.

However, IMO Paizo is responsible for escalating the arms race in their modules and materials, and for bad encounter design. I believe from previous comments I've seen on ENWorld and the Paizo board its even been publicly stated by Paizo that they assume all PCs should be optomized who play their adventures, and that many of the encounters are designed to be very difficult/meat-grinders. I know after we played about 60% through Age of Worms, we quit playing 3.x althogether due to the royal PITA running and playing a game had become, and went on to other systems until 4e came out. I loved the concepts and story for AoW, but the implementation was terrible IMO.

Ourph made a very good point about the power escalation in Paizo products, and their use of custom monsters. Personally, I like custom monsters- it keeps PCs on their toes. While many of the Paizo monsters are very cool conceptually, many of them seem overdesigned, such that they are not on par with monsters from the MM of the same CR, which makes it hard for a DM to know what he's getting himself into with Paizo materials. This is a trend I've noticied in Paizo stuff from the start- they tend to increase the power such that you're playing "D&D with the power level cranked up to 17". Having seen their APs so far and the Pathfinder Beta ruleset, it hasn't eased my reservations with Paizo, and it seems to be a chronic problem with them IMO.

I tend to share this opinion, with ... not really a reservation, but: It seems that the "overdesigned" monsters where a general problem in 3E. It didn't matter whether it was Paizo, another 3PP or WotC, you'd always find monsters that were just way stronger than their CR implied.

We used to say that the actual CR of a monster is its CR + Monster Manual Number. And for "custom" monsters in an adventure, I suppose the actual CR was something like CR + 1d8-3.

Not always was it just because of "overenthusiastic" design. I remember a monster that got the Half-Fiend template. It had tons of HD, and unfortunately, that template gave the monster a spell (Blasphemy or something like that) with a caster level equal to its HD. But it's CR was _way_ lower than its CR, and the spell basically could kill an entire party unless it was unusually widely spread out.
The tools given by the game weren't all that great here _and_ the designers didn't double-check the stats either. (Or maybe they did, and just wanted to include a "Rat Bastard" moment. In that case, well done, you made it. But if you don't promise to never do this again, I don't guarantee buying any more adventures from you, anyway.)

 

[Voadam]

What are the non-paizo, high-level adventures that we can compare these to? Can we say that "company X" does high-level 3.5 really well? Does Whiterock or World's Largest Dungeon fix the high-level burnout problem?

1-20 Adventure Paths I can think of:

Original Adventure Path: WotC

Shackled City: Paizo

Age of Worms: Paizo

Savage Tide: Paizo

Warlords of the Accordlands Campaign Adventure: AEG

Castle Blackmoor: Zeitgeist Games

War of the Burning Sky: E.N. Publishing

Dragonlance Age of Mortals Trilogy (Key to Destiny, Spectre of Sorrorws, Price of Courage).

Close:

Rappan Athuk Reloaded: Necromancer Games (about 4-20)

Necromancer, Paizo, Monkey God, Goodman, WotC, and Malhavoc each have some non AP high level adventures though I think Paizo in Dungeon would have the most for say levels 15-20.

 

[jodyjohnson]

In the course of a recent house move, I came upon some of the old "Countdown to 3rd Edition" issues of Dragon magazine. Ironically, one of the design goals they state is that the game should work properly across the whole of the level range. Peter Adkison was particularly interested in high-level play, that being his personal favourite.

For us, 3.x was head and shoulders better at high level play than the previous 1e AD&D and 2e AD&D editions.

We played vastly more high level 3.x than we ever successfully did in 1e or 2e (mostly due to exponential XP and starting at 1st after a tpk).

It took us years of play to discover the short-comings of high level play and it was primarily extreme option bloat (spells, feats, multiclassing, creature powers), the attendant bookkeeping bloat, and action bloat (iterative attacks, cohorts, summoning, charm).

3.x for us solved the earlier problems of high level play only to open up another set.

 

[Festivus]

I know 3.5 High level rules were not the best, but how many of you got to this revelation after playing any of the Paizo's APs? How many of you gave up on 3.5 shortly after that?

Did Paizo actually helped a lot of people move to 4E?

(PS I love and I am currently running AOW under 4E)

I don't think I ever felt the pain of high level D&D until I ran Age of Worms. We are almost done with the AP, and I have sworn that I will never run above level 10 in 3.5 again. I don't think it helped me to move to 4e as we still play 3.5 too, but it had exposed the problems of high level 3.5 player sufficiently to me. I'll let someone else DM high level 3.5, I don't mind being a player at higher levels.

ps: I am running Savage Tide under 4e

 

[Matrix Sorcica]

1-20 Adventure Paths I can think of:
Castle Whiterock: Goodman Games

That's lvl 1-15, IIRC.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Above level 8 or so, 3.5E combat tended to involve a lot of:

1. Text messaging
2. 2 people getting together to optimally create/manage characters for other games, or one person doing the same alone
3. Surfing the internet on laptops
4. Playing video games on laptops, handhelds, and phones
5. Knitting
6. Reading comic books from the stacks of the store we were playing at
7. Writing adventures for another game they are DMing
8. Crossword puzzles
9. Tuning out the world while listening to an iPod
10. Simply reading D&D sourcebooks brought to the game

I have honestly seen every one of these occur during 3.5E combat, and on multiple occasions. It just comes with the territory of 30 minute turns before your next chance to act.