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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8229294" data-attributes="member: 18">It was nowhere near as bad as 3.XE, as that link serves to illustrate. The sheer number of assumptions and optional rules and stuff the DM would have had to specifically authorize is huge - for example he's taking classes from two hard-incompatible settings, Dark Sun and the Forgotten Realms. He later takes other stuff from other incompatible settings like Lankhmar. That's not genuine charop, that's just lazy cheating. Genuine charop sticks within what is actually doable. Whereas with 3.XE you could break it with a relatively small amount of stuff, virtually all of which was treated as "default" stuff. Optional things just elevated the level of broken you could reach. Indeed it broke itself due to LFQW if your players were roughly equally competent to each other, by somewhere in the 9 to 12 range.So it's not a helpful comparison for you point at all, given the cheating and so on.The biggest flaw with 3E, for my group's money, though, was the anti-permissive design.In 2E, if you wanted to do something non-standard, the DM usually worked it out as a single roll of some kind, and the rules advice seemed to suggest this. Very often it was an attack roll at -4. This was fine, and encouraged players to take risks, and do fun things and helped keep martials from being boring. Likewise there was no need for a grid and the AoO rules were limited to specific situations and oft-forgotten.Not so 3E.With 3E, there were rules for virtually everything, and what those rules amounted to was very often making multiple checks to perform would likely have been one roll in 3E, and quite possibly incurring multiple AoOs in the process. This gradually crushed the spirit of my group. Casters were also much more obviously overpowered (something PF totally failed to deal with) than 2E, and were increasingly OP from an earlier level. But it was the endless rules, often with relatively high DCs, or large penalties if you lacked a specific Feat, that really crushed them. I always find it ironic people complain about 4E not allowing stunts and so on, when it had a whole set of rules specifically allow stunts and so on (in the core books even!), and in fact making them borderline overpowered. 3E was the game that killed stunts.But [USER=5948]@humble minion[/USER] makes a valid point, which is that 2E was pretty much in tatters when 3E came along. It had a rules system that was pretty much two decades out of date by 2000, and major changes needed to be made if D&D was played again, and for all that 3E had wrong with it (which was a LOT), if it hadn't happened, I doubt we'd be playing D&D today, or even spin-off games. That might not be a bad thing, but it'd definitely be a different thing.</blockquote>

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