Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9364257" data-attributes="member: 6877472">3e quickly developed a sort of odd culture where you could go to any internet forum, and people talked as if every new option in every new book that wasn't strictly optional was 100% available (and somehow a few Unearthed Arcana things snuck in there as well), and how dare any DM make changes to the sacred RAW- do you want to totally wreck the balance of the game?!And hyperbole aside, there were things you could change that could easily tilt the game's design, like old-school cheapskate DM's wanting to keep their players poor until the inevitable TPK...or DM's like me who were a little generous with things like rolling for stats and bonus Feats and a few extra magic items here and there who suddenly had characters tearing through difficult encounters like the monsters were made of cardboard!But even if you played the game precisely as written, you came to realize that the entire game was built on assumptions that would never survive actual play.  Not ever group has a four-man party of Fighter/Rogue/Cleric/Wizard.  Not everyone played a Human, cared only about damage dealing, and took only vanilla Feats that granted numeric advantages.  Some of the most busted things in the game were in the PHB, and there was a lot of useless cruft in the PHB as well.3.x thus ended up pretty much exactly where 2e had been, with tons of crazy ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck, a plethora of wacky options to work with, and some obviously far superior to others. Except now everything was being examined with a microscope, picked apart, dissected, scrutinized, examined, and debated online so that anyone with an internet connection had access to a "completely understood" metagame...which quickly fell apart the instant it came into contact with any custom content or rulings by a DM!Add onto this all the shared horror stories of DM power trips (of which there were sadly many from the pre-internet era, where people put up with a lot of nonsense because...what choice did you have?), and suddenly any DM who didn't let you play your Half-Giant Warblade/Warmind 5 (to totally bust Elder Mountain Hammer with Sweeping Strike) and didn't let you have the exact magic items your build needed, was a total jerk who didn't understand how the game was run, man!As a player, I really loved 3.x.  But I wouldn't want to DM for it again.</blockquote>

Verification