D&D 3E/3.5 4E reminded me how much I like 3E

[Steely Dan]

It certainly did. Was this codified in the rules somewhere, or did it emerge naturally?

And if it emerged on its own, whose "fault" is it? And why don't you just... stop?



(Also, I don't know what you're doing changing the color, size, and font of every one of your replies, but it really makes an annoying mess of trying to quote you. Oh, and it doesn't show up anyway.)

Yeah, I've tried to be reasonable, but you are simply too antagonistic and passive aggressive to bother with, so I think it's time to click the old ignore.

…Too bad.

 

[Hussar]

/snip I've always preferred to use groups of foes (which bizarrely I now get told I couldn't do with 3e, and yet somehow I did it anyway) so admittedly I made the situation more difficult than it would be if I was just throwing single monsters at the PCs (since all of the enemies are taking advantage of the buffs).

(and really, if a creature has an at-will spell-like ability that provides a buff - include the effects of that in the creature's stats!)

Oh, sure, you could do it in 3e. But it required a huge amount of work and pretty much every module designer out there realized that it's incredibly difficult to keep balanced. Either the encounters are cake or they steam roll the PC's.

Granted, using classed monsters would help here IMO. Keeps the individual creatures on the weak end of the CR, so adding a few (or more than a few) to the mix won't make a huge difference.

I think where you'll see a huge difference is if you try to use standard monsters in large groups. After about four, maybe five monsters, you're flying in the dark as to how the encounter will roll out.

One of the most egregious examples of this I saw was in the World's Largest Dungeon. In one of the highest level areas, they built up the EL by using large groups of formian workers, in another they used basic Derro. The party just walked all over the encounters. Didn't even break a sweat. Waded through armies of these guys and didn't even bother with spells. I think the wizard was using daggers and still killing every round.

Total, complete let down.

So, Spatula, yes, you are right, you can do it. However, it is not easy and it can fail spectacularly very quickly.

On a side note - the reason the argument about stat blocks morphed is because the original comment was somewhat unclear. Why did Rounser claim that there was a need for software to write NPC stat blocks? IMO, the need comes from the fact that stat blocks are really, really hard to write.

Raven Crowking - someone questioned you about the amount of prep time it takes in 3e? I hope that wasn't an allusion to me, because as far as I know, I've always said that 3e takes too long to prep and that's been the prevailing opinion around here for a long time.

 

[Mercule]

And yea, the heavens opened up, and light shown down, and 4e arrived on a golden cloud to deliver the masses. "You do not have to sweat the small stuff. You may fudge, o my people..."

Funny (I say that w/o sarcasm).

My preference to 4e isn't that it gave me "permission", but that it makes it easier to deal with only the important bits. Sure, you can shave some off the stat blocks in 3e, but 4e has less white noise to doing it.

4E made me miss 1E. Seriously[i/] miss it. While I dearly love 3E and the degree of character customization it allows, one thing that I have learned to truly despise is the idea of Game Balance.

Kind of agree. When I dropped 2e, I said I'd never do another class/level based RPG. Looking at 4e, I'm not entirely sold (though I do see enough interesting to make me want to give it a good try). But, it actually got me to consider breaking out my 1e books again.

I'd been disaffected with 3e for quite some time before 4e was even announced, and just trying to wrap up a campaign that was designed to close out my 20+ year old home brew setting. It's not like the spirit of 4e made the scales fall away from my eyes.

My main issue with "Balance" isn't that everyone has something guaranteed to put them in the limelight. It's that the only balance is in combat. I've always enjoyed playing non-combat characters (I've even played a pacifist ranger in 2e -- no spells, can't use combat). In 1e/2e, combat was quick enough that you could stand to be minimally effective in combat without feeling like you wasted your evening. It was a great feeling to let the meat shields and artillery do their interchangeable functions, but be the only guy who could get out of the traps, over the gaping pit, or whatever. That's my kind of limelight. I don't need an equal share of blood on my hands.

This is a concern, IMO, with 4e.

What has become of the moment in the story where "Swords are no more use here;" the point when it becomes obvious that it's down to the sorcerer calling on his deepest magical reserves to do battle with the noisome eldritch obscenity which mere mortals can do naught but quake in fear of?

Oddly enough, one of the things I miss about 1e is that I hate that tipping point. But, 1e was set up in such a way that, if it suited your group's style, you could keep the martial/stealth characters in the foreground and leave the wizards as advisers, lackeys, or background characters. Or, things could be as you said. It all depended on group style. I never could get that formula to work in 3e.

This is an area where it looks like 4e is an improvement. Even with the emphasis on balance, I'm getting the feeling that group style of "mages rock" vs. "fighters rock" will be more able to be incorporated.

That doesn't mean I don't agree with you about balance, though. At least with the general spirit of the argument.

It certainly did. Was this codified in the rules somewhere, or did it emerge naturally?

I think it intentionally informed the design of the rules. Yes, a strong DM and/or appropriately inclined group of players can ignore it. When I have multiple game systems from which to choose, though, I see no reason to piss into the wind.

Every game has some warts. Every game supports certain play styles better than others. For the style of play I want, I find 3e frustrating. It was a hard realization to come to, because I appreciate many of the elements in principle.

What kills me is that one of the big things that brought me back to D&D was the 3e idea that monsters were built using (basically) the same rules as PCs. One of my biggest gripes with 1e/2e was that there were times an NPC could do something just because he was an NPC. In practice, I've learned that statistically equivalent NPCs and PCs are not practically equivalent. The 4e abstract rules for building NPCs appeal to me a lot more, right now. Sure, you can impose an abstraction on 3e, but why build a meta-system when there's a system that's got it built in?

 

[DaveMage]

Yeah, I've tried to be reasonable, but you are simply too antagonistic and passive aggressive to bother with, so I think it's time to click the old ignore.

…Too bad.

You're talking about Wulf? Ooookay.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

My main issue with "Balance" isn't that everyone has something guaranteed to put them in the limelight. It's that the only balance is in combat. I've always enjoyed playing non-combat characters (I've even played a pacifist ranger in 2e -- no spells, can't use combat). In 1e/2e, combat was quick enough that you could stand to be minimally effective in combat without feeling like you wasted your evening. It was a great feeling to let the meat shields and artillery do their interchangeable functions, but be the only guy who could get out of the traps, over the gaping pit, or whatever. That's my kind of limelight. I don't need an equal share of blood on my hands.

This is a concern, IMO, with 4e.

I can see that. I don't know when it started, but I suppose it might just be the fact that D&D came from wargaming. Combat is a time sink in 3E and 4E.
I think that is why the "combat balance" is so important, too - if you spend more then a half of your game session with combat, you don't want to play a character that is useless in that time.

If D&D 4 had gone a different route - away from a complex, tactical combat game - balance in combat would not have become so important. But I am not sure the game would be automatically better for it - just different. Of course, the 4E is set-up - if you don't want to deal with combat, every character has a good chance to contribute outside of combat, too - you don't have expensive cross-class skill cost or max rank limitations - everyone can try to be a social, a knowledgeable, a perceptive or a stealthy guy now, too (of course, few could pull all off at the same time, but that's okay for non-combat stuff. There is little to gain if you have a group with two "faces" or two sages...)

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

I think where you'll see a huge difference is if you try to use standard monsters in large groups. After about four, maybe five monsters, you're flying in the dark as to how the encounter will roll out.

One of the most egregious examples of this I saw was in the World's Largest Dungeon. In one of the highest level areas, they built up the EL by using large groups of formian workers, in another they used basic Derro. The party just walked all over the encounters. Didn't even break a sweat. Waded through armies of these guys and didn't even bother with spells. I think the wizard was using daggers and still killing every round.

Total, complete let down.

4e got this right.

You can get a satisfactory result from 3e by increasing PC hit points (the most direct way to increase PC staying power without affecting offense) and at higher levels, finding a mechanic to mitigate Save-or-Die (and other mechanisms that bypass those bonus hit points).

4e falls down a bit here because it nerfed Save or Die too drastically.

I like Save or Die. I like the tension that it brings to the table.

Neither system works perfectly for me.

The 4e abstract rules for building NPCs appeal to me a lot more, right now. Sure, you can impose an abstraction on 3e, but why build a meta-system when there's a system that's got it built in?

I'm not trying to present this single issue as a choice between 4e and 3e. I think what I am saying is that 3e and 4e both have their good points, and their bad points. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that 4e can remove a lot of the stumbling blocks of 3e. But it does this at the expense of adding other stumbling blocks of its own.

So for me, it's a case of trying to figure out which version is going to be more annoying for me to get running the way I want it to run.

4e may yet win that war, I don't know. Right now the GSL is keeping me from having much interest in 4e, because so much of my interest in 3e is predicated on the hobby of 3e design. (Yet another facet of away from the table stuff.)

 

[MrGrenadine]

On DM authority: How am I supposed to know how much authority I have - either DM or player - if the book doesn't tell me? Even assuming we're all great pals and we all trust each other, how are we suppoesd to know what we can do and what we can't if it's not in the book?

I'm open to the possibility that you're being sarcastic, but on the off-chance that you're seriously asking, the answer is that the DM has all the authority that the players allow her to have. Also...you don't need the rulebooks.

Specifically, you absolutely do not need the rulebooks to tell you what you, as a DM, can do or what you can't. That's for you to decide. The rulebooks give you guidelines for character creation and methods of resolution for events that come up during the story--thats all. Your players want to do something thats not in the rulebook? Great! Just let them do it, or think up some quick way to resolve it, based on similar rules (or not) from the books.

Also, the players don't need the rulebooks to tell them what they can or can't do, either--they just need their imaginations, the DM, and their own willingness to comply with the DM's decisions.

I mean, as a player I could say, "And this NPC is my long-lost brother!" Do I have the authority to have that statement accepted in the gameworld? Is it true? If it is, or isn't, how am I supposed to know that without reading the rules of the game?

The relationship between the players and DM is different in every group, so this could be fine in some campaigns, and off-limits in others. A good rule of thumb--if it concerns your character's actions and/or feelings, anything goes. But anything that has repercussions on the game world, the story and/or the other characters should probably be run by the DM first, to make sure you don't step on anything that the DM has planned.

 

[WayneLigon]

Magic-Users were more powerful than Fighters because that's how it is; this is the way magic and the supernatural has been portrayed in fantasy literature, myth, and legend for hundreds and thousands of years.

Until you reach the 1950's, almost all spellcasters in books or myths are bad guys. Merlin is about the only recognizable 'spellcaster' that comes to mind that isn't an outright enemy of the sword- and spear-weilding heroes and even he's in that grey area. Now what that means is that generally the mage gets his butt handed to him by children with rocks, the kid with a spear or sword, or whatever. Usually they have to outwit him but more than half the time when it comes down to a contest between steel and magic, steel wins every time.

Even in modern books, very few mages have the sheer versatility and power that a high-level D&D wizard possesses. They typically have one or the other, and even then they get put in their place more often than not by rogues and warriors.

In other words, as has been pointed out in many other places, the only literary genre D&D has ever modeled is itself. To make it model a particular genre or sub-genre you generally have to start writing house rules. The very first thing that changes is the magic system.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

You're talking about Wulf? Ooookay.

Well that's twice he's called me passive-aggressive in this thread, and I guess one of us doesn't know what the term means.

I am trying to be as direct (and confrontational-- not antagonistic) as possible, without being a jerk.

 

[grickherder]

It certainly did. Was this codified in the rules somewhere, or did it emerge naturally?

And if it emerged on its own, whose "fault" is it? And why don't you just... stop?

I would say that if it emerges naturally from play, the system/rules itself produced it. And just stopping means that in some part, one would be fighting against the rules rather than having them work for you.

One thing I really like about 4E is the return to a hallmark of old school D&D. The importance of in game credibility being sourced in DM rulings rather than in game rules. Rulings vs. rules is one of the areas where 3.x radically departed from the D&D that came before it. I'm glad the course has been corrected.