Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4068720" data-attributes="member: 5143">D&D has been and will always be the game of killing things and taking their stuff.  Pretty much all the WOTC employees will tell you that.  Pretty much every official published adventure has been primarily about that.The default method of playing the game is pretty much: A string of combat encounters with a periodic social encounter strung together with at least a thin plot(sometimes a complex plot).Whenever the system is pushed to be used in other ways it pretty much always required large numbers of house rules or playing fast and loose with the rules at least.  In pretty much all editions.  You CAN stretch it to be a system to do other things, but it wasn't really designed for that.And part of the problem with 3rd Edition is that they finally decided to stretch it into a full blown physics simulator to allow it to be used for EVERYTHING.  It promised that you could finally do all the things you couldn't in previous editions.  However, it wasn't actually good at it.  Because there's no way to make a rule system that can simulate everything without it becoming extremely complex.Making an extremely complex system is fine for some people, however it slowly pushes new people away as the amount of things they need to know to play is fairly large.Compare 2nd Edition leveling to 3rd Edition(assuming you don't have things memorized):2nd:-Find the chart for your class in the book-See if your THACO, hitpoints and saves change and change the values on your character sheet-Choose new spells if you get them3rd:-Decide what class you want to go up in-Search the books for your possible options in order to decide(look through all the base classes, PrC, alternate class abilities, etc)-Find your number of skill points and spend them after looking up what your new class skills are-Check the chart to see if you gain new feats-Choose a feat from amongst a couple of hundred-Add BAB, saves, hitpoints-Write down your class abilities, making any choices as to which ones to get and how they will work-Choose spellsThe question is, what do you gain by all the added complexity that makes it worth it?  And what effect does it have on actual play?In my experience the main benefit to all these choices is that people look at all the options and say "Wow...I could build whatever sort of character I want.  I could be a guy who dabbled in necromantic magic before becoming a fighter then learned the strange art of psionics and then became a pacifist and a commoner and no longer uses his powers.  That's so awesome.  And I can get numerical bonuses for being a pacifist!"And I admit, it's good at simulating that nearly precisely.  Although its almost near certain that the character dropped into the AVERAGE game of D&D will be near impossible to play, or no fun, or will die quickly.I've seen it in play a number of times.  People who multiclassed in order to make the EXACT right character for them ending up with the ability to magic missile at 10th level as a 4th level caster and using it as their primary attack every round.  Then having their entire group get mad at them because they all die to a dragon when they only needed to do 10 damage to it but the character was incapable of getting past the dragon's spell resistance or hitting it with any weapons.In actual play most of those options are BAD ideas.  Great for roleplaying, poor for actual play.  I've also seen new players completely paralyzed by options, even with just the core rules.  And when they do choose, it is fairly often something that is tactically a bad idea for them because they don't know that skill focus(knowledge(nature)) is not a good feat.And that's mostly what you get from a system that is entirely tools with nearly no guidance.  There have been a number of times that I've wished I could go back to the days of 2nd edition if only to stop dealing with the headache of playing with other people who were of no help whatsoever in combat and then playing 3 hours worth of combat watching them delay while reading a book.</blockquote>

Verification