D&D 3E/3.5 4E Ruined My Love For 3.5

[jeffhartsell]

... not tabletop wargaming with a story element on the side.

This is part of what 4e wants to do. Not that I mind because I love using minis and I enjoy TT wargames, but 4e does not have the magic bullet to solve RP woes. RP is all about the person and the group. We are an RP-lite group, but that has nothing to do with the rule system.

Our group is very excited about 4e, but not because we hate 3.5e. We just think 4e is looking like an improvement. Sort of like how 3.0 was an improvement over 2e.

But that starts the whole debate of 1e v any other edition. 1e was nice, but the XP charts, xp for gold, and so many other mechanics just end up not making sense. Just like the 3.5e power creep and decrease in playability as you level don't make sense. We are running Savage Tides and it is funny how high-level PCs work; our DM has to increase monster HP by multiples to make combats even somewhat challenging.

If you only use the PHB in 3.5 then the game become less broken, but then why stick with that edition?

 

[pukunui]

This is part of what 4e wants to do. Not that I mind because I love using minis and I enjoy TT wargames, but 4e does not have the magic bullet to solve RP woes. RP is all about the person and the group. We are an RP-lite group, but that has nothing to do with the rule system.

On the contrary, I think that the rule system can have an effect on the quantity (if not the quality) of the roleplaying. With 3.5, my group has found that we spend so much time getting bogged down in the minutiae of the rules that we simply don't get to spend as much time as we might like doing other things like roleplaying. Granted, a lot of it is probably inefficient use of the rules but even after several years of playing 3.5, during which time I constantly sought to streamline the game and make things move faster, we still found ourselves spending more time looking up this rule or that rule or trying to make something up on the odd occasion that the rules didn't explicitly cover the situation, that we not only didn't get as much social roleplaying in as we might have liked but our combats often ground down to "I rolled a 20. Does that hit?" "Yes." "OK, he takes 10 points of damage." "OK, thanks. Who's next?"

I laughed uproariously at the 3rd Edition part of the 4th Edition Announcement video (the "I want to grapple the troll" bit) because it's just so true. Very sad but very true.

 

[jeffhartsell]

IMO roleplaying is the dice-less part of the game; acting out the role you play. The social encounter system sounds like an attempt to codify how social skills can work in a dice-based encounter. This is because most of us are not really diplomats, bluffers, or very charismatic and cannot articulate as well as our characters should be able to act.

The skills are there in 3e to do a social encounter, but from the comments made it sounds like 4e is explaining how to use them instead of just explaining what they do.

Anyway, the grapple rules in 3e are convoluted and take away from game-time, but they don't discourage roleplaying. A group could be dice-less without any game system and still not be good at roleplaying, such as the movie "Leonard Part 6", a truely terrible role played by Bill Cosby.

A text book will only take people part of the way towards getting better at roleplaying. The rest is practice and a natural aptitude for it.

 

[pukunui]

IMO roleplaying is the dice-less part of the game; acting out the role you play.

Yes, indeed. I'm not disputing this.

Anyway, the grapple rules in 3e are convoluted and take away from game-time, but they don't discourage roleplaying.

I never said they did. I'm not talking about encouraging or discouraging roleplaying at all. What I'm talking about is simple time management. We found that we spent so much time consulting the rulebooks that we simply didn't have enough time to do the amount of roleplaying we would have liked to do in a particular session.

The reason that we are looking forward to 4e is because it claims to be simpler and more intuitive, which means less time spent looking in the rulebooks, which means more time spent roleplaying.

Does that clear things up at all?

 

[Wolfspider]

I can't go back to 3.x - it just seems clunky and out of date, both on a mechanics level and a fluff level.

How does fluff get out of date?

 

[Pierson_Lowgal]

After the last few sessions of our 3.5 game, when we talk about our 4th edition plans, the guy playing the 9th level cleric always holds up his character sheets and says, "I hate this spell list!"

 

[mhacdebhandia]

How does fluff get out of date?

Is every wizard like Merlin - or, worse, Gandalf?

 

[CleverNickName]

Is every wizard like Merlin - or, worse, Gandalf?

Only if your players want them to be.

 

[Cadfan]

There were also a few "problems I didn't know I had" moments in the 4e release.

It was kind of like... the first time I realized that I could just declare that players were taking 10 on spot checks. That's probably in the rulebook somewhere, but I hadn't noticed it. I'd always had players roll spot. Then someone suggested to me that, rather than have this awkward "everyone roll a spot check! Oh, no one made it, umm, continue on as if nothing happened!" moment, and the resulting heightened awareness of the metagaming players, I could just assume the characters took 10.

It was such an instant improvement! I hadn't realized I had a problem before because I didn't know there was an alternative. Then someone pointed out the alternative, I felt like an absolute moron, and I fixed the problem.

The 4e release had a few of those moments. Places where I had always assumed that things HAD to be a particular way, and that certain lumps were just a natural part of the D&D oatmeal, so to speak. And then it was explained to me how to avoid them, and I had the possibility of an entire game without the lumps offered to me. That's the worst metaphor ever, but it gets the point across.

The Book of Nine Swords had a similar effect on me during my 3e days. I hadn't exactly realized that martial melee combat sucked. I mean, I knew I didn't like it, but I figured it had to be that way. Then suddenly it didn't.

 

[hong]

Only if your players want them to be.

As soon as few enough players want to play Merlin or Gandalf, then fluff will be out of date.