A Thread For Those Somewhere In The Middle

[pogre]

I don't know if I count as neutral because I am buying the first three books when they come out. I'm going to run a campaign with the new rules. My players and I will evaluate which edition is more fun for us and this will dictate whether we continue with the new edition.

So, I'm not completely bailing on 3.x, but just test driving the new edition.

I'm lucky in one regard - I run pretty much a core only campaign. That means my investment in 3.5 was considerably less than others. I can understand their resistance given the investment they have in the previous edition.

Staying with just the first three core books this time looks like it could be tougher. So 4e is going to have to be better for me to truly invest in the game.

 

[Li Shenron]

Hussar's comment are interesting as usual.

3e's flavour was locked incredibly tightly into the rules.

I usually think that 3e allows for very good flexibility in the flavor, as long as you don't try to step out of some of the core assumptions, such as the power of spellcasters or the magic item quantity. On a smaller scale, it is instead quite easy to write up or modify classes, feats, spells etc because it's quite modular.

But indeed there is some sort of "lock" between flavor and rules. Just to make a very small example, weapons are designed in a certain way so that the game assumes that every sword has a 19-20/x2 critical, and every axe has 20/x3. The type of critical could be a tactical choice for your character, while the weapon "image" could be a flavor choice. The two choices are locked, you cannot make one without locking yourself with the other. You can of course house rule something, but it's like the ruleset assumes the lock is good. In OD&D all weapons did the same damage, so the flavor choice was free: the downside is that there is no tactical option at all of course, but still the feeling it gives you is that there is no lock.

What 3e didn't have in core was any actual flavor to go with all that crunch.

This can be either good or bad depending on how you ask. Some gamers want flavor in the core, and despise a RPG which is just a "tool", they want a world ready to be played. Others do not want the flavor defined, but exactly want only a tool to which they can apply their favourite flavor (homebrew or from an existing setting).

Personally, I think that 3e fell in the middle. Some common ground of flavor was there, in the choice of races, classes, spells and magic items. But these are so modular that it's easy to remove those which don't fit with your favourite flavor, and add new ones. OA you mentioned is just a good example, and IMHO Rokugan is even better: they removed classes which don't fit (cleric, druid, paladin, bard, wizard), adjusted those which were almost ok (barbarian, ranger), kept some untouched (monk, sorcerer, fighter, rogue), and added new ones (shugenja, inkyo, ninja, samurai, courtier). That is IMHO a nice feature of the system.

So, it looked like you could do all these weird and wonderfully different campaigns with D&D 3e right out of the box. Until, that is, you actually tried to run campaigns which deviated from baseline norms. Suddenly vast swaths of problems crop up. Go too low on magic items and casters dominate. Lower the powers of casters and you suddenly make the game so lethal at higher levels that it's unplayable because you don't have healers.

Indeed, you cannot easily remove those few basic assumptions of 3e. I would have wanted a low-magic-items game sometimes, but if I just lower them I suddenly have difficult problems in choosing monsters for the adventures. If someone want a world where spellcasters don't have truly amazing spells (the higher levels), you easily end up with spellcasters being near-useless when the game goes high in level.

Fact it, I don't know yet any ruleset that allows flexibility to such extreme degree that you can really create anything between no-magic and anime. I believe that at a certain point every system is limited to its basic assumptions, and if you want to go beyond you really just have to switch to another system.

 

[Hussar]

Hussar's comment are interesting as usual.

*snip for brilliant commentary*

You're going to make me blush.

Heh. I think we're in agreement here though. I think the confusion comes when people try to think of D20=D&D. It doesn't. D20 is like GURPS - more or less basic game mechanics divorced of flavor to a large extent. D&D is on flavor of D20 and it's flavor in 3e is dictated to a fairly large degree IMO by the core assumptions.

The further you deviate from those assumptions, the more work you have to do to make D&D fit. Making d20 fit isn't all that difficult, as Li Shenron says, it's pretty modular. Pull out classes X, Y and Z and replace with A,B and C and you have a different game.

 

[Li Shenron]

You're going to make me blush.

Let's not go farther, Eric's grandma's watching, ok?

 

[TerraDave]

The Problem of Flavour:

As someone has posted on both sides of issues, it is clear there is a challenge here.

Is 3rd ed short of style and flavour: YES.
Could 3rd ed use more: YES
Is 4th ed trying to reinject some: YES

BUT: Not all flavour taste good.

The attempt to inject Big Bold Flavour into 4th ed is having predictable results: people are saying "what is this taste".

I feel that the edition with the best style (not rules, not design, not player options, not the technical skills of the artists, not readability, not usability, but style) was 1st edition AD&D. It just had a certain attitude that permeated everything. And things where not glossed over or dumbed down or mainstreamed to appeal to a certain kind of reader.

BUT, as Cam Banks has pointed out in another thread, how you do this is key. The style was most visible in artifacts, adventures, monster right ups, the art, the general tone. But in other ways, the game was wide open, and vast room was left for the imagination. There where no Golden Wyvern Adapts, unless the DM said so.

Bottom line: 4th edition should have more flavour, but the designers need to do a better job in "cooking it", and not shove it down peoples throats.

 

[TerraDave]

Flavour addendum

Flavour vs. world: there is overlap, and Hussar makes the good point on how 3ed assumes some pretty specific things on the world in its mechanics (as do all editions). But what is really needed is more style and tone then very specific world things beyond all those (races, classes) you are already stuck with. The irony is that it is not in WotC interest to have too much world. They want to sell you that separately, and the Realms will be available in 08.

Flavour, 3rded and 3rd parties: I think it is worth noting that others did show you could combine style with 3rd edition: Necromancer, Green Ronin, Malhavoc, and Pazio all come to mind. Either by going old school, or being very “contemporary”, there is some good flavor there. Even WotC did with say Eberon. Not my style, but it does have some.

 

[Hussar]

The style was most visible in artifacts, adventures, monster right ups, the art, the general tone. But in other ways, the game was wide open, and vast room was left for the imagination. There where no Golden Wyvern Adapts, unless the DM said so.

No, but there was a whole host of things for earlier editions that had no other source than someone's idea. Remember that many of D&D's most iconic elements have no prior history. Beholders for example. Think about it for a second. One of the most powerful, most iconic monsters for any edition of D&D is a floating eyeball that shoots lasers.

Imagine, for a second, if beholders were suddenly being brought up now. Do you think they would have half the traction that they have? Or would they be panned as ridiculously stupid critters that are pretty much unusable? I don't know. But, I do think that people tend to forget how much of D&D has no basis in what came before and was created pretty much whole cloth for D&D.

While the idea of dark elves certainly has floated around, Drow are NOT that. S&M lesbian men haters isn't exactly Brother's Grimm. Githyanki? Borrowed from a Martin SF novel and the backstory ripped from a Larry Niven SF story.

Sure, artifacts had lots of flavour. But, they were all Greyhawk flavour and if you didn't play Greyhawk, this got ignored. And, because they were artifacts, you couldn't exactly toss them into your campaign whenever you liked.

 

[TerraDave]

Hmm, I don't really disagree with any of that (but who says male drow weren't loved, they where the wizard/magic users afterall).

If anything, this shows the genius of the old approach. No beholder, no problem. Want to use beholders: no problem. Same goes for the Throne of the Gods and lots of other things. But all this set a certain tone for those DMs looking for inspiration. (Style is also good for the PCs, but again my point is how you work it in, and it can be indirect). (Also, on those artifacts, many where not created by Gygax--ie eye and hand of vecna--and many are actually pretty general).

 

[KoshPWNZYou]

Wait, these aren't the same thing?

I kid, I kid. A little.

You beat me to it. Really though ... at will spells? Wizards in armor? No more save or die? The game moves a bit farther from the Gygaxian every day.

I'm definitely in the middle. Actually, more on the outside. I don't care too much one way or another about any of the rules/fluff revelations that WoTC make, though I enjoy observing the community's reaction to those revelations. The final product could be a total bomb, badly watered down, unbalanced rules, with the corniest fluff we've ever seen (Flumph level of corny) ... but as long as I've got a good DM (myself included, of course) and good players, I'll probably have a lot of fun using it.

 

[Roland55]

I assert my neutrality!!

By affirming my agreement ... with your neutrality,

While still claiming that my own neutrality is unique and different.


[P.S. I'm neutral toward 4E because I don't know what this beast is yet. And neither do you.]