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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 3337689" data-attributes="member: 49613">I have played and DM'ed Classic, 2e and 3.0 and I've played 1e and 3.5.I would definitely suggest staying with 2e.  One of the last sessions of 3.5 I played was with a mid-level party of 6 characters encountering and battling about an equal number of skilled opponents, including a small dragon.  This fight lasted hours.  The session ran so long people's wives were actually pestering them to pack it up for the night.  And even though pretty much the whole session was just that one fight, and it drug on for hours, the fight wasn't even exciting.  Why?  Because it was really just a miniatures wargame.  It was all about Five-Foot Steps and exact demarcations of Areas of Effect and "Dave, move your guy into Flanking Position" and so on.  It didn't have any life or soul.  Nobody swung on a rope over a pit, nobody  kicked the evil high priest's wand out of his hand, nobody gave anybody a boost up to a ledge where he could do an end-run around the bad guys.  All that would have been too complicated I guess.  Instead, it was just a drawn-out version of a fight you might play in one of the Baldur's Gate engine computer games, but without the sound effects or flashing colors (and moving much slower).I never had experiences like that in 2e.  I remember DM'ing for a group that raided this orc temple to rescue an Orcish Princess (my little twist) from a rival faction.  In the course of the combat there were all sorts of swashbuckling antics, a large central pit containing an angry bear became an element that people were getting knocked into, and one guy even raided the wyvern aerie on the top floor and "barnstormed" the main area (send the bad guys rolling, of course!).  And that didn't take all day and it was fun, full of things never tried before or since (because there were no rules for them so it's all just the DM making calls on the spot) and it was exciting.  Everybody had fun, because for one thing they were able to do whatever cool stuff they wanted... if they made the roll.Anyway, in my personal opinion I've come to the conclusion that the high level of "rulesyness", i.e. the attempt to have a rule for everything and everything under a rule, drains all the life and imagination out of 3e.  Does your character want to run along the boom of a sailing ship and then jump off, tackling the pirate leader?  Well, you can't unless you bought "Heroes of the High Seas" and your character took the "Boomrunner" feat as well as the "Flying Tackle" feat from "Heroes of the Far East".  Why is that stricture there?  Because while Bill wants his character to do this action, Dave actually went out and bought those books to get some of the feats from them.  Which means Dave wasted his money and his feat choices if anybody is allowed to have those "powers".  Now combine that with the tactical emphasis on battlemaps and minis and you have a game that no longer possesses, in my opinion, the freewheeling and "wahoo!" spirit of the old days.  One might combine those two adjectives into one term: "adventure".</blockquote>

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