An Examination of Differences between Editions

[Reynard]

We need to loose this hard-won nerd elitism, this required reading list, this idea of the DM as some sacred seat of ancient power, all these barriers to making someone choose D&D instead of Scrabble and WoW for a night. Tear down the walls! Join the mewling masses fascinated by polygons and pixels! We're all gamers in the end.

Which i think is pretty much the point of the current crop of 3.5 adventures and Dm assistance products. WotC is actually trying to hit a couple of demographics at once these days: the high investment player that wants to really delve into the meachnical elements of character design, and the low investment DM who wants to be able to run an adventure with minimal investment outside of the game. What i don't see a lot of that I would like to see is stuff for the high investment DM -- worldbuilding tools, DIY materials, etc...* -- and the low investment player -- "Hero Builders Guidebook" type stuff.

I bet you could sell a pre-levelled 1 to 20 character of any given cool archetype as a 19.95, loose leaf softcover with special abilities, assumed buffs and all that sort of thing worked out and explained in plain language. Imagine Conan from level 1 to 20, optimized and geared up, for the casual player in an easy to use and easy to read format. It'd sell very well, i think. High investment players wouldn't want it (except maybe to tear it apart and show how their build pwnz it) but low investment players -- and I think there are lots of them out there -- would eat it up: all the benefits of "character build" with none of the work. it is the opposite side of the same coin that is making the Devle Format and the MMM style the new deal for DMs.

*I have not seen Cityscape or Dungeonscape, so i don't know if these are toolboxes like I am suggesting, or just lists of pre-rendered materials for the low investment DM.

 

[DM-Rocco]

Yeah, my friend Upper_Krust tried to run one of the Bloodstone modules; I got so bored I quit.

See, that is all in the DM. I ran through it once and I DMed it once. While it was just nuts it was also a lot of fun, with the right DM.

You can't do it today though. Back then, the difference between a 100th level adventure and a 30th level adventure was about 200 hit points and that was it. Today, if you have a 10tth level character versus 30th level, you are talking about an extra 25-45 feats, 70-1000 skill points and so much money and powerful items the Gods would fear you.

 

[Imaro]

So you have to work harder for the same rewards. It's like someone telling me they'll give me $5 if I sit at home for an hour, and someone offering me $5 if I go work in the salt mines for an hour.



Closer to it. And it's a topic called out in the post insulting the CRPG, too: the idea that somehow playing D&D is more elite, that it's higher status or makes you a better person is kind of ingrained here.

But not everyone takes some sort of justification from putting in a lot of work into creating an imaginary world of frolicking fairies. Most people, in fact, don't. A lot of demanding hard work and advanced knowledge is a barrier to getting into the game, a wall that's completely unnecessary. It should be easy to pick up a bag of dice and a module and a group of friends and blow a night having fun and killin' monsters and tellin' stories 'round the beer and pretzels.

But right now in the game, it takes a lot of hard work to be able to do that. All that hard work designing a world, balancing the party, adapting a module, arranging the schedules of 4-6 busy adults, bringing them all together in one location, and getting into the spirit of the adventure...

The challenge, in this edition and going forward, isn't to get people to understand that it's going to be a lot of hard work to get their imaginary elf. It's in making sure that there is as little hard work as possible to get to their imaginary elf. Because competitors are offering imaginary elves at the push of a button.

We need to loose this hard-won nerd elitism, this required reading list, this idea of the DM as some sacred seat of ancient power, all these barriers to making someone choose D&D instead of Scrabble and WoW for a night. Tear down the walls! Join the mewling masses fascinated by polygons and pixels! We're all gamers in the end.

There's my soapbox.

Hey get a copy of the Castles and Crusades PHB, a copy of Monsters and Treasures, and a good module and you got everything you're looking for in simplicity, less work and more time for fun, that's almosst as fast to set up as a WoW account. IMHO of course

 

[molonel]

You apparently missed the smiley. It was a joke.

Smilies are ambiguous.

Hey get a copy of the Castles and Crusades PHB, a copy of Monsters and Treasures, and a good module and you got everything you're looking for in simplicity, less work and more time for fun, that's almosst as fast to set up as a WoW account. IMHO of course

Then you have a game that you have to learn, and then recruit people to play. Maybe you'll find a good group. Maybe you won't. I know plenty of folks who have problems finding a gaming group. With WoW, you have 8,000,000 people you can game with 24/7 anywhere you have a computer and an internet connection.

I prefer pen and paper RPGs. I prefer face to face games. I prefer pizza boxes and empty Mt. Dew bottles rolling around on the table, and dice. And Castles & Crusades, along with the Saga edition of the Star Wars game and the Conan OGL revised edition, are on my list of books to buy sometime this year.

But in many ways, WoW is an easier community to plug into. If you're any good, you will have people actively recruiting for their guilds and setting up raids weekly, if not nightly.

You could do what you suggested. You could spend $50 + S&H for the books and a module. But it's not really "simpler" to put together a gaming group and write your own adventures. It's my preferred cup of tea, but I can easily understand why other people choose differently.

 

[Imaro]

Then you have a game that you have to learn, and then recruit people to play. Maybe you'll find a good group. Maybe you won't. I know plenty of folks who have problems finding a gaming group. With WoW, you have 8,000,000 people you can game with 24/7 anywhere you have a computer and an internet connection.

I prefer pen and paper RPGs. I prefer face to face games. I prefer pizza boxes and empty Mt. Dew bottles rolling around on the table, and dice. And Castles & Crusades, along with the Saga edition of the Star Wars game and the Conan OGL revised edition, are on my list of books to buy sometime this year.

But in many ways, WoW is an easier community to plug into. If you're any good, you will have people actively recruiting for their guilds and setting up raids weekly, if not nightly.

You could do what you suggested. You could spend $50 + S&H for the books and a module. But it's not really "simpler" to put together a gaming group and write your own adventures. It's my preferred cup of tea, but I can easily understand why other people choose differently.

I was more so talking about less of a "rules buy in" for players and DM's. I think this is one of the failures of 3.x... I mean it's a great game but it is soooo far gone from the make up a character in five minutes and get playing model, it's almost ridiculous. D&D once was a game where it was almost pick-up and play. Characters could be made in about five minutes and a module run afterwards. Now, unless you use pre-gens(which in my mind kind of makes all the "options" of 3.x pointless) it's taking almost a whole game session just to get everybody's characters up and ready to go(especially if you've only got one book.).

 

[I'm A Banana]

I do think 3.5 can learn a lot from Castles and Crusades. If it's one thing I think 3.5 needs it's to keep the available options and to make things more simple, more free-flowing. For this reason, I like True20 quite a bit, as it works out like a very simplified 3.5.

Which i think is pretty much the point of the current crop of 3.5 adventures and Dm assistance products. WotC is actually trying to hit a couple of demographics at once these days: the high investment player that wants to really delve into the meachnical elements of character design, and the low investment DM who wants to be able to run an adventure with minimal investment outside of the game. What i don't see a lot of that I would like to see is stuff for the high investment DM -- worldbuilding tools, DIY materials, etc...* -- and the low investment player -- "Hero Builders Guidebook" type stuff.

I bet you could sell a pre-levelled 1 to 20 character of any given cool archetype as a 19.95, loose leaf softcover with special abilities, assumed buffs and all that sort of thing worked out and explained in plain language. Imagine Conan from level 1 to 20, optimized and geared up, for the casual player in an easy to use and easy to read format. It'd sell very well, i think. High investment players wouldn't want it (except maybe to tear it apart and show how their build pwnz it) but low investment players -- and I think there are lots of them out there -- would eat it up: all the benefits of "character build" with none of the work. it is the opposite side of the same coin that is making the Devle Format and the MMM style the new deal for DMs.

Yeah, I pretty much agree with all of that. The "Hero Books" would be the other side of the "Adventure Path" coin. You could even include custom builds or new feats or variations on the theme to make it a bit more deep.

I don't think 3e has had a really good "toolkit" book in the WotC vein since the Manual of the Planes. The Heroes Of series isn't too bad in that respect, either. But the company is definitely focused now on things that make the DM's job easier, not on things to launch the DM's imagination.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Now, unless you use pre-gens(which in my mind kind of makes all the "options" of 3.x pointless) it's taking almost a whole game session just to get everybody's characters up and ready to go(especially if you've only got one book.).

I don't agree, unless you're starting at mid-level or higher. At low levels D&D still does a good job of hiding complexity, that's the beauty of the level system. Compare that with Champions where all the complexity hits you in character gen.

 

[Celebrim]

High level 1e play was entirely broken...Looking at high level modules like Queen of the Demonweb Pits and Isle of the Ape, the primary source of challenge seemed to be stripping abilities away from the PC's in order to tone them down. Nerfing or banning spells, lowering plusses on weapons, blocking access to clerics regaining spells, that sort of thing.

High level play in 3rd edition works much the same way, but it goes about it in a much more standardized and subtle way. The primary source of challenge is that at high levels, most of your foes are going to have significant immunities - to polymorph, to level drain, to ability damage, to disentigrate, and so forth. That and signficant resistances effectively does the exact same thing as nerfing or banning spells. I can also think of several 3rd edition modules (World's Largest Dungeon and Boneyard) that involved nerfing abilities in a more wholesale way.

 

[Imaro]

I don't agree, unless you're starting at mid-level or higher. At low levels D&D still does a good job of hiding complexity, that's the beauty of the level system. Compare that with Champions where all the complexity hits you in character gen.

Even at low level you have numerous options: class, race, feats, skills, spells, etc. On top of this there is a vastly increased gulf of knowledge needed to both play the game and construct your character than in former editions. If you don't know how the game works, how can you pick feats and assign points to skills. Some will argue, just limit options or assign a feat, but then I don't see where this is any different from a game like C&C where class abilities are set to easily make sure a starting character can accomplish his role in the party. It doesn't hide complexity because everything is really interlocked. I have to understand the combat rules to pick a feat for my fighter, gotta understand how skills and DC's work to pick skills for my rogue, gotta understand spells before...you get the picure. Now if you handwave this and select for them for the player or just say tell me what your character wants to do and give them feats and skills based on that...then you can do the same thing for a point system game.

Another thing is that all these choices affect your progression at later levels, so you do have to think about them and understand how they tie into the rules system as a whole.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Where C&C falls short is that it doesn't do the options that are needed once the basics get old. For some, the basics will never get old, but I hate playing a fighter who is exactly like every other fighter except for the name on the character sheet. Truly, that's a major place where earlier editions fall short for me.

Because, yes, I *can* differentiate based solely on role-playing, but why would I when I have the option to do it based on role-playing *and* based on mechanics? If Bob the Fighter and Steve the Fighter can do different things, it helps make my play experience more novel and new, which is more fun for me.