No - 3e had a completely different set of goals than 1e had. (Although, it should be noted, not all that different from some incarnations of 2e.)
I was referring to 3e being designed on the same plane as its d20 offshoots; Modern and SW and so on. I don't know that 3e has the same goals as 2e or 1e did. I would imagine not. Neither does 5e.
For me, D&D is something very specific. It's a game about exploring dungeons (or other dangerous locales), fighting dragons (or other dangerous enemies), looting treasure, and getting better at exploring/fighting/looting. If D&D isn't the best game at these, no matter what else it's doing anywhere else in the system, it fails for me.
That's fair enough. I would expect a game with D&D on the label to deliver that. However, I think it's become a great deal more than that, to the point where it is functioning as the generic fantasy rpg, even if it wasn't originally intended to do that.
3e, on the other hand, pretty soundly failed at all of it for me. It took me a while to figure out why, but it's the least "D&D" to me of all the editions because it shares the fewest goals.
That may be. However, 3e is the best generic genre/world simulator by a mile (of the D&D editions, anyway). 5e, according to its goals of capturing all editions of D&D, kind of has to cast a net big enough to include this.
But even more than that - it focuses too much on the stuff that happens between adventures, so much so that for many people that's become what D&D is about. 2e really started this ball rolling - it was mired in the 90's when dungeoncrawling was getting a bad rap - but 3e continued down that same vein and took it to an even bigger extreme where skills weren't just a sideshow but a central feature for every character, where NPC classes were a "thing", and where treasure was all of a sudden a mutant point-buy power-up system. That's simply not what I want out of D&D at all. (Again, all IMO - I know that's exactly what some folks want.)
That's all fine and good, but as you note, it's not even one edition. 2e and 3e both broadened the focus of the game. Did this move it away from its dungeoncrawling roots? Absolutely. Is it less "D&D" because of that? I suppose that depends on one's perspective.
But again, if 5e is really going to capture everyone, it can't just be about a competitive "Hunger Games" style dungeoncrawl where each class's contributions are being tracked on some imaginary scorecard. It can have that, but it can't be just that.
As for the second part - you're consistent, but what you're describing is nothing that I associate with D&D. Not with its legacy, and not with its most important goals. D&D is a game where you should be able to say, "I'm a 9th level Fighter" and that should communicate something important about who your character is and what your character does.
In 3e, it communicates that you don't understand how prestige classes work. That being said, I'm not sure what the big deal is here. Regardless of whether a character is built class-based or not, you really have to read the whole character sheet to get enough information to convey the complete set of capacities of an entire person.
Dissolving a vibrant and useful class-based approach in the interest of serving simulation is just bizarre to me when there's so many other games that don't use classes or levels already.
Couldn't you say the same of anything though? Classic D&D doesn't have a maneuver system. Tons of other rpgs do. If you want a maneuver system, just play Iron Heroes (where Mearls should have stayed), or some other game that does. Dissolving a simple d20-based approach in favor of a more complex scheme serves what exactly?
I don't see how saying "I attack the goblin", rolling a d20, and not saying or doing anything else is not D&D enough. That's what all those old-school fighters were doing over and over again. Sounds pretty D&D-ish to me.
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Really? Because to me, that's completely the opposite. Third is the most radical edition change ever because of its free and open multiclassing. It takes the paradigm the game was built on--class based niche division--and moves it towards a point by system.
I don't think it's that radical. Already 2e had proliferated splatbooks that tore the old class niches apart. D&D had gone from fighting man and magic user to dozens of classes that hybridized all the old niches and combined abilities freely. Multiclassing and dual-classing became the norm. Kits and NWPs were all the rage, which amount to either rebuilding your class to do what you want, or adding abilities completely independently of class.
Skills, feats, and open multiclassing are certainly different, but they're a logical next step in the direction the game was already going: towards more flexible and open-ended character creation and away from artificial niche protection. We still haven't taken the next steps (merging feats and class abilities and merging skills and all the other d20 rolls) after fifteen years, which I think is rather odd.
Hussar said:
if you go through the entire 4e PHB, you'll find about 4 martial powers that cause enemies to move without actually physically interacting with them. The entire bit of edition warring about how 4e allowed martial characters to mind control boils down to far, far less than 1% of the powers in the PHB. It was one choice out of 4 for the given level where it appeared. You could easily remove those four powers and no one would ever notice.
We've also established that the same is true of all those "broken" 3e (and previous) spells. If you really can't handle the polymorphs and calling spells, there aren't that many of them, and most of them are high level and out of reach for most characters anyway. And yet you seem rather concerned about them.
