Asmor's dealbreaker list

[Asmor]

*Too long to prepare. Unless you fudge things, which I usually did, altering monsters in most meaningful ways, or creating high-level humanoid NPCs, was incredibly boring and tedious.

*Combat didn't feel dynamic. Usually your best choice was pretty obvious, and most of the time it was "Stand there and full attack." Your most meaningful choice each turn shouldn't be how many points to sink into power attack.

*Low-level casters (Wizards especially) suck. They suck to play as and they suck to play against.

*High-level casters. I once spent all night picking out spells for a level 18 sorceress I was making for a soon-to-be epic game. Talk about a resource-management nightmare! I actually wanted the character to be a wizard, but that would have meant spending even more time figuring out what I wanted to memorize.

*Multiclassing, as far as casters are concerned, is broken and completely useless, barring certain prestige classes (Mystic Theurge, for example). Even then, until you've taken a few levels of the prestige class, you're still way behind the power curve.

*Narrow fun range. Low-level characters go down too fast and don't have enough interesting options. High-level combat is too swingy and is almost invariably a slaughter; the only question is whether the monsters or the PCs are doing the slaughtering. High-level combats take too long to run, high-level characters have too many resources at their disposal, and the huge number of options often leads to analysis paralysis. It was a relief to me when we stepped outside of reality and got TPKed by Erythnul when the previously-mentioned game got into the epic tiers, because it meant we could start anew at a more sane power level.

*Almost everything I've seen about 4th edition, I really, really like. Not really a dealbreaker for 3.5, but provides yet another strong impetus to switch. The only thing about 4th edition I've disliked was the thing about counting diagonals, and I've warmed to that.

So these are the reasons that I will not run a 3.5 game ever again, and why it would take a lot of convincing to get me to play one. Viva la 4e!

 

[Jack99]

Signed.

 

[OchreJelly]

The game prep thing is huge for me. Recently, I needed a bunch of drow for a 3.5 adventure I was running. After seeing some 4E monsters, I was thunderstruck looking at the 1st lvl drow warrior entry in the 3.5 MM. 4E pretty much ruined the MM for me. They may as well not have bothered using most of a page to stat that out, and instead said something like: create a classed NPC of appropriate level, add this SR, and these spell-like abilities.

The ready-out-of-the-book aspect is also great because the stat blocks are clean and easy to read. I never could use MM as a reference at the table, and always copied and pasted what I needed from the SRD. That double-duty I won't miss... sorry, I'm rambling now.

 

[Wormwood]

So these are the reasons that I will not run a 3.5 game ever again, and why it would take a lot of convincing to get me to play one. Viva la 4e!

*applause*

 

[pawsplay]

I ran a 3.5 game last night. My players delved into a forgotten crypt of a demigod. After choosing their weapons and tactics, they attacked a stone golem and prevailed. Upon opening the sacrophagi, they took the legendary spear of Zigun, awakening his bride, a mummified high priestess. Dessicated bodies in the crypt reanimated as mummies, blocking the PCs inside a long, low room. There were three full attacks in the entire battle. There were, however, several charges, a fireburst spell, a firebreathing mummy, kneeling, blinding spells, the spear's unusual power to absorb spells, readied counterspells, flanking, and grabbing of various items. I ran the game by the book, using no houseruled creatures or items of any kind, apart from the spear itself (an artifact of my own creation). It was fun, very fun.

Mostly, I find prep time for 3.5 to be minimal. Certainly, creating NPCs or tweaking monsters is easier than creating new monsters from whole cloth. In my experience, spending a lot of time on NPCs and monsters is more a sign of indecision than mechanical complexity. The math is very simple.

 

[Praeden]

I ran a 3.5 game last night. My players delved into a forgotten crypt of a demigod. After choosing their weapons and tactics, they attacked a stone golem and prevailed. Upon opening the sacrophagi, they took the legendary spear of Zigun, awakening his bride, a mummified high priestess. Dessicated bodies in the crypt reanimated as mummies, blocking the PCs inside a long, low room. There were three full attacks in the entire battle. There were, however, several charges, a fireburst spell, a firebreathing mummy, kneeling, blinding spells, the spear's unusual power to absorb spells, readied counterspells, flanking, and grabbing of various items. I ran the game by the book, using no houseruled creatures or items of any kind, apart from the spear itself (an artifact of my own creation). It was fun, very fun.

I'm curious as to why you decided to add kneeling to the list of combat highlights. Especially when everyone knows the 3.5 rules for kneeling are totally broken.

 

[mmadsen]

So these are the reasons that I will not run a 3.5 game ever again, and why it would take a lot of convincing to get me to play one. Viva la 4e!

If you did not enjoy 3.5E -- or certain elements of it -- is 4E automatically the answer?

 

[Mort_Q]

... is 4E automatically the answer?

It is one possible answer.

It's an answer that is less labour intensive than house-ruling away all the stuff I don't like about 3.x, which is what I was doing.

Time will tell.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, since I did it for the other one...

*Too long to prepare. Unless you fudge things, which I usually did, altering monsters in most meaningful ways, or creating high-level humanoid NPCs, was incredibly boring and tedious.

Not in my experience. I'm a very improv-heavy DM, meaning, I prepare as little as possible before the game. A little thought about the kind of plot I want driving over to the place, maybe, but almost nothing.

It works pretty well in 3e.

Of course, I don't labor under any obsessive need to get things "right" for my home game. Just "fun." I also use a lot of published products -- Elder Evils and Exemplars of Evil were GREAT additions to my game, and I've been clamoring for a "monster manual of NPC's" for a while. I can be laborious to design, but I don't care about design when I'm bopping around my own table.

*Combat didn't feel dynamic. Usually your best choice was pretty obvious, and most of the time it was "Stand there and full attack." Your most meaningful choice each turn shouldn't be how many points to sink into power attack.

Oddly enough, I've seen this be a "DM problem" more than a "system problem." 3e has a LOT of good environmental rules -- heat, fire, lava, smoke, ice, weather....the dungeon features were very detailed, and easy to use as set pieces. Any DM worth his flamboyant purple cape doesn't just have a party and BBEG in an empty room. Any DM who DOES have that scenario is going to be boring.

*Low-level casters (Wizards especially) suck. They suck to play as and they suck to play against.

Not IMXP. A magical market and ready availability of scrolls and wands help remedy the slightly small number of spells/day (if you actually suffer under that). I don't have a lot of experience against spellcasters of any sort, since, as I mentiond, I'm improv-heavy, so I don't design NPC's myself very often. But the few spellcasting monsters I found quite thematic, and the few spellcasting pre-prepared NPC's I've used have always been concentrated on a theme, as well.

And, again, I didn't labor under the Sysphean desire to get the NPC "right" before I plopped him down and had him launch spells. I just had one or two or four spell effects I wanted to deliver, and I hand-waved the rest.

*High-level casters. I once spent all night picking out spells for a level 18 sorceress I was making for a soon-to-be epic game. Talk about a resource-management nightmare! I actually wanted the character to be a wizard, but that would have meant spending even more time figuring out what I wanted to memorize.

As above. Thematic choices + "I don't need to get it totally 100% statted" worked endlessly in my favor here.

*Multiclassing, as far as casters are concerned, is broken and completely useless, barring certain prestige classes (Mystic Theurge, for example). Even then, until you've taken a few levels of the prestige class, you're still way behind the power curve.

Yeah, by the RAW, this kind of blew. I managed a few adept house rules for it, that mostly fixed the problem, so I didn't really have this problem for long.

*Narrow fun range. Low-level characters go down too fast and don't have enough interesting options. High-level combat is too swingy and is almost invariably a slaughter; the only question is whether the monsters or the PCs are doing the slaughtering. High-level combats take too long to run, high-level characters have too many resources at their disposal, and the huge number of options often leads to analysis paralysis. It was a relief to me when we stepped outside of reality and got TPKed by Erythnul when the previously-mentioned game got into the epic tiers, because it meant we could start anew at a more sane power level.

I'm mostly with you here. Combat overall was very binary, and unwieldy at high levels while not feeling very fantastic at low levels. The "middle range" was usually more than enough for my campaigns (which tended to be short), though.

*Almost everything I've seen about 4th edition, I really, really like. Not really a dealbreaker for 3.5, but provides yet another strong impetus to switch. The only thing about 4th edition I've disliked was the thing about counting diagonals, and I've warmed to that.

....Oh, so this is more a list of reasons you're switching, rather than a list of things you don't like in a game?

The biggest annoyance in 4e for me so far are overzealous trufans who act like 3e killed puppies and that 4e will give them all free ice cream.

And, really, that's more than enough to make me very wary of the game.

 

[WanderingMonster]

Prep-time is a HUGE issue for me. Planning to enjoyment ratio for 3.Xe is about 1:1. That's not too bad, but we might be talking about 4-6 hours of sometimes tedious tasks prior to a play session. And if you're lucky, your players will experience 1/2 your prepared content.

If 4e can make the ratio more like 1:2 (even 1:1.5 wouldn't be bad), then I am 100% sold. I'd rather spend my time making maps and designing set-piece encounters than leveling up an evil shaman that I'm not going to bother to name, or advancing a beast so that it's thematically and level appropriate.

I like D&D as it is. If they didn't have a new edition on deck, I'd be content. But if they can deliver on this issue (as they have alluded to), then I will be one deliriously happy DM.