Be honest, how long would it really take you to notice all of this stuff...?

[Wolfskin]

EDIT: sorry, wrong thread

 

[diaglo]

[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION] if you ran a quick poll (and it's probably already been done, I just don't have time to look for it) you probably would find that wealth-by-level wasn't adhered to very often in 3.x games.

Lanefan

the way i mostly encountered wealth by level was in character creation. when the DM wanted us to created PCs at higher than lvl 1.
or when the DM used it for figuring out if an NPC had the wealth required to have what we wanted to buy and such.

but yeah, i agree with Lanefan mostly.

 

[diaglo]

Well, the Human Commoner entry in the playtest's Bestiary has nothing but 10s in its ability scores, so I'd say 5e assumes PCs are extraordinary specimens.

I don't quite understand what use is the Human Commoner in the Bestiary, though.

since the birth of D&D in 1973 and print in 1974 humans and everything else you encounter is a monster. only the PCs are not.

 

[Hussar]

Again, taking wealth by level, I'd say this is a concept that has been adhered to for a long, long time.

If my 3rd level party (any edition) has 150000 gp worth of equipment, what would be your reaction as a DM? I'd say most DM's would be looking at that pretty askance and words like "Monty Haul" would be floating up. Why? Because we've given out far more treasure than is expected for that level. D&D is chock a block with advice on how to avoid this pitfall in campaign design.

Conversely, a 10th level group with 1000 gp worth of equipment between them is a pretty far outlier as well. It would not be expected. Heck, even AD&D had tables for generating higher level PC's which included magic items. And followers that were higher than first level (such as a cleric or fighter might gain) had greater wealth than lower level ones.

Sure, it might not be exactly on the nose, but, I'm willing to bet that there was closer adherence to wealth by level than not. Certainly within tolerances for the game. I know my players, in any edition, got a bit antsy if they thought the loot wasn't forthcoming enough. I doubt I'm the only DM in the world who has had players grumble about not having enough cool toys.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

IME, 3e was what killed any notion of RAW play.

My own personal history of messing with the game rules matches your perception, but the sense I get from others is that I'm very atypical. In my naivety as a young 2e gamer, I assumed that there was a good reason for each and every rule, despite how hair-brained 2e is in retrospect. It seems that every time a pre-WotC edition comes up, those who played it agree that you almost have to house rule it due to contradictions and vagaries.

I went through a sort of rules-awareness awakening during my 3.x years, and ended up with a truly massive set of house rules. And you're probably right that groups who follow all of the RAW are rare, but I never met a DM who did 1% of the rules tinkering that I did, and even most forum-goers seemed to be happy enough with the RAW to mostly stick to it.

I certainly agree that 4e is much more transparent than any previous edition, though that doesn't stop a lot of DMs from thinking that it's difficult to house rule. I myself only had 2-3 house rules before I began DMing C4, and that's more than any 4e DM I know.

So anyhow, I wouldn't take my own data points as evidence of any larger trend. Even if everyone could agree that X% of gamers follow Y% of the rules, pretty much everyone could use the numbers to defend their own position.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I've definitely seen the 3rd level party with more than 150,000 gp in equipment. Not as the typical party, for sure, but it's there. Heck, we had one game with a 2nd level character starting off with an artifact for no real reason. (I mean a real artifact-level weapon with commensurate power that wasn't deus ex machina-ed away after a session or anything).

It depends on what you'd consider the tolerance to be. The only use I've ever had for the WBL charts is to triple them and round off for starting characters, which is on the low end of what I've seen other DMs do. And then some people run low magic games. It varies considerably.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently. No problems with that. My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do. It's a fallacy. You have no way of knowing how other people played...

Exactly.

 

[sheadunne]

Whereas, for me, RAW play was far, far more common in 3e than in earlier editions. Firstly, if you think that the number of variants and whatnot was somehow greater for 3e, you haven't looked at how much material got pumped out for 2e. Secondly, you have 1e, where virtually no one played by RAW because no one could actually understand the rules as written because sometimes they really made no sense (1e initiative rules, I'm looking at you).

RAW play was pretty much standard AFAIC and IME in 3e. Now, that's not saying that it was absolutely, 100% adhered to. Of course not. But, you could be pretty close most of the time. I never saw a single player ever try to make his own character class, for example. Not once. Not in 3e. Saw it loads of times in AD&D, but never in 3e. And the number of "Core Only" DM's out there for 3e was hardly insignificant. Sticking to Core was the standard response to any balance issues in 3e.

Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently. No problems with that. My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do. It's a fallacy. You have no way of knowing how other people played, and trying to make your own personal play style seem like the norm is pretty much the standard line to take for any edition warring. "Well, everyone plays this way, so, everyone else is just doing it wrong" is how it sounds, even if that's not the point you are trying to make.

In all my groups in 3x/pathfinder we have always played pretty strictly by RAW. House rules were rare except for points of clarification when the rules were ambiguous. Same with WBL. I usually track my characters WBL and if we're below expectation I make sure to let the DM know (most of the time it's because s/he didn't adjust for the number of players) and if it's over I usually find a non optimized way of filtering it out, such as donating it to a church, overpaying for things, etc. I don't particular like 3x/PF when it deviates too far from the RAW expectations.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Look, Ahn, I don't doubt that people played differently. No problems with that. My issue was with your claim that most people played the way you do.

I'm not claiming that, and have never even hinted at that. As a matter of principle, if I thought I was playing "typical" D&D, I'd stop and do something else. So I assume exactly the opposite of what you're trying to say.

I'm not claiming that I know what people do, only that I know one particular thing they don't do, namely hew precisely to guidelines in the books. The variety of other possibilities for what they're doing is well outside of the purview of my knowledge.

 

[Ahnehnois]

My own personal history of messing with the game rules matches your perception, but the sense I get from others is that I'm very atypical. In my naivety as a young 2e gamer, I assumed that there was a good reason for each and every rule, despite how hair-brained 2e is in retrospect. It seems that every time a pre-WotC edition comes up, those who played it agree that you almost have to house rule it due to contradictions and vagaries.

Probably age is a significant issue here. 2e was long-lived. There are a lot of people who started on it, and thus played it perhaps somewhat naively. ENW's demographic being what it is, there aren't that many such people here.

I went through a sort of rules-awareness awakening during my 3.x years, and ended up with a truly massive set of house rules. And you're probably right that groups who follow all of the RAW are rare, but I never met a DM who did 1% of the rules tinkering that I did, and even most forum-goers seemed to be happy enough with the RAW to mostly stick to it.

The irony for me is that I've never met a DM who was anywhere near as obsessed with RAW play as I am, and I've been walking over the books from day 1. I think our experience is probably atypical in that, as ENWorlders, we're relatively obsessive about this hobby; we know the rules, and we study them. If anything, I'd guess most people are much farther out in the weeds than the average poster here.