D&D General D&D Evolutions You Like and Dislike [+]

[payn]

Sure, you could play Druid as a healer in 3.x/PF1. But primary healer in those editions still was - cleric. Bards were crap healers, since they were not full casters (they only got 2 0lv spells at 1st level in 3.x, 1 slot of 1st lv in PF1 and they had very limited number of spells know, which was also fixed). But druids also prepared spells and they couldn't swap prepared spell for healing spell. Ability to convert any spell into healing spell was big deal with vancian style casting ( preparing each spell slot individually ) since you could prepare buffs/damage spells as a cleric and still, if need be, burn them for healing spells. In PF1, with channeling, cleric got even bigger buff to healing ability. Paladins? They were non casters for first 3 levels.

Now, it's been a while since i played 3.x, but PF1 i played in relativley recent times. I still can't remember what class was even close to being as good as cleric for primary healer. If you know, please, share.

Another dislike i remembered. Bards becoming full casters. Just no. They have enough other stuff going for them, they don't need full caster progression on top of that.

They later dropped the Oracle (close to cleric) and the Witch (close to Bard).

 

[CleverNickName]

Evolutions I don't like:

• I never cared for "damage on a miss." Probably never will.
• I wish they hadn't moved away from monster templates. I liked the versatility and customization they brought to the game.
• I never liked multiclassing in any edition. Someone saying "my adventurer is a fighter/sorcerer/wizard" makes about as much sense to me as someone saying "my doctor is a doctor/doctor/doctor."

Evolutions I do like? Pretty much all of it, but especially:

• I say this as someone who is a fan of math, loves math puzzles, and does statistics for fun: the d20 system was a huge improvement over THAC0, and I can never go back.
• I'm a big fan of the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic. I think it is far superior to the endless stack of bonuses and penalties of older editions, especially 3rd Edition/3.5 Edition.
• Magic item attunement slots. That was a brilliant way to solve the "Christmas Tree" issue I was having in earlier editions.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's because you're trying to do the DM's work for her. You roll the die, add your bonuses, and stop there. Leave it to the DM to do the rest, which includes factoring in the target's AC and any other mitigating elements, and tell you whether you hit or not.

I cannot help attempting to do the math. I'm literally not capable of not trying to do the math. So while I appreciate what you're saying, it doesn't help.

DMing herds of cats: the story of my life since 1984.

That said, I'm a herd-of-cats player at heart, mostly because I find just being a cog in a machine to be boring AF; even more so if we're just following orders laid down by some (in- or out-of-character) party leader type. No thanks.

Okay, but what if you...didn't use inherently pejorative terms for the one and terms you consider favorable for the other?

Like what if we called the herd-of-cats thing "total dysfunction" and, instead of seeing yourself as reduced to a mere "cog in a machine", instead viewed you as an essential teammate everyone relies on, such as "birds of a feather"? Like it seems like you've already set out to judge anything that isn't "nearly constant dysfunction" as turning you into nothing more than a tool being used by other people. That's a pretty jaundiced view of teamwork.

Good summary, and in principle I'm on board.

4e's own terminology really gets in the way, though, in naming one of the roles "leader". The minute I-as-player see that, I take it to mean that in-character I get to tell the others what to do...or the "leader" in the party gets to tell me what to do, whichever way around it might be...because that's what leaders do. And at most tables, that's just not gonna fly. Cue the arguments.

I was far, FAR, from alone in this interpretation.

Do you interpret "Fighter" as being one who is exclusively allowed to fight, and no other activities? Do you interpret at "Magic-User" as the only person allowed to use any form of magic?

All "leader" means is someone at the front. Remember, these terms are actually used in real life. They don't come from MMOs, or anything like them. They come from soccer. All three role titles come from association football, excluding Controller. A defender's job is to get in the face of opponent players and stop them from achieving their goals, and the two styles of 4e Defender (namely, "Marking" vs "Defender Aura") are genuinely based on the ways people approach defense in soccer: either you focus on specific players to oppose, harrying their movements, or you focus on specific areas, preventing the passage of the ball through them. And a leader...is literally a person who leads the ball, running ahead to set up a striker so that they can get the ball into the net.

It's literally using IRL teamwork words. All this stuff about literally being The Party's Leader is straight-up in your head.

That was one colossal error of, IMO, two. The other was their face-palm-worthy approach to marketing, which seemed intentionally designed to alienate pretty much everyone already playing any previous edition.

And yet it's happened every time. 5e crapped on 4e. 4e crapped on 3e. 3e crapped on 2e. If it's a fault of 4e, it's a fault of functionally every edition published this millennium.

I suspect 4e would also have been better received at launch had it all - or at least a lot more of it - been there up front, rather than having some parts intentionally delayed into a second (and third, if memory serves?) round of PH and DMGs.

Perhaps. But by that same token, there is only finite space in any given book. We cannot put everything into the first book. Some of the time, some things may need to just...wait, because books can't scale up to infinite size for fixed price.

And, to be clear here? The time span between PHB1 and PHB2 was nine months, June '08 to March '09. If you want to complain--as some already have!--that it was a cash-grab by inflating the number of books, then sure, go right ahead. But don't make it out to be this interminable wait to get core stuff. It took more than a year for 5e to publish its first supplement--and yes, there were things in it that I'm sure folks would have preferred appear in the PHB. (Some of them got put into the 2024 PHB, which is pretty telling.)

I remember on first reading the 4e core three (first set) thinking that while there was enough there to make it playable there was also a lot missing even when compaed to just the initial core three books from prior editions (1e and 3e in particular), and I wasn't about to wait and then go and buy a second round of books just to fill in those gaps.

If I may ask--what? Obviously it did not have the full slate of classes, as already recognized. But beyond that, what was so essential that you literally couldn't run even a short campaign with it? Again, nine months. And if you spent like $15 on a single month subscription to DDI, you'd get instant access to everything published--and because they were still using the offline tools at the time, you'd keep access to it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Evolutions I don't like:

• I never cared for "damage on a miss." Probably never will.
• I wish they hadn't moved away from monster templates. I liked the versatility and customization they brought to the game.
• I never liked multiclassing in any edition. Someone saying "my adventurer is a fighter/sorcerer/wizard" makes about as much sense to me as someone saying "my doctor is a doctor/doctor/doctor."

Evolutions I do like? Pretty much all of it, but especially:

• I say this as someone who is a fan of math, loves math puzzles, and does statistics for fun: the d20 system was a huge improvement over THAC0, and I can never go back.
• I'm a big fan of the Advantage/Disadvantage mechanic. I think it is far superior to the endless stack of bonuses and penalties of older editions, especially 3rd Edition/3.5 Edition.
• Magic item attunement slots. That was a brilliant way to solve the "Christmas Tree" issue I was having in earlier editions.

Might I ask what your issue with DoaM is? Because it's been part of D&D for ages. Heck, 5.5e has it too! The Graze mastery property is straight-up DoaM:

Mastery: Graze. If your attack roll with this weapon misses a creature, you can deal damage to that creature equal to the ability modifier you used to make the attack roll. This damage is the same type dealt by the weapon, and the damage can be increased only by increasing the ability modifier.​

And every single spell that includes damage for a successful saving throw is, definitionally, also damage on a miss. You missed them with that fireball, but they still took damage from it.

I'll grant you the templates thing. They were pretty good. I think 3e executed them poorly (as it did with many things),

I...don't really understand the analogy you've used for multiclassing. You've never been able to multiclass to the same class. So it would be more like "my scholar [a generic term for people who study] is a doctor/lawyer/architect". Which is a thing people could really do, if they wanted, though I imagine the continuing education classes would be rather a pain at some point!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Given that the opposite of "leader" is "follower", I don't see it as anything but the obvious interpretation: leaders lead and followers follow.

Problem is, not that many players want to play a follower.

But "follower" can mean "subordinate", or it can mean "second in line".

The person at the front of a line is the leader of that line. Does that also make them the person to whom everyone else owes fealty?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Whereas 1e was such a jumbled mess of contradiction, it forced possibility.

Uh...what?

I don't think that follows.

 

[Lanefan]

I cannot help attempting to do the math. I'm literally not capable of not trying to do the math. So while I appreciate what you're saying, it doesn't help.

Fair enough, though I think you're in the minority on that.

Okay, but what if you...didn't use inherently pejorative terms for the one and terms you consider favorable for the other?

Like what if we called the herd-of-cats thing "total dysfunction" and, instead of seeing yourself as reduced to a mere "cog in a machine", instead viewed you as an essential teammate everyone relies on, such as "birds of a feather"? Like it seems like you've already set out to judge anything that isn't "nearly constant dysfunction" as turning you into nothing more than a tool being used by other people. That's a pretty jaundiced view of teamwork.

Yes, it is a jaundiced view; because IME (both in-game and IRL) "teamwork" all too often consists of one person doing the thinking/planning and everyone else basically following orders. And I neither accept nor follow orders well in the least, but at the same time don't always want to be the one doing the thinking/planning for anyone other than myself.

If everyone thinking and acting for themselves is "total dysfunction" then so be it. In a typical D&D game I'd far rather have that than have a navy-seal team where everyone does exactly what they're told when they're told; and usually the reality ends up at a variable point along the spectrum between those, depending on a bunch of factors rarely if ever the same twice.

That said, what you refer to as total dysfunction in fact has one very important function: it's almost always the most entertaining and amusing type of play there is.

Do you interpret "Fighter" as being one who is exclusively allowed to fight, and no other activities? Do you interpret at "Magic-User" as the only person allowed to use any form of magic?

All "leader" means is someone at the front. Remember, these terms are actually used in real life. They don't come from MMOs, or anything like them. They come from soccer. All three role titles come from association football, excluding Controller. A defender's job is to get in the face of opponent players and stop them from achieving their goals, and the two styles of 4e Defender (namely, "Marking" vs "Defender Aura") are genuinely based on the ways people approach defense in soccer: either you focus on specific players to oppose, harrying their movements, or you focus on specific areas, preventing the passage of the ball through them. And a leader...is literally a person who leads the ball, running ahead to set up a striker so that they can get the ball into the net.

I've heard "defender" and "striker" often enough as football (soccer) terms but never "leader"; that's a new one on me, and I've followed football on at least a casual basis for many a year.

And yet it's happened every time. 5e crapped on 4e. 4e crapped on 3e. 3e crapped on 2e. If it's a fault of 4e, it's a fault of functionally every edition published this millennium.

In terms of player-base, there wasn't much 2e left to crap on when 3e came out; and perhaps more notably 2e didn't crap on 1e or B/X/BECMI. That's what made the 4e marketing strategy so jarring: it was a first, at least IME.

Perhaps. But by that same token, there is only finite space in any given book. We cannot put everything into the first book. Some of the time, some things may need to just...wait, because books can't scale up to infinite size for fixed price.

I'd give this more credence had PF1 not proven the opposite a year later. Those books were massive, and still sold pretty well ( I was at GenCon 2009 when PF1 was released, and you couldn't swing a cat without hitting someone holding a copy of that book!).

And, to be clear here? The time span between PHB1 and PHB2 was nine months, June '08 to March '09.

Unfortunately, the attention span I was willing to give it was more along the line of nine days*, after which I turned away...and in some disappointment, I might add: the build-up and pre-release booklets had my hopes up somewhat that 4e - unlike 3e - could and would be a system I'd either be willing to adopt wholesale or could find acceptable with minimal kitbashing. But, no such luck.

* - or however long it took me to read through the three books and realize what I was - and wasn't - seeing.

If I may ask--what? Obviously it did not have the full slate of classes, as already recognized. But beyond that, what was so essential that you literally couldn't run even a short campaign with it? Again, nine months. And if you spent like $15 on a single month subscription to DDI, you'd get instant access to everything published--and because they were still using the offline tools at the time, you'd keep access to it.

I don't remember what tech I had at the time but odds are very high it would have been too old/slow to run DDI, either then or soon after. Further, I seem to recall all reports on their big digital initiative - was it Gleemax? - pointing to no end of bugs and glitches and problems, which didn't exactly make me eager to leap into anything digital WotC were doing.

As for what else was missing other than some classes, my main recollections are of missing iconic monsters.

And sure, I most likely could have run a short campaign with it. But a short campaign was exactly what I didn't want at the time, as about 4-ish months before 4e came out I'd just started my latest long-running campaign (which is still going).

 

[Lanefan]

But "follower" can mean "subordinate", or it can mean "second in line".

The person at the front of a line is the leader of that line. Does that also make them the person to whom everyone else owes fealty?

No, but it does make them the person who, on changing the line's direction of travel, everyone else is likely to follow.

 

[GrimCo]

All three role titles come from association football, excluding Controller.

Just to add a bit here. There is absolutely controller in football. Central midfielder is exactly that. Luka Modrić is best example of modern controller in football. He dictates pace of the game, where ball goes, pulls opposing players from their zones. Pure field control.

Leader is more like captain/box to box midfielder. Think Toni Kroos.

And to use RM analogy, we also have Striker - CR7 and Defender- Sergio Ramos.

 

[LordBP]

I still dink around with a port (to the Unity system) of Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. It seems to be a pretty strong approximation of a TSR-era dungeon-crawl. Certainly Ultima, Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Final Fantasy, and Gauntlet are all D&D-like. I think that's why I always find the adjective 'video-gamey' as a descriptor of an RPG to be too vague to be of use. What makes it video-gamey?

It was just the feeling that I got while reading 3.0 and 3.5. Can't really say it was one thing or another.