David Noonan's historical perspective on 3.0 (Update: Part III posted)

[Desdichado]

I like multi-classing restrictions for the paladin and the monk. It made them standout and it always(especially initially) got the palyers interested in being that guy who was so devoted.

Your players are very different than mine. Mine immediately asked why that stupid rules was in there, and it was immediately the first house rule we implemented to get rid of it.

 

[Hairfoot]

Heh - I remember my first game of 3.0: the DM had us roll for initiative every round.

That's how I like to do it. It makes combat more challenging and unpredictable. I also like the C&C style of "half rounds", in which a round allows you to carry out a single action, rather than standard + move + swift. Again. it makes combat more dynamic.

 

[Li Shenron]

If the playtesters amount to the thousands, then I would seriously consider them as representative.

But 3e external playtesters were maybe 200 only (at leat those mentioned in the core books), and so far 4e platesters seem even less. I don't think it's a number large enough so that the designers should abdicate from their own judgement.

 

[DragonLancer]

Silly question time, but what is cyclical initiative?

 

[Snowy]

the idea of

bob, tim, george and I roll dice and get 4, 9, 3 and 92 respectively.

the combat then going

me
tim
bob
george
me
tim
bob
george
me
tim
bob

until its over rather than re rolling each round and having an order that keeps on changing. Means initiative decides who acts first and then that what everyone does takes "roughly" the same amount of time until they next act ( excluding readying ) so the order of actions saty the same.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I think Vancian spellcrafting will be the cyclical initiative of 4th Edition. With the caveat, of course, that no one who can comment on it has seen the rules yet. Nothing that has come out yet appears to compare to the multi-classing restricitions, although its unlikely it would; why write blogs about stuff that's going to stay the same?

 

[Raven Crowking]

So, you are saying the multi-classing limits on paladins/monks in 3E was the proper choice?

I am.

Of course, I still roll initiative every round, using 1d10+modifiers, so there you go.

 

[RFisher]

The thing about the Monk/Paladin multiclassing restrictions was that they came out & told us at every opportunity that they didn't feel this was essential & that it was only there 'cause the playtesters insisted.

It would've been even better if they'd actually put that in the text of the book itself.

 

[billd91]

If the playtesters amount to the thousands, then I would seriously consider them as representative.

But 3e external playtesters were maybe 200 only (at leat those mentioned in the core books), and so far 4e platesters seem even less. I don't think it's a number large enough so that the designers should abdicate from their own judgement.

Depends more on how they were selected than how many there actually are, at least as far as being able to infer the opinions of the gaming population as a whole.

 

[Glyfair]

Dave has posted Part III.

Historical Perspective on D&D 3.0, Part III: Here's my third rhetorical question: "What's going to be the druid companion of 4th edition?"

Sherman, set the wayback machine for spring, 2000. I'm DMing a playtest with the iconics you're now familiar with. Ed Stark is tired of playing Jozan the cleric, so he asks me, "Can I have Vadania the druid instead?"

(Ted asked me because one of the weird little side jobs I've had for eight years is "keeper of the playtest iconics." They exist as Excel spreadsheet character sheets, one worksheet per level. And they all have a bug that prints more than 19,000 copies of them unless you actively change the print quantity in the print dialog box every single time. But I digress.)

Sure you can, Ted.

The playtest was no big deal, really--I don't remember what we were actually testing. But we'd done the vast majority of our playtesting with what we called the "prefab four:" Tordek the fighter, Jozan the cleric, Lidda the cleric, and Mialee the wizard. Vadania was still awfully low-mileage.

About halfway through the playtest, Jeff Grubb (playing Tordek) mutters something about Vadania's bear showing him up. A few minutes later, he leans over and starts comparing the bear stats to Tordek's stats. And Tordek was outclassed in about every category. "Looks like Vadania is the bear's companion, not the other way around," he said.

Jokes aside, there was a collective gulp at the table. The animal companions were way, way too good. The 3.0 animal companion rules were based on the animal friendship spell, which set the Hit Dice cap for the companion at double your caster level. At 3rd level, Vadania's companion was a 6-HD brown bear with more than 50 hit points and multiple +11 attacks that 3rd-level Tordek could only dream of. But the Player's Handbook was already off to the printer--beyond our ability to change. What could we do?

Well, we did what we could. We snatched the Dungeon Master's Guide files back at the last possible moment and added a sidebar to page 46. The sidebar, crossing its metaphorical fingers, notes that the "double caster level in HD" rule is accurate..."under optimal conditions." Actually adventuring druids? They're limited to companion HD equal to their caster level.

(You can make a reasonable argument that HD = caster level is still too good. But it should be patently obvious that HD = 2 x caster level is pretty much loco.)

Absent desperation, we'd never write a rule like that, presenting some sort of nonadventuring standard as the default and then telling the adventurers (basically the only people that matter, because they're sitting at your table) that they need to use a different rule in a different book.

So, getting back to the rhetorical question, it's worthwhile for us to be on guard against things that might slip by because we haven't played with them enough. Thus the rhetorical question, "What's going to be the druid companion of 4th edition?" Hopefully we won't be making big changes in the bottom of the 9th inning.

This is what it sounds like when I knock on wood.