I think of it this way - if there is any period in which there are enough folks who really liked the content of that period enough to raise a stink about you calling it a "Dark Age", then it wasn't a particularly dark age.
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Do we live in the d20 Dark Ages?
- Thread starter Ulrick
- Start date
I think of it this way - if there is any period in which there are enough folks who really liked the content of that period enough to raise a stink about you calling it a "Dark Age", then it wasn't a particularly dark age.
Orius
Legend
Hmm, looks like a good reference, I should save it somewhere. Though it does look like that file does include some stuff that were houserules and the like from the net, so not all of it is official. It also appears to be missing the proficiencies from Spells and Magic Also, 2e had seperate proficiencies for things that were combined in 3e like Perform, Craft, Profession, and Knowlege, that contributes a bit to the bloat.
If I were to go back to 2e, it would largely be because I have a much more extensive 2e library and more material to draw upon than 3e. (I showed off most of the books in this post, that doesn't count the boxed sets (Tales of the Lance, Return to the Tomb of Horrors, Night Below, and a bunch of Planescape material)). A lot of my stuff is core, the only setting I really grabbed a lot of material for was Planescape.
Back in early 3e, I converted a few things here and there but now if I wanted to use it, I think maybe I'd just play 2e with a bit of houseruling. A lot of that material did get converted, but it's scattered around all sorts of 3e splats, and trying to pick all that stuff up would be inconvenient.
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Stormonu
Legend
I think the only Dark Age for D&D might have been the span of time between them going bankrupt and the emergence of 3E. The memory is somewhat faint now, but for around 3-5 months D&D's fate was up in the air and even when it was snatched from death by WotC, I seem to recall there was very little new product being trotted out until 3E's release. We were getting things like the Wizard's Spell Compendium and such, which were compilations of past glories.
Hussar
Legend
Wow, really?
I had nothing but problems in 2e games. Constant arguments over rulings, constantly having to tinker with mechanics, frequently horrendously broken material from TSR that obviously had never come anywhere near a playtester, never mind an editor.
3e works pretty much out of the box. Most questions get answered in a two minute rule lookup. Other than some pretty wonky corner cases like Grapple rules, 3e was so much easier for me to run and play than any earlier edition.
I mean, heck, there's a reason that the 3e crowd absolutely dwarfed the 2e crowd. If 3e was harder to run than 2e, wouldn't groups have stuck with 2e?
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
Never had many of those problems. We had rule discussions but rarely arguments. We respected the DM's authority to run the game and he respected he rules knowledge of experienced players at the table. We didn't play with dicks.
We did tinker with mechanics, sure, but we did it because we wanted to improve or tailor a good game, not "fix" a bad one.
But 3e has its problems and complexities as well. Attacks of opportunity, subtle differences between full round actions and one round casting times, complex feats, and, perhaps even more to the point, rules written in a more comprehensive style leading, in my experience, to more rule arguments over the inconsistencies that could not be finally quashed from the system.
Don't get me wrong, advancements in the rules made a member of the 3e family my favorite flavor of D&D. That's [notranslate]Pathfinder[/notranslate]. But 2e is my second favorite. It surpasses 3e in a number of ways, one of which, I found was ease of running the game.
I'm not really sure the 3e crowd dwarfed the 2e one, frankly. 3e made a big splash, but I don't have the impression it's a much bigger crowd than 2e. 2e faced a lot of stiff competition and was hampered by mismanagement, yet it remained the #1 RPG except for the brief time cash flow kept its products from the market. 3e generated a lot of buzz and benefited from a lot of special circumstances, but I'm not sure that really translated into bigger numbers more than an impression of bigger numbers, if you catch my meaning.
Ulrick
First Post
In my experience, groups did stick with 2e and even 1e. Maybe there were just more 2e and 1e diehards in my neck of the woods, but I was the only one running 3e in my college gaming club for over a year after 3e came out.
And I was okay with 3e, for awhile. It was the game of choice and I could fill my tables with it or 3.5e. Yet unless you used modules and stayed away from creating your own stuff, DMing became a chore, especially at higher levels, because you had to keep track of all the rules, character abilities, NPC, so on. (I know this is an extreme case, but have you seen Kyuss's statblock in Dungeon #135?)
Overtime, I think, running D&D limited the DM's options. For those who just wanted to run a game "as is", 3e, 3.5e. and 4e work fine. But those who like to tinker, adjust things, make stuff up, D&D became more restrictive.
This part of my "Dark Age" theory, which I've yet to mention. The role of a DM became less of a rules interpreter and more of rules quoter. This shift came from the top down, instead of just providing modules and supplements to aid a DM in running his campaigns, TSR shifted to providing whole campaign worlds--and all of the rules within those campaign worlds, much of which were broken in my mind. Because of this, the rules became more and more important in the minds of the players and DMs, rather than just seeing the rules as guidelines.
1989 to 2000 was the transition period for this (again, I'm sure some will argue that this shift started happening as early as 1983). We got introduced to splatbooks, the Player's Option Guides, and whole libraries of campaign world fluff and crunch.
In all of this, how could concerns over balance between player-characters not be ignored? And how do you attempt restore balance? More rules.
Hence, 3e and the d20 system.
And I was okay with 3e, for awhile. It was the game of choice and I could fill my tables with it or 3.5e. Yet unless you used modules and stayed away from creating your own stuff, DMing became a chore, especially at higher levels, because you had to keep track of all the rules, character abilities, NPC, so on. (I know this is an extreme case, but have you seen Kyuss's statblock in Dungeon #135?)
Overtime, I think, running D&D limited the DM's options. For those who just wanted to run a game "as is", 3e, 3.5e. and 4e work fine. But those who like to tinker, adjust things, make stuff up, D&D became more restrictive.
This part of my "Dark Age" theory, which I've yet to mention. The role of a DM became less of a rules interpreter and more of rules quoter. This shift came from the top down, instead of just providing modules and supplements to aid a DM in running his campaigns, TSR shifted to providing whole campaign worlds--and all of the rules within those campaign worlds, much of which were broken in my mind. Because of this, the rules became more and more important in the minds of the players and DMs, rather than just seeing the rules as guidelines.
1989 to 2000 was the transition period for this (again, I'm sure some will argue that this shift started happening as early as 1983). We got introduced to splatbooks, the Player's Option Guides, and whole libraries of campaign world fluff and crunch.
In all of this, how could concerns over balance between player-characters not be ignored? And how do you attempt restore balance? More rules.
Hence, 3e and the d20 system.
Hussar
Legend
Yeah. Not really buying it. Until 4e came along, 2e was pretty much forgotten on these boards. If there was this large number of 2e players currently playing out there, where were they? Dragonsfoot is pretty solidly 1e. The OSR is very solidly 1e. OSRIC is 1e. And the rest of the Internet was 3e. If there was this segment of gamers in similar nmbers to 3e players, they were awfully damn quiet.
Heck, ten years later and we still have virtually no 2e retroclones. That's an awfully quiet fan base.
Heck, ten years later and we still have virtually no 2e retroclones. That's an awfully quiet fan base.
Bedrockgames
Legend
I think most of the people who still like 2E, myself included, made the switch to 3E. I didn't know that many people who held out when 3E was released. Mt made the switch, and maybe misssed some of the ways things were done under 2E but just tried to make third edition play more like second. That said, there is a growing interestin 2E out there. It isnt huge, but I have found lots o fothers who gamed in the 90s and are up for an occassional second edition campaign.
The other thing is, 2E isnt all that different from 1E, so I think many who might be inclined toward that edition, are basically satisfied by the stuff the OSR is doing with 1E.
Cleon
Legend
That's pretty much how it was for me. My D&D gaming started out 1st Edition AD&D, and the 2nd edition stuff just seems more of the same. Heck, I was using BECMI stuff without bothering to change much, too.
The systems were so similar it was easy to interchange bits and pieces or use whole adventures basically as-is. 3E and 4E are a lot more incompatible with earlier forms of D&D and each other.
