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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ulrick" data-source="post: 6064475" data-attributes="member: 775">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.</blockquote>

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