Does 3E/3.5 dictate a certain style of play?

[Kurotowa]

If you really want to go ahead with that, let me echo the people suggesting you look at Iron Heroes or Black Company or one of the varient systems that supports it. Heck, there are games out there besides D&D to try. But in D&D 3.5 the warrior types really need their magical gear to keep up with the casters. Without items a Wizard's spell does just as many d6 damage, a Cleric's buffs are just as strong, and the poor Fighter and Rogue hit less often for less damage while taking more hits themselves.

(Note that how strongly this shows depends on party level, group playstyle, and PC builds. I played a campaign from 1st to 19th level where the DM decided to reign in the treasure we got. The disparity first started to show around 9th level. By 15th level the party stratagy was that the Druid nuked, my battle Cleric hulked up and smashed things, and the rest of the party tried not to die. The effect on a group can be mitigated by low levels and/or casters devoted to party buffs.)

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

Hmm. How many threads can be combined into a single post?

Criticism of "power gamers." Check. "Is 3.x like old D&D?" check. Miniatures mentioned. Check. Magic items. Check.

But I'll fall for it once more.

To answer the first part of the post, D&D 3.x works just fine in a setting where 6th level characters are "high level." You just fight large dragons rather than huge dragons and the devils big devils of the campaign are ice devils rather than pit fiends. Nobody casts raise dead except from scrolls. And it will work just fine and you can have fun. You will also, incidentally, get a relatively low-magic campaign. If 6th level characters are high level characters then a character is, according to the by the book default, unlikely to have more than two or three permanent magic items and those items won't be too impressive. Gauntlets of ogre power, a +2 shield, and a +1 sword is about as high magic as a character is likely to achieve.

Of course, all that assumes that you really want to run a "toned down" campaign. In that case, there are quite a few parts of 3.x you won't use if you want to run a toned down campaign. For starters, you can probably ignore most of the spells of 5th level and above. Your PCs won't get to use them and if your NPCs use them, they'll kill the PCs. The same for all those high CR monsters. Ocean Striders? They're probably not on the menu if you're running a lower-powered game. But I've been playing for years and never run into an ocean strider so you can definitely have fun without running into them.

On the other hand, if you don't really want to run a toned down campaign, but what you want to do is throw world-shattering monsters at low-level PCs, then 3.x is not a particularly good venue for that. Things like balors and the tarrasque have earned their fearsome reputation and 6th level PCs are not likely to be able to oppose them. (But that was true of previous editions too. Trying to run 1st level PCs through the hall of the fire giant king would have been an exercise in sadism. Truth to be told, the older editions of the game weren't exactly problem free if you didn't give out magic items either. A high level fighter without a magic weapon and magic armor and girdle of giant strength or something similar was an even sorrier spectacle than his 3.x counterpart)

Now, all of this has nothing to do with power gaming (which is or should be an entirely separate whine). High level characters can be power-gamed, but low level characters can be power-gamed too. For every initiate of the sevenfold veil I've seen played, I must have seen a dozen 20str, 14-16 con, 6 charisma half-orc barbarian/fighters with their standard issue greatsword/greataxe. Power gaming is about creating a powerful character within the given ruleset and whether you are playing high level or low-level, high magic or no magic merely determines the way that powergaming will play out. (Though, I must say that my experience suggests that a lot of low magic campaigns encourage powergaming because if the PCs aren't getting power from their equipment, they need to get if from their stats and class/feat/skill decisions).

But, to answer the last question, "is there a place for a non-powergamer at the table," the answer depends upon what you mean. You could be championing the role-wimp ("Look, my aspiring master swordsman has taken Skill Focus and Greater Skill Focus: Underwater basket weaving, didn't bother with weapon focus, and chose druid for his starting class even though I wear metal armor and can't use the druid powers--ok, he's utterly useless at everything, but it all makes sense because it's in the seventeen pages of semi-literate backstory (which really amounts to a thinly devised ripoff of a b-movie or comic book character) that I wrote for the character." If that's the case, my attitude is "good for you, you've proved that you're not one of those evil power gamers, now get lost." If, on the other hand, you just want your single classed human barbarian with a 16 starting strength and the obvious PHB feats (Weapon Focus, Power Attack, Cleave, etc) to be viable, then there's plenty of room for you in the games I write and run.

 

[HeavenShallBurn]

Lots of interesting food for thought. I must admit that I'd feel more comfortable dramatically raising the levels needed to acquire the feats to craft magic items-given that you need to be 18th level to craft a permanent magic item, and 12th level or thereabouts to craft a magic wand, that dramatically reduces the number of magic items available in the campaign-and this applies just as much to villains as it does to heroes, which means that as DM I'd have to think up ways around these limits, which is only fair, after all!

Fine with me(then again so is everything), I love a well mangled hybrid ruleset. Even though I go the opposite way and prefer high-powered campaigns to DM and play I agree with that inner reluctance at characters becoming too overburdened with magic objects. There's an idea I use to avoid that.

Hong came up with it, and while I don't generally agree with Hong on most things I really like this one. Its the Imbued Magic Items rule found here www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/imbued_magic.htm I use a variant of it myself and automatically siphon off a portion of XP from every encounter, in return armor and weapons gain magical bonuses over time all on their own. Growing with the characters, it also means I don't have to keep dropping the appropriate magical weapons and armor. At the least it might give you some ideas.

 

[DeadlyUematsu]

Yes. Like its predecessors, 3E is not a generic fantasy game and it does dictate a certain style of play. One that I enjoy if I might add.

 

[Echohawk]

and powerful monsters routinely having CRs over 20

Of the 2671 creatures with listed CRs that have appeared in WotC 3.X books, only 231 have CRs greater than 20.

Of those 231...

• 97 are Great Wyrm (or similarly old) dragons
• 73 are from the Epic Level Handbook
• 39 are unique demon lords, archdevils, aspects of archdevils from Fiendish Codex II or unique archons from Book of Exalted Deeds

Which leaves us with a mere 22 ordinary creatures with CRs of 21+. And of those, only three have appeared in print in the last two years: the Revered Elder Phaerimm (Lost Empires of Faerûn), the Elder Brain (Lords of Madness) and the Zeitgeist (Cityscape).

So I don't think it is really fair to say that monsters "routinely" have CRs over 20. They don't.

 

[Darklone]

I feel your pain. Yet, I had the same problems and a huge preference for low level games... then I found out while playing that it's not a problem at all. With a few minor changes and good rules knowledge, my campaign ran to level 15 and worked.

One thing I always preferred: Magic items were handed out rarely. I rather had one pretty strong magic sword with a story than 9 +1 short swords for the whole group. This might cause balance problems inside of the group though.

Crafting magic items: Let the PCs do what they want, you can control it by the amount of money and time they have. Trust the rules and if your players have a similar style of gaming like you have, you'll do fine.

 

[reutbing0]

Yes. Like its predecessors, 3E is not a generic fantasy game and it does dictate a certain style of play. One that I enjoy if I might add.

While I don't think 3E dictates a certain style of play, I do feel that it encourages a certain style of play. There's quite a big difference between the two. If you prefer using a lot supplements to run your game I do think you'll find that these do nudge you in the "preferred" direction; an emphasis on fast-paced location-based adventuring that incorporates 3.5 "dungeonpunk" stylistic elements and archetypes, and employing battle maps and miniatures. This also happens to be a style I like (but not exclusively).

 

[DragonLancer]

Where is all this stuff that is devoted to min maxing, minis, and tactics? I've got a lot of books and these areas just are not in them.

While propably not intending to do so, the mechanics can (not always) lead to some serious min/maxing. I know. I've had a player in the past who was heavy into his min/maxing through the class abilities and feats. If a player wants to go that route, theres a lot that he can do with it. If thats your bag then fine, but the modular nature of the game mechanics allows for a fair bit of min/maxing.

Minis and tactics. It's all in the PHB. Combat is now geared towards the use of minis and their positions on a map. I;ve seen some games where combat has become much like chess, with figures being moved square by square to avoid AoO's and achieve the best position for flanking, setting to charge, avoiding hitting party members with spells and missile weapons.
This wasn't a part of earlier editions anywhere near as much.

 

[WayneLigon]

I don't think 3E forces you into a certain style of play. I've done extended lower level adventures in 3E by throttling XP, in order to maximize the window they would encounter certain creatures I wanted to use. And I've done higher level play.

One thing that seems to stick in people's minds is the distribution of magic items. The big difference in 3E is that if you want to blow the feats, you don't have to wait for the DM to hand you a magic item: you just make it yourself. If that didn't happen in 1E and 2E it's because s that for all practical purposes, there were no rules for it at all.

We've been over this a few times, but let's review: despite all the caterwauling about how magic items should be rare, precious things such that a person should feel lucky to have a +1 weapon at tenth level or whatever... 1E doesn't live up to that and never did. Modules are stocked with +x items and more powerful things besides.

And let's not forget that fact that after a certain level 1E and 2E requires you to have a certain level of +n weapon to even affect certain encounters. A gargoyle isn't just resistant to non-magical weapons, it's invulnerable to them. That among a couple other things is why the wizard totally dominates higher level 1E and 2E play: at the end of the day, he's the only one that can put out enough damage across the widest possible range of monsters. One DM I had put it very well: Fighters serve. After about, oh, 12th level that's all they are: servants. Especially if they don't have their magic armor and arms.

I must admit that I'm speaking more from the POV of a storyteller or novel writer as opposed to a DM, since I have no one to game with. Indeed, one of my own personal pipe dreams/hopeless delusions is to write role-playing novels that have deep characterizations on the level of Tolstoy's War and Peace or Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo, or what have you. It's still swords and sorcery with D&D motifs, only the characterization and history are on the level of Shakespeare or Homer.

And yes, I know I'm nuts.

Bah, nonsense. Doing games and doing novels is apples and oranges. What works well in a game doesn't work that well in a novel, though the reverse is not nessesarily true. You have vastly more leeway in novel and story writing than you do with a game: you don't have to have a lot of the metagaming rules that prevent players from going hogwild and accumulating Stuff with no risk to themselves at all (see other threads about why it costs XP to produce magic items, for instance).

Now, if you're looking for a game that by it's very rules will expressly translate into the sorts of things you see in a novel, then you're barking up the wrong tree. I don't think there is a game that lets you do that, not even your indie barely-a-game-at-all games. That's why we have GM's and players. In combination and cooperation with each other, I've seen game sessions that easily rival drama in a play or novel.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

While propably not intending to do so, the mechanics can (not always) lead to some serious min/maxing. I know. I've had a player in the past who was heavy into his min/maxing through the class abilities and feats. If a player wants to go that route, theres a lot that he can do with it. If thats your bag then fine, but the modular nature of the game mechanics allows for a fair bit of min/maxing.

Yeah, but people have always done this. The term "min-maxing" didn't appear out of thin air in 2000. They did it in Second Edition, even before Skills & Powers. They did it in First Edition. They did it in D&D.

Any time you have the opportunity to lessen competence or ability in one facet of a character's skillset in order to improve competence or ability in another facet, you get people who will take that opportunity and min-max their characters.

That there's more to mess around with in this regard in Third Edition means nothing. GURPS is an order of magnitude more flexible, and no-one bloody well calls it a munchkin's game.