[EDITION WARZ] Selling Out D&D's Soul?

[Keldryn]

The introduction of Cavalier was also the introduction of having stats increase by any means as a simple function of level. Paladins got it too, as they were dragged under the Cavalier umbrella at that point. Why they didn't give it to *every* class mystifies me still, though it would have required a re-think of how exceptional strength worked for Fighters and the good Colonel has said in another thread this wasn't up for consideration.

At that point, it was pretty much only wishes or effects from an item such as the deck of many things that would provide a permanent bonus to an ability score, wasn't it? 1e really seemed to go out of its way to prevent characters from gaining any permanent ability score bonuses, and then Unearthed Arcana went and gave it to Cavaliers and Paladins.

 

[Keldryn]

I agree. In fact, one of the great weaknesses of 3e is that hordes of low-level opponents are rarely a threat - and, IMO, they too quickly become obsolete. (OTOH, I don't know if 30 orcs would even threaten a 10th level AD&D party).

From my experience in either edition of AD&D, not usually. Unless the party has lost all of the magical equipment and/or the orcs are out of range and behind cover and the PCs can't get to the orcs or run away. Obviously, if the DM wants to make them deadly, he'll find a way to do it. But stick 30 orcs straight out of the MM into a big room to fight toe-to-toe with a 10th level party and lock the door, I don't see the party taking many casualties.

One of my favourite aspects of 3e is how it provides easy guidelines on how to "level up" a monster type. Of course you could do it in 1e and 2e as well -- I'd often keep using orcs as major enemies throughout a campaign by giving them fighter levels. But 3e gives you more of structure for doing so, with less of a reliance on winging it. It was always relatively easy to scale up hit points or damage, but when you start getting into effectiveness of special attacks and such, it wasn't quite as straightforward.

 

[I'm A Banana]

First of all, the point about 1e offering "more danger" in the form of more save-or-die "gotcha" monsters is well taken. It's true, 1e characters feared more instant, irrevocable, horrible harm than their 3e counterparts. However, this does not translate at all into "safety," because 3e characters still fear regular and well-earned KO's, especially at higher levels. Resurrection is there for a reason -- people die. I am willing to submit that save-or-die monsters and/or "gotcha" monsters are less fun than long-running, persistant challenges. After all, do you have more fun when your evil wizard villain gets to spend a few rounds casting wicked magic at the PC's, or when he dies because of a single botched save in the second round? It works the other way, too -- people have more fun when their hero gets to spend a few round vallaintly crusading against the wicked beast, rather than simply walking into a room and dying.

Now, characters do not fear walking into a room and dying, making the game more heroic, and more people have more fun playing heroes than getting killed, meaning the game is better suited, in a Darwinian sense, than it once was.


And then...what kind of propoganda is this below?

1. Run a game for a dozen players without your brains dribbling out of your ears.

Done in 3e. You probably see this most often at conventions, but I've seen it happen in people's houses. Most don't care to get to that level for more than a one-shot or month-long anyway, since getting 12 people's schedules to coordinate for more than one night is an excersize in scheduling wizardry that will make your brains dribble long before the rules will.

2. Resolve a melee involving nine player characters, twenty-two henchmen and seven summoned monsters on one side -v- a dozen giants with a shaman, thirty-five worgs and a cave bear on the other, in less than about two years.

Done in 3e. You need some reasonably experienced players and a pretty simplistic battlefield (which means taking away a lot of interesting, but confusing, tactical options), and I wouldn't try it at high level with many combat possibilities, but I've seen similar things done in the aforementioned massive games.

Though, again, one wonders of what use these massive combats and huge player pools are...I'd much rather have three DMs with four players each doing their own thing, and I'd much rather have a small band of heroes against a band of great villains. Which is part of why I don't do those massive games anymore.

Still, it's been done.

3. Prepare an adventure on a single sheet of graph paper in twenty minutes, and expect to get many hours' play out of it.

I don't know how you can possibly say that when, just a few pages ago, I was advocating "15 minute adventure design." Blatantly untrue as anyone following along will know.

4. When the players walk off the map you prepared, generate the surrounding terrain and encounters using random tables, and get results that make sense.

3e tells you how to craft an encounter table. 3e can roll randomly for your dungeons. Perhaps their is a little more work, and that's certainly a point earlier editions have -- I'd like to see "randomly generated worlds". I suspect, however, I'm in the minority on this, as many DMs enjoy spending the time crafting the world themselves, and so the rules would be largely wasted. So I certainly won't claim that 3e is flawed for not including something that would be useless to most DMs.

5. Let the player characters actually fight a dragon.

Done. All the time. Again, blatantly false.

6. Create a 10th level character in less than 5 minutes.

True enough, but the alternative is "all 10th level characters look the same." Given that alternative, I'll stick with time-intensive modes of character creation, especially now that there's a large support net, both online and in the books, to make an interesting one.

This is a very valid criticism, however, and definately something 3e could learn from earlier editions.

7. Create a party of 10th level characters in less than 15 minutes

This is really the same problem, so I veto it getting it's own number.

8. Place the stat blocks for 9 player characters, 22 henchmen, 7 summoned monsters, 12 giants, a shaman, 35 worgs, and a cave bear on one piece of paper (and you'll still have enough room for the map)

Again, that's the same problem, so it doesn't get it's own number, either.

 

[Numion]

Admittedly, that was a while after AD&D was released. Gary was trying to avoid the problems when people were showing up for conventions to play D&D and finding they had to deal with house rules they weren't familiar with. Often there were pages of rules changes when you were just playing in a single scenario. More often than not you didn't find out about the DMs house rules until it came up in the game ("no, I don't allow magic missiles to automatically hit").

That was a big barrier to the game at that time, and was another black eye to the idea of playing in a convention game. To a lesser extent, it happened when players moved to a new area and were trying to find a new D&D game. They were invited to play in a "D&D" game only to find so much was changed it wasn't really D&D.

So come again, was AD&D 'tinkerability' a good or a bad thing? Gary himself saw it as a bad thing. Maybe he would've done a different 2nd ed, had he not been booted

 

[Keldryn]

Having said that, I don't agree that the writing is too hard to understand. It's aimed at a literate and intelligent reader; those who failed English 101 shouldn't be playing D&D anyway.

That strikes me as an awfully elitist attitude. What about people who are too young to have taken English 101 (not to be taking you extremely literally, but I assume you get my point)? Should aspiring 10 year-old gamers be excluded because the original author wrote to a generally college-educated adult audience? What about gamers for whom English is not their first language?

The only thing 3e did really well was to reverse some of the "plot" and "story" assumptions from 2e. You know, the railroady DragonLance-style plots which were written in "Chapters" and contained long sections called "When things go wrong" which told the DM how to return to the hackneyed and formulaic progression of events which were supposed to happen when, inevitably, some bored player tried to exercise a bit of free will.

Was there much of this in either 1e or 2e, other than the Dragonlance modules and Forgotten Realms modules based on the novels? Admittedly one of the worst offenders had to be the A1-4 series of modules, where the ending of A3 required the party to be defeated and stripped of all items and spells before beginning A4 -- talk about railroading. Those certainly weren't representative of all early 1e modules, of course.

What does this tell us? It tells us that a lot of people buy the "official" version of D&D. It tells us nothing about which is the better system.

Yes, the brand name of "Dungeons & Dragons" will probably always sell far more than any other RPG product, regardless of the contents. To the world at large, role-playing game equals Dungeons & Dragons.

 

[jcfiala]

1. Run a game for a dozen players without your brains dribbling out of your ears.

I've never had a campaign with twelve players, but I did have one with eight, and my ears seem fine.

2. Resolve a melee involving nine player characters, twenty-two henchmen and seven summoned monsters on one side -v- a dozen giants with a shaman, thirty-five worgs and a cave bear on the other, in less than about two years.

Two years? I bet we could resolve that in less than two years. You got cash?

3. Prepare an adventure on a single sheet of graph paper in twenty minutes, and expect to get many hours' play out of it.

Hmm. I don't know if I ever did that with AD&D, honestly, but I think I could manage it. Am I allowed to write page references to the MM in the paper? Am I allowed to prepare this on the computer? Am I allowed to use both sides?

4. When the players walk off the map you prepared, generate the surrounding terrain and encounters using random tables, and get results that make sense.

Hmm... I'm not that interested in random generation, so it's not really something I've looked into a lot.

5. Let the player characters actually fight a dragon.

What do you mean, particularly, by 'let'? I've had my players face at least one dragon since 3.0's come out...

 

[jcfiala]

So come again, was AD&D 'tinkerability' a good or a bad thing? Gary himself saw it as a bad thing. Maybe he would've done a different 2nd ed, had he not been booted

AD&D Tinkerability was good for home games, and bad for convention games, I think is the point. Generally people have house rules to fix what they dislike in the system, but I don't think anybody would insist on using those rules if they were running a game for strangers at GenCon.

 

[Thurbane]

umm, what about Howard

As much as I enjoy his stories, I would hardly call Robert E Howard's stories "high literature"..."pulp fiction", perhaps...

[edit]Oops, I read that totally wrong, that IS what you were saying...sorry [/edit]

 

[Keldryn]

Unlike many who've posted here, I welcomed 2e with open arms. I was so sick and tired of fighting the rules in 1e, that when 2e came out, I leapt away from 1e. Sure, 1e had great adventures, but, IMO, that's all it had. Mechanically it was very difficult for me to work with. Poorly laid out, frequently incomprehensible, and with a massive powercreep between Dragon and Unearthed Arcana, the idea that 2e was going to clean up the mechanics and streamline play made me a very happy camper.

I was very much the same. I'd been playing for about 3 years when 2nd Edition was released, but I'd already accumulated most of the AD&D hardcovers, as well as having gone through the Basic/Expert/Companion/Masters D&D sets. I was very much looking forward to having a basic set of three core books again, without lugging around UA, WSG, DSG, OA, and various Dragon Magazines for "the good bits." The big laugh was on me once The Complete Fighter's Handbook and its progeny started coming out though...

2e cleaned up the layout of 1e, which had always been a point of criticism for me. A lot of rules that should have been in the PHB were in the DMG. The 1e DMG was written in a rather stream-of-consciousness fashion, and looking up a specific rule was often a chore. IIRC, it was going into detailed descriptions of diseases and mental afflictions within the first couple dozen pages... WTF? 2e streamlined some of the more cumbersome aspects of 1e and got rid of some of the mechanically inconsistent, overpowered, or just plain useless character options: cavaliers, barbarians, drow as written in UA, "roll 9d6 drop the 6 lowest for Strength...," monks, psionics, the fighter/thief/druid-but-not-really-now-actually-a-bard, comeliness, etc. Many of these returned in other forms, but at the very least they didn't have the same off-the-wall mechanics that they originally did.

2e lifted some of the 1e PHB's overly-restrictive race/class options, as well as the ridiculously low level limits on a lot of non-human characters (1e PHB: elf fighters could be 5th level unless they had a 17 or 18 strength, at which point they could advance to 6th or even 7th level!). 2e introduced a lot more opportunities to customize individual characters: specialization in one school of magic, thief skills were no longer set percentages per level, cleric weapons/armour/spells by diety, etc). THAC0 was generally faster to work with than looking up numbers on class-specific attack matrices -- and took up less space on the DM screen too.

Overall, it was a big improvement. Yeah, a few things were lost along the way, but after 2e came out I never went back to 1e, other than to mine a few ideas here and there. The 2e DMG was a pretty lousy book though. Other than looking up magic item descriptions, it didn't see much use at my game table. Nor did it provide much useful advice for new DMs or for campaign/world building.

2e eventually lost me under the bloat of a dozen PHBR supplements and the broken Player's Option books. Well, and an overall shift away from gaming and towards... chasing girls.

3e brought me back because it addressed nearly all of my annoyances with earlier editions, replacing most of the rigid "magic users cannot wear armour" type of restrictions with consequences such as "magic users aren't proficient in armour but if they do wear it they suffer an x% chance of spell failure when casting a spell with a somatic component." Of course you could always house rule these things in 1e and 2e, but 3e had most of this built in -- it still encouraged the classic archetypes, but it didn't just outright forbid anything outside of it. I found the game to be a lot more logical and consistent than either previous edition. And the universal d20 resolution mechanic was a godsend. In earlier editions, the successes of character abilities were determined by the roll of a d20 but you want to roll high, the roll of a d20 but you want to roll low, a d6 roll, a d10 roll, a d100 roll... 1d20 + modifiers vs a difficulty number, and you want to roll high. It's not so much that the different types of dice rolled for non-weapon proficiencies, initiative, thief skills, detecting secret doors, and the like made it too difficult -- eventually players would get the hang of it and remember. But it's just so much more elegant and consistent to use the same mechanic for (almost) everything, and it's a snap for new players to pick up.

I was sold on 3e before the books even game out, from the spy reports that appeared on this site. 1e certainly wasn't broken and unplayable -- I had a lot of fun with it, and so did a few million other people. It wasn't impossible to learn at the age of 12 or 13 either. Would I want to play a 1e game now when I could play a 3e game? Not a chance. Would I recommend 1e over 3e to an aspiring gamer, based on how clear and consistent I feel the rules are presented in each respective game? Never.

 

[Keldryn]

Gary Gygax was writing to an audience that read the authors and works I cited above, as well as Leiber, Howard, Lovecraft, Haggard, Burroughs, et cetera. His evocative language maps to the game's source material. IMO this is why so many gamers write fondly about "1e flavor": because reading the rule books felt like reading a fantasy novel, not a tech manual.

Fair enough... except we're not reading a fantasy novel, we are reading a rulebook for a game. And the primary purpose of a book containing rules is to convey those rules in a clear and consistent manner. Of course there is nothing wrong with a rulebook containing evocative language, so long as it isn't at the expense of the clarity of the information being communicated. And I would argue that Gygax's language often obscured the clarity of the information.

The reader's familiarity -- or lack thereof -- with fantasy literature should not be a factor in how the rules are expressed in writing. Not having read the "classics" of fantasy literature should not be an entry barrier for the new gamer. Sure, being well-read in the genre should by all means enhance one's enjoyment of the game. But it should never be a requirement to play the game or understand the rules. Not everyone gets into D&D through a love of fantasy literature, and in fact many people get into fantasy literature through their love of D&D (and not just crappy D&D-licensed novels).