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

[Garnfellow]

I'd be the first to claim my analogies are less than perfect. Too much alcohol in my youth, perhaps.

I hear you, brother.

3e has few ways of killing anyone. There's really only 4. Damage. Negative con. Coup-de-grace, drowning. Forgive me if I missed one. It makes players less cautious. Go ahead and drink that potion, if it's actually poison, you'll lose a few hits of con which will take the cleric all of one round to fix.

Let's assume, if only for argument's sake, that your statement is true -- that there are fewer different ways of killing anyone in 3e. But those ways happen much more frequently, enough so that the lethality rates are approximately the same between editions. Dead is dead, in all editions.

Anecdotally, I have had somewhat higher casualties in 3e than I had in earlier editions; based on what I've read online it sounds like most other groups more-or-less have similar fatality rates in their 3e games. There are exceptions, for sure, but there have always been patsy DMs and killer DMs in every edition.

The bottom line, in my experience, 3e is not inherently safer than 1e. And my players certainly do not feel so invulnerable that they take silly in-game risks they would have avoided in earlier editions. If anything, I've found them to be more cautious.

And, yes I did say something to that effect about the revised ToH, though I don't think I mentioned Mr. Toad specifically, lol.

I would have sworn yesterday that it was in a EnWorld thread, but Google only turned up a post from the WotC boards. Do you post over there, too, as JRRNeiklot? Anyway, I thought it was a great line. Absurd, but great.

I stand by that statement as well. Any idiot can make a killer dungeon with enough critters and traps to erode hit points. It will never generate the fear and atmosphere of instant death or save or die effects, though. I'm not suggesting these effects be prevalent, just that they should exist, though rarely.

Surprisingly, the WotC designers very much agree with you. Save-or-die effects continue to have -- and should always have -- a place in game. And the only reason to make them rare(r) isn't to coddle players. As Mike Mearls puts it in his experimental redesign of the beholder:

When used too often, save-or-die abilities are B-O-R-I-N-G. They're dull for both players and DMs.

 

[Thurbane]

They probably won't carry any change in 3E either - the EL/CR/wealth system is supposed to even out in course of one adventure. It doesn't mean that every monster was carrying around treasure. This is evident from all the published adventures, for example.

That same argument could effectively be made in 1E then, which futher renders Ridley's assertion incorrect...

That's the ticket: almost all complaints about 1E are actually complaints about the DM That's pretty ingenious and convincing. You do understand the corollary?

So let's just stick to the merits of the different systems, shall we?

Sorry, but the majority of complaints I have seen about 1E in this thread seem to be based on (or caused by) bad DMing. A lot of what I have seen ascribed to shortcomings of the 1E/2E rules seems to me to be more of a case of plain old poor DMing than anything directly tied to the rules themselves...

 

[Numion]

That same argument could effectively be made in 1E then, which futher renders Ridley's assertion incorrect...

How could you make that same argument in 1E? There's no baseline treasure / challenge ratio provided, so how could it even itself out in the span of a whole adventure?

Sorry, but the majority of complaints I have seen about 1E A lot of what I have seen ascribed to shortcomings of the 1E/2E rules seems to me to be more of a case of plain old poor DMing than anything directly tied to the rules themselves...

And majority of the complaints I've seen about 3E in this thread seem to be based on (or caused by) bad DMing. But as you can see this is not going to be a very fruitful conversation.

 

[Thurbane]

How could you make that same argument in 1E? There's no baseline treasure / challenge ratio provided, so how could it even itself out in the span of a whole adventure?

There is, actually. It's called a DM.

And majority of the complaints I've seen about 3E in this thread seem to be based on (or caused by) bad DMing. But as you can see this is not going to be a very fruitful conversation.

Funny thing is, I completely agree. The vast majority of problems that people have posted about ALL editions here are more directly related to poor DMing than the rules themselves. So what's not fruitful about that?

As I have constantly kept repeating, I don't hate 3.X - it's a good system. But like every edition of D&D I've played, it has aspects I don't particularly like, and that I houserule.

 

[Hussar]

*snip*

As I have constantly kept repeating, I don't hate 3.X - it's a good system. But like every edition of D&D I've played, it has aspects I don't particularly like, and that I houserule.

Which I think could likely be said for everyone in this thread. Pretty much every game out there will have houserules.

To me, the biggest difference between 1e and 3e with regards to houserules is 1e was far more trial and error, IME. Because there were no wealth guidelines, no CR, etc, it was very difficult to judge how a change would affect the game. Sometimes I got it right and the change was good, more often, I got it wrong and went back and changed it again.

I tend to get it right the first time more often in 3e.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

How? When the PC's are so much more powerful than any opponent, how are 1e PC's punished for Rambo approaches?

Did you play much 1e, Hussar?

The answers to your question are:

1. The PCs are much more powerful than any individual opponent. But in 1e, there are hordes of opponents... there's our 19 orcs -v- a second level party example, or the fact that by the Monster Manual, wights come in groups of 2d8.

2. Many of these hordes of monsters possess little or no treasure. About 75% of the experience points in 1e are gained by recovering treasure, so they're best avoided rather than fought.

3. 1e dungeons have traps which kill you in completely arbitrary ways. Sometimes there's a saving throw, but not always.

4. Therefore the Rambo approach results in a TPW, as it should.

 

[jcfiala]

3e has few ways of killing anyone. There's really only 4. Damage. Negative con. Coup-de-grace, drowning. Forgive me if I missed one. It makes players less cautious. Go ahead and drink that potion, if it's actually poison, you'll lose a few hits of con which will take the cleric all of one round to fix.

You missed a few:
A) Save-or-Die effects, such as disintegration
B) Negative levels. If your Negative Levels >= Character levels, you are "instantly slain"
C) Magical disease - Mummy Rot, for instance, does inflict constitution loss, but it's harder to 'heal' the charisma loss and the spells that remove the curse before you can remove the disease require caster level checks. You could argue that it's the same as con loss/negative con, but I think the greater difficulty of removing it makes it a little worse.
D) Being turned to stone. It's fairly easy to come back from (Well, so is death), but if your party can't find you or if they're all dead/stone themselves, you're as good as dead.

 

[Numion]

2. Many of these hordes of monsters possess little or no treasure. About 75% of the experience points in 1e are gained by recovering treasure, so they're best avoided rather than fought.

That's not the AD&D I remember playing. You get the XPs where you can - we purposefully did get into fights we didn't need to. You know, the time honored tradition of clearing out dungeons (of monsters and treasure).

Can others pipe in whether they played 1E where they when possible avoided monsters? Because that's just so .. not D&D

Maybe I now understand why the thread is titled "Selling out D&Ds soul". Because the soul has always been, for me at least, about killing monsters, taking the loot, and leveling up. It was like that from the first days I started slinging dice. Now, our games have gotten more sophisticated, the plots have evolved, there is real roleplaying, consequences for actions other than loss of numbers on character sheet, etc .. but the core is still the same. Hows and whys have changed, but it's still about that. So, if someones tradition has been something entirely else (avoiding those sacks of exp.. um, monsters), it might indeed seem like the soul has been lost.

But my tradition of D&D, 3E fits to a t.

 

[Ourph]

This is mistaken. The CR guidelines were added AFTER the game was designed, not before. This is a common misperception. The game was designed and then playtested. The CR and Wealth guidelines were the results of that playtesting.

These guidelines were not integral to the development of the system, they are the effects of the system as seen in thousands of hours of playtesting.

The same goes for the 4 encounters/day paradigm. This is explicitely NOT part of the 3e ruleset. What the DMG says is that IF you have about 4 encounters per day with the APL=EL, then a fifth or six encounter is likely going to be lethal. In other words, the 4/day thing is simply advice, not a rule in any shape or form. If you read the actual text you'll see that it's intentionally vague because it will vary so significantly from campaign to campaign.

Whether the guidelines came before or after playtesting makes no difference, the fact is, the CR system is based on certain parameters. If your game deviates from those parameters, you can't use the CR system as is.

If you "read the actual text" of my post you'll see I never said anything about 4 the encounter/day guidelines, I said the CR system assumes a 4 person party. This is undeniable. At least two of the designers are on record saying the basis of the CR system is a 4 person party. Whether it's written into the rules makes no difference. The rules are written around that assumption.

 

[Ourph]

But I do not think this argument is true, at least you are wrong in every way that matters.

As far as I can tell, I wasn't making an argument, I was making a factual statement about the way the rules work. I don't get it. You tell me I'm wrong then you give me a laundry list about why you don't like the way 1e does things. Since the comment you quoted wasn't "Ridley's Cohort likes the way 1e does XP and wealth" I'm not sure how that disproves or even addresses any statement I made in my previous post.