Hussar
Legend
And that's perfectly fine. But, would you consider yourself to be a typical group of 3e gamers? I certainly wouldn't. The fact that you use a number of 3rd party supplements right off the bat makes you an outlier.
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And that's perfectly fine. But, would you consider yourself to be a typical group of 3e gamers? I certainly wouldn't. The fact that you use a number of 3rd party supplements right off the bat makes you an outlier.
Typical for the groups that I know? Yes. Typical for 3e players as a whole, I have no idea how much of an outlier I am.
One of the groups that surprised me using 3rd party material was comprised of four of my Mutants and Masterminds players and two of their friends. The group was comprised of players with experience playing only White Wolf Games (two only with LARPs) when they started playing 3e . At their table, they were using both Love and War and Crime and Punishment from Atlas Games and a third book (I think it was Book of Eldritch Might, but I could be wrong). They had seen the books at a game store and picked them up out of curiosity.
Majoru Oakheart
Adventurer
There's a number of reasons why it changed. It's hard to articulate it precisely, but I'm going to try.
In 2e, there was nothing that said exactly how far you could jump(that I can remember at any rate, if there was, it was vague enough that we argued about it). So when you said "I jump over the 15 ft pit", your DM could use any number of criteria in order to decide whether you made it. Maybe you made a strength check and if you succeeded, you jumped over. Maybe your DM would apply a -5 to your strength check. Or maybe the DM would just decided that jumping 15 ft while wearing full plate was simply impossible and you fall to your death.
While playing 2e, we were used to that being the way things work. The DM was in charge, and since the rules were of no help sorting out these types of situations....whatever the DM said is what happens.
When 3e came out, it told you exactly how many feet you jump based on your d20 roll. It told you that in order to disarm someone, this is the type of roll you need to make. This is how to resist it. It told you how a grapple worked. It specifically said there were no called shots even though the 2e section on the subject was a little vague. It told you that if you wanted to swing your sword in such a way that you hit 3 enemies at once, you needed a feat to do it. It told you exactly how you gain feats and which ones were allowed.
In addition to that, there were a number of articles leading up to 3e coming out where they explained their reasoning for a bunch of the changes. The authors said that they had made a mistake with some of the 2e rules, they balanced non-combat disadvantages with combat advantages. They said they realized their mistake with all the problems it caused in games from all the letters they had received. We had experienced these same problems in our 2e games. They said they were going forward into 3e with a new philosophy...one that said all classes should be equal. Where it didn't matter which class you took that you should be able to contribute equally to the game.
This opened my eyes. I knew I was frustrated that certain kits in 2e were too powerful. But I could never articulate WHY it bothered me so much. It just seemed like a no-brainer to take a kit like the Thief version of Swashbuckler that gave you the THAC0 of a fighter when using your favored weapon in exchange for a nebulous disadvantage like "trouble finds you more often". I'd seen 10 different people take the kit and it never be bad for them in the slightest.
But here I was reading an article that says "We want to concentrate on balance between classes, to make all options equally useful. We also don't want to balance combat advantages with roleplaying disadvantages". My thought was "That's EXACTLY why that kit was too powerful. It's likely that the disadvantage never applied in the game at all....so it was ONLY an advantage."
At first we tried playing 3e in the same way we played 2e. People would just say things like "I run up to the guy and grab his sword out of his hands". But then our DMs, who were new to the system would say "wait...there's rules for that now, right? Let's look that up....hmm, is that a grapple or is that a disarm? Those have different rules. Also, do you have a feat that lets you do that? Otherwise you provoke an AOO. If the enemy hits you, you fail automatically."
Slowly but surely, we realized that when there existed rules for things that you couldn't just try anything. Because doing things without knowing the rules for them almost always involved you failing spectacularly. After the 3rd round in a row of saying "I grapple him....oh, he hits me and that immediately cancels the grapple?", you begin to think that grappling someone isn't a good idea and isn't an option you should take anymore.
Contrast this with some of the rules our DMs had made up in 2e. I think one DM let you pin and tie up an enemy simply by making a strength check. So if you had an 18 strength, it was nearly guaranteed.
The idea was that a bunch of options that DMs had made extremely easy to perform and extremely overpowering when you did perform them suddenly had real rules...and they weren't easy anymore. Our DMs had only made up the rules because there weren't any in the books. They were happy to rely on the RAW now that it existed. But following the RAW meant that many options simply weren't a good idea.
It wasn't metagaming. Your characters knew everything he has been told and experienced in his life. If I fought a beholder in a previous adventure, I knew what all the powers he used did. I saw them with my own eyes.
The problem is that in OP, there was no way of anyone verifying that you had fought a beholder before. I might have traveled to Australia where I played a number of adventures there, then came back to Canada and played under a DM here. I could say "When I was in Australia, I played an adventure where we fought one of these, it was called a beholder and I saw it charm people."
It says that the DM is supposed to give you a number of pieces of information based on how high you roll. It doesn't say you know absolutely nothing except what the DM tells you based on the roll.
The 3.5e version of the monster knowledge check didn't tell you what the DC to know the name of a monster was. Just what the DC was to "remember a useful piece of information". Generally I let people know the name of a monster on a DC 10, 15, or 20 check based on what I felt the rarity of the creature was since there was no rule for that. If I felt something was common enough knowledge, I'd tell people the name without a roll. I reserved the high DCs for useful knowledge like the text in the skill said "special powers or vulnerabilities". The skill does use the phrase "In general..." before the rule, leaving it open to times when the DC is something else.
The entire rule is ambiguous enough that it's hard to follow that rule RAW.
I think that ideally the game should be balanced enough that I shouldn't have to ban anything. 4e managed that feat for the longest time. It wasn't until quite a bit of time and many books before I banned anything at all. Even then, my list was short.
I think that the CharOp people are good at finding clearly broken things that anything who cares about balance at ALL will ban. Imagine if the list of weapons was: Longsword 1d8, Greatsword 5d8. Everyone will pick a Greatsword. That needs to be fixed. Of course, that one is obvious. However, imagine if there was a fighter class feature that increased the number of dice on your longsword by one. Then there was a feat that did the same thing. Then there was a barbarian class feature that did the same thing and a level 1 spell that did the same thing. Now, you can roll 5d8 damage on your longsword simply by multiclassing a bit when a fighter of the same level might only be rolling 2d8.
These are the kind of things that tend to only get noticed by CharOp people....and my group. I'd prefer they get noticed and fixed by the CharOp people before I have to start banning things in my game.
Yeah, that's not so much the case with me. My gf plays D&D, my friend who rents my upstairs floor plays D&D. I have at least 3 separate groups of friends who play D&D. I've played with all of them at one point or another. For instance, I know 3 people who live together and their 3 close friends, they are all either former members of my home D&D group or used to show up to our Living Forgotten Realms/Living Greyhawk games days when we used to have them. I have at least 5 or 6 other people I know that I see less often now who were also members of our group at one time. Meanwhile, my current D&D group is pretty much my core group of friends. We do everything together. We go to movies, we do board game nights, we get together to play Rock Band. We also play D&D weekly.
So, when we go out to dinner, our conversation is normally D&D oriented. Even when we get together with my other groups of friends, we reminisce about the D&D games we used to play. They also get together and play D&D without me so they tell me about their games.
I guess the rules didn't come across like that. D&D Next does, but 3e had so many specifics that it never came across as "The important thing is to roll above the DC and then you succeed." It instead came across as "If you jump and get a 17 you went X feet while an 18 got you Y feet. You got a modifier based on winds, humidity, stress, and what you had for breakfast. Here's a list of those modifiers."
Obviously, I exaggerate slightly. But the rules were very, very specific. When we read them, it came across as the entire point of the edition: To be as specific, detailed, and accurate as possible. After all, if the point of this edition was to make everything a balanced and useful option and to make balance a primary concern in the game...then that -5 to a balance check for a slippery surface was there as a balancing mechanism that shouldn't be ignored lest you break the careful balance the designers wrote into the game.
The DMG even goes into a paragraph that reads like a dire warning that the entire system is build like a house of cards and that changing anything in the slightest can cause the entire card house to come crashing down due to unexpected interactions between rules. I believed it. I still do. 3e's rules interactions are so complicated and plentiful that I don't know of a single person who can change a rule AND be able to tell me the FULL effects that the change will have to the game. There's always some Prestige Class, Feat, Spell, Monster, or Class Feature that gets overlooked and causes some really weird interaction down the line.
Like one of my first DMs in 3e who removed the entire idea of flatfootedness in his game because he didn't like the concept. We were still finding things a year later that suddenly became SO much weaker or completely useless without it.
We would never think of changing this many things. Our philosophy has always been since the beginning that we were playing D&D, not our own game. None of us wanted to spend the time and effort to balance and test our own rules. We played 15 different role playing systems, each with their own rules. We assumed each of them had their own rules for a reason. Making up our own rules seemed like a bad idea. We had no idea what we were doing and any attempts to change them only ended up in arguments about the balance of the new rules and more often, the stupidity of the DM for allowing such a clearly broken option.
We had one DM that my friend, Jim still laughs at to this day each time she's mentioned...though we haven't spoken to her in over 15 years. This is because she didn't know that a +1 sword gave a bonus to hit and damage but bet a player that it ONLY gave a bonus to hit. He said that she had to agree that if he was right, he could bring in a character with standard equipment from a country he made up that was across the ocean. He was right, of course, and so he brought in a character who had a +5 sword and +5 full plate who rode a dragon...because that was standard equipment for the Dragon Riders in his country. She felt let him have it...after all, he did win the bet.
We didn't trust our DMs to allow anything made up after that.
The goal seems different to me. At first I thought they were the same with better rules. But 2e rules are purposefully imbalanced in a lot of places. The rules just seem to be placeholders for "what would realistically happen".
The shift in 3e was to a focus on "balance". That means, that while it might be "realistically" rather easy to disarm someone, that the game made it harder because it was such a powerful option. While it might make sense that you could just choose any class every level you go up, there were restrictions on how often you could do it for balance reasons.
2e didn't so much concern itself with whether something was overpowered. For instance, it didn't tell you what level to give out a +1 weapon or a +5 weapon at. If you found one, you found one. 3e had guidelines on what levels you should receive what magic items. The stats of the monsters took these numbers into account. Monsters became too tough if you didn't get magic items on time. 3e was a well oiled machine where EVERYTHING in the game fit together into a complex ballet of moving parts.
Don't get me wrong, we LOVED that. It was the number one reason we switched to 3e. You could follow the rules and no one would be overpowered. You didn't have to spend your time coming up with new rules because they already existed. You could run the game as written without the headache of constantly having to write your own game.
However, it was clear once we started playing it that the focus was very different:
2e:
Player: "I...don't know...I get behind the monster and stab him in the shin!"
DM: "Roll to hit and damage and I'll give you a +2 for being behind him"
3e:
Player: "I move here, then here, then here. I tumble in order to avoid the AOOs. I roll 25 and make it. I have flanking here and therefore get +2 to my attack rolls. I can then activate my feat that only works while I'm flanking for another 1d6 damage."
DM: "The enemy is invisible and you can't use precision based abilities on invisible creatures."
Player: "But I currently have True Sight up and can see invisible creatures.
DM: "Alright, but the enemy has all around vision so he can't be flanked, so don't add your bonuses."
Player: "That would be true, but I have a class feature that says I can flank people, even if they couldn't normally be flanked."
DM: "Alright, but your ally cannot currently see invisible creatures, so he can't help you flank"
Player: "You're right, I'll do normal damage."
Those rules are there...trust me. I had a group of people who was willing to point out each and every one of them when those situations came up. See my 3e play example above.
However, my point is that...yes, simply rolling a d20 and creating a random or semi random DC works really well as a system. That wasn't how 3e worked, however. It is currently how D&D Next works. Which is why I like it. 3e was very much about setting specific DCs that often required looking up the charts and applying modifiers. If you did, you had rules lawyers pointing it out. Or at least, I did.
I truly believe that the cultural changes from 3e came directly from the rules. I saw the same cultural changes echoed in Organized Play players all over the world at conventions I went to. When you're forced to follow the rules as written in 3e, there's pretty much only one playstyle that comes out of them.
Ahnehnois
First Post
That's true. It's very explicit. But that really invites change. For example, it does make clear that there are no called shots, which IME has made everyone and their mother try their own variation of how to do called shots and injuries. It tells you exactly how far a 15 Jump check is (that's basically a physical law), but allows the DM to apply modifiers to a Jump check for favorable (or unfavorable) circumstances.
To me, it's very important to keep this philosophy regardless of edition. The books are a guideline to help the DM make decisions, and a common language and set of expectation, but each individual situation is always adjudicated by the person in charge, not the rules.
Doing so does require trust, and clearly, this is an issue for some people.
On one hand, I can see where that's coming from. On the other hand, it is clearly a problematic idea. For one thing, all the classes shouldn't be equal. If we're out doing adventuring stuff and one guy plays a minstrel who channels the magic of music (bard) and one guy plays a mighty warlord who fought his way to leadership of the tribe (barbarian), I do not expect them to contribute equally. I'd be pretty insulted as the barbarian player if they did.
For another thing, there are different types of games. If we're playing urban intrigue, the balance between druid, rogue, and fighter favors the rogue, makes the fighter sit on his hands a lot, and marginalizes many of the druid's abilities. If we're fighting battles in the wilderness, the druid becomes dominant, the fighter useful, and the rogue a supporting player. Context matters.
The best interpretation is that any character should be good at the things he's supposed to be able to do. Trying to go beyond that has been...problematic.
I found that the 3e rules (and later the improved PF rules) for these sorts of things encouraged people to try them, mostly against spellcasters. With the AoO not usually an issue and defenses weak, grappling a spellcaster is often feasible even for marginal combatants, and it's quite powerful. OTOH, most people respect martial opponents not to try that stuff, and they stick with things that are on their character sheet. To me, this is a good dynamic; tactically engaging and it feels natural.
It is ambiguous.
It's pretty clear that when you're using this clause, you need to make the check to know the monster's name or anything at all about it. However, "in many cases" does allow the DM some wiggle room. It's not really clear what those cases are. At best, everyone's going to interpret this a littler bit differently.
Personally, I banned 4e.
All true. That's where the Charop boards come in handy. In analyzing the balance of things that have some reason to be balanced.
On the other hand, trying to analyze the balance of things that are inherently different (like bards and barbarians, or knowledge skills and diplomacy, or magic missile and charm person) is a fruitless endeavor. And when people go overboard on trying to do that, bad things can happen.
True, but there's always the "DM's best friend" clause for adding a modifier to anything.
I kind of approached that way at first. But then what I discovered is this. There are tons of specific little rules. Sometimes, people forget them. Occasionally, this causes problems, but usually it does not. The game experience is pretty robust.
On the other hand, following the rules also occasionally causes problems, but also usually does not. It became clear to me that having a fun game that produced enough story that I could write down was a lot more important than trying to follow the rules. I'm more concerned with the outcome than how you get there.
True, but that doesn't really discourage anyone from changing stuff, IME. The process is more along the lines of: "Let's try this vitality/wound system. Wait, how do cure spells work? Let's try this. Nope. Too powerful. Let's try that. Well, if Heal heals wound damage, shouldn't Harm cause the same amount of wound damage? Okay. Wait, that's crazy powerful. Let's say save negates on the wound. What about disintegrate?" Etc., etc. And then you try combining all of that with spell points.
Bolded line is key here. You assumed the rules existed for a reason. I assume that reason was because some guy thought it was a good idea. Which is not nothing, but is not exactly gospel in my eyes either.
I assume that whatever I come up with, even if I have no experience gaming and am doing so off the cuff with no rationale or study behind it, is better than what some game designer came up with. I'm probably brighter than they are to begin with, and my specific knowledge of my players and my situation and my desired tone is an almost infinite advantage over their perspective. The point of buying a book of rules is mainly to save the time it would take me to write my own.
One of my early DMs for 3e essentially banned the rest of us from reading the DMG, because he didn't want us to know how things worked. So I learned the game initially without seeing those guidelines. Then, when we did all buy DMGs (in defiance, I might add), we saw all those guidelines for how a game "should" work. CRs, magic items by level, etc. etc., and immediately decided that they were BS and we could do better. The well-oiled machine was always in our heads, not the book, because we already knew what we wanted before reading that part.
I've had a lot of confusing situations lately. For example, one character teleported above a flying enemy and wanted a full attack during his fall. I said no. Is there a rule to back that up? I doubt it. Don't much care, the right answer was clear enough on principle.
I find that I do a lot of semi-random DC setting. The books often provide examples, but I tend to think that those circumstance modifiers really matter. And for some things (Diplomacy, for example), I do just ignore the rules and go with my gut. Are there rules lawyers out there? Sure. But that's the beauty of playing with one group. Over time, they realized that they had more fun by letting me make the number up rather than debating it.
Maybe for organized lay. What I saw with 3e was that instead of everyone doing their own thing, everyone was doing their own thing but sharing it on the internet. Because that was still when the internet was just becoming universal. Before it was just about what one DM thought, but now people like me can go online and talk game theory. Which, if anything, emboldens us to make changes. I think that modern (i.e. post-2000) houserules have a lot more substance behind them, and are shared commonly between groups more often. Given what I see and what I read, I seriously doubt that massive houseruling has become less common.
To me, D&D is a form of self-expression, and that expression happens through the DM and players creating as much of the experience as possible. I look at a DM's setting as an extension of his personality. If he uses a published setting, what does that mean? That he has no personality? Similarly, I look at his houserules as his directorial vision. If he doesn't have some clear and meaningful ones, what is his vision? To me, a DM without houserules would be like a director handing a bunch of actors a script and saying "go do that" without any further instruction.
Obviously, I wouldn't do organized play. And even if I was forced to start a new group whole cloth, I would still approach a game the same way. Clearly, our perspectives are worlds apart; you can do the organized or RAW games because your entirely philosophy is geared towards it, where mine makes those things anathema. None of this is intended as criticism, merely as an illustration of how differently two people can approach the same game.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Given the enormous proliferation of 3rd party d20 supplements that happened under the OGL, I don't see that as being an "outlier". Clearly someone bought them. Maybe not the majority of all groups, but it's hardly an irregularity. And certainly using WotC's own published, SRDed book of houserules is not that out of the ordinary.
Certainly more typical than a group that doesn't modify the rules at all.
Actuallly, the discussion, broader than Knowledge skills, which you refer to really highlighted the impact of house rules on a discussion of a specific issue. Most items raised were followed by some item or another which your group house ruled. So of course the matter would play out differently in your game - you weren't playing by the same rules.
One house rule is a lot easier to evaluate than a few dozen in tandem. That one change can be compared for impact with other rules - but not if you have modified those other rules as well. I think the groups that work well with numerous house rules are the inssulated groups you describe, who have a single group of players that changes rarely, and are not part of any larger "community". They play their own game, with their own rules, which rapidly becomes incomprehensible to those playing by the RAW, or even slightly modified RAW.
Ahnehnois
First Post
All well and good. I know that comprehending my game would be a challenge for anyone who didn't personally know me. And certainly, the combined effects of my houserules are to the point where our players refer to the rules as "3.[my name]".
And like I said, I don't really consider there to be a larger community. There are special cases that have been discussed here extensively (organized play campaigns are a special case), but the hobby started with individual groups playing home games. As far as I'm concerned, that's still the default.
All the DMs I've ever met ran their own distinct style of game, and had rules on paper on in their heads to back that up. I don't see that the comprehensibility of our games to each other is particularly important or even desirable.
Well, if you want to invoke the original game, no less than E. Gary Gygax started a furore when he stated in a Dragon column that, if you varied a single rule, you were no longer playing AD&D (at that time). Comprehensibility is important if one expects players to be able to move between groups, or wants to discuss house rules online - that is, participate (as you are now participating on these boards) in a larger community.
It makes no difference in gaming with a specific group, but I expect that your players specifically need to comprehend your game style and rules, so a need for some level of comprehensibility remains.
It makes no difference in gaming with a specific group, but I expect that your players specifically need to comprehend your game style and rules, so a need for some level of comprehensibility remains.
If one applies the same level of depth to races, then you probably do need a knowledge check to figure out what that Elf is, and can do.
I'm curious whether, and to what extent, you've worked with other game systems. To me, a system with more character design granularity would seem more attractive if characters are designed from the ground up. My game of choice for such a structure would be Hero, but others exist (GURPS being one well-known example). I've commented a few times that, if I'm playing a Hero fantasy game, the last thing I want to do is build a D&D character - I can play those in D&D.
Ahnehnois
First Post
Yes, to some extent. Besides starting with 2e, we've played some of the other d20 games (Modern and CoC), Dragon Age, and Cortex. I'm aware that there are numerous games out there, and I've read others, but none has ever compelled us to switch.
The beauty of houserules is that they build incrementally over time. It's a lot easier to make some new rules than it is to start over again. Houserules also have the benefit of being free.
Now, if someone produced a game that clearly met my needs better than what I have now, I would buy it. I'm not really expecting that 5e is going to do that at this point, though.
