Has the 3.x Era Helped or Hurt the Development of Good DM's?

[joethelawyer]

What are your thoughts?

Random things that come to mind for helping:

1. Growth of the Internet community to share ideas.
2. More books/ideas due to the OGL.
3. More people into D&D, more socially accepted, so more people to interact with and play with, providing more opportunities to grow. D&D is less a stigma than it used to be. Geeks are cooler than before.


Random things that come to mind for hurting:

1. Shift in game power from DM to players as opposed to older editions.
2. By far more player focused products than DM focused products.
3. So much published material on every conceivable thing that the DM doesn't have to create much anymore, just has to copy what someone else did.


I am asking because I don't know, really. I missed most of the 3.x era, stopping play around 2000, and picking it up again in late 2006. As it is, 3 of the 4 people I play with I have played with since the early 90's and before. The 4th player is new to the hobby in general. I don't go to conventions or other places other groups congregate, so I have really no exposure to other groups and players.

What are your thoughts?

 

[Bumbles]

I don't think anybody will give any kind of real answer except from their own experiences which will vary widely.

Anyway, here's mine just today I was in a game shop, had some people come in, looking to buy D&D for their son/grandson (who was somewhere on the autism spectrum0, but didn't know where to start.

I tried to point them to some of the board games they could try(and I wished the store had had a starter set in for any edition of the game in it), and suggested a few ways for them to look for groups, since that seemed more important to me than buying anything.

But obviously some people are still trying to get into the game.

 

[joethelawyer]

I don't think anybody will give any kind of real answer except from their own experiences which will vary widely.

That's about all I figured on with this pretty open-ended question. It's all gonna come from personal experiences. No right or wrong answers. I was just curious and have no personal experiences to base any solid opinion on.

 

[Crothian]

Helped, it was great. In fact I think your three negatives are positives in my mind. Anything that gives the players more power and makes then more involved in the game is a good thing. Player focused books again got players more interested in the game and reading the books. And I never lacked for creating my own stuff. DMs can still easily do that but the ones that don't want to due to ability or time or lazy then have the resources of using other people's material. That one is a win win.

 

[Remathilis]

Impossible to answer.

The first problem with this question is defining a "good DM". Since no one can agree on what playstyle for D&D is "good" its impossible to create a list of "Good DM qualities" that is meaningful. I mean, the absence of some universally accepted "bad" traits (unabashed railroading, unfair DMs, Deux-ex-NPC, and sociopathic DMs aside) we will never agree on what a "good" DM is.

Because of this, we can't agree on what 3.x did to harm/heal these traits. DMs who love gritty, S&S style games bristle at the core-rule assumptions of magic and healing. Similarly, DMs who enjoy the narrative structure of 2e bristle at 3es "back to the dungeon" motif. And there is a LARGE section of DMs who hate minis and tactical combat elements of 3e.

I can say this; 3e was both easier and harder to learn than earlier D&D. Its codification and mathematical symmetry removed system oddities, but the sheer volume of "active" rules (stacking bonuses, special attacks) made it a logistical nightmare at high levels. It took a dedicated DM to learn the system interactions to run a solid game. Also, the OGL created a rich world where every DM style could (theoretically) be catered to, which in and of itself was good for DMs.

But its role on the art of DMing is impossible to measure.

 

[Gothmog]

In sum, I think the 3.x era neither helped not hurt the development of good DMs.

I think 3.x helped make good DMs by starting the trend towards more player control in the game, having more ideas present due to the OGL, and simplyfiying/unifying the core mechanics of the game.

I think 3.x hurt the development of good DMs in one very important way: the over-quantification of every aspect of the system, with a rule for every situation. In previous editions, part of the fun was that the system wasn't so cut-and-dried, and DMs were encouraged to come up with creative ways to handle various situations. While this could be abused and end up wrecking a game, in practice, I only saw this happen once during the 1e/2e eras. What I did see in 3.x were a lot of DMs who felt they MUST follow RAW that they overlooked a lot of creative and fun ways to handle a situation that would be more fun than the way the core rules suggested. This also carried across into adventure design and creativity IMO. There was a strong emphasis on anything a monster could do, a character should be able to do as well, and it needed to be minutely quantified (via skills, feats, spells, etc)so that the DM knew exactly how those abilities/circumstances/modifiers were generated. This mindset really chops into DM creativity IMO, and doesn't really contribute anything to the game since the monster spends such a small amount of time onscreen. Moreso than in previous editions, DMs followed a set formula of CR and EL for adventures, and most of the adventures during the 3.x era were pretty lacking due to these problems.

 

[Corinth]

3.X made it possible for just about anyone to become good enough at running the game to run modules. 4.0 improves on this, greatly expanding on the pool of DMs for the game due to its ease of use for common people. The systems in both respects do a lot of the hard work for you, leaving you to focus your energies on actualling running the game instead of dealing with under-the-hood work.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Practice will make you a better DM.
Sharing experiences can make you a better DM.

So yes, 3.x helped the development of Good DMs, since they got to learn. The fact that 3rd Edition had a few big communities playing it that met in places like EN World or the WotC forums are certainly important, too. It allowed to share experiences.

 

[S'mon]

I think I agree with Gothmog in that 3e discourages GM improvisation & rulings in favour of rules-adherence. This can have a deadening effect on play. Whether it also discourages bad GMing is debatable, but overall 3e seemed to have an averaging effect; reducing both very good & very bad GMing.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I think having more detailed rules has both helped & hurt the game. I saw tons of games in 1E and 2E that were derailed by endless rules disagreements/debates because something was not clear in the old rules, or there was a conflict between one supplement and another. I think 3E largely fixed many of the conflicts (certainly not all, though), but the prep time for DMs seemed to grow exponentially... I think I could have planned out 6-8 sessions in 2E with the time it takes me to plan out one 3.5E session, partly because a higher level 3.5E BBEG is going to have so many different powers, skills and abilities that you're cheating yourself and your players if you don't know them all.