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

[Noumenon]

I just started DMing last year. So I can't really compare 3.5 to anything. But in my learning curve, it felt like D&D 3.5 was working against me becoming a good DM, while the D&D 3.5 community was doing all of the teaching and helping. The online monster advancers, the SRD, Enworld, the blog network, RPGnow... these are all awesome, but they're the result of the Internet, not D&D 3.5. Online Chinese-to-English dictionaries don't mean China itself is making it easier to speak Chinese.

Things 3.5 did that made it easier to DM would be things like wealth-by-level where you can just look up in a table and find out what you should do. Rules like "feat every third level" that you can remember easily and use. The d20 mechanic. Listing commands that work under the command spell. Having "undead traits" the same for all the undead.

Now I can't judge what 3.5 did that made it harder to DM, because it's the only one I tried, but I know that it did a lot to make it hard. The monster manual hides the undead traits in the back, puts evasion in the stat block instead of by the Reflex save number, makes you look up all the spell-like abilities in the PHB. The level advancement system makes it almost impossible for a new DM to advance monsters by character class.

I guess basically that's my main complaint. 3.5 made it too hard to learn and run monsters, and that keeps you from learning anything else. Corinth said "3.X made it possible for just about anyone to become good enough at running the game to run modules." That seems like exactly the opposite. To run a module like White Plume Mountain you have to be able to run an undead. Then a flying harpy. Then a bunch of rogues with nets. Then an underwater combat. Then improved grab and constrict -- oh my god. Then invisibility. All different rules, all taking so long to look up. In a homebrew, you could conceivably just learn how to build fighters and wizards and spend your time actually designing -- NPCs, adventure hooks, etc. But 3.5 said "Nope. To run this system, you need to put about 100% of your time into learning how to run monster combats for the first ten sessions, and then figure out how to make adventures later." I have to think that made for better combats in the end, but worse DMs.

 

[Gothmog]

I think it was the opposite way round, 3e made the bad DMs better but the best DMs felt restricted.

Well, if they were so good, they should have been able to ignore stuff that they didn't think was better than what they already had going.

I don't claim to be one of the best DMs, but I always looked at all the rules of the 3e era as a robust toolkit of stuff I could use... if I needed it. I never felt constrained to do everything exactly by the book just because it was printed there.

I see your point Joshua, but I think Doug makes a good point too. I personally know four DMs who ran incredible games during the 1e/2e eras, who started running 3e games and the games seemed lacking or limited. Hell, this even happened to me, I was far from a RAW kind of guy.

I think by having so many guidlines, rules, and interconnected aspects of the system, it evened out the play experience across the board. Inexperienced/bad DMs who didn't feel comfortable with DM fiat or judgement calls didn't have to worry about it, or about what was an appropriate challenge for the party, or what a suitable magic item level was. All of this was pre-calculated for you and built into the assumptions of the system.

On the other hand, experienced DMs who were fine with judgement calls or making their own difficulty of encounters or magic levels could easily feel constrained by the rules. The monsters, rules, challenges, and resource management of the 3e system were tightly interconnected, and messing with/changing one of those four aspects started a cascade of events that eventually lead to problems in play. Maybe not immediately, but down the road in a few levels it always would IME. 3e D&D was written with a very specific playstyle in mind, with rules that supported and fed into that playstyle. The 3e ruleset worked great if you were after the same thing the designers wanted to reflect in the system, but if you wanted something different, a complete rewrite of much of the ruleset was needed to support another playstyle. Those extra rules reined in the creativity of the good DMs, because they were worried if they didn't at least stick fairly close to RAW, things got wonky, and/or they didn't feel up to writing new rules of their own for their playstyle.

 

[Desdichado]

Huh. That has not been my experience at all, where I've freely added and deleted rules modules for other ones that had flavor I preferred. While I admit to having had a few combats here and there that were more (or less) difficult than I thought they would be, I can't say I ever had any really significant problems with it. I play pretty darn fast and loose with the rules, because I can't be bothered to become an encyclopedia of rules knowledge.

 

[Corinth]

3.X raised the quality of the common DM significantly. It did so at the expense of those few exceptional DMs, reasoningly--quite rightly--that those few at the top would easily be able to work around whatever they disliked while the massed majority of mediocre DMs did need all of the structure and standardization to improve their game. That this would also be embraced by the players, and mark a paradigm shift in the culture, was not unexpected as some think; it was intended by design, and that phenonemon's net effect is a positive one. It is now a reasonable expectation to go to any given table that features a 3.X or 4.0 D&D game and be able to jump right in without any time wasted on rules and rulings explanations- that greatly aids in acquisition and retention of users.

 

[Varianor Abroad]

I disagree that Third Edition put shackles on excellent DMs. I think all it did was add a little time into their learning curve, and give them a new bar to rise to. Once they got past that, they got even better. What you may have seen was a bit of burnout though, with folks no longer interested in putting in that effort. Put differently, in business parlance, the A player dropped down to being a B. Nothing wrong with that. It happened. B players are still excellent results bringers for an organization, and sometimes more valuable than the rock-star love-em-and-leave-em A's.

(All of this should be viewed in the lens of internet hyperbole. This is a massive generalization, ennit? )

 

[Hjorimir]

I think it was the opposite way round, 3e made the bad DMs better but the best DMs felt restricted.

This.

 

[Keefe the Thief]

The [era of D&D i´m currently no longer interested in] surely hurt the development of good DMs. Nowadays, i much prefer [random edition of choice], which gives me more freedom to improvise and doesn´t shackle me to the rules. It´s sad that [teenyboppers who camp on my lawn] can´t see it, but [insulting acronym for Wizards and/or Hasbro] really dropped the ball here. I´m glad that [favourite 3rd party company / retro clone creator / influental game designer] continues to carry the torch. [They / him / her / it] will get my money now.

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[Dannyalcatraz]

Been playing D&D since '77, and a DM/GM since '80.

IMHO, the answer is "Neither."

3.X didn't have any effect +/- on the quality of the DMs in and of itself. I think some DMs found 3.X to be more to their liking, and this resonance made it easier for them to learn and subsequently master. That systemic mastery set them free to improve their grasp of storytelling and other non-mechanical aspects of the game.

And the same can be said of any RPG.

For instance, I hate GURPS; I will never run it. But I have played in some AWESOME GURPS campaigns. One of those was run by a guy new to the game who had tried GMing other RPGs and failed. His enthusiasm for the game translated into a desire to learn the intricacies of the system and a burst of creativity that likewise inspired his players.

I hear the same thing about 4Ed, another game I will never DM. Yet I've seen countless posts on this site stating how that game inspired people to return to the hobby or venture back behind the screen (if they never left).

For me, the RPG in which I ran my best campaign was HERO, the 3rd RPG I learned (in its Champions form, just a couple of years after D&D and Traveller). I can design PCs for that game without the book (though I always check my work). That familiarity lets my mind concentrate on the storyline as opposed to the mechanics.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Everything official about 3rd edition was oriented to keeping DM's in place - admonished to play only by precise rules, and ultimately giving such a vast number of choices to players that any DM would be overwhelmed in trying to accommodate them. Though it was not the INTENT, nor even reliably the RESULT, 3rd Edition did indeed hurt the development of good DM's by a failure of omission. The omission was the open, repeated acknowledgement that the rules don't actually run the game - people do. It stifled creativity and imagination by endeavoring to keep the DM from doing things not already set down in print; by treating the DM as just another player at the table in an overblown game of M:tG.