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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gothmog" data-source="post: 4804906" data-attributes="member: 317">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.</blockquote>

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