I'm done with 3.5

[Crothian]

double post

 

[Hussar]

And there are people that do this for D&D. Or at least they claim to. But I doubt there is any GM of any game that truly does this because GM's think about games before they run them even if they don't make notes on them.

Yeah, I can honestly say that I'm not one of them.

BTW, it should be mentioned that much of my prep time was given over to working in Photoshop to create minis and images for my WLD game to play over OPenRPG. I would say that about half my prep time is now amateur art, rather than fiddling with D&D books.

Just a side note about inflating my numbers. I really don't think so. I did say that I included Paizo in there. Paizo pumps out 3 modules per month and has done so for the past 3 years. Right there, that's 108 modules. Goodman Games has 50+ modules. Necromancer has a dozen or so. WOTC has a couple of dozen between Forgotten Realms, Eberron and generic. So, just in the past few years, you have about 200 modules for 3.5 edition D&D. That's not including what came out for 3.0 (a heck of a lot more) and not even touching the .pdf publishers. Saying 500 modules for 3.5 edition D&D isn't all that far of a stretch methinks.

 

[fusangite]

Hey, Crowking,

When you say this, are you saying "Quite Frackin' True" (i.e. you appear to agree with the post), or "Quit Frackin' Talkin'" (i.e. you don't appear to agree with the post)? Both are accepted translations of this particular acronym (among something like 20 other translations), yet they imply opposite views. I'm just curious, since more and more people are using this phrase with no further explanation, and it's hard to tell whether they are jubilantly in support of a statement or opposed to the point of demanding no further communication.

Or does it imply something not covered by the two translations above?

With Regards,
Flynn

He means "quality fur tunnel." Duh.

 

[chobin foot]

Well, I didn't claim that Wizards didn't innovate.

For me, I think other companies do it better.

As a matter of taste, I don't find that Wizards are at the top of the craft of D20 and D20 supplements... there's a lot of variance in their output. Certainly, there was an avalanche of bad D20 supplements, but who is putting out the avalanche now?

Tastes differ, for certain. D&D just isn't my game of choice, and it doesn't mean that I'm somehow stupid or lesser than Wizards patrons... nor that D&D-haters are any better at roleplaying than D&D-players. I just don't want to use 3.5 to run what I want out of a D20 game, although it doesn't mean that I don't want to buy the occasional Wizards product myself.

I think it's sort of a misconception to say that because some person doesn't like 3.5, they're just doing it wrong. Matters of taste aren't misunderstandings or stupidity on the part of other people. Sometimes you just think some crap tastes good, and other crap tastes bad.

Everyone doesn't have to love Wizards. (I have no love for them, nor any hate for them. I think I said in the "Wizards brand" topic that I simply don't have any brand loyalty to "Wizards brand" at this point, although there are one or two "Wizards brand" hardcovers that I do want to pick up at some point)

...

(The full color books... they don't do it for me. Not just Wizards, but also Green Ronin's Mutants & Masterminds, for instance. Give me cheaper print in black & white, and an inexpensive color PDF or an art archive online. And economies of scale don't just have to refer to the end production run.)

 

[Raven Crowking]

Hey, Crowking,

When you say this, are you saying "Quite Frackin' True" (i.e. you appear to agree with the post), or "Quit Frackin' Talkin'" (i.e. you don't appear to agree with the post)?

Quoted For Troof.

I didn't know about the other one.

 

[Raven Crowking]

I fully agree with this. However, again, in context, I was asked about why WOTC doesn't innovate. They do. They do quite a bit. Liking it or not is irrelavent to whether or not something is innovative.

Yeah, well I wasn't disagreeing with you in principle, just with the specifics you used.

(I also think you did more than 10 hours prep, having read the work-intensive-to-make-work monster you're running, as well as your posts about the work you did on it and the work you wish you did on the Derro section. Heck, a lot of the WLD encounter descriptions can't simply be cut & pasted because they fail to mention the most significant elements in the room. Almost all of them fail to give any context to the encounter conditions.)

 

[Raven Crowking]

I had stopped gaming for almost a decade, and 3rd edition brought me back into the fold. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it. Actually, it read great and I was impressed with what read to be tight mechanics and integrated rules (coming from my original 1e background), but in actual play (2 years of running a 3x game) it rarely played great. It seemed more complicated than necessary from the first time we rolled up characters and played (especially combat), and despite our growing familiarity with the system over the years we played, the play itself never really got any better.

My own experience is similar. I got tired of 2e, and started again with 3.0. And, at first, I thought it was the best thing since sliced bacon. I still think that there were a lot of rules innovations that are wonderful. But the combat rules are kind of painful (houseruled 'em) and there should exist some kind of descent support for character creation/stat block creation.

There are some things I think are more complicated than they should be, others I wish they had spent more time making complicated. So I've houseruled, and I'm pretty happy with what I've done so far. I think that the base system is great, it's the examples and the specifics where WotC loses me. But, then, I make my own examples and specifics, and I find them in other, 3rd-party books.

I guess what I'm saying is that I have a love/hate relationship with the system.

 

[Flynn]

He means "quality fur tunnel." Duh.

Doh! Why didn't I see that?!?!? You're so right!

Enjoy,
Flynn

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, well I wasn't disagreeing with you in principle, just with the specifics you used.

(I also think you did more than 10 hours prep, having read the work-intensive-to-make-work monster you're running, as well as your posts about the work you did on it and the work you wish you did on the Derro section. Heck, a lot of the WLD encounter descriptions can't simply be cut & pasted because they fail to mention the most significant elements in the room. Almost all of them fail to give any context to the encounter conditions.)

The Derro section was afterwards actually. My six months was running regions H, J, and K. By far the best of the regions I ran.

Now, on the cut and paste problems, that's something I never, ever noticed. Not once did the players complain that they didn't have enough information about the rooms and I never edited the room descriptions beyond something that was obviously wrong, like typos and such.

In any case, it took me about that long to type in the room descriptions (no pdf cut and paste, I did say that if I had had that it would have drastically cut down on my prep time), do the artwork and make the die rollers. Like I said, you've had issues with the WLD that simply didn't occur to me. We never had problems with room descriptions and the issues that I did have were more to do with some sloppy map design than anything else. ((Other than region D which is by far the worst region that I ran - sigh))

 

[RFisher]

Sorry, I meant that *I* had vetted the encounters.

Ah. That's completely different then. I've come up with a whole evenings adventure in the time it would take me to vet a 3e encounter. I could probably come up with a whole campaign for Dungeon Squad. So, the DM support advantage isn't looking so great to me.

& really, I've played more D&D adventures under non-D&D systems than I have any edition of D&D. My groups have never found leveraging D&D's DM support for other systems hard enough to not play a different system.

You use pretty much the same mechanic - d20+x vs target number - for nearly every action.

Having just played classic Traveller & classic D&D campaigns after years of "unified mechanic" games, I find unified mechanics more hype than real value. xdy+z vs. target number just isn't that much more complex than d20+x vs. target number.

Try Traveler character generation sometime.

() Traveller character generation is awfully simple. You don't have nearly the number of decisions to make as in D&D3e & they're almost all simpler than the various balancing/considering decisions you have to make during 3e character crafting.

I can't say either is better. The terms I'm using--generation v. crafting--reflect the trade-offs involved. But I can say Traveller is easier.

The four players in my recent Traveller campaign had never played the game before, but they were all rolling along without any help from me PDQ. Much faster than I've ever seen anyone get a grasp on 3e character crafting.

& that probably ranks up there among the most fun sessions we've ever had.

Selling twice as many books doesn't equal twice as much money if you have to put out more titles.

Well, I think we have fundamentally different measures here. If I were Wizards, a big part of what I'd be wondering is how to shepherd the hobby. Decisions based on short-term profit margins are good, but not at the expense of long-term decline of the hobby & thus long-term profits.

Maybe. I guess I could just as easily see myself saying that RPGs as an industry don't have a long-term prospect no matter what the company does, so we might as well get as much short-term profit out of it as possible while it lasts. (^_^)

You know, it's funny. The big complaint, when 3.0 came out, was that it was too simplified. Saving throws didn't go one way, while armor class went another, and instead of a good roll in this part of the mechanics was a high roll while a good roll in this part of the mechanics was a low roll, a good roll was always high. How silly!

The whole overused, burnt-out "video game" analogy arose from the fact that D&D 3.0 seemed dumbed down in order to appeal to the masses.

Now, it's too complicated. Too many books! Too many options!

At first, that seemed very odd to me. I don't remember those complaints about 3e.

But...I think I see what you're saying.

3e shifted the complexity. Sure, the unified mechanic is simple. One can argue that it may be an over simplification when applied to somethings, but I tend to be hard-pressed to find any simplification too much these days. (^_^)

But 3e also created a lot of complexity in other areas at the same time. e.g. You now have at least three ACs to track for every PC & monster. (Probably not the best example since--by-the-book--earlier editions had some AC special cases too, even if they tended to get ignored a lot. But perhaps you get the idea anyway.)

So, yes. It is possible to make (some) things too simple & (some) things too complex at the same time.

Personally, I have found the overall increase in complexity greater than the simplifications, so the net goes to complexity.

I just think it's time to realize that a lot of people are always going to dislike 3rd Edition D&D because it shot their dog at some undefined point in the past. 3rd Edition reinvigorated the gaming industry. It's had upsides and downsides, but there are more titles, more books, more systems, and the PDF industry has EXPLODED and continues to move forward, and that's a good thing. Even OSRIC and all of the counter "Back to basics!" D&D movements owe their existence to 3rd Edition, because they are simply reacting to it.

I've said it before: 3e helped me learn more about what I want from the hobby by giving me exactly what I thought I wanted. (^_^) So, let's call this QFT.