Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="RFisher" data-source="post: 3602467" data-attributes="member: 3608">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.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.(<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o_O" title="Er... what?    o_O"  data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o_O" />) 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.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. (^_^)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'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.</blockquote>

Verification