Is 3rd edition too "quantitative"

[Turjan]

So, what you are saying is that you never had to deal with a 1e elven Ftr/MU.

Well, even with that exception, I think the original statement about the power creep in 3E is true. 2E had a much wider level range for characters where it still made sense to use them together (or as opponents). 3E is much more balanced than 2E, that's correct. But on the other hand, 3E needs much more balance, or the game will break.

 

[woodelf]

Not really what I was getting at. Truename and staves for magic are still pretty plot neutral. But AU has Diamond Throne stuff built into it much more tightly than the PH has Greyhawk or FR built into it. Ceremonial feats and wise noble giants and everthing else is just always coming back to the specific predefined setting.

Its not in any way like your hands are tied and I'm not saying that. I can take the magister out of Diamond Throne if I want to. But there was plenty of stuff in AU that if I wanted to take it out of AU, I'd need to take DT out of it first. Not the end of the world by any stretch. But there is PLENTY of other good D20 stuff out there. So I don't see any reason to bother with baggage.

The PH has default fluff. Au has mechanically built in fluff.

How are wise noble giants any more setting-specific than orc-hating elves or giant-fighting dwarves? How are ceremonial feats any more setting-specific than clerics that turn undead or rangers that dual-wield, have animal buddies, and cast spells?

I see all the stuff you're talking about, but i think it's merely different than what's in D&D3E, not any more prevalent or more-strongly integrated. It's just that you're used to D&D tropes. Give both rulebooks to someone who's never played any RPG, and has no familiarity with them, but has read lots of [non-TSR/WotC] fantasy fiction, and i'm willing to bet that they'd both be seen to have a lot of bizarrely-arbitrary tropes. If anything, i'd expect AU to be seen as less alien.

Or, to put it another way, here's a brief list of stuff that is D&D-specific:
clerics that cast "divine" spells
clerics that turn undead
clerics that are highly-skilled warriors
rogues that sneak-attack, regardless of their sort of roguishness
rangers that are magical
rangers that are animal-friends
druids that shapechange
lack of animist spirits
presence of discernable gods
elves that're basically long-lived nature-loving humans (but not "better" than humans)
D&D-style gnomes
D&D-style halflings
dwarves that get bonuses to fight giants
wizards that're wusses
bards that have magical ability distinct from their musical ability
half-orcs
paladins as divine warriors
the spelllist is full of setting assumptions--*way* too many to bother listing anywhere
dragons that're intelligent and spell-casting (and color-coded)

That's just a few of the more-obvious examples, off the top of my head. Yes, it's true that a lot of those are not unique to Greyhawk--but they are, nonetheless, almost never found outside of D&D (and certainly not all of them, together). They give any setting that uses the rules, unaltered, a very distinct feel. Just as AU does.

As for baggage: I'm running an Al Qadim campaign right now. The old AD&D2 rules had a *lot* of baggage to excise to fit the setting. Frex, all the race relations had to be dumped. Starting from D&D3E would require about the same amount of change. Starting with AU, i had to make exactly 2 changes, fairly minor IMHO: dump one flavor of witch (winter) and one flavor of champion (magic). Oh, and one major change: introduce yak-men instead of harridans as the major creepy badguys--but they're not there in D&D3E, either. That was it. And a lot of the concepts in AU that are different from D&D3E were a perfect fit for the setting, and thus obviated the need to create a new chunk of mechanics (as would've been necessary with core D&D3E). Frex, AU already has a hero point system, which is a natural fit for the "calling on fate" concept in Al Qadim. Similarly, the races fit better into a pseudo-arabic setting than the D&D3e races do. That's just one example of taking a common fantasy setting from somewhere else, and AU is a better fit, "out of the box", than D&D3E.

 

[BryonD]

We are back to perspectives vary because you haven't touched on the point.

Dwarves getting a bonus against giants doesn't set part of their basic mentality. They can fight giants because the giants kill dwarves on sight or because giants make the best slaves. Or any of a million other reasons. Heck, saying that Dwarves get a -2 CHR would have been closer to the mark because it says SOMETHING implicit about their nature.

Dwarves are not giant slayers or the giant resistance or any other pre-set role. AU tells me off the bat that AU giants are "the Stewards".

You list tells me what a ranger is like and what a wizard is like. I don't see any issue there. "D&D style gnomes" are defined mechanically. But I can still make whatever I want of their outlook.

My perspective is I don't see nearly the pushing in a certain direction in core D&D that I see in AU. Like I already said, it is not an overwhelming absolute. You can completely work with AU and D&D certainly has some set ideas. But AU pushes directions the story is supposed to go in ways that I find notably less prevalent in Core D&D. And that the ranger class likes animals just doesn't carry that kind of baggage.

As far as Al Qadim, now you are talking about a setting. Settings are SUPPOSED to have this kind of baggage. Which I why I tend to not be a big fan of settings.

And I haven't and won't offer any dispute that there are specific pre-defined setting concepts that the AU pre-sets work perfectly well for. But, my personal persepective, less setting/role assumption pre-sets is better.

 

[Turjan]

I use the AU rules with a completely different setting and without giants or sibeccai. Those rules are as bound to a specific setting as you want them to be.

The AE book will be a completely different case, though.

 

[woodelf]

We are back to perspectives vary because you haven't touched on the point.

Dwarves getting a bonus against giants doesn't set part of their basic mentality. They can fight giants because the giants kill dwarves on sight or because giants make the best slaves. Or any of a million other reasons. Heck, saying that Dwarves get a -2 CHR would have been closer to the mark because it says SOMETHING implicit about their nature.

Dwarves are not giant slayers or the giant resistance or any other pre-set role. AU tells me off the bat that AU giants are "the Stewards".

You list tells me what a ranger is like and what a wizard is like. I don't see any issue there. "D&D style gnomes" are defined mechanically. But I can still make whatever I want of their outlook.

No moreso than i can make whatever i want of giants' outlook--in both cases, there's a mechanical chunk, and then some flavor text. Yes, you can ignore the flavor text about gnomes. And about giants. What's the difference?

But AU pushes directions the story is supposed to go in ways that I find notably less prevalent in Core D&D. And that the ranger class likes animals just doesn't carry that kind of baggage.

Unless you're trying to do, say, Middle Earth, where rangers are commandos and survivalists, not nature-lovers.

But, my personal persepective, less setting/role assumption pre-sets is better.

I'm still not seeing the difference. D&D3E tells us outright that "Dwarves are slow to laugh or jest and suspicious of strangers, but they are generous to those few who earn their trust....Dwarves get along...passably with humans,...Dwarves fail to appreciate elves' subtlety and art,...[but] have, through the ages, found common cause in battles against orcs, goblins and gnolls;...Dwarven kingdoms are usually deep beneath the stony faces of mountains,..."

How is this any less defining than what AU tells us about giants? Or, conversely, why can't what you've mentioned about giants be changed just as easily as gnomish outlook? Where is it embodied in the rules (as opposed to flavor text)?

 

[Turjan]

I'm still not seeing the difference. D&D3E tells us outright that "Dwarves are slow to laugh or jest and suspicious of strangers, but they are generous to those few who earn their trust....Dwarves get along...passably with humans,...Dwarves fail to appreciate elves' subtlety and art,...[but] have, through the ages, found common cause in battles against orcs, goblins and gnolls;...Dwarven kingdoms are usually deep beneath the stony faces of mountains,..."

How is this any less defining than what AU tells us about giants? Or, conversely, why can't what you've mentioned about giants be changed just as easily as gnomish outlook? Where is it embodied in the rules (as opposed to flavor text)?

You are right. I'm really surprised how easy it is to forget that, in D&D, a whole boatload of cultural information (="fluff") is built into the race information (="crunch"). After 30 years of D&D, this amalgamation has been internalized to such an extent that many players don't seem to notice it. The image of a D&D elf or dwarf has been canonized and spread over countless other games, which blurs the perception of this mix-up even more. This is even more astounding as in case of the D&D elf, the cultural information in the PHB does not match the game mechanics anymore. Elfs and magic? Where, the heck, do you get that connotation from? Not from the mechanics, obviously.

 

[satori01]

Perhaps I am not understanding you BU, I thought your primary argument was that WOTC spends so much time creating crunch, that people focus entirely upon statistics and neglect the more "contextual" components of playing the game.

I disagree with this assertion, as in the example of a Paladin's detect evil ability additional flavor enhancers can be added quite easily to any abillity enhancing its flavor. D20 companies in many ways have not done enough to marriage game flavor with mechanical concepts, however I dont think 1e or 2e products were any better, indeed I believe they were often worse.

Mike Mearls I believe is the cutting edge of flavorful mechanics, taking Ceremonial feats and ceremonies in AU improving on the ideas in the superb books Mystic Secrets and The Book of Iron Might,(though to be fair Iron Might is not an AU book but a great way of opening the restraing system of 3e combat).

As for feats and classes requiring you to vete what your players do, again I must say it was much worse in 1e. First off very few people played by ALL the rules in the DMG, else you would soon discover that high strength fighters would roam around in Field Plate armor wielding daggers for the extra attacks that speed modifers would grant you. The exploitation factor of the old rules as written was rather high. Moreover, the 1e system would tack new subsystems on to further describe the world, often with very complicated results. Having to say no to a catergory of feats like Psionic Feats, Bardic Music feats, Divine Feats and so on pale in comparison to whole new rules like the Two weapon fighting rule introduced by Roger Moore in Dragon Magazine or the Comeliness rules which with a good score allowed people to use in effect a charm spell upon others.

Ultimately I believe that 3e is a better tool kit to describe a fantasy world than 1e or 2e was. I do think the number crunching can blind you, but monsters and characters can truly be epic, which is certainly not the case in old D&D, where Human Wizards reigned supreme, and Dragons and Elves and Dwarfs were on the decline because they could never overcome the limitations built into the rules.

 

[Psion]

Just because people are tired of the rules set or have stopped playing the game does not mean that people are not buying the books. I still buy the books even if I do not use them.

If I don't play a game, I don't buy the books for long. It sounds like you, like Akrasia, are projecting your own dissatisfaction on the audience at large.

And the weight of the rules is really beginning to affect game play.

My experience differs. As more supplements come out, I see people being more choosy with which supplements to use instead of blindly using anything that looks interesting.

 

[Belen]

If I don't play a game, I don't buy the books for long. It sounds like you, like Akrasia, are projecting your own dissatisfaction on the audience at large.

Not at all. I said that there seemed to be a growing core of dissatisfaction. I am not projecting anything on the whole audience for D&D. However, I think we're kidding ourselves if we do not recognize the inherent problems that populate 3e. If I hated the game, then I would not be running a 3e campaign or running a minimum of two 3e demos per month. What I want to see is a version of D&D that finds a middle ground where it can handle all the options we have today, but also remain a simple rules set. Even the basic core rules can be difficult to master, even without all the splat nonsense.

My experience differs. As more supplements come out, I see people being more choosy with which supplements to use instead of blindly using anything that looks interesting.

Cool. I am glad that you have a good experience. I regularly play with 10 different people per month and have a constant influx of new people running through my demos, so I see a LOT of faces on a regular basis. I can say that my experience, especially with the newer, younger players does not dovetail with your own.

 

[BryonD]

Yes, you can ignore the flavor text about gnomes. And about giants. What's the difference?

I see the flavor text directly reflected into the mechanics in AU distinctly moreso than in D&D. It is that simple.

Berandor, whom I was discussing this with, agreed that AU focused his inspiration and said that D&D left "to much 'freedom'". (See post 58) We agree on the relative focus of AU vs D&D. We just disagree on the merit therein. I offer no challenge to the validity of his preference and noted no challenge from him on mine.

Berandor's comment was fairly typical of what I have read from fans of AU. So if you don't see the difference, then you simply are not seeing something that many other people do see. It doesn't really matter. If you are happy with AU then great. It is a shades of grey issue and I'm not asking anyone to prefer the same shade as me. But if you are honestly suggesting that someone else isn't permitted to see a certain shade just because you don't see it, then that is just silly.