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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4198266" data-attributes="member: 58197">Bad?  Depends on your criteria.  Bland?  Definitely not.The editions before 3E were much less orderly and organized than 3E, and there was far less emphasis on "gamist" concerns.  Particularly where magic was concerned, the development process seemed to be:#1: Think of a cool "fluff" concept.#2: Translate it into game mechanics.#3: Estimate how powerful it is and put it into the game at that power level.Whereas in 3E, the process is more like:#1: Think of a cool "fluff" concept.#2: Estimate how powerful it should be.#3: Develop game mechanics to simulate that concept at the appropriate power level.The result is that 3E mechanics are generally much better balanced (because the mechanics were built from the ground up with balance in mind, instead of having it shoehorned in afterward), but they're often lacking in a sense of... what's the word?  I guess I'll call it "vitality."  BECMI and AD&D mechanics feel like game-world concepts translated into mechanics, while 3.X mechanics feel like mechanics painted over with game-world concepts.Case in point, the animate dead spell.  In BECMI, there was no Hit Die cap on the number of undead you could control, nor was there a material component to the spell.  You could raise literally armies of skeletons and zombies, with the only limitations being the supply of corpses and the number of animate spells you could cast per day.  A hundred skeletons, a thousand, ten thousand, if you had the time and the dead bodies, it didn't matter.Grossly unbalanced at any level, you might say, and you'd have a point.  Yet at the same time, it meant that a BECMI necromancer who set out to raise an undead horde didn't have to content himself with a paltry couple dozen.  He could raise a real, honest-to-Orcus horde, and proceed to terrorize the kingdom.  And that was something a player character necromancer could aspire to (and usually did, if I was the one playing him).In 3.X, even a 20th-level dread necromancer with maxed-out Charisma can't raise more than 320 skeletons.  It's better from a balance perspective, but it lacks the "cool factor" of the BECMI version.  3.X necromancers don't command hordes of undead, they're just guys with a handful of shambling corpses trailing after them.I wouldn't want to go back to BECMI full-time, certainly not with 4E on the horizon (or at this point, pounding down the nearest hillside with its horns lowered and the earth shaking under its feet), but it's definitely worth looking at.  A different time, a different way of doing things.</blockquote>

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