I've finally figured out why 3rd edition bugs me

[Creamsteak]

Every time I read the words, "inject flavor" I picture a turkey being basted. And this thread keeps on saying it and saying it, and now I'm hungry.

 

[MerricB]

Every time I read the words, "inject flavor" I picture a turkey being basted. And this thread keeps on saying it and saying it, and now I'm hungry.

Here you go:

Cheers!

 

[woodelf]

I don't know who wrote these rules for fabricating scrolls, but I have this kind of problem with most of the stuff Monte Cook writes. The rules are clear and sound, but it's hard to figure out the brilliant ideas behind the completely dry writing that makes me fall asleep most of the times. It took me several attempts until I finally appreciated AU (great book, if you manage to stay awake ).

Huh. Dunno about his other stuff, but it's precisely the way the flavor text is not only present, but woven into the rules that got me all excited for Arcana Unearthed, while if i'd been told "D&D3E or no RPing for you", i'd've taken a hiatus--and the complete lack of any context for the rules is a large part of it. I just sat down and read AU (well, 'cept the combat chapter--but you'll never get me to read a combat chapter in any game system until i have to).

 

[woodelf]

That's what your imagination is for!

A little bit of flavor could be a great thing in moderation but what Sebastian posted just kept going forever. I'd be really unhappy if I read 2 pages of flavor text on how to do something that takes 2 sentences to explain.

And, me, i'm really unhappy when something with a game-world reality is reduced to 2 sentences of player-level instructions. Yes, i have an imagination, but that's not the point. It's not that i am complaining about teh lack of that flavor stuff--i'm complaining about the fact that that flavor stuff has no impact on the rules [as written, of course]. The AD&D2 way suffers from arbitrariness. The D&D3E way suffers from blandness. Personally, i'll take the potentially-arbitrary rules, because it's really easy for me to whip up some lists/charts/rules/formulae to make things codified and balanced; while i can also fix the potentially-bland rules, it takes me a lot longer, so the effort to "fix" D&D3E is considerably more than the effort to "fix" AD&D2.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

The AD&D2 way suffers from arbitrariness. The D&D3E way suffers from blandness. Personally, i'll take the potentially-arbitrary rules, because it's really easy for me to whip up some lists/charts/rules/formulae to make things codified and balanced; while i can also fix the potentially-bland rules, it takes me a lot longer, so the effort to "fix" D&D3E is considerably more than the effort to "fix" AD&D2.

If true, it is because you are a truly exceptional GM. But it runs counter to all my experience at the game table. The ability to whip up codified & balanced game rules is very rare; I base this conclusion on the dozen or so RPGs and dozens of other games I am familiar with. If this talent is common those who possess seem to avoid publishing gaming material. Please understand that I am purposefully neither believing nor disbelieving you in specific, but I would be shocked if the high level of competence you describe were to be found in even 1 in 100 experienced GMs.

This opens a more philosophical question: Who are the rules written for?

I submit that rulebooks should primarily help "okay" and "mediocre" and "beginning" GMs along the way towards becoming "good" GMs. The alternative would be to assist "good" (or worse) GMs to achieve real excellence.

For the second goal, both 1e/2e and 3e are likely failures. IMNSHO 3e is a vastly better bet for most GMs with respect to the first goal.

Now if you happen to be a truly great GM already, it is very possible that the 3e approach might bore you to tears. But the 2e approach is likely to be spotty at best as well because inspirational value is a pretty subjective thing.

I happen to believe that vast majority of GMs of better served by the 3e approach (although I concede the vast majority are unlikely to agree with me). A number will say they are great at whipping up balanced rules; very few are. I do not doubt such GM exists, but they are rare birds and do not representative of the needs of the gaming community as a whole.

 

[Ranes]

I think that the 3e rules take out the fantacy and and hard rules yes but with that think of the books as the manual for the game and not where you should get your ideas from instead use your brain for the ideas and then take the rules to help make your idea in to a story......

All your full stops gravitated to the bottom of your post.

Anyway, thinking of the core books as manuals is quite right. After all, one of them is the MM. By 'taking out the fantasy', I assume you are referring to the 'f' word that has led to so much hunger around here.

The 3e books have to find a difficult balance. On the one tentacle, you want to inspire the reader to play but, on one of the others, you want to explain as clearly as possible how to play.

WotC doesn't get as much acknowledgement of its success, as I think it deserves. I don't have my books to hand but I remember a passage (probably in the PHB) about the times when your character might have to deal with a heavy load, such as carrying a sack of treasure or a fallen comrade. The evocative text is more subtle but it's still there. Sure, the tone has changed. Gone, dear reader, are the days when, in order to ensure accurate interpretation of AD&D for instance, the player and DM would have to wade through tortuously long sentences assembled in a nightmarish pastiche of an archaic idiom.

 

[Mark Chance]

The replies to this thread demonstrate the difference between role-players and war-gamers. I'm sure you can figure out who is who.

 

[fanboy2000]

DDG was a product that I thought was pretty much a waste of paper. I didn't want a book on deity stats. I wanted a book on building faiths, pantheons, unique clerics (e.g., cloistered clerics and divine defenders from UA), suggestions for tailoring spell lists for a cleric of a particuliar deity, and notes regarding vestments, etc for a particuliar deities clerics.

Wow. I loved Deities and Demigods. I loved the sections on different kinds of pantheons, the instructions on how to build a pantheon, the campaign hooks about directly dealing with gods, and the tables! The tables for the Norse, Greek, and Pharonic pantheons were worth the price of admission to me. Yeah, I'll grant that the deity stats were unnecessary, but the the opening pages on the norse pantheon were real campaign builders. It contained a table showing all the gods, their rank, portfolio, and domains. It showed a cosmology and gave a very brief description of the mythology (which I already knew). Then, they said a few words about setting the campaign after Ragnarok.

I used that information to create my own campaign world where the Norse gods are worshiped. That section contained every thing I needed to know about the gods from a game perspective. It even included a map of a typical Asgardian temple. (I've had to use that description a couple of times.)

Mind you, I wasn't a slave to the book. For one think a made Loki chaotic neutral rather than chaotic evil. And I altered the way the pantheon was worshiped slightly. (for one thing, I made it much more loose and unorganized).

Building faiths and pantheons is what the first two chapters are all about. What do you find wrong with them? Rules for clerics were beyond the scope of the book. WotC and 3rd parties publish lots of books on clerics and relatively few on faiths. Tailoring spell lists for specific deities smacks, to me, of the typical "you're a cleric therefore you have more role-playing restrictions because you worship a deity." Let players decide how their characters should best worship their deities." That's the kind of advice I don't need. Once a book goes into vestments, I fall asleep.

You seem to really, really like UA. I love UA to. However, I don't like the idea that every book should provide alternate sub-systems to way you do. To me products like Defenders of the Faith should expand on the existing rules, and stay out of the alternate rules business. One of the reasons 3rd party products are so good to alternate sub-systems market is that such products are niche products and have to be produced by a smaller company with a smaller overhead.

 

[woodelf]

If true, it is because you are a truly exceptional GM. But it runs counter to all my experience at the game table. The ability to whip up codified & balanced game rules is very rare; I base this conclusion on the dozen or so RPGs and dozens of other games I am familiar with. If this talent is common those who possess seem to avoid publishing gaming material. Please understand that I am purposefully neither believing nor disbelieving you in specific, but I would be shocked if the high level of competence you describe were to be found in even 1 in 100 experienced GMs.

This opens a more philosophical question: Who are the rules written for?

I submit that rulebooks should primarily help "okay" and "mediocre" and "beginning" GMs along the way towards becoming "good" GMs. The alternative would be to assist "good" (or worse) GMs to achieve real excellence.

For the second goal, both 1e/2e and 3e are likely failures. IMNSHO 3e is a vastly better bet for most GMs with respect to the first goal.

Now if you happen to be a truly great GM already, it is very possible that the 3e approach might bore you to tears. But the 2e approach is likely to be spotty at best as well because inspirational value is a pretty subjective thing.

I happen to believe that vast majority of GMs of better served by the 3e approach (although I concede the vast majority are unlikely to agree with me). A number will say they are great at whipping up balanced rules; very few are. I do not doubt such GM exists, but they are rare birds and do not representative of the needs of the gaming community as a whole.

I don't have time right now for a full response--you raise some good points i'd like to respond to. But, i wanted to point out an important qualifier that i perhaps didn't make explicit: whipping up balanced, fun, workable rules for the particular group you're playing for is, at least for me, very easy. This is not the same as claiming that these same rules would be balanced and fun and workable for any other group or GM, much less for D&D-players or gamers in general. The art of writing a set of rules for publication is much more demanding than doing the same for your familiar group. To make a concrete example: if i know that none of my players would even think of trying to multiclass a barbarian and a spellcaster that has con-based spell stats, i don't have to worry about whether the raging ability is too much of a boost for that particular spellcasting class. But, for a general set of rules, like D&D3E, i *do* have to watch out for such combos. And so on. So, i'm not claiming that i can out-design the vast majority of RPG authors out there, with trivial effort; i'm saying that you don't need to be a world-class RPG designer to houserule competently. Also, i think i'm a mediocre GM, not an awesome GM--i'm a pretty good game designer, however. Thus, i frequently rely on others' work for a lot of the GM-type chores (specifically, scenario/NPC development), but have no problem doing the rules myself.

One further point on the "whipping up balanced rules" thing: if you assume that the rules have to do all the work, yes, it's very hard. If you assume that the players do a large chunk of the work (i.e., simply choosing not look for loopholes), then the rules don't need to do as much of the work. Similarly, if the rules are just plain simpler, they become that much easier to do. Writing a good system on the order of complexity of, say, BESM--or adding new bits to it--is way easier than writing one on the order of D&D3E (or adding new bits to it). The other important point to keep in mind is that balance is, at best, subjective. Frex, many/most consider D&D3E well-balanced. It has never been well-balanced for the games i've played in or run, however, because i'm used to social-heavy, combat-light games, and the classes are balanced primarily on combat-effectiveness. Given that a simple shift of focus can totally mess up balance, i think expecting the rules to do all the work of balancing to be impossible.

 

[woodelf]

While I enjoy war games, I prefer my role-playing sourcebooks to be straight forward in their presentation for a completely different reason. I have my own imagination...most fluff is usually rather obvious and bland anyway. For example, the quoted section of the 2nd Edition DMG tells me nothing that anyone but the most wet behind the ears newbie fan of fantasy fiction should be able to dream up. When I look to a general role-playing supplement I want the building blocks that I can use as the foundation of my own imaginings. The only time I appreciate fluff is when it is in a setting specific supplement...and it better not be generic fantasy drivel.

Well, i get bored not be the lack of fluff, but the lack of integration between the fluff and crunch. IOW, sure, i can use the D&D3E scroll-writing rules as the foundation for the fluff of "you have to get a special, fresh quill and special ink for each scroll"--but not without significantly altering the rules. And, if i don't alter the rules, then it's nothing *but* fluff--i can say all i want about that, but however "special" i claim the quill and ink are, they only cost 12.5gp/level (or whatever), and it still costs N XP. Conversely, if i *am* going to alter the rule for whatever setting fluff i want, it no longer is a pro that the crunch is there, because i'm not using it.

I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with the existing system, or having codified rules, just that the "you can add your own fluff on top" argument is questionable, at best. You're really in the same place whether you have crunch-only, or crunch-with-fluff--if what you want to do doesn't match the crunch, you have to change it, and if it does, you don't, and in both situations that's regardless of whether there even is any existing fluff for you to ignore.