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

[Orius]

If you think it's bad at that "other site" you should check out rec.games.frp.dnd. *Those* guys are the biggest rules-Nazis I've ever seen. And downright nasty, a lot of them. Usenet has always been the wild west. Brrrrr....

I've been to rgfd. It's not quite THAT bad. Yeah, Usenet is pretty wild and as granny-unfriendly as you can get. Still, there's a lot worse places on Usenet than rgfd.

And you do realize that some regulars from rgfd post here too, right?

 

[SSquirrel]

I've been to rgfd. It's not quite THAT bad. Yeah, Usenet is pretty wild and as granny-unfriendly as you can get. Still, there's a lot worse places on Usenet than rgfd.

And you do realize that some regulars from rgfd post here too, right?

Well he did say "a lot of them" not "every last dirty stinkin one of em!" heh. Eh there's rules lawyers here, there, and in my gaming group at times *grin*
Most rules lawyers I know are proud of that fact and wear it like a badge. I doubt he's offending anyone.

Hagen

 

[shurai]

While I'm not an expert on medieval armor, a friend of mine is, and he condemns almost all fantasy art depicting armor och combat as "fake" . . . . They are not meant to be a realistic depiction of how things worked.

I'm no expert either; in fact I've got an armor expert friend myself and he agrees with your friend that most of the art is pretty "fake". He agrees that the armor isn't true to history.

I'm not really looking for a realistic-historical game, on the other hand. Rather, I'm looking for a fantasy game that makes it easy to suspend my disbelief. It doesn't have to be real or historical, but I have more fun if I believe it could be so. That's really what I mean.

I'm reminded of the armor and weapons in the Lord of the Rings films: There was plenty of fantasy, and a great sense of 'otherness' to the various props. However, it's easy to believe that I could run into a suit of, say, elven plate in a museum in England, because it looked like it could work as real armor.

-S

 

[fanboy2000]

Because many of us recognize that being able to fine-tune your character like that makes it -really- easy to min/max like crazy...? While I prefer a system with more inherent balance, such that you can, basically, do point buy (which is what self-designed classes pretty much come out to), in the 2e system, we were already used to the idea of just applying larger XP requirements to uber-er classes. Not the best approach, but not the worst.

Remember Skills and Powers?

I think you misunderstood me. I hated the rues for creating custom classes in 2e. Hated them. What I tried (and failed) to say was: "How come no one remembers how bad creating your own class was in 2e?" We get lots of posts about how much flavor 1 and 2 had, but lets not forget that there was a reason people kept buying the new editions, the rules often sucked. They often discouraged customization by the DM.

 

[Zappo]

I know what I miss from OD&D. I miss having 8-10 hours of spare time per day, and being able to play a plotless dungeon crawl for 6 hours straight and still have great fun. Oh, and I miss the ability to read bookfuls of total cheese and find them cool. And also the ability to use and enjoy rules that not only ignored realism, but also basic verisimilitude. In short, I miss being 14.

 

[Rel]

I know what I miss from OD&D. I miss having 8-10 hours of spare time per day, and being able to play a plotless dungeon crawl for 6 hours straight and still have great fun. Oh, and I miss the ability to read bookfuls of total cheese and find them cool. And also the ability to use and enjoy rules that not only ignored realism, but also basic verisimilitude. In short, I miss being 14.

HUZZAH!

 

[Greg K]

One, it depends on how you tailor the spell list. When I tailor a spell list for a campaign setting, I add spells to the PHB spell list from other sources. Sometimes I add them at the begining, making the spells available to all clerics (or wizards, or whatever). Sometimes I add the spells mid-campaign, leaving a record of the spell in a spell book, or a scroll, or a journal, in the PCs treasure.

Two, in a tight pantheon where the gods are led by a single ruler, such as the Norse gods, then the domain systmem would be the biggest distention between them. Most clerics would worship the whole pantheon (as most pesants did), so it makes sense that worshiping a single deity would give you a special domain power and acess to some difrent spells. (ie, domain spells).?

Except that:
1: the gods don't *automatically* intervene on the behalf of anyone.
2: many of the spells are not appropriate in feel for a norse campaign.

The experiance tabel they told you to use for homebrew clasess even punished the player for taking the class. On top of all of that, they said that you could re-create the PHB classes using that system because the PHB classes were "special." How come no one mentions that when they talk about how great 2e was?

I'll be the first one to say that the core mechanics of 3e are superior to prevous editions. 2e and 1e was a mess with subsystems that had no relation to one another. However, that does not change my opinion that most 3e non-setting supplements are terrible and, in general, not very useful (Note: When I wrote that Tome and Blood was on par with the Complete Wizards Handbook, that was not a compliment to either book).

 

[fanboy2000]

Except that:
1: the gods don't *automatically* intervene on the behalf of anyone.

I don't see how automatically intervening on behalf of someone works into this. Although it seems to me that if gods were real and active, they would do so occasionally.

2: many of the spells are not appropriate in feel for a norse campaign.

I'll chalk this one up to personal taste. I found most of the spells in the PHB quite appropriate. If you're talking about spells in found in other WotC books, you may be right. I didn't add lots of spells in that particular campaign.

However, that does not change my opinion that most 3e non-setting supplements are terrible and, in general, not very useful.

Weird. I find the setting books the least useful, particularly recently. The Silver Marches was great, but Unaprochable East was just another splat book to me. OTOH, the XPH sugested whole campigns to me, and Complete Arcane just gave some splended encounter ideas. The 3.5 MM and MMIII help me design unique adventures with their stat adjustments and into paragraphs.

 

[eyebeams]

I have some sympathy for folks who miss the old wacky descriptions of things, but that doesn't really compare to the systems, which are much improved from 3e onward.

However, the real problem here, in the end, is the DMG, which needs to cover so much material that it's pretty much nearly cut to the bone when it comes to providing ideas about flavour. This is an unfortunate omission, because finding good flavour on the fly isn't always easy. Not every DM bothers with creating detail from a campaign world, so moment by moment and event by event descriptions are paramount. None of this means we toss out the new, better rules for stuff, but we neeed to find a way to represent it in game.

One way I could see to remedy this would be to release a hardback that brings back this element but balance it according to existing systems (a pain in the butt component should probably not just stack upon other scroll or potion requirements). This would be a grab-bag of stuff that DMs can reference during the course of individual sessions.

We'd put campaign world design in another hardback, and these two -- maybe along with a book about dungeons -- would fill in the gaps in the DMG's necessarily quick and dirty treatments.

 

[Desdichado]

Hence when I think of old-time D&D, I imagine a wonderful system full of flavour and quick and easy rules.

One that never existed.

Yeah, I think that's the problem. It's possible I could be talked into a RC game still, because it is closer to that hypothetical Golden Age system than AD&D, though.